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.

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.

Mia Muratori

Art

For me, artmaking is the documentation of what I see and seek to understand. Watching, synthesizing, recording, I lay it all down with paint, no words, just light, color, shape and space.

Francesca Schwartz

Art

I am interested in the word, the image, the symbol. I am in love with bone. I am fascinated with the body and the end. The body is an impermanent landscape which we cannot truly know until we have also contemplated its disappearance. Part of this encounter rests on inhabiting my body as a woman. The blood flows mysteriously and then departs, marking seasonality. I meditate on corporeality and femaleness. Always the questions: What does the body retain? What is encrypted? What is memorialized? I am drawn to elements of bone, dye, chiffon, paper, wood, and found objects. I like some materials for their precision, others because of their elusiveness. Once in hand, alchemy takes over, and what happens is unexpected. So it goes, as the unconscious emerges. I tear apart, unravel, and desecrate in an effort to get to the center. I collage to bring cohesion to what feels fragmented. I assemble what is fragmented within myself and those I have lost. I devour. I cannibalize. I resurrect. By altering and reassembling the image, I encounter the space between longing and loss, memory and erasure, permanence and dissipation. I inscribe experience, even as it recedes. The body is inscribed; the word is written. We linger in some ways, yet we are destined to vanish. I bear witness while I am here.

Grace Bakst Wapner

Art

Grace Bakst Wapner’s work with urethane or satin, clay or bronze, chiffon or pipe cleaners in an interactive dialogue between material and object has been determinative in her process. In the early 1970s she erected walls and barriers constructed from satin and velvet, alluding to the dual nature of our social interactions, and now, in the 2000s, after working for years with clay and bronze, on paper and on canvas, she has returned to working with fabric, sometimes conjoining the fabric with clay. Throughout, there has been a continuing belief that the implementation of color, line, texture, and form
can evoke abstract truth. She studied painting and sculpture at Bennington College and at Bard, where she participated in the MFA summer program. But it has been her intensive day-to-day studio practice and the looking at the work of other artists that have most significantly informed her work. She has had twenty-nine one-person shows, participated in over one hundred group shows, lectured and taught, and been the recipient of honors, grants, and awards. She believes that the singular and complex practice of making art both asserts and affirms our humanity.