Artist in Residence – Biographies
2024: Ingemar Hagen-Keith
Ingemar Hagen-Keith is a designer and artist primarily working in wood, whose work is guided by the harmony of animated gesture and refined form and focuses on minimalism and familiarity. He received his BFA in Furniture Design in 2018 from the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2021, he went on to join the team at COLONY, a cooperative gallery and design studio in New York, where he worked as an Interior Designer and was Designer in Residence. After moving back to his hometown of Portland, OR in 2024, Hagen-Keith was selected as the winery’s fifth Artist in Residence. As part of his residency, he worked the 2024 harvest season and participated in the winemaking process firsthand, immersing himself in a wholly new experience. He continues his work in the Portland-based furniture and object design studio he founded, Marmar Studio. Marmar Studio is fascinated by the aesthetics of cuteness and on a mission to create the delightful and sincere – “designing inanimate objects you can’t help but animate.” Hagen-Keith’s work has been featured in Design Milk, Curbed, Business of Home, Elle Decor, and Leibal Magazine.
2023 – Krystyny Vandenberg
Krystyny Vandenberg is an artist working with painting and textiles whose work explores the significance and the difficulties involved in forming relationships with family, friends and identity. Themes of community, how we connect with others and history are central to her work. She started her career in after school art classes in 2002 and she went on to receive her BFA in studio arts with an emphasis in drawing and painting from Biola University in 2017. She received her MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in 2022. Her work has been exhibited throughout California and internationally including a solo show at the Helen and Abraham Bolsky Gallery in Los Angeles, California and group shows at the Brea Gallery (Brea, CA) the Clara and Allen Gresham Art Gallery (San Bernardino, CA), the Colonnade (Long Beach, CA) and at the Enoteca (Redondo, Portugal). Her work is currently held in collections at Biola University and the Municipal of Redondo. Her interest in history and art led her to participate in an archeological field school in the Alentejo region of Portugal in 2017. Learning how history influences art and how art affects history became important to her work. She participated in an artist residency in the town of Redondo in 2018. There she was able to physically combine painting and archaeology by using materials found on the digsite and around town to paint the people she was surrounded by. She now has her studio based in Southern California and frequently collaborates with local artists and curators.
2022 – Nieko McDaniel
Growing up in Southern California, Nieko McDaniel was influenced by an urban lifestyle of graffiti, street art, hip-hop, and rap. He is interested in world-building, recognizing that we try to escape the current world through simulation and invention. Using repurposed materials, McDaniel makes work about identity and escapism. He is influenced by the types of entertainment his Millennial generation prefers in literature, music, movies, comics, television, and video games.
McDaniel is an Adjunct Art Professor for North Carolina’s Rowan-Cabarrus Community College and Southern California’s Palo Verde College. In November of 2021, McDaniel became the Artist in Residence for Oregon’s A to Z Wineworks.
2021 – Hadley Hatcher
A pandemic furlough from Hatcher’s career in the music industry allowed her to return from Los Angeles to finally work an A to Z harvest in Oregon. After completing the required harvest internship, this prolific, self-taught painter applied to continue her work as the winery’s second Artist-in-Residence. A lifelong artist, she focused on photography when she was younger but has shifted her creative focus to devote more time to painting in recent years, as captured in her studio by A to Z’s first Artist-in-Residence, Adrian Chitty.
2019 – 2021: Adrian Chitty
Adrian Chitty is a photographer living in Yamhill County, Oregon. His work celebrates craftspeople and artisans, people who work with their hands and lovingly touch every product they make. He chronicles their skill, craft, and passion in an overwhelmingly industrialized and automated world.
Adrian came to photography after nearly two decades in software engineering. Stepping away from that career to become a stay-at-home father afforded him more time to explore his own creative urges and after stints learning metalwork, woodwork and ceramics he came upon the idea of marrying his long-standing love of photography with his rapidly increasing appreciation for the skill and craftsmanship of the people he met in these fields.
After a series of one-day photoshoots, Adrian realized that he wanted to go deeper. Deeper into an individual craft, and longer in time spent absorbing it. The idea of spending a year with a winery was born.