Rock Martinez is an International Aerosol Artist, with over 20 years experience painting large surfaces, commercial buildings and private spaces. From commissions to relevant public tributes, Rock brings creative solutions to neighborhoods around the United States. Working across cultural boundaries of the challenges communities face today, Rock brightens city streets with his larger than life murals. His skills are known for pushing ideas to extremes and unlocking public art awareness. Rock is based in Minneapolis with studios in the Twin Cities and Tucson, AZ.

www.cyfiart.com

179 is a muralist and teaching artist in Seattle, and works with the community on public art projects and workshops. Her goal is to create safe and beautiful spaces for community members by engaging them in mindful installations. She loves working with youth and challenging their brilliant minds to think about their roles within the rapid growth of our city. Her work strives to engage the viewer to be a part of their environment through observation, critique, and participation. She believes community engagement is vital to successful art planning, and art should be accessible to all. Her focus is education and leading by example.

Hoka Skenandore is an enrolled member of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin in addition to being Oglala Lakota, La Jolla Band of Luiseño and Chicano. He grew up in a home where he learned to appreciate traditional native art as well as fine art. On his own, he embraced the DIY ethos of punk rock and hip-hop culture, setting him on the path to becoming a style writer. He transitioned from painting graffiti to working on murals in the Albuquerque metro area in the late ’90s. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in studio arts in 2006, and later from the University of Oklahoma in 2020 with a Master of Fine Arts degree in painting. He is currently full-time faculty at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he teaches introductory Painting and Drawing courses.

Tammy Joy Granados is an enrolled member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, from the Itazipco and Hunkpapa bands of the Lakota/Dakota people, and she was born and raised in Eagle Butte, South Dakota. She currently resides in the community of LaPlant on the Cheyenne River Sioux Reservation. She uses the name Tammy Joy Art for her professional work, and TamiJoy for her graffiti and street art.

Tammy’s expressionistic style is honed through years of experimenting with different mediums and styles — primarily acrylic paint, graffiti and street art, graphic art, and paper. She draws inspiration from cultural components and storytelling, as well as from subjects and objects that have great meaning to her.

Tammy has four young children who inspire her daily, and they often can be found in the pieces she creates. She credits her artistic knowledge to her late uncle, Leonard Granados; her pride in her uncle’s creations evolved into a motivation to learn and find an avenue for her own self-expression. She also attributes a great deal of her artistic growth to her years employed with the Cheyenne River Youth Project in Eagle Butte; she learned a variety of artistic techniques and mediums alongside the young people she served.

Tammy sees her artistic development as a lifelong journey, one in which she is constantly fine-tuning her artistic vision and enhancing her skills and techniques. While she works primarily with acrylic on canvas, she also creates large-scale murals as a graffiti and street artist. On a smaller scale, she produces craft items and wood decor. She enjoys video creation as well as graphic arts; she creates logos, publicity pieces, holiday cards, T-shirt designs, and illustrations for children’s books and other publications. For several years, Tammy has participated as an accepted artist in the “Native POP: People of the Plains” art market, and she has consistently placed in CRST’s Labor Day Domestic and Lakota Arts Exhibit. In addition, her work has been displayed at the Journey Museum in Rapid City as well as at the Rapid City Public Library.

LadyRise began writing graffiti at the age of 14 with her brother and cousin in Chicago, Illinois. It was through the practice of letter style development that she learned to use color and design to help her express themes centered around women. Her passion for graffiti pushed her into learning more about art. She decided to study design and then photography in the school of art at Northern Illinois University.

Working with community, youth and women has always been a part of her everyday living. In Chicago, she belonged to an all female hip-hop collective known as Synergy in which she contributed and helped by facilitating graffiti workshops for the youth on the south and west sides of the city. It was one of the ways she passed down knowledge to young women wanting to learn graffiti.

Today, LadyRise continues to work with the youth as an art teacher on the west side of Phoenix, and she offers graffiti workshops to the youth in surrounding communities. She’s a member of the hip-hop crew Them Bad Apples, and she also is a member of Neoglyphix, an all-indigenous aerosol art collective. You can find her murals throughout Phoenix and view her studio work at gallery exhibits.

As world-renowned dancers, Lumhe and Samsoche Sampson (Mvskoke Creek/Seneca)—a.k.a. the Sampson Brothers— strive to promote cultural pride, unity, and hope by setting a positive example through art, education, and dance. They hope to give back to their tribe and the Indigenous community as a whole by breaking stereotypes and thus creating opportunities for generations to come. The Sampson Brothers aim to be successful artists, but also use that success to educate others while keeping their culture alive. With perseverance in modern times and tradition in tact, they bridge two worlds to provide positive inspiration as 21st century warriors.

Hoop dance has been the brothers’ passion and instrument of choice since they first learned as young boys. While the Powwow styles of Grass and Fancy dance were their origins when they began to walk, they were always encouraged to “never stop learning” and try more… that’s when they were introduced to and picked up their first hoops. At first, it was simply to inform and share with their peers at school assemblies, yet it quickly became a means of living, and ultimately, a way of life. More than 25 years later, they have since performed in more than half a dozen countries and at hundreds of universities, and they have educated thousands of individuals around the world about their culture and Indigenous Hoop Dancing.