Art Rosenbaum and Hye Yeon Nam by Tyrus Lytton

The works and lives of Rosenbaum and Nam mirror and grow from a source/sense of place defining us through our traditions and the creations of new systems. Rosenbaum’s paintings give rise to the temporal strangeness of what many consider traditional American lives through painting while Nam utilizes new media and performance to re-examine cultural traditions and our daily interactions through unique methods. Both artists operate on multiple levels of humor, flirtatious-ness, and soul that have the ability to lead the viewer to deeper meanings within themselves if they are willing to play along. They make it difficult to resist not doing so.

Art Rosenbaum, born in 1938 in Ogdensberg, NY, is a painter, muralist, and illustrator, as well as a collector and performer of traditional American folk music. He earned his MFA in Painting at Columbia University and has worked in France on a Fulbright in Painting; he also has a Fulbright Senior Professorship in Germany. Among his exhibitions was the Corcoran's 41st Biennial of American Painting, and his works are in many collections, including the New Orleans Museum of Art and the Columbus (GA) Museum.

He has executed mural commissions at the UCLA School of Law and the Center for Humanities and Arts at the University of Georgia. His solo show in 2000 at the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York was reviewed in Art in America.

His folk music field work in the South and Midwest has resulted in over 14 documentary recordings, several of which are on Smithsonian-Folkways; he wrote and illustrated two books, Folk Visions and Voices: Traditional Music and Song in North Georgia (1983), and Shout Because You're Free: The African American Ring Shout Tradition on the Coast of Georgia (1998), both published by the University of Georgia Press.

A performer on a variety of folk instruments, he has appeared at numerous folk festivals both solo and with groups like the present-day Skillet Lickers, has cut three banjo/vocal LPs and CD's, and has written and illustrated two instruction books on traditional banjo styles.
He is Wheatley Professor in Fine Arts at the Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia and in 2003 was a recipient of a Governor of Georgia's Award in the Humanities.

Hye Yeon Nam is a digital media artist working on interactive installations, performance video, speculative design, and experimental games. She is a Ph.D. candidate at the Georgia Institute of Technology and holds an M.F.A. in digital media from the Rhode Island School of Design. She foregrounds the complexity of social relationships by making the familiar strange, and interpreting everyday behaviors in performative ways. Hye Yeon's art has been showcased in The Smithsonians National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. (2011-2012), Times Square (2009), the art gallery Eyebeam and The Tank, the conflux, the D.U.M.B.O. Art Festival in New York (2009), FILE (2011, 2012), SIGGRAPH (2008, 2010), CHI (2010, 2012), ISEA (2011), E3 Expo (2011), the Lab in San Francisco, and several festivals in China, Istanbul, Ireland, the UK, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Switzerland. Her work has been broadcast on the Discovery Channel (Canada) and LIVE TV show Goodday Sacramento, published in Leonardo Journal and featured in Wired, We Make Money Not Art, Makezine, Bussiness Insider, Slashdot, Engadget, and among other publications.