The Artist Profile Archive

The founding producer and director of The Artist Profile Archive, Sophie Chahinian, a Los Angeles native, earned a B.A. in Philosophy from Occidental College. She became involved with independent film production as both a producer and actor before she began working for Light and Space artist Eric Orr in the late 1990s. Wanting a more formal education in the field, she earned an M.A. in Contemporary Art from the University of Manchester through Sotheby’s Institute of Art London. She then started The Artist Profile Archive as a platform for primary information, allowing artists the opportunity to talk about their own work, in their own words.

Artist Alice Aycock was born in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in 1946 and grew up in nearby Camphill. She earned a B.A. from Douglass College and M.A. at Hunter College. Known for installation, land art and sculpture, she has completed many public sculptures throughout the world. In 2014, seven of her large-scale works were installed on Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan. Her retrospective, Some Stories Are Worth Repeating was first shown at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. It thereafter traveled in two parts to the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at the University of California, Santa Barbara and the Santa Barbara Museum of Art in 2014. She has been based in New York City since 1968.

Artist Jon Kessler was born in Yonkers in 1957. He earned a B.F.A. from SUNY Purchase. Known for his kinetic sculptures and multi-media installations, his work critiques the current obsession with images and surveillance and explores themes of anxiety and climate crisis via found objects combined with motorized machines. Structurally complex and narratively engaging, Jon Kessler’s multimedia sculptures often deliver an emotional punch beyond their humble means. He is currently a professor at the School of the Arts at Columbia University. Kessler’s work is included in many significant collections including the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Walker Art Center, the Israel Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.

Artist Robert Longo (b. Brooklyn, 1953) lives and works in New York. His work is represented in major museums and private collections, including the collections of MoMA, New York; The Broad Collection, Los Angeles; and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Longo is represented by Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac; London, Paris, Salzburg. For the last 40 years Longo was represented by Metro Pictures, New York. His debut solo exhibition at his new representation, Pace Gallery, is on view until October 23rd. Another presentation of Longo’s work opens on the seventh floor of Pace’s gallery in New York on November 4th. Currently Longo also has solo exhibitions at the Palm Springs Art Museum, California; and at Guild Hall, East Hampton.

Artist Arcmanoro Niles makes vivid, brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while also making reference to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, Color Field painting, and ancient Egyptian sculpture. Hailing from Washington D.C. and born in 1989, Niles attended the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. He earned a BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He currently works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail’s ArtSeen section, Ann C. Collins holds a BFA in Film and Television from NYU and an MFA in Art Criticism & Writing from the School of Visual Arts. Her work has also appeared in Degree Critical and Variables West. Her film editing projects include Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold; Can You Bring It: Bill T. Jones and D-Man in the Waters, and the Netflix series The Pharmacist. Her film work has screened at Sundance, Berlin, and New York film festivals. She lives in Brooklyn.