Ash Gifford
Founder, Creative Director & Editor-in-Chief
Ash is a writer, art historian, and creative/tech professional currently based in Portland, Oregon — (on the traditional unceded lands of the Multnomah, Wasco, Kathlamet, Cowlitz, Clackamas, Bands of Chinook, Tualatin Kalapuya, Molalla, and many other Indigenous peoples). She founded Art & About in 2014 and has been the primary contributing writer, photographer, and organizer since its inception. She has collected and cultivated all the resource-based information that is found in the Art Guide and Calendar. Through this, Gifford has created an extensive archive and chronicle of art in the Pacific Northwest.
She has worked with contemporary and nonprofit arts organizations, creative agencies, and technology-based companies for the past decade. She has an academic background in Art History, Studio Art, and Business from the University of Hawaii at Mānoa. Her writing can be found on the Portland Mercury, Oregon ArtsWatch, Art Practical, Ceramics Now, Journal FYI, and other publications.
Lindsay Costello
Head Writer & Editor
An experimental artist and writer in Portland, Oregon, with an academic background in textile research at the Oregon College of Art and Craft. She joined Art & About in 2018 as a contributing writer and is the co-founder of Critical Viewing, an aggregate of art community happenings in the Pacific Northwest. In 2021, Costello's role evolved to Head Writer and Managing Editor.
She is the founder of plant poetics, an herbalism project, and soft surface, a digital poetry journal/residency. Her artistic practice centers magic, ecology, and folkways in social practice, writing, sculpture, and installation. Her critical writing can also be read here on Art & About as well as at Hyperallergic, Art Papers, Art Practical, this is tomorrow, and Textile: Cloth and Culture, Oregon ArtsWatch, among other places.
James Casey
Design
James is a designer based in Portland, Oregon originally from Waialua, Hawaii. He has been the liaison for design since we published our Art Guides in 2018. In 2020, James collaborated on the re-design effort for new logo and branding.