A BEAUTIFUL & BIZARRE TAXIDERMY SHOWCASE - ONE NIGHT ONLY

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 A unique combination of science and style, Divya Anantharaman is New York City's premiere taxidermist. An award winning licensed professional preserving animals with honor and compassion for clients ranging from museums, high end designers, gallerists, and collectors. Her specialties are birds, small mammals, and anatomic anomalies, with a select number of commissions open for pets. Her work seeks to combine the demonstrative aspect of scientific presentation with the symbolic, introspective nature of art, using taxidermy to engage diverse audiences with conservation. She is passionately curious about the untapped potential of this scientific art.  

She left the corporate fashion industry to pursue her love of natural history as the resident taxidermist at the Morbid Anatomy Museum, and has since built a following creating taxidermy, skeletal, and entomology displays, along with jewelry and wearable art, for anyone who finds wonder in the natural world. In addition to running her own business, she works part time at the esteemed studio of George Dante, which specializes in museum taxidermy and historic conservation. Here, her passion for nature grows through helping preserve animals and exhibits for future generations.

She has recently been featured in the award winning documentary "Rearranging Skin" highlighting the changing face of taxidermy as  the artform evolves with our modern world. 

http://gothamtaxidermy.com 

http://instagram.com/gotham_taxidermy

Justin Fornal is an international explorer and cultural detective.  In June of 2018 he was listed as the '#3 most adventurous person in the world right now' by Men's Journal.  He is Co-Founder of the History, Arts, & Science Action Network (HASAN) a non-profit organization that focuses on relic repatriation, historic justice, and documenting vanishing cultures.

Fornal is currently the host of UNEXPLAINED AND UNEXPLORED, an exploration series that solves mysteries using both ancient maps and cutting-edge technology.  The program has been airing on the Discovery Channel and Science Channel in since 2019.  

Fornal is a SATWF Lowell Thomas Award winning writer who has written extensively for National Geographic, VICE, The Explorers Journal, Parts Unknown, and Roads & Kingdoms. In 2016 he tracked down the lost skull of African American enslaved rebellion leader Nat Turner and repatriated it to the Turner descendants.  The relic had been missing since 1831. 

Fornal is an extreme open water swimmer and is currently attempting the GREAT ARCTIC SWIM This will be the first attempt to perform a continuous swim from Canada to Greenland across the Nares Strait.  He will be wearing a specially designed open-cell neoprene wetsuit for the task.

https://justinfornal.com/

Kate Clark is a sculptor who lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her hybrid sculptures synthesize the human face and the body of wild animals. Her fusion of human and animal creates a fiction that suggest that our humanity is fully realized when we acknowledge not only our current programming but also our natural instincts.   Kate had her first solo exhibit at Claire Oliver Gallery in New York in 2008. Since then she has been exhibited in solo museum exhibitions at the Mobile Museum of Art, The Newcomb Art Museum and the Hilliard Museum and in group museum exhibitions at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, The Islip Art Museum, and The Bellevue Arts Museum, MOFA: Florida State University, Cranbrook Art Museum, Frist Center for the Visual Arts, The Winnepeg Art Gallery, the Glenbow Museum, the Musée de la Halle Saint Pierre, Paris, The Art Gallery at Cleveland State University, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, the Nevada Museum of Art, the David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Biggs Museum of American Art, the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, and the J. Paul Getty Museum.  Her work is collected internationally and is in public collections such as the JP Morgan Chase Art Collection, the 21c Collection, the David Roberts Art Foundation in London, the Cranbrook Museum, and the C-Collection in Switzerland. Clark’s sculptures have been featured in the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, New York Magazine, Art21:Blog, The Village Voice, PAPERmag, The Atlantic, Hyperallergic, NYArts, Huffington Post, Hi Fructose, the BBC World News Brazil, Hey! Magazine, Time Out, ID Paris, Cool Hunting, Wallpaper, Creators Project/VICE, Sculpture Review and many other publications. Kate’s work is the cover image for Art ltd. magazine, November/December 2014. Kate was filmed by National Geographic in her studio over a 2 month period for a short documentary about her work. 

https://www.kateclark.com/

http://instagram.com/kateclarkstudio

Avery Coffey (she/they) is a media personality and film reviewer known for their horror podcast and community events. Her passion for community inspires her to find representation within the macabre. A lover of Halloween and all things gay, they have a deep admiration for subversive art. 

https://www.instagram.com/urhorrorpodcast/?hl=en

https://www.iheart.com/podcast/269-unbound-rewound-horror-pod-106088144/

George Dante has more than 36 years of experience as a taxidermist, sculptor,

model maker, illustrator and fine artist. He has been a field naturalist his entire

life and formed Wildlife Preservations while in high school. George continued to

develop his company while obtaining a Bachelor of Arts from the School of Visual

Arts in New York and today the company is a world-class provider of natural

history exhibit services. Their work has been recognized in media outlets such as

the New York Times, New York Post, Chicago Sun Times, National Geographic

Magazine, Popular Mechanics, Good Morning America, Martha Stewart Living,

NPR, Scientific American, Atlas Obscura, Popular Science, Treasures of New

York, National Geographic Explorer, and more.

Recently George and his team have also become recognized as leaders in the

restoration and conservation of older taxidermy and museum dioramas. His work

continues to advance the way collections are restored by bridging the gap

between classical taxidermy and fine art conservation.

In addition to being the recipient of numerous awards, George is also served

many years an NTA certified judge and instructor with several publications in his

field. His clients include some of the most prestigious institutions and

organizations in the world, such as the American Museum of Natural History, The

Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Harvard University, The Field

Museum, National Geographic, Oxford University, US Fish & Wildlife Service,

and more.

http://wildlifepreservations.com

http://instagram.com/georgedante 

SamSam Graves is an artist, bird educator, and monitor who collaborates with many different organizations such as Local Nature Lab, NYC Plover Project, NYC Bird Alliance, and so many others. They use taxidermy as a tool for conservation to bring awareness to all the amazing creatures we share our space with. 

https://www.instagram.com/samsamgraves/

Robert Marbury is a multi-disciplinary artist working in fabric, photography, and fur. He is a co-founder of the Minnesota Association of Rogue Taxidermists and lectures internationally about alternative taxidermy. He has developed his Urban Beast Project since 2000 in order to investigate the ferine nature of animals and their interaction with humans in the urban environment. Robert has played a drape in John Waters' Crybaby, been held up by pirates in Indonesia, and served as the Public Arts Chair on the Minneapolis Arts Commission. He was a regular judge at the annual Carnivorous Night's Taxidermy Contest. His work has received support from the Aljira Contemporary Art Center in Newark, NJ; the CAFKA Public Art Forum in Ontario, Canada; the Minnesota State Arts Board; and the NEA Artist Initiative Grant. In 2007, Robert was included as one of the “stray dogs of contemporary art” in Charley 05, edited by Maurizio Cattelan, Massimiliano Gioni, and Ali Subotnick. Robert earned his B.A. from Connecticut College and a Post-Bac from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. He currently lives and works in Baltimore, MD. Taxidermy Art: A Rogue's Guide to the Work, the Culture, and How to Do It Yourself is Robert's first book. 

http://robertmarbury.com

http://instagram.com/abeanpie