Tip N' Tell

Melissa Stern is an artist and journalist living in NYC. Melissa has worked in sculpture, photography and drawing for over twenty years, exhibiting throughout the U.S., as well as Europe and Asia.  She has made a multi-media installation exhibition, The Talking Cure, that has been traveling to museums around the States. since 2012.  Her work is featured in a number of prominent corporate and museum collections including News Corporation,  JP Morgan, The Arkansas Art Center, the American Museum of Ceramic Art, Racine Art Museum, and the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis.  With a background in anthropology, Melissa’s work reflects both non-Western and outsider-art influences. Her drawings, collages, and figurative sculptures are richly drawn and deeply layered, with quirky, often dark humor. “I work like a handyman cobbling together drawings and sculptures from elements found, borrowed, and imagined. I use a wide range of materials from encaustic to clay, pastel to steel. The drawings and sculptures, often made in tandem, resonate with one another, the ideas in one reinforcing the themes of the other. All of my pieces share a thematic thread. Childlike and goofy my figures live in a dream world, cower in relationships or stand tall in the face of adversity. They are at once dark and funny, expressive of the absurd world around them.”  Stern serves as a contributing writer for Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn-based digital arts publication, working at the intersection of the arts, culture, and politics. She has covered major exhibitions on assignment throughout the world. She served earlier as the principle art critic for The New York Press. She is a past Board Director of The Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC, Watershed Center in Maine and contributing curator of the Human Rights Film Festival from 2008-2015. 

Orange Li, who grew up in Taipei and now lives in the United States, is currently creating in her studio at the MANA Contemporary in Jersey City. Her childhood was not always particularly smooth and happy. The memories of her childhood influenced her desire to seek self-identity in society as she grew up. At the age of 27, she decided to leave Taiwan and live in the United States to start a journey to find her most genuine self. Being in a different country, she felt a strong sense of isolation and loneliness, and the hardship of having to struggle in life. Even so, she accepts all the difficulties gladly.

These mixed and intense emotions led Orange Li to look directly at the duality of life, including the Yin and Yang, good and evil, life and death, dreams and reality. These have become the themes that continue to emerge in her creations. On the other hand, she has also experienced a huge culture shock, which became an opportunity to expand her visual vocabulary by absorbing different cultures. Her works not only integrate Chinese and Western elements, but also interweave the philosophy, psychology and mythology of the East and the West.

Orange’s artwork is a hybrid of culture, a fusion of spirit and science, thus bringing the diversity of life in to create the most avant-garde visual and sensory impact, while trying to eliminate the boundaries between them and move towards Oneness.

Grace Roselli is a Brooklyn based visual artist who focuses on the beauty and bias that manifest in the ever-shifting boundaries of female self-perception and culturally imposed feminine identities. To create her artwork, she’ll photograph herself and/or communities with whom she partners in scenarios for role play within a studio setting or act as witness to a transformational moment by photographing her subject in settings of their choice.

Olivia Palma creates emotionally provocative soundscapes based out of Berlin, Germany. 

Zara Fina Stasi is the founder behind Good for the Bees. She is an artist, designer, facilitator, and positive human living and working in New York City.

She values hearing perspectives, our planet, building strong minds, cultivating community, equality, democratizing and demystifying the art world, growing plants, and spreading hope.

She founded Good for the Bees to use art to help people thrive. She does this through visual capture, murals, painting, and illustration (and is always ready to try new things)!

Sei Smith (b. 1990, New York City) studied painting at The School of Art Institute of Chicago. He had his first solo exhibition in 2011 and has since shown both nationally and internationally. In 2012, Smith and his brother founded Apostrophe NYC, an art gallery/curation experiment. They notably staged guerrilla pop-ups in the stairwell of the Whitney, the courtyard at MoMa PS1 and a Brooklyn subway station. Along with his art practice, Sei continues to curate shows/happenings.


XVIIDUKE is a Newark, New Jersey based poet & artist. 

"I found freedom in poetry. I write to share love, memories, moments and stories with the world. It matters that I write because it matters that I live. The more I live, the more I experience. The more I experience the deeper I feel. I put the time and effort into writing for the expression of emotions. Feelings take time to understand, express and then write. Poetry becomes a release of emotions. Through my poetry I want to convey beauty. As a poet, I want my legacy to be unreal. I became a writer when I realized that one of the most important things to me in this life is freedom. Writing and performing poetry provides me with that. Poetry gives me an opportunity to connect worlds, connect people and connect feelings. For that, I am forever appreciative of the art form."

Ian Eckstein, is a New Jersey based sound artist. 

Ian works as a freelance location sound mixer and post production sound editor.  

Please see the links below to some projects he has worked on.

Z Behl, b. 1985, is a New York based filmmaker and visual artist. 

Z’s work in sculpture, performance, and installation has received awards from NYFA, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. She has exhibited at ArteBA, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, and CAC New Orleans. Z has been artist-in-residence at Mana Contemporary, Pioneer Works, and MOCA Tucson. Her last solo show at Kai Matsumiya Gallery was covered by the Wall Street Journal, Artnet, and INTERVIEW Magazine. Her debut film, Geppetto, which she wrote, directed and starred in, has received support from Kodak, IFP and the Venice Biennale.

A graduate of Wesleyan University (2007), Z is a founding member of the filmmaking collective Court 13. She worked as an artist on Benh Zeitlin’s “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Egg.” Z has acted in films by Ray Tintori (Jettison Your Loved Ones), Kentucker Audley (Open Five 2) and Cary Fukunaga’s "Go Forth America." She has Production Designed Music Videos for MGMT and Chairlift (Time to Pretend, Electric Feel, Evident Utensil).

Lauren Bergman, a painter working  in Jersey City, NJ. 

As a figurative narrative artist Lauren Bergman creates stories in paint that reside at the juncture of myth and social realism. Through her personal language of symbols, the paintings explore both female identity and comment on our shifting political and cultural landscape.

Beginning as a high school student, Lauren Bergman was involved in art classes at the Corcoran School of Art. Her talents and mature narratives quickly landed her gallery exhibitions in Washington, D.C. at Capricorn Gallery, exhibiting among renowned American realists, including Burton Silverman and Sondra Freckelton. Bergman’s work has been featured in publications ranging from The New York Times to Juxtapoz Magazine. She has had three solo exhibitions at the O.K. Harris Gallery in New York, which represented her for a decade. Other solo and two-person exhibitions include the Makor Gallery and Tria Gallery in New York and the Corey Helford Gallery in Los Angeles. Her many group shows include Plus One Gallery in London, Carl Hammer Gallery in Chicago, and Jonathan Levine Gallery and Claire Oliver Fine Art in New York.

Bergman grew up in the Washington metro area, where she studied at the Corcoran School of Art. She earned her bachelor’s degree in fine arts and education from the Univeristy of Massachusets at Amherst, graduating summa cum laude, and her master’s degree at Smith College before relocating to Manhattan to study painting and design at FIT and The Art Students League. Bergman now lives in a converted pickled herring factory in the West Village and has a studio at Mana Contemporary.

Luke Ivy Price, Sculptor & Painter 

In the summer of 2015, Luke left his jobs at a sawmill and cotton mill, and relocated to New York City to pursue a self-guided “MFA” in contemporary art. He has completed numerous unofficial independent work/studies in the industry: installing exhibitions, delivering works to major institutions and collections, assisting other artists with writing and fabrication, organizing events, consulting, and more. Luke is currently participating in an artist residency preparing works for his first professional solo show. His works are expressionistic figurative abstractions that create erotic narratives. “I want to create images and objects that are the sublime emotional partners to the contemporary intellectual discussion surrounding sexual politics.” A showing of his sculptures and paintings is slated for fall 2020 at the Ki Smith Gallery.

Rashad Wright is the Poet Laureate of Jersey City and the first person to hold this title since 2004.  Receiving a BA in Creative Writing from New Jersey City University, he is the only person to be titled the “Grandslam Champion of Jersey City Slam” twice. Rashad has also competed in the 2015 National Poetry Slam in Oakland, California, then again in the 2017 National Poetry Slam in Denver, Colorado. Since 2016, he has coached Jersey City Slam. Also at the 2017 Individual World Poetry Slam in Spokane, Washington, Rashad won 25th in the country. At the 2018 Individual Poetry Slam in San Diego, California, Rashad placed 20th in the country

Rashad’s work expands into memoir, fiction, short story, performance art, and music. His work has been published in several online magazines and journals. Please see the link below to his published debut manuscript of Romeo’s Whiskey.