Kedrick McKenzie’s work is an inquiry of what lies underneath layers and layers of frontiers. Growing up on the West Coast, where, as Joan Didion puts it, “boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension,” McKenzie has said his work originates from the act of questioning his assumptions about the place he calls home and the stories told about it. By combining quotidian craft practices with ephemeral materials, he challenges the slippery and subjective ways that histories are recorded and recounted. His practice revolves around the uneasy combination of the care and individuality imbedded in craft traditions with the extractive practices and consumer culture that built his homeland. The result is a research-led practice that suggests new stories about place, identity, and history. 

As manager of the Greenhouse Education and Research Complex at Temple University Ambler, Benjamin Snyder oversees the use and care of various educational horticulture features, including a tropical greenhouse collection, organic food production garden and seasonal outdoor displays. His primary interests focus on controlled environment horticulture, including plant production and ex situ plant conservation in an educational setting. 

B.S. Horticulture, Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University 

lydon frank lettuce is an artist, writer, and all-around goon from rural Pennsylvania. They plant poems in your garden and dig diagrams into the sand. They wrestle with the knotted garden hose of language and press your semantic satiation up against the wall. They hold an MFA from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA from Parsons, the New School. They are always speaking frankly.