The YVE Collective is a group composed of four women visual artists (individual bios below). We came together during the pandemic lockdown in order to stay in touch (by USPS and email). We developed a collective praxis of working on each other’s collages around the themes of women, war, and peace.
J. Yvonne Skaggs is an artist who exhibits two- and three-dimensional work in various venues in New York and New Jersey. She studied at the University of Iowa School of Art and Art History. Her varied career includes producing maps and technical drawings and designing and preparing exhibits for small history and art organizations. With traditional artifacts being destroyed around the world by man and nature, she has been considering what we mean when we preserve objects, paintings, and artifacts of all kinds. With the abstracted landscape images shown here, she thinks about the definition of style and culture and the objects we choose to save to record our time. She uses the technique of collage, reassembling elements to sculpt, build, and construct images. The papers and fabrics come from many sources — magazines, newspapers, photographs, paper, and fabric.
Meredeth Turshen is an artist, teacher, and writer who lives in Hoboken, New Jersey and has taught at Rutgers University–New Brunswick for more than twenty-five years. Her art studies began at age ten at the Art Students League in New York and continued, after majoring in studio art at Oberlin College, in workshops and residencies at Pratt, the Printmaking Council of New Jersey, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Printmaking, Vermont Studio Center, and Moulin à Nef (VCCA France). She exhibits regularly in the New York metropolitan region and with the National Association of Women Artists. A feminist activist and author, Meredeth has written extensively about women’s experiences in wartime and organized conferences in Dakar and Johannesburg where women shared their trauma of living through conflict.
Enid Braun uses urban and nature landscape imagery in mixed-media drawing, pastel, and oil. She currently teaches private figure drawing classes in her Brooklyn studio and pastel and drawing classes at the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. She was a visiting artist at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and was awarded a pastel fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center. Born in Detroit, Enid received a BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA from Pratt Institute. Enid is also a political activist, focusing on local issues of housing and park space in Brooklyn.
Susan Darley, by profession, is an experimental social and licensed clinical psychologist, but by nature she has been creating artwork since as far back as she can remember. Her dream as a child was to be an artist when she grew up. Now nearing 80 she continues making art — mostly collages — but is still looking forward to growing up. Susan coordinated the art program at the Trenton Area Soup Kitchen for thirty years and is now mentoring the artists, renamed “The ANEW Artists Alliance,” as they work to develop independent art careers.
