We host a series of brief lectures by York, PA's makers and doers, who talk about their craft. Our speakers come from varied backgrounds, but they all work systematically and intentionally to create visceral experiences.
PechaKucha Night York utilizes the 20x20 PechaKucha presentation format: 20 slides that automatically advance every 20 seconds. Learn more at PechaKucha.org.
Featured Speakers AT January 25, 2018 PK NIght Event
Our eighth event featured six presenters talking about their respective crafts.
Matthew Clay-Robison
Why Stand On A Silent Platform?
Dictators target artists and art funding because artists have their fingers on the pulse of what is happening in society and can speak truth to power. “This machine kills fascists,” Woody Guthrie wrote on his guitar. As a college art gallery director, Matthew Clay-Robison’s primary curatorial mission is to give a platform to artists whose work addresses critical social issues and challenges harmful power structures in our society, thereby fostering necessary dialogue within the campus and regional communities so that we might build a more just future.
Matthew Clay-Robison is Gallery Director at York College of Pennsylvania, where he has organized exhibitions on campus since 2009, and also more recently at Marketview Arts in downtown York. He is also an artist, focused mainly on addressing issues of social justice through printmaking. His work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and internationally. He has received numerous awards for his work, including Best in Show at National Juried Exhibitions at the Arlington Arts Center in Arlington, Virginia and Foundry Gallery in Washington, DC. His prints belong to several public and private collections including the Library of Congress, who recently acquired his woodcut White, Hot Rage (Home-Grown Demagogue), which was also described and discussed by NPR’s Steve Inskeep on Morning Edition. Matthew was recently awarded CreativeYork’s 2017 Educator of the Year for bringing challenging, thought-provoking exhibitions by artists with international reputations to York, PA.
Victoria Kageni-Woodard
From Kenya, With Love - Purposefully Blooming Where I am Transplanted
In over the two decades that Victoria has been a resident of these United States, she has reinvented herself in more ways than one as life has called her to do. More recently her relocation to York city in 2012, her matrimonial home, presented her another opportunity to plant and grow anew. Her relocation from Allentown in the Lehigh Valley has provided her yet another opportunity to bloom where she finds herself planted. Although she wears many hats, creating art using fabric remains her second most favorite activity, closely following her love and care for her family and whatever community she is a member of. Since the inception of her retail space in the WeCo district, new ideas continue to bloom in a similar fashion as the crops did on her childhood farm.
Victoria Kageni-Woodard is a wife, mother, entrepreneur, and is a native of the East African nation of Kenya. She is also the owner of Gusa By Victoria, a women’s clothing retail shop that offers more than meets the eye. Growing up on Sunday View Farm, her family-owned property on the southern mainland from Mombasa island, planting new things is a process deeply embedded in her.
Caleb Robertson
FOCUS!
Why do we desire to become masterful? How an unfocused life brought Caleb to his life's work.
Caleb is recently married, weighs in at 155 pounds, is the eighth of eight children, a dreamer of dreams, a climber of trees, a maker of things, a little brother to all; he likes run-on sentences, gives up too much personal information in his bio, and if it were not for his wife, he would probably be malnourished and bit hairier.
Zachary Rupert
Wait, People Will Pay Me for My Doodles?
Despite graduating from “art” school twice, Zach never expected individuals and companies to reach out to him to create illustrations and art for them, and especially didn’t expect them to be paying him for it. Follow along as he tries to explain how he went from complete obscurity to still pretty obscure, but now people wear his art on shirts.
Hailing from parts unknown (he lives in York now), Zachary Rupert is a two-time graduate of a for-profit art school that closed because its parent company was being investigated and sued for misleading claims in its efforts to recruit students. He has been active in the design field for over 10 years, and is currently a senior designer at YRK Creative. He also is the dude behind Rupert Beard, his own design and apparel line (go buy a sweatshirt, it’s probably cold out).
Emily Sablosky
Art and Anatomy
Even though we live in our bodies every day of our lives, we don't know that much about them - how they work and how they are put together. This presentation takes a look at the nearly two-thousand year history of visualizing the body, how it varies amongst Eastern and Western cultures, and what we know today.
Emily is an acupuncturist and massage therapist at The Sanctuary in York. She also repairs and restores stringed instruments, practices taiji, and makes all sorts of stuff with paper. In the past, she worked in the library at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, repaired books at the Library of Congress, studied to be a specialist in clocks and watches at Christie’s, trained horses, almost went to architecture school, and holds a master’s degrees in Traditional Oriental Medicine and in the history of science and bachelor’s degrees in art history and French from the University of Maryland.
Leah Limpert Walt
Starting Over with Art
Leah re-invested in her artistic side after starting her life over in York. Thanks to successes and support in the York City community and working hard toward her passion, she’s almost finished her senior year at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design in Lancaster. Leah’s work explores mental health, spirituality, nature, nurture and personal experience through bold colors, dissipating spaces, realism and the occasional sculpture.
Leah Limpert Walt is a Senior BFA student at Pennsylvania College of Art and Design. She was featured as one of YRK Magazine’s Emerging Artists from summer 2017, as well as the recipient of the Cynthia E. Price Memorial Scholarship. She recently had her first solo exhibition entitled “Layered” at Marketview Arts and has had work shown in Harrisburg, York, Lancaster and New York City. Leah lives in York City with her husband Craig and their dog, Monk.
