WCA BOARD & COMMITTEES

Sandra D. Davis is an artist that likes to experiment with materials and mediums, with a focus on mixed media, utilizing components like acrylics, found paper, newspaper and magazines, keeping a recycled theme.  Sandra’s current work is a direct response to social issues happening in our country, including present grievances, in- equality and identity of others.

Issues such as Equal Pay, Health disparity, housing and education and the continued assault on men and women of color are all topics that remain a real concern.  In this era of social media, we are bombarded by tweets, instant messaging, Instagram pics are quick snapshots of capturing current events are platforms for inspiration.

The impacted parties are not only the same groups of people, but the fight has been recycled and re-emerged and refocused.  This has created new fraternities and sororities that has a broader reach and now includes a new generation of how society and people in power want to identify.  Her images can be found on various surfaces including tabletops, tote bags and wearable art. Sandra regularly participates in exhibitions throughout Maryland, DC and Virginia.

Sandra serves as the Exhibition Committee Chair for Women’s Caucus for Art Greater Washington. https://wcadc.org, she also serves as a president-elect for the National Women’s Caucus for Art.

Luner’s artwork allows for contemplation and interpretation on a multitude of interrelated levels: visual, intellectual, and historical.
Form, color and craftsmanship are all important factors, even when she uses materials that are not considered conventional art materials. Often, she uses industrial products like styrofoam as a substrate and a variety of organic substances stabilized with acrylic mediums: tortillas, muffin wrappers, coffee filters, dryer lint among many others.

Reinforcing her desire to have the work read on a variety of levels, the titles often reflect an ambivalence towards the viewer/consumer, the interpretation process, the art market, or the piece itself. She also enjoys a humorous approach, often using a play of words or ironic suggestions like in the titles: We Won’t Give or this latex piece might outlive your lifespan. However, her work rarely takes on a purely ironic stance, and when it does, it usually involves some kind of criticism directed at the male dominated art market, the ‘old boys club’, or the male-centric historic narrative. Art For Art’s Sake Is A Luxury Women Just Can’t Afford, a mounted piece of plastic junk, or Holy Baloney, a sausage made from a bible are perfect examples. She might also refrain from titling a work to invite a matter-of-fact approach, refusing to guide the viewer into any pre-fabricated point of view. For example, all the pieces in the styrofoam/packaging-peanut/bandage series are Untitled. In general, she prefers a serial approach, one of which escalated in 1996 into a 256 part series: The Office Coffee And Cake Piece, in which she made a painting for each workday of the year of 1996.

Over the years, her work transformed from the early 1980s figurative expressionist style practiced in Berlin where she studied and received her MFA, to her Super 8 movies, to the abstract feminist works of the 1990s, to her current abstract organic approach. These shifts have been important stages in clarifying and defining her artistic vision. 

In 2016, she moved to Upstate NY and rediscovered her love for plants and mushrooms, and now spends most of her free time gardening and tending her chickens.

Joni Inman is known throughout the community as a business and government affairs consultant but she’s been a “Maker” for most of her life.  She’s worked in many craft mediums but always comes back to fiber art as her first love.  With years of experience in quilting, fabric collage, purse making and as a former needlecraft instructor, she recently decided to dip her hand (literally) into wet felting after seeing a beautiful piece in Santa Fe, NM.  This has quickly become her medium of choice. 

Joni is the Vice President of Community Engagement for the Colorado Chapter. 

She, and her metal artist husband, live in Golden, CO.

Rona Lesser did not start out as an artist, but originally got her degree in Elementary Education, specializing in Special Ed. As a young mother, she took her first drawing classes and fell in love with drawing people. She continued to take classes part time for many years, concentrating on figure drawing and painting and learning different media. At the same time, she continued her involvement in education, teaching life skills to special needs adults and then adult basic education to welfare clients part time, always reserving a morning for art classes.

As her children got older, she began teaching for City ArtWorks, a nonprofit afterschool art program, applying her love of teaching to her new love of art making. Through teaching she learned art history and many new art techniques.
She also worked for Young Audiences as a teaching artist in the schools. Teaching remains her passion, and she continues to work in various capacities as an art educator. One role is as a longtime docent at the Blaffer Art Museum of the University of Houston, which has been a window to understanding contemporary art. She is also working with Jewish educators in the arts to create curriculum and training for including the arts in lessons.
Currently she works mostly in watercolor, with some work in pastel and acrylic. Her subjects are mostly figures done from life, and landscapes done both plein- air and from her travel photos. She has had work in many juried exhibits in Houston, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles.

She became involved at the national level of WCA as chair of the Jewish Women’s Art Network about 20 years ago and served on the national board as a chapter representative, JWAN chair, and S.W Regional Chair. She has also in the past served on the board in Houston of the Women in the Visual and Literary Arts. She is a member of the Watercolor Society of Houston, the Visual Arts Alliance in Houston, and WIVLA, as well as serving on the board of the new WCA Texas chapter.

Amanda Banks is a multidisciplinary artist local to Huntsville, AL. Her inspiration comes from the pattern language of life and her artistic practice explores how patterns can be combined to create new realities. She has enjoyed a varied practice across her 15 year career and enjoys working across many forms of media. Amanda has led arts-based academic research under the direction of the National Science Foundation (NSF), Department of Justice (DOJ), and National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

Currently, Amanda lives in North Alabama with her partner and their two teenage children. She works from her sensory-friendly home studio and is available by appointment.

Dr. Rachel Epp Buller is a visual artist, feminist art historian, professor, and mother of three. Her artistic and scholarly pursuits often address these intersections, including exhibitions and publications that focus on the maternal body and feminist care in contemporary art contexts. Her current research-creation project, Acts of Listening: Art and Relational Attunement, addresses listening as artistic method in contemporary art. Most of the works in this exhibition were created during a 2021-22 fellowship as Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Arts and Humanities at the University of Alberta.

She has exhibited her artwork in solo and group exhibitions in the US, UK, Netherlands, Germany, and Italy, and in 2016 she curated and wrote the exhibition catalogue for the first-ever retrospective of German artist Alice Lex-Nerlinger, hosted by Das Verborgene Museum in Berlin. She is a board member of the National Women’s Caucus for Art, regional coordinator of The Feminist Art Project, certified practitioner in Deep Listening, and Professor of Visual Arts and Design at Bethel College (KS).

Allicette Torres is a Puerto Rican artist, curator, and arts writer who has lived in Harlem for over 20 years. As a photographer and visual composer, the core of her work is about memory. She includes aspects of film, performance art, and sculpture in her schemes.

Orchestrating scenarios that imbue the pain of the past and its ramifications in the present. Often, she explores highly charged themes such as repression, history, and race; her photographs ask, How does history coupled with choices or inactions shape the fabric and legacy of who we are.

Lisa’s art is her story. She embraces Mother Earth and the women she created. By sharing what affects women and the environment, Lisa tells a story of darkness and light of abuse and love. Using vibrant bright color, moody dark color and nature inspired textures her art transcends age, race, cultural boundaries and ideologies. Through lines, pattern and space the strength and beauty of a planet and women combine to tell an amazing story.

Cathy Salser is a national leader in the emerging field of durational art, dedicated to incubating individual and community-driven art activations as a modality for supporting social change.
As founder of A Window Between Worlds (AWBW), Salser has spent 31+ years co-creating a circle of arts-based change-makers innovating journeys to transform trauma that lives in our bodies, relationships, communities and systems. Through this work, Salser has invited hundreds of thousands of adults and children who have experienced domestic violence, homelessness, child abuse, incarceration, sexual assault, substance abuse, community violence, and intergenerational trauma to pilot their own art practices that anchor change. The scope of this work today includes over 300 active community sites engaging over 60,000+ participants annually in 40+ states as well as Mexico, Pakistan, South Africa and Venezuela.

Salser served for a decade on the board of directors of the Liberty Hill Foundation, a partnership of donors and community activists working to address issues of social, racial, and economic inequality. She served for five years on the board of the Southern California Women’s Caucus for Art, and currently serves on the board of the national Women’s Caucus for Art.

At AWBW, she serves as Strategic Vision and Partnership Advisor, supporting key initiatives to uplift community voices, center social justice and embed sustainability in organizational practices. Recent cornerstone projects include:
• #PrisonersToo, a project created by individuals living in custody within South Carolina women’s prisons designed to shift institutional culture and practices around rape, sexual assault and trauma.
• Act of Hate  Activate, a Los Angeles based project incubated within LAvsHate, supporting a cohort of community leaders to prototype art-based practices to ground community action, breaking isolation and standing against hate.

Salser’s lifelong inquiry is:
• How can we use art to anchor transformation?
• What does that unique journey look like for a given individual and/or community?
• How can we build a circle innovating, interconnecting and practicing art as a resource for connecting deeply to ourselves and each other in the face of violence and trauma?

She honors each partner, facilitator and participant as the innovator of art-based practices to serve their own journeys, contexts and needs. As community partners uplift and interconnect voices, these projects invite and embody a co-creative fabric of change.

Salser earned her BA in Studio Art at Williams College, where she was valedictorian of her class of 1988 and was awarded the college’s Bicentennial Medal in 2006. She was also valedictorian of her high school class and she received the Future Masters Award from the City of Los Angeles and was one of four National Presidential Scholars in the Visual Arts for which she was honored at the White House. Additional awards and recognition include: Women’s Caucus for Art President’s Award for Art & Activism, Bank of America Local Heroes Award, Avon Hello Tomorrow Fund Award, Betty Fisher Award from the Los Angeles Domestic Violence Council, and Karen Cooper Lifetime Achievement Award from the California Partnership to End Domestic Violence.

Sarah Ernst is an artist, curator and advocate for all things that help right the boat of life. She was born in Wyoming and currently works in Virginia. She received her Bachelor’s in Studio Art from the University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Virginia in 2010 and her Master’s in Visual Arts from Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 2019. She works in both painting and sculpture to investigate how the common, and comfortable become odd and illicit and vice versa. In 2019, she wrote her thesis on archetypes of fear and femininity and, which one is in the position of power when they are combined. In her work, it’s always the feminine.

Sarah is passionate about her work as a curator because it gives her the opportunity to choose projects that amplify the voices of those that have been underrepresented, and undersourced. She has 15 years of experience in exhibitions including a robust exhibition and programming record in museums.

Sarah is a single mother of two adult children, and a thirdwho happily still lives at home as well as many, many dogs and cats. She enjoys collecting 1972 Chevrolets, home renovation, paddleboarding, yoga and any adventure she can take her dogs on.