Uncertain Journey, 2016/2024

Chiharu Shiota

Art

Chiharu Shiota, born in Osaka in 1972 and based in Berlin, draws inspiration from personal experiences and emotions, exploring universal themes such as life, death, and relationships. Through immersive thread installations enveloping everyday objects like shoes, keys, and dresses, she investigates the idea of “presence in absence,” conveying intangible emotions in sculptures, drawings, performance videos, and photographs. Awarded the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize for New Artists in Japan (2008), Shiota’s work has been showcased in prominent institutions globally, including the Grand Palais, Paris (2024), Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2023), ZKM, Karlsruhe (2021), and Gropius Bau, Berlin (2019). She has participated in notable exhibitions like the Sydney Biennale (2016) and represented Japan at the Venice Biennale (2015).

if I say the sky's small arithmetic its inscription, its echo

Keli Safia Maksud

Art

Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works toward destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state. Maksud earned her BFA in painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a diploma in art and curatorial studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in visual arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at the Cue Art Foundation, Goodman Gallery, Salon 94, Huxley Parlour, Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art−Seoul, Galería Nueva, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.

The Shiftless Countryside of Emancipation, 2024

Kara Walker

Art

Kara Walker was born in Stockton, CA, in 1969, and raised in Atlanta from the age of 13. She received her BFA from the Atlanta College of Art (1991) and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (1994). She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award in 1997, and the United States Artists Eileen Harris Norton Fellowship in 2008. She was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2012 and became an Honorary Academician of the Royal Academy of Art in London in 2019. Her work can be found in the collections of prominent institutions worldwide, including Kunstmuseum Basel; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museo nazionale delle Arti del XXI secolo (MAXXI), Rome; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Tate, London; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among many others.

Abidemi Olowonira

Art

My works are engaged in a dialectic discourse, which finds grounding in transcultural dynamics, a notion that enables me to frolic in the nerves of globalism, as both migrant and human, while using my works as a platform to narrate my story within a larger story. Growing up in Lagos, Nigeria, with its rich history of sculptures and contemporary regenerative arts, I was able to get my first art lessons in my grandma’s tie and dye workshop. The experiences I have absorbed in my travels have also impressed upon me not only a wide range of sensibilities but a trove of material to use when conveying my artistic vision: living in Texas, I was exposed to leather as a medium of expression while working as a gun-holster designer. Then, during my travels, I was exposed to both Chinese and Arabic calligraphy in the two and a half years I spent in Central Asia and the Middle East. Ultimately, my goal is to explore the concept of storytelling through the nuances of modernity while exploiting space, shapes, and voids, and enhancing these elements with the luminosity of light, to create a metaphors around the human experiences. I intend to continue using leather, a pliable and durable material, to promulgate—however subtle that might be—a version of a modernist concept. My intention is to layer and infuse this concept with my multidimensional outlook.

Siren

Ray Smith

Art

Smith produces exuberant paintings and sculptures characterized by an inimitable style and subject matter that reflect his bicultural American and Mexican heritage. Contorted and morphed figures recur throughout his work, in a hybrid that draws from his early studies of fresco painting with traditional practitioners in Mexico, and an indebtedness to Picasso, the Surrealists, and the politically daring Mexican muralists. Through these varied beings, Smith reflects upon the complexities and absurdities of society, family, politics, culture, war, and the human condition itself, framed by birth and death.

Mohamad Khayata

Art

The paintings, drawings, and photographs that make up my practice grow out of close observation of my surroundings, an awareness of the past, and memory. I am fascinated with the materiality of color and light, the mysteries of proportion and scale, and the relative and often great distance between two points in close proximity to each other. It is my hope to make present in the work the moments of equilibrium, the rhythms of disclosure, and the different realities that I discover in the act of looking and making. I hope these discoveries, evolving over time, will prompt recognition on the part of the viewer, as they have in me.

David Bloch

Art

The paintings, drawings, and photographs that make up my practice grow out of close observation of my surroundings, an awareness of the past, and memory. I am fascinated with the materiality of color and light, the mysteries of proportion and scale, and the relative and often great distance between two points in close proximity to each other. It is my hope to make present in the work the moments of equilibrium, the rhythms of disclosure, and the different realities that I discover in the act of looking and making. I hope these discoveries, evolving over time, will prompt recognition on the part of the viewer, as they have in me.

Admire Kamudzengerere

Art

Admire Kamudzengerere’s work explores identity, politics, and society, often informed by the multifaceted structural and social issues that have marked Zimbabwe’s last decade. Working in various media, he frequently reveals an unequal world in which the powerful ride roughshod over the weak.

Jan Cunningham

Art

The paintings, drawings, and photographs that make up my practice grow out of close observation of my surroundings, an awareness of the past, and memory. I am fascinated with the materiality of color and light, the mysteries of proportion and scale, and the relative and often great distance between two points in close proximity to each other. It is my hope to make present in the work the moments of equilibrium, the rhythms of disclosure, and the different realities that I discover in the act of looking and making. I hope these discoveries, evolving over time, will prompt recognition on the part of the viewer, as they have in me.

Reuben Sinha

Art

Traversing boundaries, cultures gained and cultures lost, and sensations across time and space are continual themes in my work. I left India at age eight and, ever since, have worked to reconcile what has been lost and found. My work is a continual meditation on memory and the body using line, color and form. Each work begins with raw materials: wood panels cut from prefabricated doors, beeswax from local farms, damar crystals and basic color pigments. In natural light, these paintings carry a translucency created by pigments suspended in beeswax, evoking sensuousness, depth, and personal reflection. In 2018, I began a series of brown encaustic color studies to explore the limits of a single color’s expression. The series is a response to mass disenfranchisement under Trump and growing xenophobia against brown skin. To some, brown is beautiful. To others, it is dirty; the outsider, the enemy. These color studies mirror the skin of the NYC public school students I teach. By layering and blending loving and hateful associations to “Brown,” I have developed a personal meditation on Otherness. These meditations on “Brown” have naturally incorporated expressions of isolation, anxiety, and calm emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic.