Artist Profiles

Aaron Allen Marner is a native Phoenician currently working as a full-time and self-taught artist. He was heavily involved in art as a child. Ten years ago in Los Angeles, his passion and love for art and painting was reignited. Since then, he has been honing his craft and exhibiting work in various spaces. His art career has led to life changing opportunities and notable experiences. These include being spotlighted by the Phoenix Art Museum as an emerging artist, having solo interdisciplinary shows at Arizona State University, gaining gallery representation from Framed Gallery of Cleveland, Ohio, creating public art displays, creating his own pop-up art gallery called Pink Elephant and having his work shown in the Children’s Museum of Phoenix.

While mostly working with acrylics, acrylic pen, oil and spray paint, Marner’s approach to portrait and figurative painting includes using collage style and vibrant, colorful hues while often adding geometric shapes and aspects of nature. His work conveys a sense of abstraction and surrealism and is not subjugated by one style. Texture, heavy application of acrylic paint, palette knife strokes while using a more monochromatic style has become a vast part of my creativity.

The purpose in Aaron Allen Marner’s work often is to convey his experiences but also to give viewers a sense of power and emotion. His mission is to inspire youth as well as anyone who dreams of becoming an artist and he believes that representation is essential. “Having the ability to see someone who looks like you and who is from the same community as you,” he says, “ gives individuals the motivation to pursue their passion in art.”

Bob Martin is a native New Yorker who was surrounded by Art, jazz, dance and basketball while he was growing up. He believes that “Creating Art is a real opportunity, to be honest, with no need for an explanation or a defense.’ He believes that “Art is not a prelude to what is to come . . . it has its own life” and, that as the poet-theologian-activist Thomas Merton once said, “Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”

Martin has been creating Art and exhibiting for almost sixty years. He studied Art at the N.Y. School of Visual Arts and The Art Students League of New York with Barry Zaid, Peter Cox, Harvey Dinnerstein, David Lefell, and Ted Seth Jacobs. His most recent one-person shows and group exhibitions have been featured across Arizona in such sites as ASU Gammage, the Goodyear Library, the West Valley Museum of Art, Olney Gallery at Trinity Cathedral, Estrella Mountain Community College and the Sedona Art Center.

Born in Jackson, Michigan, Jenita Landrum earned her BFA degree from Arizona State University and her MFA degree from The Ohio State University. She has studied with and been mentored by artists Sam Gilliam, Rip Woods, Jacob Lawrence and Pheoris West. Her work is part of collections at the Mesa Community College Library in Mesa, Arizona, Jackson Community College in Jackson, Michigan, the King Arts Complex in Columbus, Ohio and the Dial Corporation in Phoenix, Arizona.

Landrum describes her voice in art making as a response to layered societal problems and issues that may affect black lives and gender and that encompasses a range of ethnic groups and class status. The series “Black Male Energy” and “We The People” counteract the views and misconceptions of black identity through abstraction and mixed media. Through abstraction, geometric shape and color, she dispels the perceptions of the black male as a one dimensional being. The paintings explore each man, revealing their personal inner voice on what Black man identity looks and feels like. They reveal layers of emotions, venerability, passion, spirituality, compassion, love, kindness, thoughtfulness, anger and grace.

Landrum’s “We the People” Series examines who and how black people have and are looked upon in the United States. She sees the works as narratives of self-identity that speak through personal voice, abstraction, color, and geometric forms that show how colors, shapes and mixed media can give insight into portraiture and emotions.

Born in Detroit, Michigan, Jacqueline Chanda’s talent for drawing was discovered at an early age. She earned her undergraduate degree in painting and drawing from University of California, Los Angeles. Graduate school led her to Paris, France, where she studied visual arts, art education and plastic arts, theory and aesthetics at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts and the Sorbonne University. While there, she participated in Académie de Port-Royal open studio sessions and exhibited works at the Grand Palais and the Galerie Louis Soulanges. After a successful career in teaching and higher education administration in art education, she returned to her initial love--making art—and Jacqueline is now a full-time artist living in Tucson, AZ.

Chanda has been the recipient of a Research and Professional Development Grant from the Arizona Commission on the Arts, an artist residency at Hypatia-in-the-Woods in Shelton, WA and an artist fellowship-in-residency at the International Women’s Center in Santa Fe, NM. She has participated in solo and juried group competitions and exhibitions at local, national and international levels. Publications about her art have appeared in the Cliente Magazine of the Arizona Daily Star, Sonoran Arts Network Art Review, Tubac Gallery Guide, Lovin’ Life After 50 and The Desert Leaf Magazine.