The Artists Behind
The Holding Project

Ashley Pryor Geiger is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar (Ph.D. Philosophy, The Pennsylvania State University, 2000), who lives and works in Toledo, Ohio.  Drawing on her extensive research and teaching in the humanities, her visual work uses digital collage and the manipulation of old photographic processes like calotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, and daguerreotypes to create a bridge between the past and the present -- especially as it relates to those who have been forgotten, overlooked, or underrepresented in history.   Her work takes up the strategies of “détournement” -- a technique of “rerouting” dominant cultural assumptions first developed in the 1950’s by the Letterist International.  Her work is most closely affiliated with this movement, even as it is tempered by a healthy suspicion of any form of ideology or dogmatism.

Geiger works with new technologies such as AI algorithms and special effect filters to simultaneously uncover neglected aspects within the original photographic image, but also the viewer’s own assumptions about the historical past and how it informs our contemporary self-understanding.

Geiger has participated in three Artists Labs through The Kolaj Institute, her collage work was recently exhibited in Birr, Ireland, and August, and the Limner Gallery (N.Y.) late summer.  Her works have appeared in numerous online print publications.  She was the recipient of the 2021 Arts Commission Merit award to support her work bringing collage arts to incarcerated people at the Toledo Correctional Institution through the Inside/Out Prison Exchange Program.

Lee Fearnside has been making art since she was a child in suburban Boston. Her art has always been about personal narrative, storytelling, and social change. She came out through her photography in high school in the early 90s, and since then has been making and curating art to encourage social change. Fearnside earned an M.F.A in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design, a M.S. in Arts Administration from Drexel University, and a BA from Smith College. She moved to northwest Ohio in 2007, and for ten years was Associate Professor of Art and Director of the Diane Kidd Gallery at Tiffin University. There, she co-founded the EVAC Project, an organization that connects veterans and artists to educate the public about life in the military. EVAC Project art and stories have been exhibited at Cleveland Hopkins Airport, Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Reagan National Airport, the Army Transportation Museum, the Rutherford B Hayes Presidential Center, and academic galleries across the country. She is the Director of Annual Giving for Bowling Green State University, and lives in Toledo with her wife and son.

Barbara Miner holds the position of tenured Professor and Chair in the Department of Art, at the University of Toledo, in Toledo, OH.  Her mixed media sculptures, installation works, and paintings, informed by the nexus of human/nature interaction, and the practice of meditative repetition, have been exhibited nationally (Maine to California) and internationally (Sweden and Poland) in over 50 exhibitions. 

She has curated three events, including a lecture/workshop with the noted Photographer, Rosamond Purcell and the sculptor Dewey Blocksma.  Miner has participated in numerous national and international artists’ residencies.  She has presented at national and international conferences and contributed articles to Ceramics Monthly, Dialogue/Arts in the Midwest, and the journal published for the International Conference on Environmental, Cultural, Economic & Social Sustainability. Miner has received both internal and external grants in support of her research and art practice, as well as numerous Awards for Excellence/Merit.