Himikalas Pamela Baker (Musgamakw Dzawada’enuxw, Tlingit, Haida, and Squamish) is a highly accomplished Indigenous artist and designer with 45 years of traditional knowledge and teachings in West Coast First Nations protocol and artwork. She is a successful entrepreneur and owner-operator of Touch of Culture, TOC Legends Designs.

For the past 31 years, Baker has garnered extensive experience in fashion design, fashion show production, marketing, retailing, coaching, production, and delegation of various art projects, including clothing and jewelry design.

She has practiced her cultural traditions since age five and utilizes these traditional teachings, incorporating them into her fashion designs and projects. It’s her lifelong commitment to continue to study and create work inspired by her ancestors.

After earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Fashion Design from Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles in 1998, Baker returned to Canada to share what she’d learned and to mentor youth.

Baker has received two prestigious awards: the NAMSB for menswear, and the Arthur Gilbert Award, the top award in evening wear. In February 2024, she was hired as the first Indigenous designer in residence at Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Wilson School of Design, in Surrey, British Columbia. She also has received recognition as a renowned First Nations fashion designer.

Lewis deSoto (Cahuilla), born in 1954 in San Bernardino, California, is known for creating installations, sculpture, photography, writing, and public art that engages cosmological questions and notions of self and plays with inherent phenomena. He was educated at the University of California, Riverside, and Claremont Graduate University. He taught at Otis Art Institute in Los Angeles and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle, Washington, and served as the director of graduate studies at California College of Arts and Crafts. He is an emeritus professor of art at San Francisco State University.

His work has been exhibited in Japan, Europe, and the US. It is also in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Seattle Art Museum, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, Columbus Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and many private collections.

He has written two books, Empire, essays and photographs about the Inland Empire that accompanies an exhibition, and Tired of Eternity, writings that record stories of the extraterrestrial being Coyote and his calculations about faster-than-light travel.

He lives in Napa and Channel Islands Beach, California.

The prints Ethan Lauesen (Gulkana Village Council) develops archives their experiences as a visibly queer Alaskan Native and how they are perceived in Alaskan public spaces. Their work explores core themes of intersectionality, community, and identity acceptance. The work Lauesen creates directly references the emotions they experience associated with the tension surrounding doubt and lack of acceptance. To achieve this effect, Lauesen often incorporates figurative distortions, adding disconcerting elements into the figures, obscuring facial features, and repeating specific anatomical features and the entire figure itself.

For Lauesen, the premise behind the figurative distortions is to create an effect of emotional transference that alludes to the experience of identity rejection. Emphasis is placed on a strong sense of place and the activities, routines, and cultural associations with city and rural scapes.  They reference places that resonate with their conscience and memory. Much of the imagery they create incorporates visual cues from their cultural background, collaging formline imagery into their prints. The collaged formline elements are spectral in nature, capturing the spiritual importance of Lauesen’s cultural heritage. “No matter where I go in the world,” they say, “it will always be a core part of my identity.”

Lauesen’s work is an autobiographical, visual narrative compiling their day-to-day experiences through intersectional context—from relationships and community interaction to identity acceptance and development. To emphasize the intimacy of their prints, Lauesen works on a relatively small scale, utilizing intaglio techniques that require more attention to detail. As a result, their body of work is also a coming-out story for their own queer identity and the gradual process of becoming more comfortable with that identity. Their work highlights the complexity of Alaska’s cultural dialogue, especially regarding Alaska Native and LGBTQIA+ experiences. Through their imagery, they strive to challenge the notion that one must present oneself for the comfort of others and to foster an appreciation for community and diversity. 

Kellen Trenal (niimíipuu, Nez Perce, and Black) is a visual artist, performer, small business owner, University of Notre Dame alumnus, and holistic wellness practitioner.

Trenal—pronounced like “Chanel”—was born and raised in the Pacific Northwest. He embraces his Black and niimíipuu (Nez Perce) ancestry to empower his work across multiple industries. His art explores the intersection of tradition and innovation as an act of cultural reclamation as a contemporary Black niimíipuu voice. Storytelling, traditional arts, and language revitalization are key ingredients in Trenal’s creations. He shares his artwork through Trenal Original, a traditional-arts-based, Queer, Black, Indigenous, People of Color (QBIPOC)-owned, small business.

Currently, Trenal performs in Spokane Ensemble Theatre’s single-person show, According to Coyote, nationwide, with recent performances at Seattle Rep theater and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian.

Born in 1969, Gina Herrera (Tesuque Pueblo) was raised in Chicago and currently resides in California. She has a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Art Education from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. During her studies, she was deployed overseas with the US Army to support several war contingencies.

While serving in Iraq, miles of mountainous trash heaps amidst the devastation of combat galvanized a lifelong love of nature into an activist’s calling. Her art practice evolved to lessen her environmental footprint and to channel Mother Earth consciously in a spiritual and aesthetic ritual that stems from her personal affinity to nature and her Tesuque and Costa Rican heritage.

Once her final tour was complete, Herrera obtained a Master of Fine Arts from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She has received fellowships, grants, and residencies from the Harpo Foundation/Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Arts, Hambidge Center, Ox-Bow, Peripheral Arts Foundation, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation, The Puffin Foundation, Self Help Graphics, and Kasini House Artist Lab, in conjunction with 516 Arts and the Albuquerque Museum.

Herrera’s first temporary public art installation was in residence at the Valencia Town Center in Santa Clarita, California, in 2016. From 2017 to 2019, an installation was displayed at the South Bend Museum of Art in South Bend, Indiana, and in 2022, her work was featured on an episode of Bel-Air on the Peacock TV network.

In 2022, Herrera participated in the Conversations in Practice Online Residency at Ox-Bow and received a grant from the DEMIL Art Fund for veterans. In 2023, she was a National Endowment for the Humanities veteran fellow. She participated in the 2023 SURVIVING THE LONG WARS  Veteran Art Summit, where her work was displayed at the Chicago Cultural Center. Most recently, she was awarded the California Arts Council Established Artists Grant.

Herrera is currently creating and exhibiting work in galleries around the country and exploring avenues for creating larger-scale permanent public art projects to bring her message of environmental mindfulness to even more people.

Her dedication to service extends to all aspects of her professional life—from her almost 25 years in the US military to educating and inspiring the next generation as an art teacher at Arvin High School and adjunct professor at Bakersfield College.