Mission
Serve & Project utilizes the arts to promote civic engagement, cultural understanding and positive social change.
Serve community by offering space within which to discuss and create.
Project by lending artistic voice to given community dialogue and conversation stimulated by the making, production or consumption of food.
As co-directors of Serve & Project, Lisa Link and Io Palmer research and approach organizations to use food to address personal and/or social issues. Both artists then collaborate to create artwork born out of community input and artistic knowledge.
Io and Lisa are experienced community art educators who met while working at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild (MCG) in Pittsburgh, PA where Io was a ceramics instructor and Lisa taught in the digital imaging lab.
Artist Bios
http://www.iopalmer.com
Io Palmer is a multimedia conceptual artist. Her work address issues of race, class, gender and societal influences surrounding dialogue and language. Io received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia and her MFA from the University of Arizona in Tucson. Currently Io is Assistant Professor at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington.Ms. Palmer has had extensive experience conceptualizing and co-leading various public arts initiatives throughout the country including mosaic and straw-bale installations in the Sonoran desert and multimedia performance productions in Rockland Maine. Most recently she lead a multi-generational collaborative public arts project in Minneapolis, Minnesota where she collaborated with such centers as the Peace Foundation and the Walker Arts Center to create socially and politically informed public art.
http://lisalink.net
Lisa Link has a lifelong dedication for historic research and visual analysis. She was recognized for her scholarship with election to the Phi Beta Kappa society of Harvard University. In 1992, Ms. Link earned an M.F.A. in photography from the University of Colorado, Boulder. She created and exhibited a series of computer montages and video titled Warnings‚ which examines critical issues in women's history.The Warnings national tour includes over forty galleries and educational institutions in fourteen states including the Women's Building in San Francisco, Artspace Gallery at The University of Virginia, the Joseph Gross Gallery at the University of Arizona and the New York University Law School.
She currently works as a web designer at the University of Massachusetts Boston and as a freelance artist for the Crimson Summer Academy at Harvard University.