Charles Schick Tasha Robbins Carla Crow Nancy Calef Regina Bartkoff
REGINA BARTKOFF. Regina is a painter, actress and writer. She was born in 1956 to a Finnish-Hungarian father and Neopolitan mother and raised in Queens, New York, Howard Beach. After high school, she worked as a hotwalker and groom for racehorses at Aqueduct Racetrack, discovered great life-saving literature, and then fell in love with acting. In the early 1980s, she moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side. There she met her husband, Charles Schick, and they raised their daughter Hannah, who is now 25 and an actress living in L.A. Regina began painting and also performing in numerous plays, including her own productions of Love, Medea, Anna Christie, and Savage in Limbo. She is currently working on a production of the Tennessee Williams play, The Two Character Play, with husband Charles.
NANCY CALEF. Born and raised in the Bronx, Nancy learned about ethnic strife and picked up some survival tools. As a child model, she was taught to concentrate on “how I look” and escaped that pressure by drawing how she saw. At fifteen, she was accelerated from Bronx High School of Science to the College of New Rochelle on a painting and sculpture scholarship. In 1977, she moved to San Francisco and now splits her time living there and in NYC. Nancy continues making new work and regularly exhibits in solo and group shows. She also lived in Greece and Thailand, traveled throughout the U.S., Europe, Mexico, Central America, Southeast Asia, India and Nepal, most often painting in plein-air, which served to develop her figurative style and sharpen her understanding of the cultural and spiritual diversity of the world landscape.
CARLA CROW. Crow was born in 1946 and raised on the South Side of Chicago by first generation Polish Catholic parents in a lower-middle class, ethnic neighborhood. She studied painting, drawing and photography, as well as metals and jewelry construction. She directed the Stone Gallery in Kansas and curated and jurored local art shows. Living and working on Maui for 23 years, she evolved as an artist by dwelling in a location of sublime beauty and leading a lifestyle close to nature. An exploration of the Hawaiian culture added another dimension to the art. Her work was shown widely throughout the islands in numerous one person and group exhibitions. In 2001, Carla began designing rugs made in the traditional Tibetan technique of hand knotting. Fueling the process was the study and practice of Tibetan Buddhism, inspired by Maui’s potent dharma community. Crow currently resides in Eugene, Oregon.
TASHA ROBBINS. Tasha has lived and worked in New York, Provincetown, Boston, Boulder, Santa Fe, San Francisco and New Orleans. Her Portrait of George Scrivani with a Photo of Vali Myers & Gregory Corso by Ira Cohen appeared in the exhibition “Poetry and its Arts” in San Francisco. Portions of An Angel Alphabet have been shown at Berkeley’s Judah Magnes Museum and in Philadelphia at the Borowsky Gallery @ the Gershman Y/University of the Arts. From the Aspect of Mercy, a triptych regarding the Quan Yin, has hung in the Florence Biennale, the Aurora Gallery in the artist’s native Worcester, MA, and at the Goldmine Saloon, home of New Orleans’ 17 Poets! and Festivals for the Imagination. Her work has been reproduced in small press magazines and books, including YAWP, tripwire, Aaron Shurin’s Codex, Gallery Works, FRAMMIS, MAGCITY, and Bombay Gin. (photo by Marco Bakker)
CHARLES SCHICK. After making it through WWII, Charles’ father joined the Marine reserves to make a little extra money. Korea broke out and he was wrenched from his family, shipped out, shot at and frozen over there. He returned, and Charles was born in Chicago in 1955. A series of Civil Service jobs followed, taking them to Munich and Heidelberg, Germany. Old World Europe and Army base schools, cheeseburgers, movies, ice cream sandwiches, carnivals, bicycles, swimming pools, magazine covers, rock-n-roll filtered through transistor radios. Gleanings of the counterculture. A world gone Mod. Back to the States, billboards, television, exhaust fumes, a hotel in Cincinnati, a house in Detroit, and then the ocean, a stint in the South Pacific, the Micronesian Islands of Palau and Saipan. Leaving home, Charles lived in Tokyo, Los Angeles and finally in 1981, New York City, where he met Regina Bartkoff and they raised their daughter Hannah.