An ordinary Romanian woman, Alexandra Ciupag was imprisoned during Nicolae Ceausescu's communist reign in Romania for helping women obtain illegal abortions. She is looking off into the distance with abject kindness. Still alive.
Somewhere within the Outsider Artist tradition, Gene Tanta explores his unconscious heart pitted against systemic conventions, forces he first felt as an 8-year-old whispering “artist” under a dictatorship in communist Romania. His studio practice deals with the paradoxes of not fitting in, with dislocation as a felt experience authorizing his hand-to-heart coordination as well as his perspective on historical figures, biographical introspection, and color theory. Tanta earned his MFA in Poetry from The Iowa Writers' Workshop (2000) and his PhD in Creative Writing from UW-Milwaukee (2009). He has served as Senior Fulbright Scholar to Romania with the University of Bucharest. He has also attended the Enos Park Residency for Visual Artists.
