Artists
Beth Allen
Beth is a 9-5 graphic designer who has a long list of hobbies outside of work. When she’s not on the clock, she’s busy rocking out in one of her local bands, vanning, dirt biking, creating multimedia art, or dabbling in taxidermy. A small garage freezer (now half full of frozen specimens) was one of her first purchases when she relocated from SF to Morongo Valley in 2017.
Beth’s interest in preserving dead animals began in the early 1990s when she learned to stuff a mouse in a class taught by San Francisco artist, Jeanie M. Jeanie’s taxidermied white mice with angel wings were popular in novelty shops in the bay area every year at Christmastime.
After the mouse class, Beth explored doing taxidermy on other small creatures -- mice, rats, small birds, squirrels and even a tarantula! Because friends were interested, she started teaching classes.
You can check out some of Beth’s taxidermy art here.
Sunny Atema, aka Wildlife Freeway
Sunny Atema (aka Wildlife Freeway) is an installation/fiber artist, musician, abstract painter and filmmaker who tours with an upright piano. Her debut album Sunny, a collection of exquisitely crafted, jazz-folk songs that fill the wakeful heart's hunger for intimacy, was produced and accompanied by Alex Ebert (Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros), released in 2022 on Ebert’s label, Community Music. Attending a Wildlife Freeway concert is to enter into a portal of stillness, emotion and awe. Sunny is also the creator and illustrator of Animal Medicine Cards, an oracle deck that gives divine wisdom from our neighbors the animals. She has a growing collection of musical films that are time capsules and fantasy journeys filled with cameos, paper mache masks, record stores, forests, underwater dancing and, of course, piano concerts for unlikely audiences on questionable terrain. With her strange songs in Wildlife Freeway music, with the Animal Medicine Cards reaching through species to learn from each other, and through powerful, experiential installations and paintings, Atema engages the senses to widen awakening of our capabilities and wonder.
Visit her website here.
Anthony Greenz
Anthony Greenz is an entertainer who strives to engage and inspire audiences as well as individuals in any setting. Greenz jumps at the chance to inspire people because he loves to be inspired, this is how he originally became a performer. Anthony Greenz received a BFA in dance, and has since performed and created performance troupes that have done shows all over the world. Although he specializes in dance and choreography, Greenz is also a skilled character actor and circus artist. Anthony Greenz has been in the entertainment industry for 15+ years and still continues to produce shows with original acts at festivals, corporate events, and in unsanctioned renegade spaces.
Alea Bone
Alea Bone is a repurposed metal assemblage artist.
She received her BFA from the Pacific Northwest College of Art with a major in Illustration, but soon after graduating, traded in her paintbrush for tin snips and a hammer. She gleans inspiration from discarded items such as bottle caps, beer cans and vintage tin. Over the last 15 years of working with recycled materials, she has discovered that objects have a way of finding her - rather than the other way around.
She recently relocated to the desert from Portland, Oregon in a car loaded with more bottle caps than personal possessions. Her extensive collection has been donated by friends from all over the world throughout the years. These materials represent a collaboration of intention, generosity, and love, and add communal energy to her work.
She will be constructing a human-sized aviary during her month long residency at the Sanctuary, January 2024. The cocoon-like capsule will serve as an interactive portal of possibilities highlighting the transformative potential inherent in everyday objects, challenging perceptions of waste and value.
Erin Maxick (The Little Zoo)
Erin is a So Cal native who started life as a shy child.
After moving to Los Angeles from Orange County, Erin toured with a modern dance company and worked with performance artists Robert Wilson, Eleanor Antin and Karen Finley which lead her to open herself to a more fantastical journey.
She became inspired by the wild creativity of the then underground pioneer cirque theater troupe Lucent Dossier Experience and joined as a full-time member in their first year dancing, twirling fire and creating unique characters. She has additionally toured as a dancer with Panic! at the Disco and the Dresden Dolls.
Erin has appeared in many plays, short and independent films, and over 25 television commercials.
Erin is the founder of The Little Zoo, a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing love and connection to seniors, veterans and children with complex needs through therapeutic animal visits. She has 28 pets including chinchillas, lizards and snakes and loves sharing the heartwarming joy that animals bring.
Erin has her own line of French style botanical soap called Éclore Soap.
She loves fine wine, smoking her father’s old pipe, single malt scotch, hosting tea parties and tending to her collection of over 250 exotic orchids.
Bunnie Reiss
Highway Sanctuary Artist in Residence October 2023.
Bunnie Reiss was raised under the wide blue skies of Colorado and often describes her childhood as similar to the song ‘Little Fluffy Clouds’ by The Orb—What were the skies like when you were young? They went on forever. She grew up a tiny rebel with a large imagination and knew from a young age that she would build things much bigger than herself. Raised in a large Polish and Russian family, Bunnie’s inner and outer worlds were shaped by a familial love for food, loud talking, and deep community. These roots forever encourage and influence her creativity and work.
While living in Rural Colorado in the 90s, Bunnie studied literature, worked for NPR, and quietly painted on the side. Magic, mysticism, nature, and stars slowly crept into her consciousness and she began obsessively studying these interests and callings that permeate her work today. Driven by an ever-present need to travel, be in community, and obtain information, Bunnie has lived and worked in many places, including the San Francisco Bay Area, where she received an MFA from San Francisco Arts Institute, found a community of artists, and grew and thrived in years of creative incubation in wild streets full of weird art and people, painting everywhere she could.
After a short, but influential, stint in Pont-Aven, France and a few other areas around the United States, Bunnie relocated to Los Angeles where she began creating her murals and art all over the world. Her murals, and mural-making process, are always in conversation with the communities she works within. Bunnie is forever taking off her headphones to chat with people curious about her work and process. During the pandemic, Bunnie began creating more mosaic and sculpture work. Her intricate mosaics use traditional techniques to converse with objects, collections, and memories to create vibrant missives from the natural and supernatural worlds. Her sculptures are based on nostalgic playground toys made for adults, sparking conversation between serious and playful, fine art and low brow, and encouraging interaction and play.
Bunnie has shown extensively in both the United States and around the world, in galleries, alternative spaces, bookstores, abandoned buildings, fields and forests, or any place that seems to need a little extra magic. Her brightly-colored folk murals decorate many countries and can be found all over the world in places like Los Angeles, Mexico, Italy, Paris, India, Philippines, Detroit, Milwaukee, New York, and San Francisco.
In 2016, Bunnie purchased her dream property in the Mojave Desert of California and began slowly building up a 5-acre art farm affectionately known as Lilac Lane Farms where she has found a balance of life and art within her painting studio and alongside animals, vegetable and flower gardens, and community.
Bianca Lee
Hello! I am Bianca Banka Lee aka BabyBossinova.
I’m an artistic spirit and jack-of-all-hustles, expressing creativity in any mediums available including painting, sewing, sculpture, and performance.
The experience of being inspired is what I love, so I act with the intention of creating more of that for others. While I love to craft, the ultimate art is the precious moments of life that we share together.
Let’s collaborate on making life our masterpiece!
Stephanie Brockway
Highway Sanctuary Artist in Residence September 2023
Stephanie Brockway is a Portland, OR based woodcarver and found object artist.
From the artist:
Part anthropologist, part collector, my art path has taken many twists and turns. I don’t set out to recycle or upcycle, so much as hold an object and see possibilities. I’m driven to build or create something where there once was nothing. At heart I’m a painter, having dabbled in many mediums. A common thread in my work is unexpected colors or materials. I am easily bored if I’m not challenging or pushing myself, creating a problem that needs solving.
The worn, discarded fragments I use can range from old fishing floats, vintage household implements, furniture and building parts, to a discarded paint brush used for many years, all the layers of paint telling a story. It’s exciting to see what emerges. Wood carving is a subtractive medium and unforgiving. Each piece of wood is a bit of a mystery, with different grains and ages, each presenting the challenge I crave.
I strive for craftsmanship and try to elevate the forgotten into an heirloom. My style is primitive and naive with touches of urban, destruction, and decay creeping in. I seek simplicity in a world that is too often mass-produced.
I have had the privilege of being published many times, including two articles in the spring 2013 issues of Art Doll Quarterly and in Prims. Another highlight was a spot on HGTV’s That’s Clever and being a featured artist on Oregon Public Broadcasting’s Oregon Art Beat in 2018.
www.instagram.com/stephaniebrockway
Morgan Sorne
Morgan Sorne is a multi-disciplinary, award-winning vocalist, composer, visual artist, instrumentalist, actor and filmmaker, boasting an unparalleled vocal range with perfect pitch. He brings listeners to tears with his hypnotic angelic falsetto, and has churned crowds into a writhing frenzy with his bone-rattling dynamism and range.
Sorne was featured in Rolling Stone’s top 50 finds of SXSW 2015, selected as one of 63 artists to represent contemporary art in Texas by Art in America in 2008 and 2012 and currently working on a graphic novel with poet, actor and musician, Saul Williams due internationally in 2019 through First Second Books.
Dominic Snow, aka Elephantman
Highway Sanctuary Artist In Residence: September - December 2022
Dominic Snow, aka Elephantman, is a sculptor and painter living and working in London whose work explores the nature of what constitutes a ‘person.’ Snow has been mostly self-taught. In 2015, Snow launched a guerrilla street art campaign aimed at generating discussion on the rights of animals to be considered non-human persons.
Snow is also a member of the Urban Art Association and will be in the first Artist In Residence at Highway Sanctuary. His time at HS will be be building an art installation, The Empathy Revolution: Love Machine, which will have its debut at Art with Me Musical Festival in Miami, FL on November 26, 2022.