Guest Curators

Reilly Davidson

Reilly Davidson is a curator and writer based in New York. She has organized exhibitions at Damien & The Love Guru (Brussels), C L E A R I N G (New York and Los Angeles), Shoot the Lobster (New York), Martos Gallery (New York), and CASTLE (Los Angeles), among others. Her writing has appeared in a range of exhibition catalogues, editorial projects, and publications such as Cura, Artforum, and KALEIDOSCOPE.

Helen Shu

b. 1996, Shanghai, China. Lives and works in New York, NY.

“Helen Shu rarely regards two works alike, instead cruising across an endless highway of visual signals. She picks up and ditches motifs along the way, gaining constant momentum as she seeks new methods of material arbitration—geometrical tenors intersect with objet trouvé fragments, just as fractured abstractions abut fluid shape-play. Each composition is thus a capsule of freely spun gestures and objects. Rather than commit to a fixed methodology, Shu moves freely between systematic terrains; her will toward formal freedom manifests in unbidden improvisation and recombination.”

Artwork Image: Nail Salon, 2024. Oil on wood panel.

Maddie Butler

b. 1993. Lives and works in Saint Paul, MN. 2025 MFA, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA. 2015 BA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT.

“Resin-coated image worlds, a mosaic of broken smartphones, videos made of photo bursts, and refit digital detritus. These are just a few manifestations of Maddie Butler’s affective circuitry, as she encodes personal affects within technologically dominated ecosystems. Under her charge, memes, data scraps, and salvaged gadgets collide and warp. This is all a matter of arbitration, as Butler seeks to totally distort origins, providing totally new perspectival courses. Alongside the cybernetic web, she hones in on the properties and conditions of light, using different methods of refraction and diffusion to recalibrate her visual fields.”

Artwork Image: Unzip, 2024. E-waste, inkjet prints, acetate, hardware, LED light. 36 x 48 x 3 in.

Megan Plunkett

b. 1985, Pasadena, CA. Los Angeles, CA. 2017 MFA, Bard, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY. 2008 BFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

“Thrown slightly off-kilter, Megan Plunkett conjures an amalgam of content that tracks the inherent strangeness and volatility of imaginal distribution. She extracts and reshapes content from circulating media systems, or else she constructs it anew in order to work through and destabilize visual grammar. This is always a matter of framing, rather than holding fast to the oft-invoked, overly romantic “decisive moment.” Her photographs are not “moments,” but rather interjections into the lives of objects and the dissemination of information. Methods of deconstruction, repurposing, and recapitulation are fodder for a mapping of the symbolic threads, desirous productions, and subjective orientations that underpin her field of interest.”

Artwork Image: The Hollywood Upstairs 03, 2025. Inkjet print mounted to 1/4 in. black gatorboard.

Yana Kadykova

Yana Kadykova is an art theorist and curator based in Switzerland and Germany. She serves as an Assistant Curator at Kunsthalle Basel and holds an engagement as curator at 47m Contemporary Leipzig. Her practice moves between exhibitions, listening formats, and editorial work, with a sustained focus on migration, language, and the politics of knowledge-making. She researches how different formats–readers, symposia, translation, and text–produce meaning and make contested social experiences discussable. She is currently developing a multilingual reader gathering voices from artists of first and second migrant generations across Europe.

alfatih

Lives and works in Egg, Switzerland.

“alfatih's works require a counterpart. Not in the sense of an audience that observes, but rather a structural prerequisite. The work becomes complete only in the moment of encounter. It is the active passage through the work, the act of engaging with it through specific actions or movement, that sets it in motion. His practice brings people together and breaks down the distance sometimes found in passive contemplation. Guided by expectation and irritation, familiar objects lose their original function and slip into the absurd. There lies its humor, and perhaps that is also where its joy comes from.”

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2025; rotating light box. Photograph Sandra Pointet.

Anna Ehrenstein

Born 1993 in Tirana, Albania. Lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

“Anna Ehrenstein works from a position she must continuously relocate. Moving between different cultures, across shifting power structures, she has come to understand collaboration not as a romantic ideal but as a matter of honest positioning. Her practice is fundamentally relational, built on the inclusion of people and the reciprocal work of learning from one another. What becomes visible is only ever the surface of something far more layered. Through an opulent material language, she traces and negotiates the flows that circulate between bodies and systems. Permeated by multinational codes, her work unfolds differently depending on who encounters it and from which position. No single interpretation exhausts it.”

Artwork Image: Doom Scroll Djinn Tapestries, 2025; series of tapestries with prayer rugs and hand embroidery.

Tianyi Sun

b. 1996. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2022 MFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY.

“As a multidisciplinary artist, Tianyi Sun contextualises the dilemma of a generation drifting into the technosphere, unwilling to relinquish what it means to be human. The shifting of her media seems as a position. Operating within a language that moves between the Symbolic, the Real and the Imaginary, transparency becomes central in any medium, both in materiality and semantics. Preservation and processing appear at once as liberation and confinement, as the question of what one chooses, and until which moment choice remains possible, stays inscribed.”

Artwork Image: Remote Viewing 2:16, 2025; epoxy resin, ink, wax, American ginseng, red beans, spirulina, silk, digital print transfer, acrylic polymer.

Sibylle Friche

Sibylle Friche is Partner at DOCUMENT gallery in Chicago, where she served as the gallery's first Director between 2015 and 2022. Prior to DOCUMENT, she was the Director at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago and Galerie Laurent Godin in Paris. She holds degrees in French and Hispanic Studies and an M.A. in Arts Administration from University of Lille, France. Friche has also worked at various institutions such as the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in Buenos Aires, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Le Plateau / FRAC Ile de France in Paris, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

Minia Biabiany

b. 1988. Lives and works in Saint-Claude, Guadeloupe

"Minia Biabiany is an artist whose practice encompasses sculpture, installation, video, photography, and drawing. Her work originates from the Caribbean, particularly the island of Guadeloupe, and addresses the ongoing effects of colonial violence and subjugation by the French government. Employing materials such as volcanic sand, local clay, and burnt wood, Biabiany is also interested in her relationship to spirituality and pre-colonial memories. Her works often connect spatially in immersive installations and her use of creole (Kréyòl Gwadloupèyen) in many of her titles acts as an important bind between poetic and political gestures."

Artwork Image: nuit, 2024. Video the length of my gaze at night. Exhibition view: siluetas sobre maleza, Museo Jumex, Mexico City.

Jonas N.T. Becker

b. 1982, Morgantown, WV. lives and works in West Virginia and Chicago. 2010 MFA, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA.

"In recent photo work, Jonas N.T. Becker uses very fine coal mixed with gelatin to create a pigment that coats the photographic tissue. Depicting former mining sites in the artist’s home state of West Virginia, the prints make reference to nineteenth-century landscape photography while also embracing the imperfections of their own process. Becker’s practice focuses on the impact that humans have had on rural environments, contrasting natural beauty with the devastating effects of resource extraction."

Artwork Image: Better or Equal Use: Christine West “Bridge to Nowhere” on the former East River Mountain, 2024; photography (materials: coal, gelatin, dichromate, paper).

Suneil Sanzgiri

b. 1989. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2017 MFA, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA. 2011 BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD.

"Suneil Sanzgiri’s films combine archival footage with experimental film editing in multichannel installations. His practice is driven by researching archives of liberation movements and struggles of the Global South in the 20th century and defining a space where collective grief and memory can be shared. The solo exhibition he opened at the Brooklyn Museum in the fall of 2023 focused on the 450 year long Portuguese exploitation of Goa on its inhabitants and tragically resonated with the ongoing violations of human rights rooted in modern day colonial violence."

Artwork Image: An Impossible Address, 2025; single-channel video, buried & rotting muslin, hand-dyed muslin, C-stands, archival digital prints.

Aryn Foland

Aryn Foland is the Director at Nazarian / Curcio in Los Angeles. A Los Angeles native, she earned her BA in Art History from Columbia University and spent many years in New York (with a brief stint in Chicago), working in fundraising at MoMA and the ACLU of New York, as well as in gallery roles at Kavi Gupta and Susan Inglett. She returned to Los Angeles in 2023 and now works closely with the Nazarian / Curcio’s roster of artists, as well as collectors and curators, helping to connect and support their practices.

Anna Sidana

b. 1960, lives and works in San Francisco, CA. 2020 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, CA.

"Anna’s work immediately caught my eye when I was looking through Foundwork’s platform. Her brushwork and color palette feel so alive—soft and hazy while totally full of movement. The paintings hover between abstraction and still life—the florals and landscapes are just perfectly blurred, sending you into a fantasy-like world. You can tell her painting is personal, pulling imagery and colors that resonate with her life and memories. I was amazed to read Anna came to her arts practice later into her life; her paintings are so sophisticated and thoughtful, you can sense the emotion in her work and how she is painting to connect with her family heritage and history."

Artwork Image: Metamorphosis I, 2025. Oil on canvas.

Michelle Im

b. 1984. Lives and works in Queens, NY. 2008 BA, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

"I’m obsessed with Michelle’s work. Her ability to tell a story through ceramics is incredible. I look at her work and I want to know who are the figures she’s creating, and who is Michelle?! They carry such strength and vulnerability, you can tell each has their own story. I love how Michelle draws from Korean tradition, as well as familiar forms, to explore identity and belonging. There is something so deeply human about her sculptures—they feel tender and deliberate, each gesture, each detail, holding a layer of cultural history and personal reflection, all while maintaining such charm and whimsy!"

Artwork Image: Ju-Bi Eun-Bi (宙飛 恩飛), 2025. Ceramic, epoxy, acrylic, white gold luster, enamel.

Matthew Cole

b. 1987. Lives and works in Queens, NY. 2010 BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA,

"I immediately fell in love with Matthew’s paintings! What drew me to his work was the way his spaces feel both totally mysterious and strangely familiar. There is something about each painting that feels slightly surreal and brings you back to that dreamstate, questioning whether this scene exists in real life or if it’s imagined. He’s testing perspective so subtly and thoughtfully. Even when the figures or settings feel fragmented, there is this warm familiar sense to his paintings—they are like memories you can’t quite place."

Artwork Image: Forever Young, 2025. Acrylic on canvas.

Allie Furlotti

Allie Furlotti is a multidisciplinary artist and PhD candidate in Depth Psychology whose work lives at the intersection of personal mythology, feminism, and relational aesthetics. With a background in ceramics and a passion for performance, her practice spans from uncanny installations to absurdist acts of stand-up comedy, often exploring the sacred and profane in the same breath. When she’s not manufacturing fake cakes out of architectural foam or appearing in films as “Lady #3,” she is creating immersive worlds through ILY2 Galleries in Portland, New York, and beyond. For her, raising a child is inseparable from raising culture itself, where each gesture in the studio is an act of world making, each project a relational offering. Her work is a conversation between the uncanny and the deeply human, inviting audiences into spaces where vulnerability, humor, and depth collide.

Jean Smith

b. 1959, Vancouver, BC. Lives and works in Vancouver, BC.

"Jean Smith paints portraits of women who aren’t here to make you comfortable. No smiles. No pretty posturing. Just faces that exist on their own terms. Since 2016, she’s sold thousands of her 11 x 14" paintings for $100, making her work accessible while funding the Free Artist Residency for Progressive Social Change. Jean is also the vocalist of Mecca Normal, a band that’s been challenging the status quo since 1983 and inspiring the Riot Grrrl movement. A published novelist and two-time recipient of Canada Council for the Arts awards, her work, across painting, music, and writing, is about emotional honesty, feminist resistance, and creating space for complexity."

Artwork Image: Angry Woman in Rock #92, 2025. Acrylic on canvas panel. 14 x 11 in.

i. max miller

b. 1980, Weed, CA. Lives and works in Portland, OR.

"i. max miller’s work always circles around hybrid realities, weaving personal and autobiographical threads into expansive narrative worlds. Through myth-making and intricate world-building in both audio and visual mediums, he creates spaces that feel simultaneously intimate and otherworldly. Since the recent passing of his longtime partner, his practice has deepened, becoming a dialogue with grief, memory, and the surreal landscapes of his inner life. His works oscillate between playfulness, horror, and profound sadness, depending on the viewer’s frame of reference. Even when working with niche mediums like abstract video games and uncanny installations, max’s art remains relational and accessible. There are always entry points, always places where I can find myself. I relate to his work as deeply heartfelt, coded with layers of meaning, always inviting, always playful."

Artwork Image: 4 Motivational Posters (detail), 2023. Digital print. 36 x 24 in.

Sarah Ama Duah

b. 1989, Berlin, DE. Lives and works in Berlin, DE. 2025 Diploma, Berlin University of the Arts.

"Sarah Ama Duah’s work feels urgent because it refuses to let history sit still. She uses the body, her own and others, as a site of resistance, pushing back against the frozen legacy of colonial monuments and grand narratives. I’m drawn to how she reclaims sculptural form, not as a static object, but as something alive: performed, worn, moved through. There’s a tension between the weight of history and the softness of flesh that she makes visible, an insistence that memory is not neutral, not abstract, and not settled. Her practice connects material craft with political embodiment, offering a new way of thinking about monuments: not as things we build and forget, but as actions we perform, remember, and sometimes dismantle. That combination of critical rigor and visceral presence is what makes her work stand out to me."

Artwork Image: Obroni, 2022. Sculpture-half relief.

Jesse Aran Greenberg

Jesse Aran Greenberg is an artist, dealer, and curator based between NYC and the Hudson Valley. He is the owner of JAG Projects, which operates as a roving curatorial production and events agency. Greenberg is co-founder of 247365 and Hudson House gallery and residency. Currently, he is a curator for Acrylicize; the director of programming and public relations for FORELAND; and programming events and exhibitions at A365, a new venue in Tribeca that merges art, music, and food through artist-designed events.

Fern Apfel

b. Kinderhook, NY. Lives and works in Kinderhook, NY.

"Fern T. Apfel is known for her paintings with hand written text. Nudging the boundaries between language, painting, and abstraction, these compositions present life as an inescapable circle of time and memory. Though her works are still-lifes, Apfel explores our naturally occurring two-dimensional plane through the social interfaces it inhabits, mining beauty from playing cards, real letters, old stamps, pages of diaries, pieces from well-thumbed books, and memorabilia gathered over years from around the world. Often mistaken for collage, her tromp l’oile compositions push our comprehension of the tangible. The dots on a set of dominos become constellations of stars and an open notebook hints at new possibilities."

Artwork Image: A Page from Helen S. Smith's First grade Sewing Book, 2024. Acrylic & Pen on wood panel. 20 x 24 x 1 1/2 in.

Becky Brown

b. New York, NY. Lives and works in Buffalo, NY.. 2012 MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY.

"Becky Brown's paintings react to our relationships with technology through word play and explorations in language. Brown celebrates what is lost in an over-digitized experience; the material presence and the handmade mark. Gathering texts from online sources such as news, advertising, and social media, Brown concocts often-humorous compositions that play into our shared experience of overexhaustion as we navigate endless accounts, passwords, files, apps, and options. Her works, which are often colorful and playful, seem to reflect the corporate palette and design she's riffing off."

Artwork Image: Silent Disco, 2024. Acrylic on canvas. 16 x 20 in.

Helen Shu

b. 1996, Shanghai, China. Lives and works in New York, NY.

"Helen Shu’s paintings don't seem to stick to one style; rather they share a similar way of playing between graphics and abstraction. Though there is an obvious mark of the hand and intuitive reactive painting style, some shapes entering the composition feel like they were sourced, but the reference is left indistinguishable. Forms look like they are templates, or silhouettes of borrowed origin, but they’ve been scrubbed of meaning. It’s as if a sticker was applied but then washed out and all that's left is the shape without the content. The resulting paintings feel like characters, each with their own personalities."

Artwork Image: Bedroom, 2024. Oil on Linen. 8 x 10 in.

Bill Cournoyer

Bill Cournoyer is an independent creative consultant and founder of The Meeting—a private exhibition space, art advisory, and consultancy firm located in New York’s West Village. The Meeting has presented the debut solo exhibitions of Andy Bennett, Nick Hoecker, Samuel Farrier, and Tod Lippy, as well as the first New York solo exhibitions of Andrew Chapman, Buck Ellison, Christopher Culver, Henry Belden, Hongyan, Jack Ryan, and Patrick Carroll. Cournoyer held the position of Assistant Director of the Giorno Poetry Systems (2021-2022) where he curated and managed The Bunker, the Giorno Poetry Systems' debut public programming event series. In 2023, Cournoyer conceived and curated Downtown Dealers, a new conversation series that brings together New York art dealers across generations, recently acquired by Independent Art Fair.

Hasani Sahlehe

b. 1991, St. Thomas, USVI. Lives and works in Atlanta, GA, USA. 2015 BFA, Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA.

“Artist Hasani Sahlehe creates colorful abstract paintings that emphasize the physicality of the painted surface, drawing parallels between painting, music, and architecture. His recent techniques involve applying color to raw canvas using contrasting methods, creating a tension between textures. Sahlehe's work that references monumental architecture resonates with me the most, additionally creating a relationship to sculpture. The building block forms reflect ancient cultures or natural environments, perhaps with windows inviting us to peek into another time or space.”

Artwork Image: Song Ideas, 2024; acrylic gel and airbrush on raw canvas.

Kathe Burkhart

b. 1958, New York, NY. Lives and works in New York, NY. 1984 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.

“Kathe Burkhart has been an influential artist since the 1980s, focusing on gender roles, sexuality, and identity through various mediums and cultural references. Her fabulous, ongoing, and most well-known project—The Liz Taylor Series—critiques patriarchal systems by recontextualizing images of Elizabeth Taylor, challenging stereotypes and commodification of women. Burkhart's punk influenced works incorporate bold text and graphic imagery to explore themes of power and agency, emphasizing a radical female subjectivity, reflecting cultural movements. I would highly recommend reading her thorough and generous artist statement to gain additional insight into her practice. I’m a fan.”

Artwork Image: Sick Puppy, 2019; mixed media, acrylic on canvas, metal mash panel, cable ties, hooks, temporary tattoos.

Alexander Shchurenkov

b. 1984 Russia. Lives and works in New York, NY.

“Alexander Shchurenkov's artistic practice reflects on the emotional and political landscapes of queer life, influenced by his experiences in Russia and the US. His work addresses themes of isolation, addiction, and the construction of identity in the face of rising anti-queer sentiment globally, particularly in Russia and the US. Shchurenkov's decision to utilize a visual language akin to minimalism, subtly but powerfully creates suggestive narratives through austere means, allowing the viewer to respond to the work through their own history. Lastly, the use of visual metaphors of sex and glamour gives the work an edge which lingers long after the experience is over.”

Image: After (Silk), 2024; high-polished stainless steel, metal doorknob, vintage Hermès silk tie.

Selene Preciado

Selene Preciado (she/her) is the Curator and Director of Programs at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions). Prior to this post, she was a Program Associate at the Getty Foundation, supporting Pacific Standard Time and managing the Getty Marrow Undergraduate Internship program. Preciado’s curatorial practice is research- and history-based, approaching topics such as memory, language, place/diaspora, ritual, and popular culture through experimental perspectives. Raised in Tijuana, Mexico, Preciado obtained a BA in Visual Arts from the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and holds an MA in Art and Curatorial Practices in the Public Sphere from the University of Southern California (USC).

Minga Opazo

b. 1992, Santiago, Chile. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2020 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. 2015 BFA, University of California-Berkeley, Berkeley, CA.

"Investigating the relationship between climate change and textile production within capitalist modes of production and the depletion of resources, Minga Opazo’s works are visually reminiscent of geological cross-section diagrams that tell stories of ecological distress. As a material, textile has instant associations with resistance and the reclamation of the feminine, the domestic, and the environment, among other issues. Using recycled clothing layered with organic materials such as wood, grass, or mushrooms, Opazo creates objects that invite the viewer to reflect on time, life, and consumerism."

Artwork Image: Re-Dress, 2021. Oyster Mushroom Digesting clothing. 18 x 12 x 3 in.

LaRissa Rogers

b. 1996, Ruckersville, Virginia. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2023 MFA, University of California-Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA. 2019 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

"LaRissa Rogers’s work addresses the liminal spaces that diasporic and Black bodies navigate within intimate and historical contexts of violence and displacement. Her collaborative performance work with other women artists of color is particularly poignant, as it centers on the transformative effects of care, solidarity, and kinship on bodies that experience grief. She works in a vast array of media, including collage, sculpture, and performance, using bodily fluid, sugar, soil, and porcelain chinoiserie as loaded symbolic materials that challenge and heal our shared history of colonization and its aftermath."

Artwork Image: Those who love us, never leave us alone with our grief, (a tulipiere for those withholding), 2024. Porcelain, glaze, luster. 18 x 9 x 9 in.

Kim Garcia

b. 1989, San Diego, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2018 MFA, University of California-Irvine, Irvine, CA. 2015 BA, University of California-San Diego, San Diego, CA.

"Kim Garcia explores a shared colonial past as a second-generation Filipino American through the spectral and poetic layering of personal and historical narratives. The body is always present in her work as a repository of a collective memory that wants to come to the surface through movement and transformation; sculptures extend themselves like in a dance or embrace, and hands point at clues and responses. Her experimental use of materials and objects such as bottles, gloves, peacock feathers, rope, and jewelry chains is a vehicle for storytelling in which her parents, and history itself, are collaborators."

Artwork Image: still dancing, 2024. Resin, pigments, gloves, fabric, and necklace chains. 29 1/2 x 14 1/2 x 1/2 in.

Ashleigh Kane

Ashleigh Kane is a freelance writer, curator, and consultant in London. She is the Arts & Photography Editor-at-Large at Dazed (previously the Arts & Culture editor, 2014-2020). Ashleigh has also written for AnOther, Elephant, EPOCH, Plaster, British Journal of Photography, and more. She curates and hosts Art After Hours, a monthly ‘after hours’ gallery tour and recently worked with Forma as an Associate Curator on Artists’ Film International 2024. She has also been researching how artists channel rage through their work (as well as how art can incite rage); this will manifest in a project titled All The Rage.

Josefin Arnell

b. 1984, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Lives and works in Amsterdam. 2016 PhD, Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten, Amsterdam.

“Josefin Arnell views her multidisciplinary practice as a form of protest. Primarily working with film, she also includes performance, installation, poetry, and drawing to explore themes of desire, perfectionism, and control, often using regular people—rather than actors—to convey these ideas. Recurring figures like the teenage girl, the horse, and the mother serve as allegories for human struggles and environmental crises. By blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, she creates narratives that place characters in the impossible demands of contemporary life, prompting us to reflect on our own place within societal and power structures.”

Artwork Image: Dinner, 2024. Photography. 59 x 44 in.

Tild Greene

b. 1994, Hastings, UK. Lives and works in Amsterdam, Netherlands. 2017 BA (Hons), Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts London.

“Tild Greene explores the material traces of lived experience by working with found objects such as bottle holders, doormats, head guards, baby baths, and green tea to examine ideas of resistance, purpose, and utility. Resulting in ‘anthropomorphic’ works, in this sense, each ‘found object’ represents the qualities—strength, purpose, and usefulness—found in both the human body and in the tools we use. Greene not only re-purposes but pushes these objects beyond their usual functions to disrupt ideas of our collective drive for constant improvement, but also raises questions about social value.”

Artwork Image: Chariot, 2024. Bottle holder, bike rack, archery bow, baby bath, part of a toy archery bow, a broken shell charm. 24 1/2 x 45 1/3 x 10 in.

a.r. Havel

b. 1991, San Antonio, TX. Lives and works in New Orleans.

“a.r. havel’s multidisciplinary practice bridges photography, theatre, and performance art, building custom sets and collaborative portraits that honour queer and radical communities. Drawing on a background in set design and live performance, Havel transforms studio spaces into theatrical altars adorned with decor and elements co-created with collaborators. His medium-format photographs often expose the borders of the set, embracing transparency in the production process and the collaborative narrative behind each image. Inspired by queer resilience and infused with humour, reverence, and a DIY ethos, his process-driven work evokes dignity and play within these shared utopian visions.”

Artwork Image: True Colors, 2021. Digital scan of medium format negative.

Domenico de Chirico

Domenico de Chirico is an independent curator from Italy who collaborates with artists, galleries, institutions, art fairs and prizes, and magazines worldwide. Recent and upcoming projects include engagements with SWAB Barcelona Contemporary Art Fair; MIA Photo Fair, Milan; Prisma Art Prize; Swiss Institute, Rome; ORTIGIA CONTEMPORANEA, Syracuse, Sicily; Premio Fondazione The Bank at ArtVerona; Accademia di Belle Arti di Bologna; We Art Open 2025. He is also involved in forthcoming exhibitions in Milan, Rome, Hong Kong, Stockholm, Caserta, Prague, Paris, Genoa, and Shanghai.

Paola Angelini

b. 1983, San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. Lives and works in San Benedetto del Tronto, Italy. 2008 MA, Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, Florence.

“Paola Angelini—among wild horses, sculpted statues, dancers, demons, birds and dreamy human figures—develops a personal lexicon made of motifs inspired by 20th-century statuary, medieval tapestries, and the history of Italian art in general, with clear references to her unconscious, personal memories, and relationship with nature. Her stylistic code, made of cracks and homogeneity, polishness and roughness, density and dynamism, is characterized by the indissoluble bond between tangibility and vision. Her chromatic palette, which is particularly vigorous, creates an extraordinary visual tension, wavering between heritage and contemporaneity.”

Artwork Image: Alter ego, 2024. Oil on linen. 59 x 50 x 1 3/4 in.

Alessandro Sicioldr

Born 1990, Tuscania, Italy.

“Between technical mastery, hypnotic suggestions, and visual aulicism, the unmistakable and strongly autobiographical art of Alessandro Sicioldr oscillates incessantly between Surrealism and Symbolism, passing smoothly through Mannerism. His canvases, inhabited by enigmatic figures that populate an indefinite, almost liminal space, are nothing but the transmutation of nocturnal visions, symptomatic of moods or internal conditions, premonitions, sensations, flows of consciousness, and everything that concerns the so-called sensorial hemisphere of the unconscious. All this is wisely corroborated by the essential connivance of arcana and allegories, Eros and Thanathos, Apollonian and Dionysian.”

Artwork Image: La Santa, 2023. Oil on linen. 77 3/4 x 94 1/2 in.

Gianni Caravaggio

Born 1968, Rocca San Giovanni (Chieti), Italy. Lives and works in Milan, Italy.

“Through essential lines and composite meanings, Gianni Caravaggio carries forward his theoretical reflection on the bewitching, intangible, and liturgical mystery of the process of creating a work of art in conjunction with its potential for reinterpretation and self-renewal. Through his solemn sculptural language, he adopts different formal and material solutions that elegantly synthesize the value—simultaneously allegorical and evocative—of his works. Caravaggio defines his works as “devices for demiurgic acts” because, taking into account the space-time coordinates, they are able to generate alchemical processes and perceptive illusions that play on the paradox, thus involving the bystander in a game made of boundless imagination and sensitive perception.”

Artwork Image: Time runs through my fingers, 2021. Bronze cast, palm leaf. 14 x 78 x 39 in.

Dominique Clayton

Dominique Clayton is an arts consultant, writer, and gallerist born and raised in Los Angeles. Clayton is the founder of Dominique Gallery, a storefront turned pop-up exhibition and online program which showcases and advises emerging artists with a focus on marginalized artists and artists raising families. In addition to the gallery, Clayton also serves on the curatorial and programming committee of Destination Crenshaw, a forthcoming outdoor art museum and arts program based in the historic Crenshaw community of Los Angeles. Clayton previously worked as Manager of the Founding Director’s office at The Broad and later as an interim director at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery. Her arts writing has been featured in publications including Cultured Magazine, LALA Magazine, Artsy, Sugarcane Magazine, Blavity, and her own forthcoming Black Arts Diary.

Mike Reesé

b. 1990, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

“Mike’s work has a nostalgia and playfulness that takes me to a simpler time in life. I love the incorporation of fantasy and figuration which conveys a story of youthful wonder and emotion. Similarly, his use of mixed media and found and repurposed objects like taxidermy insects beautifully signals a transfer of life from nature onto the canvas. I often think of art as an extension of our quotidian experiences, archived in innovative ways to bring us back to center, and Mike does this brilliantly.”

Artwork Image: Love Matters, 2022. Acrylic, watercolor, and flashe on stretched canvas. 64 x 42 x 1 1/2 in.

Lauren Carly Shaw

b. 1986, Ridgewood, NJ. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2016 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute. 2010 BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York.

“I was immediately drawn to Lauren’s work because of the hair and body shapes. There’s something absurd and bizarre in the work that feels rather timely, given the chaos of our current climate and the ongoing attacks against women and their rights. The positioning and placement of her sculptures feels so familiar and approachable as most women I know, myself included, have found themselves in these physical and mental states of anger, confusion, reflection, and rest. I’m very much interested in sculpture lately, and Lauren’s sculptural assemblage is incredibly innovative and touching.”

Artwork Image: Hair Lady (seated strawberry blonde), 2016 synthetic hair, cardboard. 34 x 29 x 26 in.

Hana Ward

b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2011 BA, Brown University, Providence, RI.

“Hana’s paintings are beautifully poetic. I love how she plays with setting, placing figures either in open outdoor space or in intimate domestic interiors while keeping the same mood and introspection. The oscillation between inside and outside signifies a longing and teleportation between environments. I see myself in her paintings, which instantly draws me in, and I like to believe she sees me too. There’s an emotional exchange I feel while looking at her work and I also love how she brings her figures into another dimension with the ceramic works. Together, all of her work feels deeply smart and poignant.”

Artwork Image: Provision Gardens, 2024. Oil on linen. 72 x 54 x 1 1/2 in.

Lee Foley

Lee Foley is a writer and curator based in Los Angeles. She has served as the director of Bel Ami gallery since 2019. She holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, New York and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Kiah Celeste

b. 1994, Brooklyn, NY. Lives and works in Louisville, KY. 2016 BFA, SUNY Purchase.

"Kiah Celeste builds an awareness of patterns of production and consumption by re-using manufactured objects in dynamic sculptural combinations. By repurposing existing objects, the works evoke ‘life hacks,’ where the inefficiency of a broken system is clear and we are empowered to tinker with what is at hand. With each sculpture, Celeste arrives at a playful balance of strength and fragility, lightness and darkness, the industrial and the organic. Deriving beauty from the mundane, Celeste constructs monuments to the quest for new ways of seeing and relating to one another in a shaky world."

Artwork Image: Rounded Corners, Pointed Curves, 2020. Concrete, exercise balls, glass. 40 x 110 x 37 in.

Olivia Hill

b. 1985, Chicago, IL. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2020 MFA, University of California-Riverside. 2006 BFA, San Francisco Art Institute.

"From Olivia Hill’s landscapes, the harmonies and the dissonance of our relationship with the earth emerge. People are absent from Hill’s scenes, but signs of human occupation can be found everywhere. The humble subject of a concrete picnic table is a relic and a stage. In Los Angeles, it’s a relief to encounter a piece of public infrastructure that actually functions. From a small pocket of a city park to a macro view of a Californian poppy ‘super bloom’ from space, Hill reveals how changes in the scenery around us can produce spectacular effects."

Artwork Image: Picnic Table in Poppy Field, 2024. Oil on Canvas. 60 x 48 x 2 in.

Lisa Kereszi

b. 1973, Media, PA. Lives and works in New Haven, CT. 2000 MFA, Yale University School of Art. 1995 BA, Bard College.

"Lisa Kereszi’s photographs are saturated with failed fantasies of escape into Americana. She depicts emotional treasure hunts at a carnival, a haunted house, a strip club, a movie theater and a junkyard, to name a few. In exploring escapism, Kereszi also seeks to understand our addictive desire to flee reality, compelled by feelings of sadness and loss. While Kereszi repeatedly captures the cracks in the fantasy, her images also suggest possibilities. Often her compositions frame half-open portals—windows, doors, and bus stop shelters—that let in the light. Kereszi captures grit and resilience in bright hues; America as a cabinet of curiosities."

Artwork Image: 4th of July at the racetrack, 2000. Archival inkjet print.

Gemma Rolls-Bentley

Gemma Rolls-Bentley is a curator, creative consultant, and writer who has been at the forefront of contemporary art for nearly two decades. Curating exhibitions and building art collections internationally, her curatorial practice amplifies the work of female and queer artists and provides a platform for art that explores LGBTQIA+ identity. Her debut book Queer Art: From Canvas to Club, and the Spaces Between was published by Quarto in May 2024. Most recently she curated “A Million Candles: Illuminating Queer Love & Life” at the London Art Fair. In 2023 she curated the group exhibition “Dreaming of Home” at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art in NYC and the Tom of Finland Art & Culture Festival in London. She also curated the Brighton Beacon Collection, the largest permanent display of queer art in the UK. Rolls-Bentley is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and has taught at numerous institutions including Goldsmiths and Glasgow School of Art. She co-chairs the board of trustees for the charity Queercircle and sits on the Courtauld Association Committee.

Dominic Myatt

b. 1993, Leicester, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. 2014 BA, Goldsmiths, University of London.

"The fashion world has been obsessed with Dominic Myatt’s work for years; his distinctive line drawings have appeared in collaborations with numerous labels from Vivienne Westwood to Hugo Boss, and Tom Ford collects his paintings. Working across a range of mediums from tattoos and illustration to painting and sculpture, he presents a unique approach to abstract figuration that blurs the remembered with the imagined to explore queer desire inspired by his own experiences of working in sex clubs. Having recently been awarded a coveted place in London’s Royal Academy of Arts MA Programme, 2024 marks a pivotal moment in Myatt’s career."

Artwork Image: Fireplace, 2023; gas fire, rope, pulley, centipede.

Sarah Francis

b. 1982, Wrexham, Wales. Lives and works in Leeds, UK. 2011 MFA, Leeds University, Leeds, UK. 2007 BA Photography, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK.

"Sarah Francis draws on her neurodiverse and queer identity to shape her work, posing questions about consent, agency, and pleasure. Her assemblage work, incorporating found and recycled materials, channels the landscapes of Northern England and speaks to the kinship between queer bodies and the natural world. In 2023, she presented her work in the US for the first time in a group exhibition at NYC’s Leslie Lohman Museum of Art alongside Catherine Opie, Jenna Gribbon, and Nicole Eisenman. Her work has recently entered a number of significant collections, both private and public, that champion the work of queer and female artists in the UK and US."

Artwork Image: Peek No.4, 2024; wood, paint, pencil.

Zach Toppin

b. 1987. Lives and works in London, UK

"Zach Toppin is a painter whose work explores love, sex, emotion, and gender. Their rich visual language comprises references to queer culture, coded symbols, and deeply personal experiences. The work reveals an appreciation and fascination for the creative and ritualistic ways in which clothing, accessories, and objects play a role in the formation of outwards presentations of identity. After coming out as trans last year, Toppin found the confidence to return to their artistic practice. With recent participation in a flurry of celebrated exhibitions and a major London solo show lined up for 2025, an exciting journey lies ahead for the artist."

Artwork Image: (I was a cliff, then a rock, then a stone, then a pebble, then sand, then a) Pearl, 2024; oil on Canvas

Chris Wan Feng

Chris Wan Feng is a Hong Kong-based writer and independent curator with a focus on the intersections of locality and art ecosystems. His recent curated exhibitions include the internationally showcased “Blue Throat” series (2024, Paris; 2023, Hong Kong, Singapore, Tokyo, Shenzhen), exploring themes such as diaspora, displacement, and identity, alongside notable others such as “A Collection in Two Acts” (2022, Rossi&Rossi) and “Residual Heat” (2021, Axel Vervoordt). In 2023, he curated the public program at Art Central Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Focus sector at Abu Dhabi Art. Chris regularly contributes to prestigious art journals such as Artforum and ArtReview. He is also the founder and editor of Daoju, a pivotal not-for-profit art writing project focused on Hong Kong's contemporary art scene.

Wu Jiaru

B. 1992, Guangdong, China. 2014 BA, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 2017 MFA, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

"Wu Jiaru's expansive creative practice encompasses painting, moving image, and installation art, exploring the interplay between personal emotions and artistic mediums. Her work delves into mythology, cultural traditions, historical memory, and contemporary realities. Drawing from mythological texts and personal histories, she crafts artworks that balance universality with personal depth. Through her creations, she evokes intimate, emotive atmospheres, inviting viewers to connect on a visceral level and prompting empathetic responses. This approach not only enriches her narratives but also resonates with a broad audience, bridging personal experiences with broader cultural and historical contexts."

Artwork Image: beigejellyprojection_i & ii, 2021. Video installation.

Ivy Ma

b. 1973, Hong Kong. Lives and works in Hong Kong. 2002 MA, University of Leeds, UK. 2001 MFA, RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia.

"In her practice blending drawing and collage, Ivy Ma intricately intervenes, disrupts, and rejuvenates photographic imagery. This distinctive approach not only extends her longstanding artistic exploration but also mirrors her nomadic lifestyle in recent years. Ma's life and art are inseparably intertwined, resonating deeply in her newly created images imbued with metaphorical vigor. These artworks reflect her contemplation on human connections to place and respond to the dynamic complexities of contemporary society—starting from Hong Kong and expanding to many other localities."

Artwork Image: Bird of Shape: Cities: No.200 (Bath), 2024. Collage with laser print and acrylic on paper, mounted on acid-free paper.

Lee Kai Chung

b. Hong Kong. Lives and works in London, UK.

"In Lee Kai Chung’s extensive exploration of East Asian history, his methodical and logical approach seamlessly integrates with emotive materials that keenly capture real-world contexts. This cumulative depth empowers his visual narratives to offer profound insights into the humanistic history of specific locales, while collectively presenting an archipelagic overview that resonates within a global context. Rooted in contemporary realities, his moving-image work reflects a historical gravity that transcends time, enriching future perspectives and offering a compelling lens into East Asia's cultural tapestry."

Artwork Image: The Narrow Road to the Deep Sea- Part II: The Smoking Lady (film still), 2019; single-channel video | HD | color | 16:9 | stereo | 9:43.

Trâm Nguyễn

Trâm Nguyễn is a curator, programmer, and educator based in London, focusing on queer and anti-racist practices. Sometimes they can be found performing/making art under the alias ‘vinacringe’—a Vietnamese diasporic export. They are currently curator of young people’s programmes at Tate Britain and Tate Modern.

Adam Farah-Saad

b. 1991, London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK. 2014 BA (Hons), Camberwell College of Arts, University of the Arts, London.

"I have never felt so at home among artworks like I do in Adam Farah-Saad’s worlds. Aptly named ‘WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM YOU AND MYSELF (PEAK MOMENTATIONS / INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE MIX)’, Farah-Saad’s presentation at Camden Arts Centre in 2021 playfully explored the intimacies of heartache, longing, desire, and loss with ‘endz poetic,’ anchoring it in a deeply, specifically familiar backdrop of a swiftly changing London. As an artist, composer, sauce-maker and bootleg archivist—Farah-Saad creates worlds of tender wounds and critical reflections with iPods, poppers, cruising, and moving, set to softly playing background tracks by Mariah Carey."

Artwork Image: Installation views of “WHAT I’VE LEARNED FROM YOU AND MYSELF: (PEAK MOMENTATIONS / INSIDE MY VELVET ROPE MIX),” at Camden Art Centre, 2021. Photo: Rob Harris.

Chantel Foo

b. 1997, Singapore. Lives and works in London, UK. 2021 BA Fine Art and History of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London.

"Chantel Foo’s medium is the body: its glimmer, slippages, glitches, excavations through movements. Foo also explores elements of sculpture, sounds, technological locations, and writing. It is easy to feel lost in the non-linearity of Foo’s work, and feel at ease in it. With a background in traditional Chinese dance, Foo challenges their relationship with the body and its history as their home, how it relates to perception of the gaze, and how it is situated in time. Often, Foo moves through associations between the instrumentals with the theatrical and spiritual, articulating the birth of a new womb for these movements."

Artwork Image: Pond, 2022, Southbank Centre Purcell Sessions.

Vy Trinh

b. 1996, Saigon, Vietnam. Lives and works in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. 2023 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. 2019 BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY, United States.

"Vy Trinh’s practice explores the sculptural reconfiguration of Saigon heat: the sprawling bodies of construction sites, the scent and markings of rubber of the city’s infinite rivers of mopeds, the glass windows of its tall buildings and the glimmer of blinding sun bouncing off it. There is a sense of tenderness in Trinh’s workings and reworkings of raw and found materials such as brass, fan guards, plastic wrap, bicycle wheels, ball chains, and cable ties that fall together into flickering dreams of a city I find at once familiar and fantastical."

Artwork Image: Honda (KIA), 2023. Found bumper, PETG, metal rod, nickel plated steel ball chain, brass, flux, cable zip tie, and epoxy putty.

Jared Davis

Jared Davis is a producer, curator, and writer based in London with a focus on independent music and sound culture. He has contributed art- and music-related articles to publications including AQNB, DIS Magazine, Public Seminar (The New School, New York), 3hD Festival, and more. Davis has produced numerous music and live events for London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts, and worked as a part of the programming team for Berlin’s Creamcake and its annual 3hD Festival. He was associate editor of AQNB from 2018–2023.

Lucia Leuci

b. 1977, Bisceglie, Italy. Lives and works in Milan, Italy.

“Lucia Leuci’s work is a playful tragicomedy of the mundane. If the practice of everyday life speaks to the way in which we devise systems and meaning out of the semiotics of our daily rituals, Leuci’s sculptures turn a mirror on this notion with tactile and subtle humour. There’s an intriguing beauty in her metal forms, found objects, and colourful resins, as well as iron and fabrics. Her constructions each feel familiar, but sit recontextualised to highlight sites of play and potential in our common experience.”

Artwork Image: Le cinque Camille (Gynandromorphic trolley), 2022. Iron, resin, pigments, acrylic colours, plastic. 59 x 42 x 47 1/5 in. Photo by Tiziano Ercoli.

Bronte Stolz

b. 1991, Adelaide, Australia. Lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. 2019 BFA, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne. 2012 Bachelor of Design (Product Innovation), UniSA, Adelaide.

“Bronte Stolz creates stark architectural forms that eliminate traces of the human, developing a sense that our bodies are now inextricably melded with industry. While many present-day sculptors produce anthropocenic plays on the body and our somatic presence, Stolz’s work seems to highlight the residual—the metal moulds, the grates, the foundations—only to leave the viewer feeling an uncanny sense of familiarity. Stolz’s forms highlight that we ourselves are made of no different stuff to the mineral waste of everyday life, but equally that this debris can readily continue without us.”

Artwork Image: Body image fading down corridors of computer sky, 2021. Cast aluminium, rubber, talcum powder. 22 x 16 x 4 in.

Yein Lee

b. 1988, Incheon, South Korea. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria. 2022 MFA, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna.

“The noun ‘organism’ has its roots in a Greek term for implements and tools, while likewise relating to the word ‘organisation.’ At some point, the organic came to represent a constructed and anachronistic understanding of the ‘natural world.’ Such a concept is leaky and insufficient today, as more and more we are intertwined with material waste and digital landscapes. Yein Lee’s sculptures create bodies of the present, returning the notion of the organic to its essence as a means to identify systems. These works spotlight our entanglement with plastics and extracted metals, as well as a confused sense of consciousness.”

Artwork Image: Devouring chaos - growth of reconstructed time, overflowing bodies, and static electricity, 2022. 70 x 62 x 31 in.

Alison Wong

Alison Wong is first-generation Chinese American artist, curator, and educator born in Illinois and based in Detroit, Michigan. Wong is the Director + Curator at Wasserman Projects, a split for and not-for-profit arts organization focusing on supporting artists by bringing to fruition new projects that inspire discourse and meaningful engagement with audiences throughout Detroit. She is also the Founder of Butter Projects, Adjunct Faculty Member at College for Creative Studies, and serves on the board of several arts and cultural organizations in the region. As an artist, she primarily works in the field of painting and drawing, taking inspiration from everyday ephemera that is embedded with personal histories of love and loss.

Katie Butler

b. 1995, North Canton, OH. Lives and works in Akron, OH. 2021 MFA, Kent State University, Kent, OH.

"I’ve long admired Katie Butler’s work and was delighted to come across her profile on the Foundwork platform. On their surface, Butler’s paintings seduce and satisfy with their rich tones and mouth watering subjects, while their distorted perspectives prevent the viewer from entering scenes, serving up a critique on the imbalances throughout our society. Overflowing with contradictions, each canvas contains a melting pot of high and low, historic and contemporary. Butler’s work simultaneously attracts and repels the viewer, speaking to our values and desires in a world full of social and political imbalances."

Artwork Image: State of the State, 2023. Oil and acrylic on canvas. 66 x 84 in.

Sze Wai Wong

B. 1990, lives and works in Hong Kong. 2013 BFA, The Chinese University of Hong Kong. 2020 MFA, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.

"Drawn in by Sze Wai Wong’s distinctive palette and ephemeral tableaus, my appreciation for the work was furthered by the unique processes employed. Wong creates natural pigments from clay bodies found in the Dung Huang riverbed and uses ancient mural techniques to build faded yet rich layers that evoke a sense of reverence. Combining the old with the new, Wong invites the viewer in a liminal space that feels both familiar and otherworldly. The stylized environments in Wong’s paintings serve as a record of time passed—vessels for memories and the traces we leave behind."

Artwork Image: Trio, 2023. Ink, water-based colour, colour pigments and clay on canvas. 47 1/5 x 59 in.

Marcos Castro

b. 1981, lives and works in Mexico City. 2006 BFA, Escuela Nacional de Pintura, Escultura y Grabado - La Esmeralda, Mexico City.

"The thoughtful consideration of time and place in Marcos Castro’s installations immediately struck me. Not only does he demonstrate a technical proficiency in his use of varied materials and mediums, but the subjects and themes depicted connect so strongly to the locations in which the exhibitions are mounted. The works call upon historical as well as personal references, creating a range of entry points and associations to each of the elements that make up the entire experience. Holistically, it speaks to our understanding of the present through a reflection of the past and speculative look to the future."

Artwork Image: Era una noche lluviosa, pero no era de noche ni estaba lloviendo (It was a rainy night, but it wasn't night and it wasn't raining), 2020. Exhibition view. Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, Netherlands.

Ashton Cooper

Ashton Cooper is a curator, writer, and art historian based in Los Angeles. Her research focuses on the history of painting and sculpture in the U.S. after 1960 and examining gesture, abstraction, and expression from queer feminist perspectives. She is currently the Luce Curatorial Fellow at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, where she was part of the curatorial team for Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living. As an independent curator, she has organized nine solo and group exhibitions in non-profit and gallery spaces in New York, Toronto, and Vienna. She has a PhD in Art History from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Rachel Deane

b. 1993, Atlanta, GA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2019 MFA, University of California-Davis, Davis, CA. 2017 MA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI. 2016 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

"Rachel Deane’s enigmatic textile works join embroidery floss, fabric, and fluid acrylic on unstretched canvas. Her compositions feature wide stretches of softly tinted fabric punctuated by window-like representational scenes, long excerpts of cursive script, and moments of abstract form and patterning. The overall effect is tender, suffused with a sense of longing and loss. The hand of the artist asserts itself through the thick stitches of the artist’s embroidery needle, which are installed as to be visible on both the front and the back of the work."

Artwork Image: Dwelling Object (Grief with Good Change), 2022. Embroidery Floss, Fabric and Fluid Acrylic on Canvas. 11 x 13 in.

Dena Novak

b. 1968, Chicago, IL. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 1997 MA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, MA.

"In her frenetic, candy-colored paintings, dena novak piles abstract forms atop one another in dense, tactile, and delightfully chunky amalgamations of paint. Thick scrapes of cadmium red and baby blue pigments abut swirls of rose pink, squiggles of turquoise, and trailing squeezes of orange. Built-up layers of underpainting peek through the smudges layered over. At times, the artist carves hatch marks and squirming lines into the surface. Though seemingly upbeat and energetic, novak’s titles frequently refer to the painful vicissitudes of inhabiting body and mind."

Artwork Image: Hierth/Life Before Pain, 2022. Oil. 20 x 24 in.

Hana Ward

b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2011 BA, Brown University, Providence, RI.

"Hana Ward paints portraits of sturdy, pensive women nestled in the mountainscapes, plains, forests, and vistas of the natural world. Frequently using fields of primary and jewel tone colors, Ward’s settings are economical but evocative. Various flora and fauna—a horse, an orange, a tall plant stalk—accompany the figures. Her subjects look into space or directly at the viewer with raised eyebrows and, at times, purposefully distorted proportions. There is an emphasis on the psychology of the sitter, the fraught tête-à-tête between representor and represented."

Artwork Image: The field and the knower of the field, 2023. oil paint, image transfer. 60 x 54 x 1.5 in.

Claire Sammut

Claire Sammut is an independent curator and writer based in New York City. She has previously contributed curatorial research and assisted in the production of exhibitions at the Dia Foundation, the 57th and 58th Carnegie International, ArtistsSpace, LUMA Arles, The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Palais de Tokyo, Lubov Gallery, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, and Gladstone Gallery, among others. Sammut has curated exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art and Maxwell Graham Gallery. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and is a Director at Maxwell Graham Gallery in New York.

Beatriz Jaramillo

b. 1964, Medellín, Colombia. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA.

"Beatriz Jaramillo’s work explores the interface between natural landscapes and industrialization, informed by her personal experiences. Her works, crafted with porcelain and paraffin, skillfully convey a profound sense of layered histories. Through excavating embedded memory, Jaramillo contemplates the enduring influences of urbanism and globalization on historical and contemporary landscapes. By employing different strategies ranging from the photographic assemblage and gradation of materials cast and mold, the artist meticulously constructs works that approach foundational questions of stewardship, preservation, erasure, and mnemonic cartography—Jaramillo mines environment and industry as a means of subversion, a new heartbeat with a prescient cadence."

Artwork Image: In-Between: Los Angeles Wetlands, 2020. Porcelain, laser engraved aluminum and metal rods. 90 x 72 x 48 in.

Meghan Murphy

b. 1990, Chicago, IL. Lives and works in London, UK. 2022 MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

"Meghan Murphy's work is anchored by her commitment to narrative legacy. Through incorporating talismans, familial textiles, archival footage, resin, paint, and fabric, Murphy considers the interplay between consumption and memory as these concepts evolve from unity to fragmentation. Through an exchange of images, form, and subversion, she addresses the effects of decay while interweaving themes of mythology and narrative storytelling. In doing so, she examines the ripple effects of generational memory in the context of consumerism, particularly concerning idealized concepts like the "American Dream"—the belief that hard work and determination lead to prosperity and success."

Artwork Image: Building Castles, 2022. Oil & acrylic paint, original print on Somerset paper. 11 x 8 in.

Anna Ridderstad

b. 1976, Stockholm, Sweden. Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden. 2006 MFA, Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm, Sweden.

"Anna Ridderstad's practice begins with the body and its surroundings. Using natural materials like dried nettles, stones, wood, and sand, Ridderstad's works are as flexible and subtle as they are bold, addressing the inherently complex relationship between architecture and the corporeal form. In departing from a long history of land art and minimalism, Ridderstad reimagines how materials come together and function against the grain of the environment. Methods of molding, impression, color, locale, and stillness join to produce a kind of topological contradiction, situated in the natural landscape or inverted, bringing the land inside the space of the white-bound room."

Artwork Image: Horizon, 2021. Wood, stones, egg oil tempera. 67 x 165 x 9 3/4 in.

Rebecca Heidenberg

Rebecca Heidenberg is a curator, filmmaker and co-founder of the Minneapolis gallery Dreamsong, which, beyond a full exhibition program, has also begun participating in art fairs including Frieze Los Angeles, Expo Chicago, and The Armory Show. In 2021, Heidenberg launched Twin Cities Art Week through Dreamsong, an annual celebration of contemporary art in Minneapolis and St. Paul which features events at over twenty venues, from small artist-run spaces to leading galleries and major institutions, including the Walker Art Center. Heidenberg’s feature-length film, Queens of the Revolution, is a portrait of Mejunje, a cultural center in Santa Clara that paved the road for LGBTQ+ rights in Cuba.

Lee Noble

b. 1983, Nashville, TN. Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. 2020 MFA, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, Minneapolis, MN.

"Appropriating phrases from sources that include graffiti by the UK anarchist collective King Mob and a poster from the Paris student protests of May 1968, Lee Noble’s paintings juxtapose mantras of twentieth century counterculture with degraded images lifted from fanzines of forgotten genre films. Built up from striking depths of color and abstract grounds, Noble layers and processes vestigial remnants of familiar images and texts, rendering our own memories uncanny and unsettling utopian ideals. The work underscores the ways in which histories haunt our psyches and has been bringing to mind Walter Benjamin… ‘a storm is blowing in from Paradise.’”

Artwork Image: Witching Hour Video, 2022. Flashe, acrylic, gouache, oil, ink, spraypaint, collage on canvas. 60 x 40 x 2 in.

Ta-coumba Aiken

b. 1952, Evanston, IL. Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN.

"Ta-coumba Aiken has spent decades channeling the spirit of his ancestors through form and color in paintings and works on paper rooted in abstraction. A vessel for the collective memory of his community, his imagery is deeply engaged with Black history and culture. Aiken begins each painting with intuitive freeform underpaintings that the artist terms Spirit Writing. Upon these serpentine gestures, eyes, brows, mouths and hands rise and recede, dancing in and out of the viewer’s field of vision, rhyming and twisting in chromatic choreographies that seem to contain the past, present, and future."

Artwork Image: Now Let Me See, 2023. Acrylic on canvas. 48 x 48 in.

Alexa Horochowski

b. 1965, Comodoro Rivadavia, Argentina. Lives and works in Minneapolis, MN. 1996 MFA, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI.

"Though Alexa Horochowski resides in Minneapolis, her practice is deeply tied to the landscape of her childhood in the Patagonia of Argentina. Using diverse materials including natural kelp, adobe clay, bronze and lead, Horochowski’s sculpture emphasizes human impermanence within ecologically deep time and contemplates how political upheaval and climate change reshape personal and collective memory. Working through ideas rigorously and slowly building layers of meaning, Horochowski’s recent work summons memory, family, violence, art history, and landscape into a convergence of meanings and narratives that echo across time and space."

Artwork Image: El País de Nomeacuerdo (I don't remember land), 2022. Steel, weathervane directionals, sandbags, fabric. 84 x 168 x 120 in.

Hanna Girma

Hanna Girma is a writer and curator based in London, where she is currently Senior Editor and Curator of Editorial Projects at Serpentine. Prior to this role, Girma held positions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Studio Museum in Harlem, and the Mistake Room, Los Angeles. She has a B.A. in World Arts and Cultures and Digital Humanities from UCLA.

Faysal Altunbozar

b. 1993, İstanbul, Turkey. Lives and works in London, UK. 2019 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

"I really enjoy Altunbozar’s play with material. In the artist’s sculptural practice, industrial rubbers and metals meet organic matter to reveal sensual undertones and buried lore. I'm interested in the way he mines histories of specific sites, extracting foundations of power and desire that the West was built on. In Altunbozar’s built environments we see the body's mark on the natural landscape, the limitations we have constructed with social and urban infrastructure and the possibilities for transgression."

Artwork Image: Feeder No.1, 2019. Glazed ceramic, nylon straps, bird bands, water, epoxy, local plant.

Yoshie Sakai

b. 1970, lives and works in Gardena, CA. 2008 MFA, Claremont Graduate University, Claremont, CA. 1994 BA, University of California, Los Angeles.

"I was initially drawn to Yoshie Sakai’s work for its humor and low-fi video aesthetics. Her bold absurdist built worlds pull the viewer further into these constructed pop nightmare-fantasies. As someone who is also second generation, I related to spending countless hours watching soap operas, telenovelas, and daytime TV with my grandmother who did not speak English or Spanish but was nonetheless captivated by these fables. Sakai’s work captures the melodrama of identity and consumer culture."

Artwork Image: KOKO's Love: The Technicolor Unfairy Tale Ball (installation detail), 2018. 16-channel mixed media video installation. 264 x 504 x 1020 in.

Katja Farin

b. 1996, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2025 MFA Candidate, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, London, UK. 2018 BA, University of California, Los Angeles, CA.

"Katja Farin’s paintings act as joyous melancholic vignettes of the everyday. Though their palette is at times deeply vivid, the characters in Farin’s portraits express a deep sorrow and loneliness, perhaps an indescribable and surreal sense of longing and contemporary nihilism. The experience of looking at their work is a practice of empathy; it is an emotional experience. Through the intimate scenes of apathy and ennui, we are transported through fleeting and familiar moments whether they be real or daydreams."

Artwork Image: Notetaking, 2023. Oil on Canvas. 28 x 22 in.

Moira Sims

Moira Sims is a Brazilian-American writer, curator, and producer of artist projects and exhibitions living and working in New York City. She is currently a Director at Anat Ebgi, and previously worked at Simone Subal Gallery and 47 Canal. In 2020, Sims founded Octagon, a curatorial initiative focused on working closely with artists to produce long-form solo projects.

Levani (Levan Mindiashvili)

b. 1979, Tbilisi, Georgia. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2010 MFA, Buenos Aires National University of Arts, Buenos Aires. 2003 BFA, Tbilisi State Academy of Arts, Tbilisi.

"Levani’s practice tenderly considers the ways in which language and memory inform identity and spark community, or cause these constructs to become increasingly fluid and fall apart. The artist’s immersive installations reference places where people gather and ideas cross pollinate, ranging from neon soaked nightclubs to a domestic space replete with family photographs and houseplants. These powerful "rooms" and related sculptures examine interconnectivity, trauma, and adolescent exploration through a decidedly queer lens. Levani’s silkscreen prints of the Georgian alphabet on cascading latex are particularly captivating, and they draw natural associations to religious script, window drapery, and erotic fetish."

Artwork Image: instar, 2023. Stainless steel sanitizing box, syringe and glass beakers from 1980’s, gauze, dry flowers, aragonite, snowflake obsidian, faux pearl, atlantic ocean red algae, soy wax casts of human genitalia, stone shelf 26 x 16 x 12 in.

Talles Lopes

Lives and works in Anápolis, Brazil.

"Through sculpture, artist books, and installation, Talles Lopez’s practice investigates the ways in which socio-political systems and Modernist architecture in Brazil echo the country’s colonialist past and inform its complicated present. The columns of Brasilia’s Alvorada Palace are a recurring motif in Lopez’s work—commonly understood as a proud, yet kitsch symbol of Brazilian progress, Lopez satirically personifies the columns by setting one into a hammock or leaning several against a wall as a suggestion of municipal surplus. Through replication and appropriation, Lopez retroactively questions the political agendas behind historical events of the Global South."

Artwork Image: Monumental Surplus, 2020. Styrofoam, polyester canvas, grout and iron bars, variable dimensions.

Wisrah Villefort

b. 1989, Buritizeiro, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo.

"Wisrah Villefort’s conceptual practice harnesses found objects and preexisting social contracts to produce sculptures and installations they refer to as “scores.” These groupings of objects typically provide an absurdist meta-commentary on the site in which they are presented: ranging from an ornamental gate rented to an arts organization by the artist’s father, to an assortment of miscellaneous supplies and tools belonging to an institution’s private offices. Engaging within the tradition of institutional critique, Villefort’s installations provide a window into the complex bureaucracies of an artist’s everyday life that are often obscured from sight or intentionally hidden."

Artwork Image: Belonging, 2022. Score: A set of objects belonging to the institution, gallery, organization, or space where the work is presented. Variable dimensions and materials. Installation view at La Becque, Switzerland.

Irini Miga

Irini Miga is an interdisciplinary artist based between New York and Athens. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Essex Flowers (New York), The Drawing Center (New York), Thierry Goldberg Gallery (New York), Atlanta Contemporary Museum (Atlanta), Neuer Essener Kunstverein (Essen, Germany), Capsule Shanghai (Shanghai), Benaki Museum (Athens), and Museum of Cycladic Art (Athens), among others. In addition to her artistic practice, Miga has served as a Curatorial Advisory Board Member for the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, and is a core team member and editor for the Daily Lazy, an artist collective, online publication, and digital archive for contemporary art formed in Athens in 2011. Miga studied art at London’s Central Saint Martins College, obtained a BFA from the Athens School of Fine Arts, and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in New York.

Cici Wu

b. 1989 in Beijing, China. Lives and works in New York and Hong Kong. BA in Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong. MFA in Sculpture, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

“What captivates me in Cici Wu's work are the poetics of light—light not only as an open source of illumination, but also as a sensation that can evoke transformative experiences and hint at different states of being. Wu’s twinkly works harness the play of light and shadow to conjure a liminal space that hovers between absence and presence. Employing diverse media and materials, Wu choreographs stories, weaving together personal and collective memories, inviting us to explore the oneiric realm where the ethereal world intersects our reality, forging connections that span across time.”

Artwork Image: Upon Leaving the White Dust, 2017–2018. Ceramic, clay, handmade glass, silicone, plaster, white fabric, rice paper, ink, plastic drop cloth, sponge, mop, Lehmann Gross Bahn train tracks, white LED, enameled wire, Dupont connectors, arduino, video (30 min, light data collected from the screening of unfinished film footage White Dust from Mongolia by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, 1980). Dimensions variable.

Emma Schwartz

b. 1992 in Toronto, Canada. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2014 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 2019 MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York.

“What I find fascinating in Emma Schwartz’s paintings is the feeling of immediacy and playfulness. By overlaying loose brushstrokes with memories and spaces from her childhood, she produces textured canvases that resemble frescoes. Her expressive use of charcoal and pastels adds depth and emotional resonance to her mixed media paintings. As teenage scenes in intimate spaces capture fleeting moments that become emblematic, ranch-style homes and the storied land they sit on develop a narrative between personal and cultural histories. Emma Schwartz’s paintings are a portal to a dimension where peculiar, intimate moments that question subjectivity are unearthed.”

Artwork Image: hate to break it to you, 2023. Oil, charcoal, and pastel on canvas. 34 x 44 in.

Latent Community

Established 2017 and based in Athens, Greece. Latent Community is the interdisciplinary artist duo by Sotiris Tsiganos (b. 1992 Athens, Greece) and Ionian Bisai (b.1992, Saranda, Albania).

"I'm constantly intrigued by Latent Community’s work and practice, which has at its core moving image and explores issues of social, political, and ecological justice. The artist duo weaves participatory strategies and performative sequences, resulting in hybrid film productions and video installations. Their research-based projects focus on the critical reading of underexposed stories and twisting them through new contexts. Their work creates ripples of thoughts and emotions while critically confronting contemporary social history; it cuts through the noise and invites us to engage more deeply with the pressing issues of our time.”

Artwork Image: NEROMANNA (Film still), 2017. Video, Full HD, Color, Sound.

Brittni Ann Harvey and Harry Gould Harvey IV

Brittni Ann Harvey (b.1992) is a sculptor and textile-based artist whose works examine global shifts in production, technology, religion and class hierarchy. Harry Gould Harvey IV (b.1991) is an autodidactic artist and scholar of history whose work often invokes time, utilizing materials such as wooden ornamentation sourced from burned buildings, candle wax drippings and used industrial heaters. Together they co-founded The Fall River Museum of Contemporary Art (FR MoCA) in October 2020. FR MoCA works to provide contemporary art resources to the community of Fall River through perpetual experimentation around the potentials of art, its institutions, and the ecology of place.

Todd Bartel

b. 1962, Manitowoc, WI. Lives and works in Watertown, MA. 1993 MFA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. 1985 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI

“Todd Bartel’s compositions could be read as a historical homage to the development of industry and its complicated influence on the reality of American life post-industry. Utilizing ‘rain washed and weather beaten bulletin board paper’, ‘staple rust’, and ‘dictionary definitions of the word pastoral’, his use of materials can be seen as conceptual symbols meticulously curated in their influence of idea as much as arrangement of aesthetic image. There is poetic consideration of the past, its artifacts, detritus, and state of mind. These poetics, in combination with the subtle dynamics of composition, highlight the things we inherit both in our psychological and societal realities."

Artwork Image: Terrain, Scream and Cede—Industrial Locomotion 1844 [Landscape Vernacular No. 17], 2021. Interlocking collage, rain washed and weather beaten bulletin board paper, staple rust, xerographic-transfers on 19th century end papers, map graticules, dictionary definitions of the word “pastoral,” pencil, Yes glue, document repair tape. Each panel 27 1/2 x 16 1/2 in.

Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado Roswell

b. 1982, Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Lives and works in Roswell, NM. 2012-14 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 2004-08 BFA, Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

"Manuel Alejandro Rodríguez-Delgado’s sculptures straddle a line of function and mechanical science fiction. Under the guise of DIY experimentation, in works like SC/UD (Space-Clasp/Upward Dive): Backpack, organic forms and combinations are birthed from utility and emphasized by the use of materials like ‘Gorilla tape’, ‘rocket cartridges’, and ‘power tool batteries’. The work stems thoughts of what new horizons there are for technology and imparts an individual accessibility of its potential. There is power in the work of reimagining the everyday objects around us that feels accessible."

Artwork Image: Jíbaro, 2022-23. Wood, plywood, OSB, HDPE plastic, PVC Plastic, vinyl, rubber, nylon straps, plastic buckles, 2.5 gallon water jug, windshield wiper water pump, hair dryer, power tool batteries, electric wires, bungee cords, duct tape, tarp material, ethafoam, steel, casters, various reclaimed electronics, tropical plant gathered from Puerto Rican rain forest. 98” x 24” x 30” in.

Julie Schenkelberg

b. 1974, Cleveland, OH. Lives and works in Detroit, MI. 2011 MFA, School of Visual Arts, NY.

"Julie Schenkelberg’s sculptures compile materials that act as an archive of the factory rich history that pertains to Detroit. There is evidence in the material choices and forms of the influence of time on things not revered, and the uniqueness of the human hand despite the overpowering presence of mass-manufacturing and production. This is represented in works like Curio with the use of ‘found Detroit rusted factory metal and scrap copper wire’, ‘soil and pine needles’, and ‘vintage fabric’. The works feel like an intimate story of place, one rich with humanity and nuance despite an industry triggered economic downturn.”

Artwork Image: Curio, 2020. Old typeset printer’s drawer, plaster, acrylic paint and medium, vintage fabric, found Detroit rusted factory metal and scrap copper wire, soil and pine needles. 26 x 20 x 2 in.

Elizaveta Shneyderman

Elizaveta Alexandrovna Shneyderman is a Belarusian-American curator, writer, and publisher. She is Curator and Founder at the Riga Technoculture Research Unit (RTRU) and Curator (Special Projects) at Kim? Contemporary Art Center (Riga, Latvia). Shneyderman’s interdisciplinary research focuses on the history and philosophy of media materialities and the techniques that emerge from them, including their influence on contemporary art. Her essays on contemporary art and visual culture have been published in Artforum, Animation Studies Journal, BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, PIN-UP Magazine, and Rhizome, among others. Previously, Shneyderman has held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the MoMA PS1, the Hessel Museum of Art, Smack Mellon, EMPAC, PARTICIPANT INC, Hunter East Harlem Gallery, Kunsthalle.Ost, and Mana Contemporary. She holds an M.A. in Curatorial Studies from Bard College and currently serves as Adjunct Professor of Art History at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Wai Lau

b. Hong Kong. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2020 MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York.

"Interested in the cross-section of culture and emerging technologies, Wei Lau investigates the complex processes that go into identity formation. Combining global history, fictionalized storytelling, and computer-generated imagery, Lau explores how cultural representations have been continually reinforced through fantasized depictions and synthetic media technologies, such as Deepfakes. By probing Hollywood and cinematic portrayals of Asian identity—from the broad stroke depictions of the “Orient” in relation to Hong Kong, to Asian diasporic representations—Lau gestures to the paradoxes inherent to constitutions of representation, raising questions about who actually has legitimate power and control over bodies."

Artwork Image: Feed 3.0 / T318k V399k 0.1, 2021. 3-channel HD video (color, sound, looped) / Adhesive vinyl. 4:45.

André Magaña

b. 1992, Lagunitas, CA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2013 BFA, Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.

"André Magaña’s work reimagines Mexican-American identity as it singles out the colonial legacies inherent to its visual culture. Through careful examination of white supremacy’s prominence, Magaña probes and deconstructs the infrastructures which have replaced indigenous history and iconography within everyday Mexican society. Drawing on indigenous motifs—including pre-Columbian altarpieces, totems, and ceramics—Magaña envisions a “parallel timeline in which the detritus of Western capitalism is re-consumed as material for the construction of sculpture of the spirit and of the people.” By collapsing object making traditions with contemporary means of production, Magaña subverts the oft-contradictory realities which coloniality ushers."

Artwork Image: Pelosiestataquero & Pelochingamicheladón, 2019. Enamel, epoxy resin, 3d-printed thermoplastic. 15 x 46 x 47 in.

Cammie Staros

b. 1983, Nashville, TN. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2011 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. 2006 BA, Brown University, Providence, RI.

"Mining Classical antiquities, Carrie Stamos creates original sculptures which recontextualize Greco-Roman images and artifacts into new arrangements. Staros artfully combines ancient ceramic techniques with modern industrial processes, such as milling and machining, in order to dissect institutional tropes of display. Her work reveals the semiotic systems at the heart of Western art history, challenging its conventions of production and neutrality. What most fascinates me are the broader regional and epochal additions she makes to the works, examining overlapping, aesthetic histories within visual culture."

Artwork Image: Figlinum aquaticum, 2021. Ceramic, acrylic, wood, laminate, de-chlorinated water, aquatic filtration system, programmed grow light, aquarium soil, lace rock, quartz-veined basalt, aquatic plants (Dwarf Lily, Eusteralis Stellata, Ludwigia Repens) (also shown with harlequin rasbora, tiger snails, and shrimp). 18 x 30 x 12 in.

Camila Palomino

Camila Palomino is an independent curator and researcher from New York City. Her research is invested in aesthetic relationships between urban infrastructures, social memory, and imaging technologies. Most recently she has organized the exhibitions Return Sale at Abrons Art Center, and In Practice: Literally means collapse at SculptureCenter. She has previously held curatorial positions and contributed research to exhibitions at the 58th Carnegie International, The Drawing Center, and MoMA PS1. She is currently Curatorial Assistant at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics.

American Artist

b. 1989, Altadena, CA. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2015 MFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY.

"American Artist investigates histories of race and technology across media. From smashed iPhones and oozing computer peripherals to fictionalized police dashcam footage and interventions into museum websites, Artist’s work refuses the claimed neutrality of digitally networked systems to reveal how racial biases and anti-blackness are designed to be replicated and repeated through soft and hard wares. By pushing disciplinary boundaries, Artist's interventions reveal the slippery interface between digital and physical life, exposing parallels between technological and social programming and how they are inextricably linked and engender each other."

Artwork Image: Server Rack (for Pigford), 2021. Wood, hardware, paint, hay baling twine.

Yuchen Chang

b. 1989, China. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2013 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

"Yuchen Chang creates systems and encounters that reconsider the entanglements of labor and value. Her work is methodical and intimate, with a commitment to hand and craft-based practices and media. The traces of her hand have extended from patched and sewn assemblages of fabric-turned-garments to an alphabet made from delicate and precise portraits of coral. Chang’s projects are also invitations into poetic transactions that challenge existing economies, from the flows of commodities to the exchange of meaning and words in language."

Artwork Image: Coral Dictionary (capture), 2022. Clay, fishing net, fish wire. 7 coral sentences captured.

Huidi Xiang

b. 1995, Chengdu, China. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2021 MFA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. 2018 BA, Rice University, Houston, TX.

"Huidi Xiang makes playful sculptures and installations. Her work can be cute, digital, and deeply ironic. Curved edges, colorful printed wood, and many motors and wheels are some components of Xiang’s work that bring a mischievous bend to her architectural thinking. Borrowing elements from video games and game consoles, Xiang’s clever installations turn the logic of systems and space inside out, creating a place for the on and off-line, the absurd and the logical, to work (and play) together."

Artwork Image: then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff., 2021. 3D printed wood PLA, 3D printed general PLA, drawings printed on clear acetate, cement, MDF, wood, tube, wheels, modified Maneki-Neko, caster wheels. 52 x 36 x 48 in.

Storm Ascher

Storm Ascher is an artist, curator, writer and founder of Superposition Gallery. Ascher has a BFA in Visual & Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts and an MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute and Claremont Graduate University. She worked at various galleries and institutions prior to starting her own curatorial program, such as LAXART under Hamza Walker, David Lewis Gallery, and Spruth Magers. In 2018, Ascher founded Superposition Gallery as a nomadic gallery and curatorial platform with a mission to subvert gentrification tactics used in urban development through art galleries. Storm is a Forbes 30 Under 30 2022 Art & Style Honoree, has curated for the Eastville Museum, and is slated to curate OOLITE Residency's Annual Miami Basel show in 2023. She contributed the forward for The Brilliance of the Color Black Through the Eyes of Art Collectors (2021) and has contributed to Cultured, PHILLIPS, Tilt West, the Getty Archives, and the Melinda Camber Porter Archive.

Deborah Joyce Holman

b. 1991, Basel, Switzerland. Lives and works in London, UK. 2018 BA, Haute Ecole d'Art et Design de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.

"Deborah Joyce Holman’s interest in the absence of the Black body, or refusal of participation, interests me. How do we visualize not wanting to be seen, or wanting to be seen for something other than what is expected of us in a post-colonial, post-digital framework? I think of Legacy Russell’s book, Glitch Feminism, which explores the idea of a glitch being not an error, but instead an opportunity for liberation from social norms and rigid concepts of identity. Holman exemplifies non-participation as justice reform through the redaction of visuals and language that are co-opted time and time again."

Artwork Image: Untitled (for scale), 2021. Bitumen paint on cardboard, steel.

Natalia Villanueva Linares

b. Montpellier, France. Lives and works in Chicago, IL. 2010, DNSAP, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Beaux Arts, Paris, France. 2008, DNAP, Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Beaux Arts, Diplôme National d’Arts Plastiques, Paris, France.

"Natalia Villanueva Linares understands the power of repetition and multiples, while also conveying a personal narrative. I think of Aristotle’s concept, horror vacui, which is a fear of empty space in art, and the need to fill every crevice with visual information. Linares transmutes found objects and the mundane from life, participates in a destructive process in order to rebuild, and categorizes them aesthetically by color or form. The result is a shrine-like ode to the objects’ purpose, to be appreciated in a new artistic form. Linares says, “I disappear into the repetition and effort, inviting others to feel the magnitude of their generosity.”

Artwork Image: Desmedida, 2018. Used clothing patterns Straight pins. 16 x 45 ft.

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

b. 1991, lives and works in Detroit, MI. 2017 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL. 2015 BFA, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI.

"Darryl DeAngelo Terrell wants everyone to feel seen. By delving into an aspect of Blackness and fully exploring it—in this case, a queer, hyper-femme alter-ego, Dion—Terrell makes an argument for a collective Black experience: the Black woman is Blackness. Mickalene Thomas and Deana Lawson come to mind in regard to Terrell’s ability to use their medium of photography to merge portraiture and still life out of the many accessories that adorn the Black body to convey gender—reclaiming the colonial scientific or photojournalistic approach to Hottentot."

Artwork Image: I Look Like My Momma (Self-portrait 1980), 2019. Digital Ink Jet Print. 24 x 36 in.

Tautvydas Urbelis

Tautvydas Urbelis is a curator, (ex)philosopher, and writer working in the fields of contemporary art, education, and speculative architecture. Focusing on intersectional modes of knowledge distribution, transdisciplinary exchange and unruly fictioning, Urbelis explores the poetics and tensions of an increasingly complex world. Currently he is a curator of Alternative Education and Public Programmes at Rupert (Vilnius, Lithuania), an editor of Regeneration [and its Discontents] (Architecture Fund, 2021), and leads the research project Architecture of Lust. Urbelis has curated events for and in collaboration with Architecture Fund, Contemporary Art Centre, EXPO Chicago, Future Architecture, Kaunas Architecture Festival, London Architecture Festival, Architecture of Shame, International Kaunas Film Festival and others.

Isabell Bullerschen

b. 1985. Lives and works in Zürich, Switzerland. 2017 MFA, Zürich University of the Arts. 2014 BA, Berlin University of the Arts, Berlin.

"It takes time for light to reach our eyes—sometimes a millisecond, sometimes billions of lightyears. In this sense, the light, also being a carrier of encrypted information, is always late and non-compliant to linear understandings of time. Isabell Bullerschen’s research-driven works thrive in this radiating longing for a past that never was and a future that might not arrive. Effortlessly moving between mediums, Bullerschen’s gestures are both meticulous and bewildering, even cheeky. Saturated pastel colors, plants, digital infrastructure, and perplexed wolves conflate nostalgia with anxious future-cravings, revealing the artist’s rich visual and theoretical vocabulary."

Artwork Image: "Hyperion [Exp. IV/ ⌇365nm ≣120µm]: rising/falling," 2021 (detail view). Stone paper (UV degradable), acrylic glass frames, growing lamps, UV lamps, soil, bioindicators (Lepidium sativum / Mentha x piperita), PIR motion sensor, Arduino controller. 210 cm x 200 cm x 90 cm.

Adrienne Elise Tarver

b. 1985. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2011 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 2007 BFA, Boston University.

"Adrienne Elise Tarver’s paintings, sculptural objects, and embroidery lure the viewer into the lush world of the natural and the mystical. Here, blurred female figures transpire from saturated environments, speaking of erasure, violence, and disappearance. In many instances, these are worlds of ominous excess, brimming over into the realm of uncanny. Installations reminiscent of foliage do not attempt to hide its artifice—they are here not to imitate, but rather to seduce and to reveal the fabricated nature of our desires. However, somewhere between somber embroidery, oil pastels, and digital photo collages lurks an invitation to explore the healing potential of this verdant excess."

Artwork Image: Empress, 2021. Woven tapestry and embroidery. 52 x 36 in.

Millicent Young

b. 1958. Lives and works in High Falls, NY.

"There is a theory—one of many—that the fundamental particle of our universe is actually a string and that its vibration brings everything into being. Imperceivable neither to the human eye nor to machines, the elusive string can be traced in Millicent Young’s works. However, what we are seeing is not a cold, scientific revelation—instead, by using horsehair, thread, charred cedar, lead, and other materials, Young offers a material glimpse into a quivering world that converges the mundane and the cosmic. Her subtle gestures juxtaposing curvy branches, steel bolts, and threads remind us that these fundamental particles, just like the universe itself, are both inherently melancholic and prevailing."

Artwork Image: "When There Were Birds (iii)," 2021. Installation.

Umulkhayr Mohamed

Umulkhayr Mohamed is a Welsh Somali artist, writer, and independent curator, who also produces work under the alias, Aisha Ajnabi, their art other. They are a member of the Black Curators Collective, a collective of Black women and non-binary curators in the UK that radically imagine—through practice—nurturing, sustainable structures which prioritise the needs of Black creatives and communities. Their artistic practice explores the tension between enjoying the act of inhabiting emancipatory temporalities and a functional need to position oneself in the now. Their work has been featured in The National Museum of Wales, Festival of Voice, MOSTYN, Oriel Myrddin Gallery, Seren Cardiff Poetry Festival, LUMIN 4, and Maps & Rooms: an anthology.

Hira Mansur

b. 1985, Lahore, Pakistan. 2013 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, United Kingdom.

“Hira Mansur creates multi-medium miniature artworks that impress a commitment to the delicate, particularly upon closer inspection her use of watercolour and needle piercing. This commitment not only speaks to a mastery of technique, but also seems to be in homage to the patience her adopted mother found in sewing while she waited for Hira’s adoption process to be completed. The hyper-realistic figures that populate her work are left in an incomplete abstracted state, sometimes surrounded by equally abstracted depictions of sewing apparatus, nature, and home life, leaving you to wonder what the connections that thread them all together are.”

Artwork Image: Synthesis, 2016. Watercolour on wasli. 6 3/4 x 96 in.

Naomieh Jovin

b. 1995, Philadelphia, PA, USA. 2017 BFA, Moore College of Art & Design, Philadelphia, PA, United States

“Naomieh Jovin’s practice presents the rich visual culture of her Haitian-American diaspora community, with her’s source material being old family photographs that she adapts as a way to resist these images being read as dated and unimportant. Familial absence and community erasure are made playfully visible as brightly-coloured cut out figures replace individuals at a gathering and heads are made to float, disembodied, above sofas in living rooms. When not reworking these images of her family, the artist reproduces the striking intimacy by producing new portraits of herself as a means to embody a making-space for the future of her lineage.”

Artwork Image: The Gathering, 2021.

Ulrik López

b. 1989, San Juan, Puerto Rico.

“Ulrik López’s work is tied together with a neutral palette and the use of natural materials that have been woven or moulded into patterns in such a way that reveals an accomplished ability to balance the influence of human touch and nature's allure. Many of his artworks seem to function as generously open gestures towards ideas around communication through code. His practice presents an alternative visual language that is equally tied to heritage and feels refreshing in its ability to draw you in, whether it be with sculptures, installations, or performance work.”

Artwork Image: The day and night, 2021. Adobe and pine wood. 27 x 55 x 74 in.

Alex Nazari

Alex Nazari is an artist who runs Gattopardo, a Los Angeles gallery dedicated to providing exhibition opportunities and meaningful support to emerging and mid-career artists. Her work has been exhibited at the Los Angeles Municipal Gallery, The Box, LAXART, Lane Meyer Projects, and The Other Places Art Fair. Recently, her writing appeared on LACMA’s Unframed blog. In 2020, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree from ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California.

Ling-lin Ku

Born 1984 in Taiwan. Lives and works in Austin, TX. 2019 MFA, University of Texas, Austin, TX. 2016 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

"Ku’s system-based sculptural practice locates the animist uncanny through her nimble manipulation of materials that would otherwise register as dormant or mundane. Her installations hover enigmatically between futurist mise en scene and urban planning maquette– the scale not quite right to confirm either intention, instead affirming the holistic liveliness and interdependence of each detail and decision. In Ku’s smaller, discrete works enlarged tools of bodily care like bandages and cotton swabs serve as protagonists and antagonists, absorbing personas of healing and phobias. For Ku, sculpture is not about the body, but instead is the body itself."

Artwork Image: Off the Map, 2020. Mixed Media Installation.

Aaron Zulpo

Born 1985 in Chicago, IL. Lives and works in Palm Springs, CA, and Los Angeles, CA. 2008 BFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

"Zulpo’s filmic, fabulist paintings deftly produce an idiosyncratic sense of the sublime and absurd in their wry depictions of both historical events and distinctly contemporary moments of malaise, leisure and uncertainty. Each canvas is thick with narrative, some mythologize a ski trip with almost impressionistic fracture while others make cross sections through simultaneous time as if Bruegel were invited to play the game Clue. A folkloric immediacy permeates the work, pulling the viewer into Zulpo’s captivating world."

Artwork Image: Teddy Bear, 2017. Oil on canvas 36 x 36 in.

Elizabeth Corkery

Born 1986. Lives and works in Sacramento, CA. 2013 MFA, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.

"Corkery’s practice approaches printmaking as a semiotic form, expanding on notions of repetition and reproduction through her use of dimensional substrates and installation. Hegemonic display hierarchies collapse under Corkery’s care, as she often uses site specific decorative elements as source material for her syncopated investigations. Perceptually playful yet astute, Corkery invites us to consider an expanded field of representation and display."

Artwork Image: Glenrowan Rocks, 2021 (detail view). Slip cast porcelain with ceramic decal. 10 x 12 x 6 in.

Eden Deering

Eden Deering (b. 1991) is a New York City based curator and director at PPOW. Deering has organized numerous solo and group exhibitions with the gallery including Anton van Dalen: Junk Culture, 2019, Do You Love Me?,2019, Noplace, 2020, Recovery, 2021, and a forthcoming group exhibition opening in October 2022. Deering also co-runs the curatorial project DUPLEX since 2016, which has collaborated with organizations such as Visual AIDS, The Box NYC, and Planned Parenthood. Deering was recently featured in The New York Times style column ‘Up Next’.

Heidi Lau

Born 1987 in Macau. Lives and works in New York, NY.

“Heidi Lau’s practice exists within the disappearing identity of home. Taking the shape of ritual, domestic objects, and large-scale zoomorphic sculptures, Lau’s ceramic miniature worlds are at once alive and fossilized. Investigating the architecture of memory, nostalgia, and displacement, Lau engages in reconstructing what her hometown of Macau has repeatedly lost to the powers of colonialism and empire, most recently since 1999 when sovereignty was passed from Portugal to the People’s Republic of China, resulting in the merciless erasure of neighborhoods and cultures. Like pulling memories from a dreamlike underworld, Lau’s practice is a process of recovery. Combining Taoist mythology, folk superstitions, and Macau’s complex and difficult history, Lau uses the ancient art of clay to honor and provide a resting place for people and places who no longer have a physical body, ultimately creating space for collective remembrance and mourning.”

Artwork Image: Bestiary (The Play), 2021.

Nereida Patricia

Born 1996 in Hudson, NY. Lives and works in Chicago, IL. 2020 BA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Il.

“What I love about Nereida Patricia’s practice is its impulse—through sculpture, text, painting, and performance—to communicate new forms of storytelling and provide new mythologies, both for herself and for racially and gender marginalized groups who endure prejudices that in many cases can result in violence or death. Mining personal experiences of resilience and survival, and examining postcolonial feminist theory and Peruvian symbolism, Patricia builds a nuanced visual language about the transformation of the human and the collective body. Her highly-detailed glass beaded relief sculptures are inspired by traditional Chilean arpilleras, brightly colored patchwork burlap textiles constructed by mostly female makers to expose the human rights violations of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Patricia’s work echoes such forms of protest art, chronicling fictionalized versions of herself and members of queer communities, as well as those living and working in the streets on their hero’s journey towards survival and sanctuary.”

Artwork Image: Guardian Angel, 2020. Glass beads, concrete, glass dust, acrylic, and paper clay on canvas. 72 x 60 x 4 in.

Iagor Peres

Born 1995 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lives and works in Recife, Brazil.

“I was drawn to the work of Iagor Peres for its tactility and ambiguous relationship to the body. A Brazil-based sculptor and performance artist, Peres began his career in dance and theater, the threads of which can be seen in his immersive installations which combine text, video, objects, and performative acts. Experimenting with both organic and synthetic materials, Peres’s eerily corporeal sculptures ebb between body, object, architecture, and personhood. Generated from the perspective of a racialized body, Peres’s practice makes visible the invisible substances of relationships between spaces, people, and social structures. Peres’s practice is shaped by his personal experiences and his political engagement with Black communities in Brazil. Aiming to transform society’s process of categorizing human beings, Peres gives voice to historically subjugated and dehumanized communities in order to dismantle forms of racial violence.”

Artwork Image: Strucuture for denses fields #1, 2020. Skin material and iron.

Caterina Avataneo

Caterina Avataneo is an independent curator based in Turin, Italy. She was awarded the 2017 NEON Curatorial Award by The Neon Foundation and Whitechapel Gallery and her curatorial projects have appeared in institutions, project spaces, and galleries across Europe. From 2018-2021 she was Associate Curator at Arcade in London & Brussels, and Assistant Curator on assigned projects at Serpentine Gallery in London. In 2019, she was Assistant Curator of the Lithuanian Pavilion for the 58th Venice Biennale—winner of the Golden Lion—and since 2020 she has been part of the board for the fellowship programme at Cripta747, as well as curatorial consultant of the New Entries section for emerging galleries at Artissima (both in Turin). Currently, she is also part of the curatorial team of Pompeii Commitment.

Deborah Joyce Holman

Born 1991 in Basel, Switzerland. 2018 BA, Haute Ecole d'Art et Design de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.

"Multidisciplinary at the core, Deborah Joyce Holman is always on point when it comes to exploring dissidence, illegibility, and the refusal of representation. Recurrent elements such as teeth, kanekalon hair, shadows, or labyrinthine texts unveil an approach towards identity which contrapposes abstract biological information with queer opacity and porousness. With a focus on Blackness, the artist questions the way in which identity is understood and instrumentalized within Western identity politics, and gives space to shapeshifting possibilities to be found in the most obscure sites. Emblematic in this sense is Holman’s interest in the figure of the trickster, working within the framework of the dominant system, but without subscribing to its rules."

Artwork Image: Untitled (in rage), 2021. Sound installation. 20:24. Commissioned by the 7th Athens Biennial, Athens, Greece

Lucia Leuci

Born 1977 in Bisceglie, Italy. Lives and works in Milan, Italy.

"Familiar at first, surreal soon after, the more one observes Lucia Leuci’s work, the creepier it becomes. There is a sense of narrative permeating Leuci’s sculptures and paintings, where the everyday and the lived experience spurt into the fantastic. The domestic is treated with a detached gaze, averting saccharin effects and employing rather cold materials like iron, epoxy resins, or synthetic hairs. The result is a highly symbolic lexicon which dramatically diverts from patriarchal structures. It feels like a child approaching the world: uncontaminated by moral and aesthetic codes, able to allow the horrorous and the beautiful to inhabit the same room."

Artwork Image: L'allevamento intensivo della vacca da latte (Intensive breeding of the dairy cow), 2021. Iron, ceramic, resin, pigment, alabaster powder, soil. 5 1/2 x 8 2/3 x 5 in. Photo by Flavio Pescatori.

Alessandro Di Pietro

Born 1987 in Messina, Italy. Lives and works in Milan, Italy. 2013 MFA, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Italy. 2011 BFA, Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan, Italy

"Alessandro Di Pietro’s work encapsulates an artistic methodology rooted in a cinematographic grammar and practices of appropriation and embodiment. Shards from the future, cryptographs of an ancient past, and considerations on the present, Di Pietro’s artifacts build upon the aesthetics of the archive and the archeological, while resisting categorization. They cease to be works of art and become autonomous fragments of narrative environments and ghostly atmospheres telling about absent characters, be this Paul Thek, vampiresque beings, or sentient architectures. Unveiling their monstrous essence they die, resurrect in new forms, and make you time travel…"

Artwork Image: HOBOBOLO, 2021. Cement, wood, aluminum, pigmented concrete, 3D printed bronze and PLA filament in metal, wood, steel, wax, kerosene and pigmented chalk, iron, acetate, perforated metal sheet. 98 1/2 x 236 1/5 x 47 1/3 in.

Jeffrey Ian Rosen

Jeffrey Ian Rosen is co-founder, together with his wife, Misako, of MISAKO & ROSEN, a contemporary art gallery located in Tokyo, Japan. The gallery is also one of three spaces that contribute to the collaborative gallery project LA MAISON DE RENDEZ-VOUS in Brussels, Belgium. Rosen is co-president of the board of NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance) and a member of the IGA (International Galleries Alliance). Together with Tokyo-based artist run space, XYZ Collective, MISAKO & ROSEN are co-founders of Onsen Confidential, a gallery-share and hot spring retreat set to launch its first (covid-delayed) edition in September 2022. Following the motto, “art is not a competition,” Rosen believes in the need to develop alternative, commercially viable models to counter a profit-driven approach to contemporary art.

Dirk Knibbe

Born 1980 in Grand Rapids, MI. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2019 MFA, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA. 2003 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

"Dirk Knibbe is a quintessential contemporary Los Angeles sculptor. An unexpected, design-surreal combination of materials and an implied logic or language characterizes his lecterns. Comedically abundant, Knibbe’s sculptures suggest play—playgrounds, absurd architecture and, even, imaginary torture devices. Fetishistic and distant yet metaphysical, the works are academic in the best sense: accessible to those for whom materials prove an intellectual stimulant. Despite the apparently cold care with which the sculptures seem to have been assembled, there is more than a faint suggestion of the body that took pleasure in putting them together."

Artwork Image: The Pegboard Lectern, 2019. 38 x 32 x 96 in.

Tania Alvarez

Born 1983. Lives and works in Catskill, New York. 2017 MFA, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. 2005 BFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

"The paintings of Tania Alvarez demonstrate a deft use of contradictory elements—both unsettling and inviting, and/or inviting because unsettling, the work, certainly as presented digitally, prompts a closer look. Floating or free-standing curtains, jarring geometries, and interior depths served on panels muted in palette yet highly textured (and, somehow, logically small), all of these elements suggest a properly contemporary approach to metaphysical painting. Appropriately unpeopled, Alvarez’s paintings feign to picture—what they more likely achieve is to reflect."

Artwork Image: Thistle, 2022. Acrylic on panel. 12 x 12 x 1 1/2 in.

Umico Niwa

Born 1991 in Nagoya, Japan. 2020 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA. 2015 BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD.

"Umico Niwa’s work is touching; it invites touch yet evades this via context, and a presence that evokes at once the fragile and the gnarly. Her artist statement provides a backstory that, contrary to most, does not feel obtrusive but instead necessary. It offers an invitation to an intimate conversation with and about her and, via a natural extension, you and your place in a contemporary ecosystem of engaged identity. Hers is not a process of anthropomorphoses, but rather of experimentation and openness, allowing rather than alchemic and (her voice) a strong if gentle (example) of expanded reason and an organic, materialized psychedelic."

Artwork Image: Baby Shoe Series: Puffer Rattle, 2021. Foraged organic materials, copper and oil paint. 4 x 3 x 6 in.

Isis Awad

Isis Awad is a curator, writer, and poet based in New York City. She is Founding Director of Executive Care, a curatorial initiative at the service of underrepresented artists, with a special focus on early-career artists from performance and nightlife communities. Awad has held curatorial positions at Townhouse in Cairo as well as the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art and Participant Inc in New York.

Max Colby

Born 1990, lives and works in New York, NY. 2012 BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, MA.

"Intricate, and brightly colored, Max Colby’s highly-detailed sculptures, installations, embroidered drawings, and paintings employ historically feminized forms of craft, such as needlework, to comment on patriarchal notions of labor from a trans, nonbinary lens. Sequins, lace trims, stuffed animals, and small, plastic gumball machine toys embellish soft, androgynously-phallic sculptures that appear to have been extracted from some alien, deep sea, yet somehow retained their shine, and luster. Evoking a ceremonial affect, Colby’s multidisciplinary practice draws inspiration from maximalist religious ornamentation to subvert those very forms and narratives."

Artwork Image: They Consume Each Other (#1), 2021. Crystal and plastic beads and sequins, found fabric, trim, fabric flowers, ribbon, costume jewelry, polyester batting, thread, glass stands, custom pedestal. 66 x 40 x 40 in.

Jordan Strafer

Born 1990 in Miami, FL. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 2020 MFA, Bard, Annendale-on-Hudson, NY. 2016 BFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY.

“Dark, camp, and humorous, Jordan Strafer’s work is often autobiographical, exploring the oppression and privilege perpetuated onto, and by, white American femme identitites. Her drawings on pink onion-skin paper, grotesque ceramic sculptures, and videos featuring morally-questionable characters all evoke a disdain for the slick form, and an appreciation for the depraved. Text also makes its way into Strafer’s multidisciplinary practice appearing as bad grandma jokes in exhibition press releases about her work, or traced onto drawings from news headlines. In her videos, prosthetics and special effects makeup adorn the characters’ faces to both draw attention to their ‘whiteness,’ and problematize the unavoidable representation of the actors playing them, who are often Strafer’s close friends or family members.”

Artwork Image: Peak Heaven Love Forever, 2021. Still image from video. Duration: 19:19.

Teona Yamanidze

Born 1988 in Moscow, Russia. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2018 MFA, Syracuse University, Syracuse, NY. 2012 Diploma, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London, UK.

"Teona Yamanidze’s large-scale oil paintings depict melancholic scenes of romantic domesticity. Bodies reclined or laid down together on soft surfaces, in bedrooms and living rooms, at dusk or dawn. Dim, white, daylight peaks through translucent curtains, surrounded by shady palettes of deep grays; the subdued glowing-blue of a tv screen perhaps left on while a body rests. These familiar modalities suggest the Georgian painter’s reckoning with, and proximity to, American home culture. Sometimes the surfaces of Yamanidze’s paintings appear crackled like having suffered the injury of a home fire, or like a faint memory, only half-recalled."

Artwork Image: With you, 2020. Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 x 2 in.

Stefano Di Paola

Stefano Di Paola is Partner and Senior Director at Anat Ebgi, Los Angeles. Stefano joined Anat Ebgi in 2014 and has been instrumental in the growth of the gallery's program, helping to bring on artists such as Faith Wilding, Jordan Nassar, Janet Werner, and Tammi Campbell. He recently co-organized a group exhibition with artist James Bartolacci, It's Much Louder Than Before, which explored various communities and aesthetics of queer nightlife. Previous to joining Anat Ebgi, Stefano worked at the ONE Archives in Los Angeles and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Italy.

Erick Medel

Born 1992 in Los Angeles, CA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2018 MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, RI.

"Medel’s embroidered compositions of quotidian life speak to a particular community; within them is the capturing and memorializing of a uniquely Mexican/Angeleno/American experience. The painstaking craft of Medel’s embroidery is slow and meticulous, a stark contrast to the snapshot-like scenes it depicts. Partially a documentarian and partially a synthesizer, Medel’s overlays images of his community with traditional, pop cultural, and textile motifs that represent the swinging pendulum of identity felt by diasporic groups. I hadn’t seen Medel’s work before encountering it on the Foundwork platform—finding it there was such an exciting moment because it gave me an insight into my own city and its artistic production."

Artwork Image: Madre e Hijo (Covid Madonna), 2021. Faux leather, polyester thread, cotton fabric, hardware. 22 x 27 x 3/4 in.

Jake Ziemann

Born 1986 in Des Moines, IA. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2012 MFA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA. 2009 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL.

"Ziemann has an uncanny ability to make us feel for his sculptures. Within his compositions of ceramic objects and attendant support structures, Ziemann casts his minute forms as caricatures imbued with emotional intelligence, tragedy, failure, and (in rare exception) joy. His fragile little slumps are inherently precious, needing to be held and supported by their companions. The quiet moments alluded to in his compositions create a new sense of intimacy, permitting us viewers to project and empathize with his tender tableaux. We root for both their successes and their failures."

Artwork Image: Through the surface, where they can't hurt us, 2021. Spray paint, acrylic, gouache, ink & paint marker on ceramic, braided metal wire, brass, latex, tree branch, leather, steel, aluminum stoppers nails, mirrored glass, paint, oak plywood. 122 1/2 x 68 x 44 in.

Sula Bermúdez-Silverman

Born in New York, NY. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2018 MFA, Yale School of Art, New Haven, CT. BA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY.

"Bermúdez-Silverman’s works are incredible sculptural objects that situate themselves both on the wall and in the space of the viewer. With a broad range of bodies of work and mediums, her most recent alchemical concoctions of materials—such as sugar, glass, salt, and resin—capture a material memory rooted firmly in colonial histories. Like the associations between classic horror flicks and the macabre narratives of oppressed peoples, she is able to instill a sense of duality—problematizing our perceptions of objects, substances, and meaning."

Artwork Image: Repository II: Dead Ringer, 2021. Cast glass, Himalayan salt, water, Florida water.

Elyse Derosia

Elyse Derosia is the director of Derosia, a New York art gallery that is focused on a diverse range of socially engaged practices of primarily emerging artists. From 2014–2021 the gallery was called Bodega, which grew out of an artist-run project space of the same name in Philadelphia from 2010–2013. The gallery has maintained a commitment to artistic practices at the ground level, providing the first New York solo exhibitions for many of the artists with whom the gallery works.

Clifford Prince King

Born 1993 in Tucson, Arizona. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

"Clifford Prince King’s photographs are at once intimate, quiet, and charged, reminding me of my favorite elements of Nan Goldin’s work. His images offer a glimpse into private moments of everyday queer Black intimacy where, in King’s words, “communion begins to morph into an offering of memory.”

Artwork Image: Communion, 2019.

Julie Beaufils

Born 1987, lives and works in Paris, France.

"Julie Beaufils’ abstracted landscapes use raw pigments and are inspired by sublime moments that the artist has experienced in nature. The works of course have a certain timelessness and ethereality, but for me it’s important to also remember that they were made amongst the intense socio-political chaos of recent years. They are a call to the spiritual to cope with the all too real."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2020. Oil on canvas. 50 x 50 x 1 in.

Bat-Ami Rivlin

Lives and works in New York, New York. 2019 MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York. 2016 BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York.

"Bat-Ami Rivlin extracts and isolates large-scale discarded objects, disconnecting them from their intended function. Through both poetic and violent interventions, she draws unique attention to these familiar items that once facilitated presence, labor, and control. It’s interesting to me how this removal and failure can so poignantly speak to the larger systems from which these objects once belonged."

Artwork Image: Untitled (metal gate, yellow foam, duct tape), 2019. Found Object Sculpture. 48 x 24 x 10 in.

Sara Sassanelli

Sara Sassanelli is Curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, as well as an associate of CONDITIONS, a London-based studio program and creative laboratory. They have previously worked at Tate, Goldsmiths, and the Royal Academy of Arts and have programmed events at Somerset House Studios, Southwark Platform, Guest Projects, Arts Admin, Fierce Festival and Block Universe. They are interested in work at the intersections of sound and choreographic practices and their research focuses on the aesthetics and politics of contemporary live practice. At ICA, they work across exhibitions, talks, and live events. Their recent programming at ICA includes Dykegeist by Eve Stainton (2021), Inferno Summit by Lewis G. Burton (2020), and The Tender Interval: Studies in Sound and Motion (2020), a convening exploring the transformational qualities of sound and dance practices.

Lithic Alliance

Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. 2020 MFA, Goldsmith's, University of London, UK. 2012 BFA, Gerrit Rietveld Academy, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

"Lithic Alliance is a project initiated by artist Daniel V. Keller. It contains Keller’s expansive practice and deals with the ontological significance of geological environments. Their work has transformed my understanding of the lithosphere, as he positions it as an active agent, pulling apart the problematic idea of single human agency as ‘supreme.’ Through an exploration of animism and the rights of nature, Lithic Alliance engages with the polyphonic agencies of the planet, abstracting and contrasting them to the accelerated power relations of ‘cheap nature’ and mining. I appreciate Lithic Alliance for its interest in collaboration and its commitment to knowledge production through the visual, the sonic, and the performative."

Artwork Image: Counting Backwards - Notes on Erasure, 2020. 2-channel video, 4-channel sound, steel

Rebecca Bellantoni

Born 1981, lives and works in London, UK.

"Rebecca Bellantoni’s expansive practice includes writing, sound, video, performance, photography, textiles, printmaking, and sculpture. Threaded through is the investigation of the everyday and meditations on the self. Her work feels rooted in a sense of abstraction as she extracts the materials of daily experiences and reforms them in a process of reorientation. Experiencing her work feels like a process of collective thinking and I deeply appreciate her layered research into the psyche, selfhood, and the materials of the city. Through her research project C.R.Y Concrete Regenerative Yearnings, she presents the sounds and materials of the city such as metal, concrete, sirens, greenery, and stones as abstracted spaces of reflection."

Artwork Image: Per Nanny (I sit, I pray, I dream, I make), 2021. Mixed media.

Shenece Oretha

Born, lives and works in London, UK. 2018 BA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK.

"Shenece Oretha’s work reminds me of the importance of listening, and that listening is not only aural but also an experience felt in/by the body. Their work explores the polyvocal, and through writing, installation, sonic composition, and sculpture they create spaces to explore listening as a collective practice. Experiencing their work has solidified that sound is a conduit to the emotional conditions for processing and that it can mobilize a kind of temporal deprogramming, rejecting oppressive linear time constructs, and opening up spaces for healing and communing."

Artwork Image: Dearly Beloved, 2019 (detail view)

Elise Lammer

Elise Lammer is the founding member of Alpina Huus, a research platform and collective exploring performance and domestic space active across art institutions internationally. She is curator at La Becque | Artists Residency in Switzerland, where, since 2018, she has been developing a garden, archive, and artistic program in homage to Derek Jarman. She is also the curator of the yearly film and performance program DAMA in Turin, Italy. Her writings and research on art, performance, and film have been published in magazines and catalogs internationally, including CURA., Mousse Magazine, and Frieze, and she has participated in exhibitions and projects in institutions in Switzerland and abroad, including at Centre Culturel Suisse, Paris; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; The Schinkel Pavillon, Berlin; and The Goethe Institut, Beijing and Hong Kong.

Awuor Onyango

Born 1990, lives and works in Nairobi, Kenya.

"I first encountered the work of Awuor Onyango via their writing in Contemporary And (C&), and was really impressed by their complex, bold, and poetic approach to questions around the cultural and political status of looted Kenyan artifacts. With a similar valor, their multifaceted artistic practice spans freely over photography, painting, and video in order to address the political—in a broad sense—from a very intimate perspective. Drawing from one’s personal experience in order to address universal questions proves the artist’s capacity to take immense risk and is, in my opinion, a very generous strategy when it comes to a sincere political engagement."

Artwork Image: Visibility is a Trap, 2017. Glossy photo paper.

Marcelo Brodsky

Born 1954, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina. 1983 Economics and MA Degrees, University of Barcelona, Spain.

"Among the diverse selection of artists who are part of Foundwork’s online community, the historical figure of Brodsky acts as an inspiring pioneer within the history of photography. Without his work, the life stories of hundreds, if not thousands, of disappeared civilians would have gone unnoticed. By paying homage to those who were killed during the Argentine dictatorship, and other tragic episodes of modern history, Brodsky’s poetic visual language helps to unveil aspects of systems of oppresion that transcend territories or timelines."

Artwork Image: 1968 the Fire of Ideas, 2017. Intervened photography.

Jessy Razafimandimby

Born 1995 in Antananarivo, Madagascar. Lives and works in Geneva, Switzerland. 2018 BFA, Haute Ecole d'Art et Design de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland.

"Active both as a painter and performer, Jessy Razafimandimby works within a practice that truly lies at the intersection of the two mediums, whereby his body “enacts” movements based on his visual and formal work and his paintings ‘trap’ and fix motions on paper and canvas. I’m particularly drawn by the very specific frame of references that his work is based on; through an anti-modernist study of the history of fashion and interior design, the artist always returns to the notion of what the concept of “home” can mean within different cultural contexts."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2021. Charcoal on paper, various sheets and materials.

Anqi Li

Anqi Li is a curator and an educator. She was most recently the Curator of Education & Public Programs at Para Site in Hong Kong, and has previously held positions at the Harvard Art Museums in Boston, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, and the Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco. Li is currently pursuing her PhD studies in museology and cultural policy at the University of Hong Kong.

Tan Jing

Born 1992. Lives and works in Guangzhou, China and London, UK. 2017 MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

"Herbs, spices, platser, seashell, slime, silicon...these materials that replicate subtle feelings and unique experiences make up Jing’s sculptural works. You don’t have to read the artist's statement in order to understand her intention, because there is always something in her works that can trigger your senses. They might dissolve into their environments, but it is their camouflage—just listen, smell, touch, and see with your heart. It will open a door for you to imagine and explore a more sophisticated world behind."

Artwork Image: Shell-less, The Vanished Nymph, 2020. Pump, lamp, clay, tube, slime, silicone, wallpaper, sound device. Dimensions variable.

Yan Wai Yin

Born 1994. Lives and works in Hong Kong. 2016 BA, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong.

"Wai Yin approaches image-making with deep emotions. In her recent, ongoing photography series “Falling,” she translates her grief for lost lives into poetic landscapes and fleeting imagery such as ginkgo leaves and shooting stars. Not only does she commemorate her loved ones, but she also cares about collective memories and the complex feelings that exist around the changes in her home city. In her video works, she glitches, biguates, and segregates these visual narratives, eliciting new perspectives and stimulating sympathy regardless of who we are or where we are at."

Artwork Image: Falling: 2a. irresistibly dreamy, resistible act, 2021. Laser-cut Digital Prints on Hahnemuhle Paper. 20 x 16 x 2 in.

Yi To

Born 1995 in Hong Kong. Lives and works in London, UK. 2021 MA, Royal College of Art, London, UK.

"Yi’s canvas is where she practices philosophy. She is fascinated by the origin of life and the idea of reincarnation, thus she often captures a moment of immemorial existence or eternity in her paintings. The choreographed figures are flat but liquid, flowing in between each other and within their own bodies, as if they are searching for some untraceable remembrance of humanity when it was still newborn, soft, vital, and loving. Time stops with To’s brushstrokes and leaves us in limbo: Why are there beings at all, instead of nothing?"

Artwork Image: Inertia, 2020. Oil on canvas. 74 x 47 x 1 in.

Grace Aneiza Ali

Grace Aneiza Ali is a Curator, an Assistant Professor and Provost Fellow in the Department of Art & Public Policy at the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. She also serves as the Curator-at-Large for the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York. Her recent book, Liminal Spaces: Migration and Women of the Guyanese Diaspora explores the art and migration narratives of women of Guyanese heritage. Speaking about her guest curator selections, Ali comments that "over the last year, as we grappled with immense sorrow, loss, tumult, and injustice, so many of us rooted ourselves in the natural world. There we found solace and repair; reprieve and restoration. I was drawn to these artists for the reverence shown towards flora and fauna in their oeuvre—whether in subtle touches or extravagant flourishes. Their work kept drawing me back to ponder this lovely question by the artist Camille Henrot: 'Is it possible to be a revolutionary and like flowers?'"

Anna Wehrwein

Born 1990 in Albany, New York. Lives and works in Columbia, Missourri.

2017 MFA, University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 2012 BA, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

"Anna Wehrwein’s body of work returns us to the domestic space—the home, the backyard garden—as a site of creativity, renewal, and, most importantly, care. Whether we see them in full or obscured, the women as subjects in Wehrwein’s paintings reflect something deeply wholistic as equally as they emanate beauty, community, grace, fortitude, vulnerability. The artist’s reverence for and the embrace of objects of the natural world signal the ability to capture an equally powerful quality—metamorphosis."

Artwork Image: Replanted (by falling asleep she becomes a plant), 2017. Oil on Canvas. 60 x 48 in.

Spandita Malik

Born 1995 in Chandigarh, India. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2019 MFA, Parsons School of Design, New York.

"Spandita Malik is not interested in speaking for the Indian women she photographs—she is not perpetuating a lens of the outsider nor is she repeating the trope we hear so often of ‘giving voice to the voiceless.’ Instead, Malik embraces the stories of the women she meets and the hardships they have experienced as a privilege and gift shared with her. The artist offers these women the tools to tell their own stories and with their own creative flourishes. Those artistic gestures come in the artform of embroidery—the portraits are printed onto regional fabrics and then embroidered by the women themselves, many of which are marked with floral bouquets as central motifs. For the artist, these women are not only subjects; they become collaborators."

Artwork Image: Fozia, 2019. Photographic transfer print on Khadi, Embroidery. 23 x 19 in. Series: Nā́rī (2019-Ongoing).

Dominique Hunter

Born 1987. Lives and works in Georgetown, Guyana.

"Dominique Hunter masters the art of collage. She layers organic imagery reminiscent of Guyana’s lush vegetation found in its interior Amazon as well as on its riverbeds and the famous Sea Wall on the coast of the Atlantic Ocean. Embedded in her visual imagery is a silhouetted self-referential figure. Its haunting presence is rooted among the flora and fauna that thrives amidst Guyana’s extreme elements of temperature, wind, water, and sand. In this symbolic artistic gesture, Hunter places the viewer in a seeming contradiction—entanglement and agency."

Artwork Image: The threats that stalk by day, 2018. Mixed media collage on watercolour paper. 30 x 22 in.

Emilia Yin

Emilia Yin is a curator and the founder and director of Make Room, a contemporary art gallery in Los Angeles. Yin has a keen interest in cultural identity issues, intersectional feminism, and the complicating binary structures within the related social discourse. She founded Make Room in 2018 with an all-female group exhibition, marking the start of her committed support to female artists' practices. The diverse and experimental program at Make Room has received critical acclaim in the gallery's first two years of operation, with projects featured in ARTFORUM, FLAUNT, and the LA Times among others. Yin studied curatorial practices and Art History at the University of Southern California, and in addition to running the gallery she is a guest contributor to Wallpaper* Magazine.

Hidetaka Suzuki

Born in Hokkaido, Japan. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan. 2014 MFA, 2012 BFA, Musashino Art University, Tokyo, Japan.

"I resonate with Hidetaka Suzuki’s quote about image-making and its function—he says, 'Our future is woven from these fragments.' Perceiving painting as a subjective glimpse, each of his works seems to occupy a space somewhere between the mundane and the uncanny: the cross-eyed pigeon, the hairy neck of a Geisha, or aggressive fire coming out of an ordinary stove. The brushwork of his paintings is tender and playful, as if subtly reminding you not to forget the absurdity of our own existence, but with a dose of love and care.

Artwork Image: Diff, 2020. Oil on canvas. 46 x 36 in.

Lior Modan

Born 1983 in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2013 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. 2009 BFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel.

"Looking at Lior Modan’s work is like gazing into another time and dimension. His relief works, using velvet fabric and epoxy putty, allow the sculpted surface to engage with ambient light and environment. I think about my childhood experience, playing with the surface of a velvet shirt—the changing surface as it’s rubbed in different directions. Each work presents an encapsulated moment, as if an invisible hand placed a velvet cover over whatever was happening—the scene quiets down, leaving no words, only marks. The spaces in these works often appear to be domestic, yet each is highly specific and activated with curious objects."

Artwork Image: Heat Wave, 2018. Velvet, nitrile, epoxy putty in cast rubber artist frame. 22 x 18 x 1 in.

Isabelle Albuquerque

Born 1981 in Los Angeles, California. Lives and works in Los Angeles. 2003 Barnard College, New York.

"What draws me to Isabelle Albuquerque’s works is their radical yet seductive character. Her practice creates complex conversations around the body as a stage and vessel for desire and power. At first, many of the forms in her sculptures seem to be typical female statues, familiar from our collective memory of how the narrative of the female body is told throughout history. Looking closer, however, we see the figures as a embodiment of strength and unapologetic intimacy. Casting her own body in various headless statues in different gestures, Albuquerque invites us to co-configure our experience beyond just the physical and emotional."

Orgy For 10 People In One Body: 2 (Front View), 2020. Resin, Wax, Flame. 28 x 23 x 25 1/2 in.

Londi Modiko

Londi Modiko is a curator and art advisor with over a decade of industry experience including positions at notable South Africa-based institutions such as Goodman Gallery, WHATIFTHEWORLD, and David Krut. Modiko runs an art advisory, An Art Agency, which specializes in contemporary art from Southern Africa, offering independent and comprehensive expertise to connect individuals and private collectors, estates, non-profits, corporations, and government agencies to a wide network of exciting artists. The advisory has worked on projects for South African art collectors, the BAG Factory in Johannesburg, and the Constitutional Hill of South Africa, to name a few. Modiko is also a co-founder of UNDERLINE, an exhibition platform for independent curators launched in September 2019.

Nonzuzo Gxekwa

Born 1981 in Ladysmith, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Gxekwa is a South African photographer whose practice is concerned with noticing and capturing mundane scenes and moments in the city of Johannesburg. She documents the inhabitation of the city, black people going about their daily routines of commuting to various appointments such as work and places of religious worship. The minibus taxi features in many of her images; it is a critical pillar of the city’s public transport sector; it is also considered the servant for the majority of urban poor. For me Gxekwa's’s photography captures the lives of black people going about their business in a captivating way in a dynamic fresh eye."

Artwork Image: Wanderer (Green), 2019. Photographic Print. 11 3/4 x 8 1/3 in.

Selloane Moeti

Born, lives and works in Durban, South Africa.

"Moeti is a South African painter and performer who draws on links between cleansing and healing. Her paintings are powerful dreamscapes that present figures of woman whose faces are covered in red clay; she infuses symbols of pop-culture and esoteric knowledge. The paintings are an attempt to trace and understanding her lineage. In her work Moeti brings together an assortment of cultural references, including but not limited to her own seSotho modality."

Artwork Image: Morena, 2019. Red Clay, Adhesive & Oil paint on canvas. 39 1/3 x 33 1/2 x 6 in.

Keneilwe Mokoena

b. 1988, Pretoria, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Mokoena's enchanting drawings, digital prints, and sculptural installations aim to dismantle learned knowledge and explore meaning and awareness about the self and the environment we occupy. The result are artworks that resemble some form of dimensional order. There’s something beautiful about her process of creating new meaning from old ideas and constantly discovering brilliant ways of interpreting information."

Artwork Image: #0260, 2019. Digital collage print. 8 1/3 x 5 3/4 in. Ed. 10.

Lee Pivnik

Lee Pivnik is a Miami-based artist, working predominantly in sculpture, video, and social practice. He graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in Sculpture and a concentration in Nature-Culture-Sustainability Studies. In his artwork and curatorial projects, he attempts to help produce a more regenerative, biophilic, ecozoic world. Acknowledging the scale of such an endeavor, Pivnik considers his practice as an opportunity for collaboration. In 2017 he started the Institute of Queer Ecology, a collaborative organism which broadens discussions around environmental issues by synthesizing queer and feminist theory and decolonial thinking into exhibitions and publications. Since 2018 he has also been the Operations Manager at Bas Fisher Invitational, an artist-run space in Miami, Florida.

Kimo Nelson

Born in 1980. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2012 MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

"Kimo Nelson’s otherworldly landscapes stem from a process of direct observation and plein-air draftsmanship conducted during research expeditions. In the field, Nelson sketches, photographs, and collects found objects that will serve as ways for him to archive each site. Once back in the studio, Nelson gives way to his memories of the sites, and in doing so, you can see the passion and reverence he holds for them as he renders vibrant, contrasting pastel drawings and paintings that monumentalize the landscapes as not only geological entities, but cosmological ones."

Artwork Image: Untitled(GC-20), 2018. Acrylic, flashe on canvas. 70 x 60 in.

D Rosen

Born 1988 in Iron Mountain, Michigan. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. 2013 MFA, University of Chicago.

"D Rosen’s works are rarely made alone. Their practice constantly relies on other species to shape their sculptures. The objects Rosen chooses to cast in bronze or hydrocal are first sculpted by goats, who have licked away at salt blocks, or field mice who have eroded seed blocks. Beginning these collaborations with acts of generosity (the offering of food, in many cases), Rosen’s approach always finds ways to support mutualism, while dismantling the supremacist legacies and systems that are built on degrading and commodifying the lives of so many species and people for power and profit."

Artwork Image: Skank is another word for animalic stench, 2021. Cast incense with notes of Vetiver, Lavender, Amber, and Toh Makko (Original object: Dog toy chewed on by various domesticated companions on walks in 2019.). 6 1/2 x 2 1/2 x 1/4 in.

Josephine Lee

Lives and works in Burnaby, British Columbia. 2020 MFA, Parsons School of Design, New York. 2018 BFA, University of British Columbia, Vancouver. 2010 BS, Agriculture, Animal Science, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon.

"Having lived parts of her life in Canada, the United States, and South Korea, Josephine Lee’s practice is heavily informed by the violence of cultural assimilation and nationalism. Her performances, installations, and sculptures shift between an intersectional analysis of this violence at the scale of a nation (where nuclear tests, land-seizures, and xenophobia exacerbate one another) and of the home (where the burdens of identity and generational trauma can be foundational and inescapable). Within this framework, Lee relies on a brilliant use of materials and forms to signify histories of both oppression and cultural yearning."

Artwork Image: /born ignorant in an abyss of light, 2020. Glass, plasma, porcelain, video. 120 x 240 x 360 in. 21:14.

Tausif Noor

Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and art historian working in the fields of global modern and contemporary art. Currently a PhD candidate at UC Berkeley, Noor concentrates on the intersection of art and politics, particularly with regard to histories of nationalism and internationalism, post-colonialism, and Marxist thought. His writing can be found in Artforum, frieze, ArtAsiaPacific, BOMB, and other magazines, as well as in artist catalogues for Alex Da Corte (KARMA, 2019) and the India Habitat Centre in New Delhi. Noor has previously held positions at the Imperial War Museum in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Zach Hill

Born 1992 in Rochester, New York. Lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 2019 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 2015 BFA, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

"Slick surfaces, from polished glass and resin to LCD screens, juxtapose with industrial metal fragments and warped wax forms in the sculptures and installations of Zach Hill. The artist’s sculptural practice is situated between the traditions of assemblage and craft fabrication, and the resultant forms tease an uncanny dynamic of grotesque recognition and queer sensibility. In recent work, Hill underscores the conditions of constant surveillance endemic to our times through combinations of mirrors, cameras, and reflective surfaces, suggesting that being looked at and looked for are now inextricably linked."

Artwork Image: Hand Held Mirror 2, 2020. Aluminum, epoxy, spray paint, looping HD video. 42 x 36 x 32 in.

Maryam Hasnain

Born 1992 in Karachi City, Pakistan. Lives and works in London, England. 2020 MA, Chelsea College of Art and Design, London. 2019 BFA, Goldsmiths, University of London.

"Through installations and assemblages of textiles, as well as digital video pieces, Maryam Hasnain conducts material investigations of transnational and cross-cultural exchange and the paradoxes of provenance and origin sources. In considering how particular craft forms, such as textiles, can be reconceived and understood in a media-saturated landscape, Hasnain reroutes the circuits of disposability and invisibility that craft traditions are so often relegated to. Drawing on the histories of the textile trade and her own experiences working and living across South and Southeast Asia and London, Hasnain considers the politics and presentation of artistic labor, often applying reflexive self-critique to her own position as an artist."

Artwork Image: Architectural Anatomy, 2018 Assorted fibers tufted on burlap (Merino, silk, mohair, cotton). 63 3/4 x 50 x 5 in.

Calum Craik

Born in Scotland. Lives and works in San Francisco, California. 2020 MFA, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, California. 2012 BA, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh, Scotland.

"From the detritus of late capitalism, Calum Craik assembles installations, sculptures, and videos that materialize the invisible socioeconomic divisions in contemporary society. Using a range of found materials, from corporate branded ephemera and silicon, to a stone sourced from the home of Adam Smith, the foundational philosopher of capitalism, Craik produces works that are often spare, subtle critiques of society’s excesses and undermine ideas of the status symbol. Together, these works demonstrate how we as producers, consumers, and observers are all implicated in larger social networks."

Artwork Image: Under the Sun, 2020. Hat, flowers. 16 x 10 x 3 in.

Morgan Elder and Allison Littrell

Morgan Elder and Allison Littrell are the co-founders and directors of Murmurs, Los Angeles, a multi-faceted arts space that champions experimental and emerging practices. Murmurs strives to present an alternative model outside the museum/gallery binary by centering those voices that have been systemically displaced, both historically and currently, and by strengthening community solidarity. In the two years since its opening, Murmurs’ exhibition program and numerous performances, workshops, and events have earned critical recognition in ARTFORUM, LA Magazine, Carla, BLAU International, and Artillery, among others.

Alexeis Reyes

Born 1971 in San Cristobal, Cuba. Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. 2020 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA. 2013 BA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, NY.

"Alexeis Reyes was born and raised in Cuba and lived in various cultures. Reyes’ artistic practice can be seen as grappling with the limitations and restrictions he faced as a young, gay artist in Cuba. Juxtaposing materials loaded with feminine connotations (faux pearls, mink fur, mannequins) with stark elements reminiscent of public infrastructure, he interrogates the implications of gender, queerness, state surveillance, and censorship in relation to diasporic displacement. Moreover, his sculptures are often constructed in ambiguous, borderline haphazard positions that call to mind the instinctual quality of process-based conceptual artists of the 1960’s such as Lynda Benglis. By referencing this period of art history, in sculptures that feel almost impossible in their existence, Reyes manifests new forms of representation that both call attention to their own precarity and resist silencing."

Artwork Image: We are not gonna be shady, just fierce, 2016. Tire tube and woven human hair.

Forrest Lawson

Lives and works in Athens, GA. 2022 MFA Candidate, University of Georgia, Athens. 2018 BFA, University of Central Florida, Orlando.

"A common material in Forrest Lawson’s sculptural and installation is real human blood from a specific source: “queer blood” or “blood of participants.” Using a bodily fluid that is the vehicle of both life and disease is a poignant gesture which recalls 1990’s “abject” artists such as Felix Gonzalez Torres, who also used the physical human body to comment on queerness and the AIDS epidemic. Lawson’s work hones in on the anxiety that pervades corporeal existence-- the universal experiences of illness, death, and the fragility of life. Pushing even deeper, by allowing fragments of humanity to surface, in the form of text or the blood of others, Lawson activates a sense of empathy that salves the fear."

Artwork Image: What Are We to You?, 2020. Queer blood, petri dish, resin, parafilm, acrylic, LED light.

Zac Hacmon

Born 1981 in Holon, Israel. Lives and works in New York, NY. 2018 MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY. 2012 BFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem.

"Zac Hacmon’s interdisciplinary practice critiques the socio-political nature of architecture through his examination of our built environment. Drawing on “non-places” or transient spaces where history and identity are erased as coined by French anthropologist Marc Augé, Hacmon explores how territorial borders are a means of oppression, division, and a tool to instill identity. Hacmon’s interactive installations provoke the viewer to reinterpret their relationship to space by placing the viewer in the experience of the “other” in an empathetic attempt to elucidate how our built environment can be weaponized as a means to further marginalize communities."

Artwork Image: Gateway, 2018. Steel. 55 1/2 x 124 x 85 in.

Rosie Motley

Rosie Motley is Associate Director of Casey Kaplan, New York, and co-founder of Motel, Brooklyn, a contemporary art gallery established in 2015 by Motley alongside collaborators Riley Duncan and Curtis Wallen. Over five years of programming, the gallery held solo and two-person exhibitions with artists such as Veronika Pausova, Kayode Ojo, Winslow Laroche, GaHee Park, Corin Hewitt, Tom Forkin, Harry Gould Harvey IV, Willie Stewart, Sydney Shen, Aline Bouvy, Teneya Lee Izu, Rachelle Dang and Will Wheeler. Motel has been featured in outlets including Artforum, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, The Art Newspaper, and Time Out. In 2019, Motley was selected for the fifth edition of Young Curators New Ideas, presented during Detroit Art Week.

Judd Schiffman

Born 1982, lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island. 2015 MFA, University of Colorado, Boulder.

"Judd Schiffman’s ceramics take the form of whimsical yet restrained wall drawings. The scenes from his “Outline” series are composed of individual fragments of fired and glazed clay that actively engage the negative space of the wall where they are arranged. Mythological figures and ambiguous symbols appear to float within an indeterminate environment, enclosed by thin, oval borders. Each form is like a neurological synapse, an elusive thought or memory that arises out of nowhere and just as quickly begins to float away as the mind scrambles to contain and make sense of it. Judd has cited his young daughter as a point of inspiration in his practice—an influence evident in the child-like wonder of his folkloric dreamscapes." 

Artwork Image: Birthing Room, 2020. Ceramic.

Jongwon Bae

Born in Seoul, South Korea. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2017 MFA, Hunter College, New York. 2012 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Jongwon Bae’s hallucinatory paintings depict technocratic futures scarred by a past of human frailty and abjection. His compositions are densely layered—both formally and through the multiple references that are superimposed within each kinetic tableau, spanning history, psychology, ontology, and personal memory. The visual language of Bae’s fantastical and speculative architecture reminds me of Bodys Isek Kingelez, but void of Kingelez’s utopian optimism and fused instead with the tangled symbolism, caricature, and social critique of Peter Saul or Lari Pittman. Fusing disparate stylistic techniques, the paintings present a world of accelerationism, claustrophobia, and temporal collapse."

Artwork Image: The Elephant Dream, 2019. Oil on canvas. 72 x 72 in.

Terrence Musekiwa

Born 1990 in Seke, Zimbabwe. Lives and works in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe.

"Terrence Musekiwa’s meticulous, carved stone sculptures integrate a range of repurposed items such as metal wire, copper pipes, wood, glass and other found objects. Musekiwa is deeply invested in the indexing of his materials—tracing the origins of natural resources, the implications of where they are found, the institutions that control, transport and profit from them, the ecological and sociopolitical conditions from when they date, and the current conditions and personal anecdotes detailing how they came into his possession. With proficient craft, his assemblage sculptures tell stories about post-colonial Zimbabwe that resist predominant histories and focus instead on the vast potentiality of the present."

Artwork Image: Kurarama kwevakashinga, 2019. Cobalt stone, fruit serpentine, butter jade stone, opal stone, green opal stone, found ( metal threaded wire, copper pipe, wooden chair leg, broken glass and painted wooden box). 23 x 20 x 16 in.

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell is a BLK queer artist, curator, writer, and educator based in Detroit, Michigan. Terrell has exhibited or performed at The Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, Brooklyn, the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago, Xpace Cultural Centre, Toronto, and The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Washington D.C., among others. They center their practice around the philosophy of F.U.B.U. (The Shit Is For Us) and intend for their work to aid in a larger conversation about blackness and its many intersectionalities, including the displacement of black and brown people, othered identities, gender, sexuality, and personal narratives. Terrell received their BFA from Wayne State University, Detroit, and their MFA in Photography from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Derrick Woods-Morrow

Born 1990 in Greensboro, North Carolina. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

2016 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago. 2014 Post-Baccalaureate Certificate, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston. 2012 BA, Randolph College, Lynchburg, Virginia.

"When I was first introduced to Derrick Woods-Morrow’s practice in 2015, it was the performative gestures in his work that struck a chord with me, and that continue to resonate with me today. Working across photography, video, sculpture, and performance, Woods-Morrow pushes boundaries around pleasure, queerness, historical narratives, and leisure. In so doing, he builds a world, and envisions a society, where Black queer bodies can be sexually liberated without inhibition."

Artwork Image: Frederick on Lake Pontchartrain | After Lincoln Beach, 2019. Archival Piezographic Carbon Print. 40 x 30 in.

Clifford Prince King

Born 1993 in Tucson, Arizona. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

"Clifford Prince King gives black gay men the space to be, to exist, and to love on one another seemingly without judgment or interference. In his photographs, we are granted access into otherwise private domestic scenes of black queer intimacy, yet the bodies depicted here aren’t overtly sexualized. Prince King’s subjects are often shown looking at one another as they engage in acts of pleasure or leisure. Our own gaze is unreturned, establishing our status as observer rather than participant in these personal exchanges."

Artwork Image: Safe Space, 2020. 35mm.

Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas O'Neal

Born 1991 in Chicago, Illinois. Lives and works in Chicago.

2015 BA, University of Illinois, Chicago.

"Black women photographing black women as an act of love and care—these are the thoughts that come to mind when I experience the multidisciplinary practice of Zakkiyyah Najeebah. Her work, which spans photography, video, and mixed-media objects, is tender in tone, highlighting the importance of shared space to community building and personal connection. Najeebah’s progressive practice straddles the line between art and social discourse; it exists as an archival process of Blackness, Black womanhood, Black queer womanhood, and Black Chicago."

Artwork Image: Krystal and Ruth, 2018. Film scan archival print. 48 x 36 in.

Justine Do Espirito Santo

Justine Do Espirito Santo is Director at the gallery Arcadia Missa in London. The gallery was founded in 2014, after three years of operating as a project space. The main focus of Arcadia Missa's program is on emerging artists, whose practices are specifically geared towards highlighting contemporary struggles within the various fields of identity politics under networked capitalism. The gallery represents fourteen artists working in video, installation, performance, sculpture, photography and painting. Arcadia Missa also has a regular publishing programme of journals and artist books. Espirito Santo joined the gallery in 2018 and previously worked as an adviser and curator.

Cristine Brache

Born 1984 in Miami Florida. Lives and works in Toronto, Canada. 2016 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England. 2007 BFA, Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida.

"Cristine Brache often takes her personal and family history as a starting point to explore cultural erasure, the Caribbean Diaspora and codified behaviours related to womanhood. In recent works she has also explored the institutionalisation of women’s pain and illness, as well as the ramifications of gaslighting—the pathologization of female emotion and expression. To me, what distinguishes Brache’s approach to these subjects is how she articulates personal histories of female oppression with the wider context of history and art history."

Artwork Image: Woman Getting Reupholstered, 2020. Fabric, oak, foam, plywood, hardware. 50 x 28 x 20 in.

Gray Wielebinski

Born 1991. Lives and works in London, England. 2018 MFA, Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, England.

"Working across various media, Gray Wielebinski explores how gender, sexuality and identity intersect with society’s power structures. What I find particularly interesting about their practice is how they unpick masculinity by looking at American pop culture, highlighting the mythologies around gender that pervade through fashion, sports and celebrity culture, as seen in some of their videos and their works based on their personal collection of childhood baseball cards. I also like the use of fabrics and clothes in Wielebinski’s work, highlighting the cultural values that we assign to certain materials and garments."

Artwork Image: Custom Baseball Cards, 2020. Childhood baseball card collection, leather, fur, paper. 3 1/2 x 2 1/2 in. (per card).

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Born 1993 in Baldwin, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. 2016 BFA, New York University, New York.

"Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. is a really exciting conceptual photographer. I like how his practice blurs boundaries between genres, not only between editorial photography and art, but also between photography, architecture and sculpture. His fragmented portraits, where subjects seem to escape the picture plane, are preoccupied with showing moments of interiority, intimacy and marginality. Frames and sculptural assemblages sometimes further obstruct the image, as the artist explores the materiality of photography and its relationship with domestic architecture."

Artwork Image: Inherent distance, 2018. Archival inkjet print. 10 x 15 in.

Jack Schneider

Jack Schneider is an artist and curator living in Chicago, Illinois. Schneider is a curatorial assistant at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago where he has organized numerous exhibitions including Water After All, Chicago Works: Deborah Stratman, and Dan Peterman: Sulfur Cycle 2.0. Schneider is also co-director of Prairie, an independent exhibition space focused on critically engaged emerging artists. His own artwork has recently been exhibited at Murmurs Gallery (Los Angeles), Gas Gallery (Los Angeles), The Franklin (Chicago), Horse & Pony Fine Art (Berlin), Bass & Reiner (San Francisco), 1.5 Rooms (Brooklyn), Adds Donna (Chicago), Born Nude (Chicago), and Lodos (Mexico City).

Ozan Atalan

Born 1985 in Gelibolu, Turkey. Lives and works in İstanbul, Turkey. 2016 MFA, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New York.

"Ozan Atalan asks his viewers to consider their relationship to anthropocentrism; that paradoxical perspective wherein humans regard themselves as both separate from and of central importance to nature. Through a variety of mediums—including sculpture, video, and digital media—Atalan addresses both the cultural origins and effects of anthropocentric thinking, such as Immanuel Kant’s philosophy and the destruction of Water Buffalo habitats around Istanbul. By moving beyond false oppositions between nature and culture, human and animal, and ultimately self and other, Atalan’s work encourages a less hierarchical and more interspecific worldview."

Artwork Image: Monochrome, 2019. Soil, Concrete, Water buffalo skeleton, video.

Edra Soto

Born in Puerto Rico. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. 2000 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Edra Soto’s artistic practice engages communities within and between her native Puerto Rico and adopted home of Chicago. Mixing materials and motifs endemic to each environment—from discarded liquor bottles to decorative rejas screens—Soto creates installations, participatory performances, and architectural interventions which, in her words, “prompt the viewer to reconsider post-colonial visual culture.” Indeed, Soto advocates for a more nuanced understanding of colonialism, particularly how the United States’s colonial history and ongoing exploitation of its subnational territories manifests in the landscapes of contemporary Chicago and Puerto Rico."

Artwork Image: Screenhouse, 2017. Sintra, pvc, metal. 144 x 120 x 96 in.

Assaf Evron

Born in 1977. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois. 2015 MA, Tel Aviv University, Israel. 2013 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

"Assaf Evron investigates the cultural and material geneses of cityscapes through his expanded photographic practice. Evron’s images, sculptures, and installations invite close consideration of seemingly simple architectures, showing how they emerge from complex interactions between peoples, ideas, and landscapes. In one project, Evron showed how naturally occurring crystalline structures relate to the rational geometries of modernist architecture, and how these patterns mutate into new variants as they cross cultural contexts. Of particular interest to Evron are the expressions of modernism that have taken root in Tel Aviv and Chicago, two cities he has called home."

Artwork Image: Collage for the McCormick House, 2019.

Sharon Louden

Sharon Louden is an artist, educator, advocate for artists, editor of the Living and Sustaining a Creative Life series of books, and the Artistic Director of the Visual Arts at Chautauqua Institution. Louden's work is held in major public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, Weatherspoon Art Museum, and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. As an active catalyst, Louden has gathered thousands of artists together on her international conversation tours, public speaking engagements, and her work with many non-profit organizations including Creative Capital and Joan Mitchell Foundation. In 2019, Louden and collaborator, artist, and critic Hrag Vartanian created an interactive installation for Signs & Symbols in New York. Sharon shares a studio with Vartanian in Brooklyn.

Vesna Jovanovic

Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

"Vesna Jovanovic's work reads as physical, installation-like, kinetic forms that are beings in space. The just-enough-glimpses of narrative references within organic, free flowing forms, and an architecture supported by various patterns with smart open spaces create stimulating tension throughout each piece. In addition, each work is widely different than the other and yet they all share similar intimacies that is a common thread connecting all of the work together. I can only imagine how dynamic this work would be to see in person as it alludes to different textures and media."  

Artwork Image: Clinical Case 001 (After Reporting Ingestion of a "Cat"), 2018. Ink, Watercolor, Gouache, Acrylic Pen, and Colored Pencil on Paper. 14 x 11 in.

Eva Vazquez Abraham

Born in Barcelona, Spain. Lives and works in Barcelona.

"Eva Vazquez Abraham's work resonated powerfully through her intimate gestures, spectrum-wide use of media, color and undefined practices that come together naturally as one vision. Reading from her website, I found her statement sincerely reflective of her powerful work that has notes of childlike effervescence. In addition, Vazquez Abraham's exploration of performance made sense as another mode of expression, further clarifying her vision. Eva's work is compelling and I am looking forward to following her growth going forward."

Artwork Image: Mother, 2018. Acrylic and pencil on paper.

Shiva Aliabadi

Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

2014 MFA, Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles. 1999 BA, Trinity College, Hartford, Connecticut.

"The vulnerability, richness and simplistic use of raw materials compelled me to look further into Shiva Aliabadi's work. The way Shiva's work is composed leaves a sense of loss that captures moments in time and transition. The curious and compelling serialized titles—coupled with the surprising turns in the work—made me want to not only to see all of the work together in person, but to sit with the welcoming, yet uncomfortable, nature of it all."

Artwork Image: Safety of Objects (blue-orange), 2016. Styrene, paint. 30 x 22 x 7 in.

Juana Williams

Juana Williams is the former Exhibitions Curator at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts (UICA), Grand Rapids, Michigan. Prior to joining UICA, she held positions at institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Elaine L. Jacob Gallery at Wayne State University, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Williams is a persistent advocate for supporting artists and the preservation of art-centered spaces. She is passionate about community engagement, elevating diverse voices, and giving a platform to artists for innovative expression.

Khalif Tahir Thompson

Born 1995 in Brooklyn, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn.

2018 MFA, SUNY Purchase, Purchase, New York.

"Khalif Tahir Thompson’s mixed media works are intimately intertwined with his own identity and responsive to larger concepts. Through the use of a variety of materials portraying visual references, he tells his personal story, while simultaneously discussing his curiosity about individuality, rooted in indefinable characteristics. The disjointed figures and objects appeal to an ethereal quality as if existing only in memory or imagination. Saturation of pattern and color weave through the images creating connection, and visual texture. Layering and differing materials illuminate the complexity of the identities Thompson is examining."

Artwork Image: Baubles, Bangles, and Beads, 2019. Oil on Canvas, Handmade Paper, beads, Lithograph. 68 x 68 x 2 in.

Dafna Rehavia

Born in Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"Through installations, fiber and mixed media work, Dafna Rehavia’s interdisciplinary practice incorporates her background in art and psychotherapy, and delves into issues of survival, identity, and healing. The materiality of the work is also indicative of her interest in socio-cultural analyses, with particular focuses on feminism and women’s experiences. Rehavia’s work includes juxtaposing elements of everyday, man-made objects, merged with art materials, such as clay, plaster, resin, cardboard, paint, and textile. Combining opposing materials creates dialogue between divergent ideas, and brings about questions relating to human existence."

Artwork Image: Passing, 2018. Ground, plaster, nails, stones, clay. print, carriage. 28 x 15 x 18 in.

Dawn Ertl

Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

2015 MFA, California State University, Long Beach. 2009 BFA Otis College of Art and Design, Los Angeles, California.

"Dawn Ertl’s fiber works are metaphors for relationships and the effects of those relationships on people and the environment. She focuses intently on trauma based in our collective imaginings. Initially, the material is woven into small work, then connected to create larger works. The significance rests on the understanding of each piece as a combination of strands. Ertl stresses the value each individual strand has on the functionality of the larger structure and consequences of one strand unravelling. Likewise, people are to realize how their actions affect those beyond themselves."

Artwork Image: My God, Your God, God (their god), 2019. Cotton, baby alpaca, metallic film, acrylic paint 38 1/2 x 38 1/2 in.

Kalup Linzy

Kalup Linzy is an American video and performance artist. His work has garnered numerous institutional awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Creative Capital Grant, a Jerome Foundation Grant, and a NYFA. Public collections include the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Linzy is represented by David Castillo Gallery in Miami Beach, Florida, and The Breeder Gallery in Athens, Greece. He serves on the board of the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts and is a 2019 Tulsa Artist Fellow.

Meredith Stoudenmire

Born 1975 in Greenville, SC. Lives and works in Greenville, SC.

1999 BFA, Atlanta College of Art, Atlanta, GA.

"Stoudenmire's works are powerful because they create a feeling of innocence and a sense of danger. Euphoric feelings experienced in childhood are paired with environments that appear to be on the verge of a nightmare. Maintaining their innocence and oblivious to the dangers surrounding them, the children in these works move through the forecasted perils unaffected. With no conclusions in sight, the viewer may find themselves fearing for her subjects and hoping they find their way to safety before what feels like the inevitable happens."

Artwork Image: Volcano River, 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 26 x 30 x 1 in.

Zakriya Rabani

Born 1993 in Naples, FL. Lives and works in Tallahassee, FL.

2018 MFA, University of South Florida, Tampa. 2015 BFA University of Florida, Gainesville.

"As a response to spending the majority of his life in academic institutions, Rabani’s work explores and critiques ideologies that have allowed these systems to remain in place. When diving deeper into his work, one might uncover answers or even begin to mine the subcultures that have been created as a result of these entities."

Artwork Image: Divine Decks, Tampa, 2018. Used skateboard decks, wood, shoelace, steel, light.

Ruth Owens

Born 1959 in New Orleans, LA. Lives and works in New Orleans, LA.

2018 MFA, University of New Orleans, LA.

"Owens' well balanced compositions and emotional use of colors with children as subjects, give semblance of an adult still connected to childhood memories. Although her brushstrokes lean toward something abstract, the emotions of the artist and her subjects aren’t forfeited. Her execution draws the viewer in more, hankering them to spend more time engaging with her narratives."

Artwork Image: Baby Love, 2018. Oil on canvas. 36 x 48 x 2 in.

Tina Sauerlaender

Tina Sauerlaender is a curator, writer, and art historian based in Berlin, Germany. She focuses on the impact of the digital and the Internet on both individual environments and society at large. With her exhibition hub peer to space, she organizes international group shows including The Unframed World, House of Electronic Arts, Basel, Switzerland, 2017, and Speculative Cultures, The New School Parsons, New York, 2019. She is co-founder of RadianceVR.co, an online research platform for VR in visual arts, and of MiRAA.org, an online platform for VR education in the arts. She is also the founder of the SALOON, an international network for women working in art in Berlin, Brussels, Dresden, Hamburg, London, Paris, and Vienna.

Ivonne Thein

Born 1979 in Berlin, German. Lives and works in Berlin.

"Ivonne Thein delves into the human body with her photographs, videos, sculptural and mixed media installations. Her presentations of the body are those which too often fall through the cracks of social acceptance—pregnant women, hermaphrodites, androgynous people. The consternation her works often provoke reveals our narrow standard definition of beauty and the formal language we usually see for human bodies. This limited aesthetic in turn impairs and damages people’s self-perception."

Artwork Image: The Self and the Other, 2019. Mixed-media installation. 59 x 61 x 39 in.

Vivian Liddell

Born 1971 in Memphis, Tennessee. Lives and works in Athens, Georgia.

2002 MFA, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, New York. 1993 BFA, University of Georgia, Athens.

"In her works Vivian Liddell colorfully merges prints, fabrics, embroidery and paintings into spatial installations creating unusual and diverse perspectives. The artist sees the world through a variety of lenses. She combines references from popular culture, art history and feminism. Liddell often humorously includes the occasionally occurring absurdities of daily life. With her painting of male nudes from a female perspective, she inverts the traditional canon, where male painters shaped the image of women in art history."

Artwork Image: MAN AND TRUCK II, 2018. Oil and oil pastel on canvas. 21 x 18 3/4 in.

Richard-Jonathan Nelson

Born 1987 in Savannah, Georgia. Lives and works in San Francisco, California.

2017 MFA, California College of the Arts, San Francisco, California.

"In his chromatic, mixed media collages, Richard-Jonathan Nelson addresses black queer male identities. Eroticized bodies are embedded in natural elements and structures, traversing and partly fragmenting each other. Digital collage and layering techniques dynamically highlight natural processes such as growth, blossoming or withering. Nelson creates natural surroundings that point to all-encompassing natural circles that include and embrace all genders or identities disregarding any social norms."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2018.

Ambre Kelly and Andrew Gori

Ambre Kelly is a multi-disciplinary artist and Andrew Gori is a writer and filmmaker. In their spare time, they collaborate together and have co-created projects like the curator-driven art fair SPRING/BREAK Art Show, the production house The They Co., the publishing house The Underground Library, and the co-operative domestic art collective BOYFRIENDGIRLFRIEND.

Zac Hacmon

Born 1981 in Holon, Israel. Lives and works in New York, NY.

2018 MFA, Hunter College, New York, NY. 2012 BFA, Bezalel Academy for Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel.

"These elegant, playful reconstructions with pedestrian pool and shower building materials are always a go-to for us, referencing architecture and the idea of occupying developments, sometimes with more sinister undertones, cartel-ed innocently into housing structures in various parts of the world."

Artwork Image: Apparatus, 2018. Ceramic tiles, stainless steel, grout. 22 x 26 x 14 in.

John Richey

Born in San Diego, CA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

2004 MFA, University of California-San Diego. BFA, University of Arizona, Tuscon.

"Painting's intersection with, or re-construction inside of, textile and the unconscious aesthetics within everyday designs is what we pull from John Richey’s interests, one we appreciate as a way to bring to focus what tends to be invisible, aesthetically, in our everyday life."

Artwork Image: Tartan, 2017. Immersive installation comprised of mural-sized wall paintings, digital prints, hand-painted video animations, garment facsimiles-as-sculptures, and fine art prints.

Rachael Starbuck

Born 1988 in Miami, FL. Lives and works in Austin, TX.

2017 MFA, University of Texas, Austin. BFA, Sculpture and Extended Media, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

"Consummate fans of the Material Girls, Rachael’s work bridges a rigorous sculptural practice in these pieces that seem like relics from the near past, stripped down here to a simplicity, casting bikini tops and short shorts in latex paint."

Artwork Image: your heart melts, you pour it out, 2018. Cast latex house paint. 18 x 54 x 30 in.

Sara Maria Salamone

Sara Maria Salamone is the co-founder and director of Mrs., a contemporary art gallery located in Maspeth, Queens. Founded in September of 2016, the gallery collaborates with and showcases a variety of emerging, under-represented, and mid-career artists, in the hopes of engaging the community and offering a new platform for their practices. The gallery’s dynamic program has already received critical praise from outlets such as Artforum, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, the New Yorker, and The New York Times, among others. Salamone has a creative background herself, having received a BA in Photography from Hampshire College and an MFA in Photography and Related Media from Parsons, The New School for Design. Outside of Mrs., she has curated exhibitions at venues including Albany Center Galleries, LAUNCH F18, site95, Field Projects, and Doppelgänger Projects, among others. Salamone lives and works in Queens, New York.

Fay Sanders

Lives and works in New York, New York.

2019 MFA, Brooklyn College, Brooklyn, New YOrk. 2013 BFA, School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Tufts University, Boston, Massachusetts.

"Fay Sanders' athletic portraits are bold and unambiguous, replete with active brushwork and saturated color. These pictures don't seem appropriated from sports broadcasts or media imagery, however, as there's a strong  familiarity apparent between subject and painter. An energy exudes directly from the depicted athletes; one can feel a sense of success and accomplishment and a certain quality of sportsmanship recognizable to those who are also physically active in their lives. Sanders' subjects either gaze directly at the viewer or slightly past us and off to the side, their eyes prominent, as if they have their prize in view."

Artwork Image: Swimmers, 2019. Oil on canvas. 48 x 30 in.

Sarah Tortora

Born 1988 in New Haven, Connecticut. Lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

2013 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia. 2011 BS, Studio Art, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven.

"At once cumbersome and tidy in their assembly, Sarah Tortora’s well-constructed sculptures oscillate between reality and narrative. In a statement, the artist remarks that her work “accepts the premise that every equestrian monument is truly a Trojan horse, and seeks to unveil the passive social conditioning toward our manufactured environments and histories.” A short fantasy novel written by Jorge Luis Borges, titled the “House of Asterion,” is also the title of Tortora’s latest series of sculptures. Notoriously, Borges begins his tales with an outcast or unusual protagonist and ends with an unexpected turn of events. By naming her works after this fiction, I imagine the artist is relating to the central character, who has become trapped in a world of their own creation, which allows for possible new interpretations of infinitude."

Artwork Image: The Myth of Origin (Angelus Novus), 2019. Wood, concrete, epoxy resin, epoxy clay, geode. 90 x 86 x 24 in.

Telma Góes

Born 1977 in São Paulo, Brazil. Lives and works in São Paulo.

"When I viewed Telma Góes works on Foundwork, the first thing that came to mind were blue sun-faded posters from Miami storefront windows in the 90's. There was a certain immediate nostalgia to her works, though upon second glance I saw a simplified and quieter version of Italian Futurism. Referencing the block colors of Fortunato Depero’s works and the cityscapes of Carlo Carrá, mixed with Góes' use of herons, pelicans and penguins, these works are graphic and tenacious. Like the Futurists, Góes experiments with dynamic motion, forced perspective and form."

"Artwork Image: Untitled, 2018. Acrylic on canvas.

Helena Anrather

Helena Anrather opened her gallery in 2017 in Chinatown, New York. The gallery is dedicated to showing emerging and mid-career artists with an emphasis on international perspectives and a commitment to presenting a wide variety of voices. In the spirit of community and exchange, the space is a platform for event-based projects, dinners, screenings, and conversation.

Julia Rooney

Born 1989 in New York, NY. Lives and works in New York, NY.

2018 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT.

"Julia Rooney’s paintings are tactile and lush, glowing with internal luminescence. The paintings’ surfaces are gauzy, hazy, like the light of a phone on a nightstand or of some deep-sea creature. The abstracted forms recede and emerge within the picture plane, adding to their mystery and ambiguity."

Artwork Image: paper (red), 2018. Newspaper, tempera, Flashe, acrylic, ink and adhesives. 37 x 35 1/2 in.

Austin Furtak-Cole

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

2009 MFA, Painting, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY. 2003 BFA, Green Mountain College, Poultney, VT.

"Austin Furtak-Cole’s disembodied hands and feet seem to be searching for meaning in a world that is inaccessible through its deceptively simple flatness. Gently cradling strange knots and blocky clouds, the hands are weighted down by their own tenderness and empathy in a hyper-saturated and fragmented reality."

Artwork Image: Exploratory, 2018. Flashe on Paper. 24 x 24 in.

Sacha Ingber

Born 1987 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

2013 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.

"Sacha Ingber’s sculptures hover sacred and camp, transforming the banality of consumer and domestic items through materiality and abstraction. A barbecue and an air freshener become strange relics, a cheeseboard becomes an altar-piece. Sacha’s work lends a playful gravity to objects that are often overlooked and disposable."

Artwork Image: Egg Vending, 2018. Urethane, pigment, glazed earthenware, coin slot. 30 1/4 x 28 1/2 x 1 1/2 in.

Inês Valle

Inês Valle is a Lisbon-based curator and director of the Cera Project, a non-profit art organisation for the promotion of art that falls outside Eurocentric and Western narratives. Valle is also chief curator at Velvenoir, an Austrian-based art consultancy, as well as co-founder of FRAT, an art and sustainability lab in Nigeria. Valle specialises in art that is politically engaged, and as an independent curator she collaborates internationally with organizations including Canberra Contemporary Art in Australia, Centro Cultural Belém and Colecção Museu Berardo in Portugal, the National Museum of Lagos in Nigeria, and the Artspace Aotearoa in New Zealand, among others. Valle holds a master’s degree in curatorial studies with a focus on contemporary Aboriginal art as a socio-political tool from the University of Lisbon.

Marcelo Brodsky

Born 1954, lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"Marcelo Brodsky is a force of perseverance, a revolutionist, and an activist, but above all a man using his art to raise awareness for the socio-political dynamics of our world. Brodsky is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice investigates human resilience—through images, words, and archival documents—and the ways in which specific memories have shaped our collective history. Through his work—where he speaks about oppressive regimes, migration, exile, and the fight for freedom—he leads us to question, forces us to reinterpret, and dares us to participate in the debate about our roles as active citizens in society."

Artwork Image: The Class, 1996. Photography. 44 x 70 in.

Nikki Luna

Born in Manila, Philippines. Lives and works in Balearic Islands, Spain. 2019 MA, Goldsmiths, University of London.

"Nikki Luna's multimedia practice aims to take apart misconceptions and unveil the misogynist structures of power which are endemic both to the art world and to society at large. By shining a bright light on disturbing subjects, Luna makes us consider brutal and oppressive realities affecting millions of people. An advocate for women's rights in particular, Luna tackles social and political issues through a feminist lens, creating beautiful works that tell resonant and shocking stories of injustice."

Artwork Image: Rebel Woman, 2011. Resin, wedding dress lace, lightbox.

Nandita Kumar

Born 1981 in Pamplemousses, Mauritius. Lives and works in North Goa, India. 2009 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California.

"Nadita Kumar is a new media artist whose practice resulted naturally from her early life growing up between several countries and continents, experiences that gave Kumar a passion for—and a unique perception of—dissimilar cultures. Her work is an expansive undertaking, where art, science, nature, technology, and even communities intersect to create immersive environmental spaces. Through her hybrid art—spanning installation, sculpture, painting and video—we are placed somewhere between the industrial and the natural, and forced to reflect on the impact of technology and the possibility for a sustainable shared future."

Artwork Image: The Unwanted Ecology, 2017. Interactive sound installation powered by solar panel. 39 1/3 x 17 3/4 in.

Will Hutnick

Will Hutnick is an artist and curator based in Wassaic, New York, where he is Director of Artistic Programming at the Wassaic Project, a year-round residency and creative community. Hutnick is also Co-Director of the gallery Ortega y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, and has curated numerous exhibitions there and at other venues such as SPRING/BREAK Art Show, Trestle Projects, and Pratt Institute. Hutnick has been an artist-in-residence at Yaddo, Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works, DNA Gallery, and Vermont Studio Center, and a curator-in-residence at Benaco Arte, Sirmione, Italy, and Trestle Projects, Brooklyn. He is a 2017 Martha Boschen Porter Fund grant recipient from the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, and a 2015 grant recipient from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Portrait photo by Monica Hamilton.

Amelia Briggs

Born 1985. Lives and works in Nashville, Tennessee.

2015 MFA, University of Memphis, Tennessee. 2009 BFA, Herron School of Art and Design, Indiana University, Indianapolis.

"I was first drawn to how anthropomorphic Briggs’ work is, and the fine balance between what is repulsive yet cozy. The objects appear to be like keepsakes, talismans, or artifacts from some unknown, mystical, or animated universe. Despite tip-toeing towards violent connotations where images of deer heads and “trophy bucks” come to mind, in their place is something surprisingly playful, surreal, familiar and warm. Briggs’ sensitivity towards combining various media, along with the artist's propensity for distinct characters, reminds me of my (robust!) keychain and sticker collections that I had as a kid, respectively. The viewer wants to hold onto these works—their longing, their nostalgia—as tightly as possible, before they melt away."

Artwork Image: Moppet Installation, 2019. Mixed media.

Maryamsadat Amirvaghefi

Born 1989 in Tehran, Iran. Lives and works in Fayetteville, Arkansas.

2017 MFA, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville.

"Amirvaghefi’s visually compelling collages, paintings, drawings and sculpture are deceptively complex, and pack a punch. Amirvaghefi’s work playfully mines the arena where sports, identity, humor and language mix. The work is reminiscent of fragmented memories and the tools that attempt to capture them, specifically, distorted old Polaroids that have either been purposefully cut up and/or manipulated, or have just come out weird. There is an altered, conflated and mediated sense of time and memory, one that we’re completely convinced of. The viewer is totally on board, even if the narrator/memories might not be the most reliable. Amirvaghefi’s use of collage, both as a formal and conceptual parameter, decidedly fix narratives and compositions in new spaces, (re)negotiating alternative realities."

Artwork Image: Famous Female Bodybuilder, 2017. Mixed media on paper. 12 x 9 in.

Scott Allen Roberts

Born 1980 in Los Angeles, California. Lives and works in Gardiner, New York.

2002 BA, University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

"Roberts’ lush and sensual paintings navigate the liminal space between day and night, physical and virtual, real and imagined. “Twilight” is an apt reference point and metaphor for Roberts’ warped notions of time and space. Roberts’ graphic visual vocabulary and hyper-saturated colors, combined with all-over patterns and unique vantage points, speak to where/when the tangibility and recognizability of the perceptible world fades away. This opens up a space where memories and recognizable objects daringly disappear and reappear, and new and imagined realities take shape."

Artwork Image: Interim, 2018. Acrylic and oil on canvas. 52 x 68 x 2 in.

Francesca Gavin

Francesca Gavin is a curator and writer based in London. She is the Art Editor of Twin, editor-at-large at Kaleidoscope, and contributing editor at Good Trouble, Beauty Papers, and Semaine.com. She was the co-curator of the Historical Exhibition of Manifesta 11 and created exhibitions internationally including at the Palais de Tokyo and Site Sheffield and was the curator of the Soho House collection for seven years. Gavin has written six books including Watch This Space, 100 New Artists, and Hell Bound: New Gothic Art, and contributes to numerous publications including The Financial Times, Dazed, AnOther, and Newsweek. She has a monthly radio show Rough Version on NTS Radio on art and music where recent guests have included Adam Pendleton, Aria Dean, and Oscar Murillo.

Susan Begy

Born in Rochester, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2010 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, New York. 1984 BA in Studio Art, Western College of Colorado, Gunnison, Colorado.

"Begy’s work is part sci-fi part human. She operates at a really interesting intersection between organic references like intestines and bones and more linear scientific and mathematic influences. The mix of materials in her sculptural work is not always comfortable—a sensation I’m often searching for in art."

Artwork Image: Precious Positions, 2017. Alabaster, broken tempered glass, wood. 42 x 26 x 24 in.

Michael M. Lopez

Born 1970 in Newark, New Jersey. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

"Lopez captures the weird and eerie atmosphere of the edges of a city—in his case Gowanus in Brooklyn which echoed his native Newark. His unbranded, yet to be gentrified spaces exude pathos and a kind of slow, odd sense of narrative."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2018. Archival inkjet print.

Paolo Arao

Born 1977 in Manila, Phiippines. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

1999 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

"I’m in love with the vibrancy of Paolo Arao’s work which sits somewhere between textile and painting. His constructed sewn graphic abstract wall pieces fuse everything from the modernism of Anni Albers with the South American 1970s aesthetics and even a dose of post-cartoon rave acidity and a strong queer motivation addressing how we see."

Artwork Image: Casino Karaoke, 2018. Pieced and sewn cotton and canvas, colored pencil. 45 x 36 x 1.25 in.

Pieter Dobbelsteen

Pieter Dobbelsteen is the owner of CINNNAMON. The gallery opened in 2015 in Rotterdam, Netherlands, with a program exploring positions in new materialism and the influence of digitalization on traditional media. From there, the program has expanded into new territories, with curatorial curiosity and collaboration with the gallery’s stakeholders (first and foremost the artists) leading its development. From the onset, the gallery has participated in leading European art fairs such as Artissima, ARCO Madrid, and Art Brussels.

Andrea Heimer

Lives and works in Bellingham, Washington.

"For centuries, the notion of storytelling in visual arts was a given. Think of the vases of ancient Greece, the Bayeux Tapestry, or medieval mosaics. In her paintings, Andrea Heimer gives a contemporary and very personal twist to this narrative tradition in art, telling a tale of growing up in rural Montana. In colourful bird’s eye views we see the people and animals, we witness the seasons, the seasonal events, the rituals and dreams of young people as they navigate the world they were thrown into. The landscapes are flattened –perspectives are skewed or absent– which makes all elements on the paintings equal. I can’t stop looking at these works, they suck me in. The works are undeniably funny, but also full of small tragedies and deeply, deeply humane."

Artwork Image: Nice Chores Are Part Of A Nice Life In A Nice Body In A Nice Yard Surrounding A Nice House With Nice Neighbors You Never Talk To., 2018. Acrylic. 30 x 40 x 2 in.

Dominik Halmer

Born 1978, lives and works in Berlin, Germany.

2009 Postgraduate, Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. 2006 Meisterschüler, Academy of Fine Arts, Düsseldorf, with Professor Albert Oehlen. 2000 Undergraduate studies in Philosophy and History of Art, Humboldt University, Berlin.

"The idea of painting has been thoroughly researched in the past century and a half. Boundaries have been crossed, both literally and conceptually. A painting today is no longer just a depiction (representation), but also an object. Dominik Halmer maps the relationship between painting and object in a very distinct, playful way. The result is a kind of baroque constructivism. Cleverly combining painting and everyday objects, a choreography materializes in which abstract notions like balance, direction, and gravity are key. Still, painting remains at the heart of his work. Paintings that seem to employ Plato’s ideal forms as acrobats in a cosmic circus. I couldn’t ask for much more to make me happy."

Artwork Image: TERRITORY, 2018. Exhibition View, Museum Wiesbaden, Germany.

Stephen Evans

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama.

2017 MFA, University of Iowa, Iowa City. 2010 BFA, University of the Arts, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

"Think of that moment just before, or just after, something happens. Think of ‘something happening’ as the sun setting, as a spider catching a fly, as the moon rising over a mountain range or a rooftop. Think of the transitional life/death event that uproots everything, a transition to a new normal. Think of that moment –still and suspenseful– as a trope of movies and novels. The paintings of Stephen W. Evans seem to be painted with a concentrate derived from such tropes. The brooding atmosphere, mesmerizing yet peaceful. Evans paints close to the heart. I’d call it Romanticism, but his Romanticism is stripped of grandeur. In the absence of the sublime, there might be an epiphany in the shape of the trees, in an abandoned car, in the act of painting."

Artwork Image: Search Party, 2018. Acrylic on wood panel. 12 x 16 in.

Rolando Anselmi

Rolando Anselmi is the owner and director of Galerie Rolando Anselmi, Berlin and Rome. Established in Berlin in 2013, the gallery aims to promote an ambitious program that supports site-specific projects realized within the gallery space. In this way, the gallery exists not only as a commercial venue but also as a production center for contemporary art. In addition to its exhibition program, the gallery advocates artists by supporting publications, outdoor projects, residences, and participation in international art fairs. In 2020, the gallery will open its doors to a new headquarters in the center of Rome which will include exhibition spaces, show rooms, gallery offices and archive, as well as a space for artists' projects and residences.

Evan Halter

Born 1990 in Cincinnati, Ohio. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2016 MFA, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. 2013 BFA, Art Academy of Cincinnati, Ohio.

"Evan Halter is interested in painting’s ability to function in multiple states simultaneously, namely as both illusory space and physical surface. He works through various media such as oil on canvas, oil on panel, water color or gouache on paper. The imagery and framing devices in his work often reference artists such as Giovanni Bellini, Ambrosius Bosschaert, Fra Angelico, and, in particular, the still life paintings of Juan Sánchez Cotán, always using those references as a means of pointing toward something non-material, something we can grasp at, but that continually evades us."

Artwork Image: Threshold (Wisteria), 2018. Oil on wood panel. 20 x 16 in.

Dan Devine

Born 1940 in Kent, Connecticut. Lives and works in Ghent, New York.

1988 MFA, Bard University, Annendale on Hudson, New York.

"Dan Devine’s plaster sculptures explore the relationship between interior and exterior spaces, redefining the spectator’s relationship to internal volumes and to the idea of impacts. Resulting from the colliding of objects, impacts can also occur between cultures, philosophies, or changing natural environments. In his sculptural process, folds, dents, rips and slices all occurred upon a violent and piercing impact, and in contrast, the castings are formed by the slow flow of suspended plaster and their forms gently occur rather than being shaped or forged."

Artwork Image: Serac, 2019. Cast Plaster. 44 x 48 x 10 in. Cast in mold made from body of a crashed car.

Thomas Lawson

Born 1951 in Glasgow, Scotland. Lives and works in Los Angeles County, California.

"Thomas Lawson's pictorial practice explores the ways in which figurative representation allows for, and sometimes disrupts, the transmission of meaning. His paintings are suffused with surprising, critically astute, and often humorous disjunctions that reflect the instability of contemporary life. His pictorial practice is absolutely current although unchanged for many years, and his images suggest multiple allegorical possibilities through the long, historically-oriented ‘literature’ of representations that has, over the centuries, become the foundation for understanding how subjects relate to their social environments."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2018. Oil on canvas. 84 x 60 x 3 in.

Scott Ogden

Scott Ogden is the founder and director of SHRINE, a gallery located in New York's Chinatown neighborhood that specializes in exhibiting self-taught, outsider and contemporary art. The gallery's core mission is to find and highlight under-known artists of all backgrounds, as well as provide installation services and collection advisement for collectors. Ogden is both a visual artist and filmmaker, and in 2011 he released the documentary film MAKE, which chronicles the lives and art of four American self-taught artists: Prophet Royal Robertson, Hawkins Bolden, Judith Scott and Ike Morgan.

Evelyn Reyes

Born 1957. Lives and works in San Francisco, CA.

"I've never been to Creativity Explored (based in San Francisco) in person, but I have long admired their program, artistic mission and talented artists. It was a nice surprise to find CE artist Evelyn Reyes on Foundwork. Reyes's bold abstractions immediately caught my eye. They seem to veer towards being recognizable forms but then never to come together as being definitive objects. There's something magic in that back and forth as well as the confusion between her positive/negative space."

Artwork Image: Carrots (blue), 2005. Oil pastel on paper. 11 x 17 1/4 in.

Bill Brunken

Born 1971 in Slippery Rock, PA. Lives and works in Pittsburgh, PA.

2000 MA and 2001 MFA, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, TX.

"Bill Brunken creates sumptuous oil paintings with pigments so thickly-applied they seem in jeopardy of sliding off the canvas. His paintings appear abstract at first glance but then slowly materialize into figures, landscapes and faces. This play is heightened (and we are helped) with titles that point us in the right direction—Five Piece Band, Potato Head Blues and Sitting at Night, and the works leave me wanting to decadently run my fingers through his scenes."

Artwork Image: Five Piece Band, 2019. Oil on canvas panel. 9 x 12 in.

Carlos Fernandez

Born 1986. Lives and works in Richmond, CA.

"Carlos Fernandez hails from the NIAD Art Center in Richmond, CA, which helps artists with developmental disabilities make art full-time. Fernandez, while self-taught, creates work that resonates is both contemporary and minimal. Images of birds, disco balls, stop lights and floating hats provide us with just enough information to give these objects form. He pays equal (if not more) attention to the obsessively rendered backgrounds engulfing his subjects, which leaves them floating and is a wonderful effect."

Artwork Image: Untitled (D0780), 2013. Mixed media on paper. 17 x 19 in.

Megan Koza Mitchell

Megan Koza Mitchell is Executive Director of Guns in the Hands of Artists Foundation, New Orleans, an organization promoting community-based art as a means to open a dialogue around gun culture and gun violence in contemporary American society. Koza Mitchell also manages The Hope Photo Project, also based in New Orleans. As a curator and academic, Koza Mitchell’s research focuses on the reformation of identity in the wake of trauma, specifically in regard to public art and public space. She is interested in the ways that visual interpretations of trauma can create, or recreate, collective cultural identity following catastrophic events, as well as the social and cultural ramifications of public art. Koza Mitchell has contributed to various exhibition catalogues and outlets for contemporary art criticism including Prospect 4: The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp. She lives and works in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Marco Bizzarri

Born 1988 in Santiago, Chile. Lives and works in Santiago, Chile.

"Bizzarri’s dystopian paintings and installations, set both within gallery walls and out in open landscapes, focus on the juncture between built and natural environments. Using acts of concealment to draw our attention to the thing underneath, Bizzarri highlights the constant drive for progress that perversely leaves more destruction than advancement in its wake. Formally, this strategy appears in Bizzarri’s use of articulated moments of intense color to serve as beacons for the viewer, what the artist calls “veilings” of chaotic gesture, line, and form, simultaneously obscuring that which we need to see and that which has been forgotten."

Artwork Image: Sitting At The Table, 2017. Wooden and iron table, mining industry waste, industrial paint. Dimensions variable.

Julie Schenkelberg

Born 1974 in Cleveland, Ohio. Lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.

2011 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York.

"The beauty of Schenkelberg’s work resides in her ability to delicately manipulate notions of home, and the post-industrial landscape of the Midwest, through complex yet fragile installations. Schenkelberg juxtaposes domestic detritus such as china, flatware, tabletop religious icons, and linens with decaying industrial materials like wood and concrete, using palpable materiality to suggest social and cultural collapse. The distressed and crumbling matrices of Schenkelberg's work call to mind fossils and archaeological dig sites, or collapsed buildings in the wake of catastrophe, embodying not only history reclaimed, but healing as well."

Artwork Image: Symptomatic Constant, 2014. Mixed media- plaster, wood, found domestic items. 240 x 360 x 228 in.

David Borawski

Born 1956 in Hartford, Connecticut. Lives and works in Hartford, Connecticut.

"Borawski’s skillful deployment of Freud’s theory of the uncanny through sculpture, installation, video, and digital printmaking generates systems of information for viewers to process. Reflecting on the dark underbelly of society and contemporary political culture, and drawing on the history of art, Borawski leads viewers to consider current realties in new or renewed contexts. His semiotically driven work represents a darkly playful combination of nostalgia, pop culture, and socio-political moments that have significantly influenced our group consciousness, but in recent times have slipped into the realm forgotten history."

Artwork image: Let the Good Times Roll, 2020. Digital video projection, PVC pipe, cotton flags. 110 x 160 x 130 in.

MADEYOULOOK (Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho)

MADEYOULOOK is a collaboration between multidisciplinary practitioners Molemo Moiloa and Nare Mokgotho. The works of MADEYOULOOK are, as the name suggests, tongue-in cheek interventions that encourage a "re-observation" and de-familiarization of the ordinary. Their works and curatorial projects engage daily urban routines normally considered a given, or not considered at all. By reworking and interrupting these modes of behavior, viewers and participants are made to "re-look" and question societal relations. Based in Johannesburg, MADEYOULOOK have exhibited widely, including in South Africa, France, and the Netherlands. They were nominated for the MTN New Contemporaries prize in 2012, and the Vera List Center Prize for Art and Politics at the New School, NY in 2017.

Art Group 705

Originated 2005 in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Based in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan.

"Art Group 705 are a multi-disciplinary collective with a focus on theatre. They also work in drawing and animation which is strongly situated in the cultural and political context of Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. The search for an adequate language to express their socio-political concerns presents as a central feature of the collective’s exploration, resulting in a levity underscored by opacity and a dark humour. Their work is temporal, grappling with the contemporary and the historical, the absurdist tradition of their predecessors, and the present realities that are their everyday relations."

Artwork Image: Minister Answers, 2018. Still image from animation (view animation here).

Malebona Maphutse and Simnikiwe Buhlungu

Originated 2016 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Based in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"This duo works together on explorations of the word, written and spoken, as a subject of engagement and as medium. They incorporate discursive strategies to examine personal narratives, under-addressed histories and what they refer to as living archives. Language, text, publishing, orality and relational gatherings are characteristic features of their work. The use of self-publishing in particular, and the festival on this theme they helped found, are a vital claim for utterance and language as political tools of identity and place making for young people in an increasingly isolating post-1994 South Africa."

Artwork Image: Mangolo, 2016. Work on Paper, Letters.

Sangwoodgoon

Originated 2009 in Hong Kong. Based in Hong Kong.

"Hong Kong-based collective Sangwoodgoon describe their work as “connecting the aesthetic portrayal of the land with the physical working of the land.” As a farming collective, their work is a deep exploration of praxis as both intellectual venture and vital life force, through the acts of growing food as well as developing cultural projects such as film festivals, collective relational meals and self-publishing. Made up of journalists, academics, writers, designers, and artists, working within the sphere of the environmental and political, Sangwoodgoon presents a challenge to cultural practice’s role beyond and within representation."

Artwork Image: Sangwoodgoon KidsClub, 2018 (2018-ongoing). Social Practice.

Aaron Levi Garvey

Aaron Levi Garvey is a Curator working nationally and internationally. He is currently the Curator of both Jonah Bokaer Arts Foundation and Long Road Projects Foundation. Recent exhibitions include The Hudson Eye in Hudson, New York; 1:1 at The Front in New Orleans; Chiharu Shiota’s Infinity Lines at the SCAD Museum of Art; Ephemera Obscura at the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans; and Manon Bellet's MEMO and Shikeith’s notes towards becoming a spill, both at Atlanta Contemporary. In 2016, Garvey curated* We Are What You Eat*, the inaugural art exhibition at the United Nations headquarters in New York, and most recently has been a visiting lecturer at the University of Florida and the University of Iowa. Garvey is also a collaborator of Independent Curators International.

Dana Morrison

Born 1986 in Springfield Mills, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in San Francisco, California.

2016 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute. 2010 BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore.

"Dana Morrison's work evokes a bit of tension or horror vacui upon first glance, as the pieces are often singular and surrounded by empty space. However once the object’s structure, balance and form are recognized as working with the space rather than existing within the space, viewers make engage with the works with a sense of ease. By offering spaces that prompt viewers to channel underlying memories and emotions related to prosaic architecture and objects, Morrison is able to expound upon her own experiences through works that relate to her own occupancy of space."

Artwork Image: Wrap, 2018. Found Fence Post, Custom made ratchet straps. 22 x 25 x 2 in.

Shay Arick

Born in Israel. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2014 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, Carolifornia. 2011 BFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel.

"Shay Arick examines the notions and origins of global violence and identity in a nuanced yet pointed manner. Arick’s work and research pulls away from mainstream bombastic rhetoric and allows viewers to examine and experience his work wholly, beyond simply a surface level aesthetic or overtly politically charged imagery. Arick’s work comes from a place of compassion and desire to understand the rationales of violence and aggression within global society while simultaneously offering pointed criticisms."

Artwork Image: Stigmata, 2018. Mixed media. 30 x 30 x 25 in.

Brittany Watkins

Born 1989 in Carrollton, Georgia. Lives and works in Columbia, South Carolina.

2016 MFA, Florida State University, Tallahassee.

"Brittany Watkins’ manipulation of space and everyday objects of comfort successfully evokes both anxiety and curiosity. Building on memory, past experiences and the subconscious, Watkins creates an atmosphere for introspection into the mundane and casual tasks of an individual’s day-to-day. These highly saturated and all consuming installations act as reflections of an individual, treating altered objects as portraits drawing a balance between psychological and physical spaces."

Artwork Image: Under them-there Hills, Mama..., 2019 Mixed-media installation with live performance. 216 x 240 x 192 in.

Lara Koseff

Lara Koseff is a curator and writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. From 2010 to 2018, Koseff worked at Goodman Gallery, Johannesburg, where she served primarily as a curator and liaison for numerous artists. While at Goodman, Koseff was involved in the launch of South-South, a curatorial initiative exploring connections within and constructions of the Global South, with a focus on Latin America and Africa in particular. Her curatorial work has included projects in South Africa, Brazil, Portugal, and Argentina, and collaborations with artists artists including Grada Kilomba, Ghada Amer, and Reza Farkhondeh, among others. Koseff is creative director of [offsetculture.art](offsetculture.art), an online platform for printed matter. In 2019, with Londi Modiko and Natasha Becker, she established UNDERLINE projects, an exhibition platform for independent curators.

Helena Uambembe

Born 1994 in Pomfret, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Helena Uambembe is an incredible storyteller, deftly re-articulating the past in visual form. She weaves narrative about the history of her family’s complex trajectory into her artwork, which takes the form of performance, installation, printmaking or photography. Through these various media, Helena recovers stories that were previously told on behalf of others, reclaiming them with a tenacious approach and a sophisticated visual language. Helena was born in Pomfret, South Africa in 1994 to Angolan parents who fled the civil war. Her father was a soldier in the 32nd Battalion, a military unit within the South African Defence Force mainly made up of black Angolan men. This heritage is the main motif with which Helena works, unearthing a hidden archive and chronicling moments in time in new and important ways."

Artwork Image: My Load I Shall Carry (Prayer to Mother Njiga ) IV, 2019. Photographic print. 18 3/4 x 26 3/4 in.

Lunga Ntila

Born 1995. lives and works in Pretoria and Johannesburg, South Africa.

"Lunga Ntila explains that there are five key conceptual “blue-prints” behind the construction of her work. These are: identity, re-imagining, perspective, unlearning and interpretation. Perhaps the most curious yet salient of these, when looking at her entrancing work, is unlearning. Through photographic manipulation and digital collage, Lunga reveals the importance, as a young South African, to not simply accept what one has been taught, and the resulting knowledge that has been inherited. There is a quiet power in learning the rules to knowingly break them, which Lunga does so very skilfully."

Artwork Image: Untitled (Coquette II), 2018. Digital collage. 19 1/2 x 17 3/4 in.

Enoch Cheng

Lives and works in Hong Kong.

2014 MA, Creative and Life Writing, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK. 2007 BA, University of Hong Kong.

"Enoch Cheng is an artist interested in decontextualising the personal mythologies that emerge from a particular culture, and letting them evolve within a broader, more participatory situation. His complex, generally performance or video based work, often references his grandfather’s migration from Hong Kong to South Africa on a container boat in the 1960s. Yet this story is always considered in relation to the expansive context of, what he calls “the natural history of other lifeforms." As Michelle Chan suggests in her Frieze opinion piece titled Walk with Me, Enoch’s work asks: are we prepared to join in when faced with an uncharted journey? In these vigilant times, how can we engage with uncertain, unfamiliar forces and collaborate on something new that offers plurality rather than singularity? Are we prepared, Enoch asks, to have a “genuine, yet safe, engagement with the unknown?”

Artwork Image: Study of Zebra (I-V), 2019. African print pinned on Thai silk on clip board. 11 1/2 x 8 1/4 in.

Neil Goldberg

Neil Goldberg is an American video, photo, mixed media, and performance artist. His work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Museum of Modern Art, New York (permanent collection), the New Museum of Contemporary Art, The Kitchen, the Hammer Museum, and NGBK Kunsthalle Berlin—and has garnered fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, New York State Council for the Arts, and the MacDowell Colony, among others. Goldberg is a Critic at the Yale School of Art and is currently a mentor with Queer | Art | Mentorship. He is represented by Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, and a monograph of his photographic series, Other Peoples’ Prescriptions, will be published in spring 2019 in collaboration with Esopus Books.

Marius von Brasch

Born 1958 in Cologne, Germany. Lives and works in Rookley, UK.

2012 PhD, University of Southampton, Southampton, UK.

"I love the dynamic between restraint and exuberance in Marius von Brasch’s work. In his spare drawings, the marks tend to engage each other from a respectful distance; in his paintings, the visual elements—rendered in hyper-saturated pinks, oranges, and greens—are inclined to commingle ardently."

Artwork Image: Rites of Passage: Liminal, 2019. Oil on canvas. 39 x 39 x 1 in.

Ann Toebbe

Born 1974 in Cincinatti, OH. Lives and works in Chicago, IL.

2004 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. 1994 BFA, Cleveland Institute of Art, Cleveland, OH.

"Ann Toebbe’s paintings take the resolutely three dimensional contents of other people’s lives and offer them to us in two dimensional space, all at once, through a process by which possessions and the spaces that contain them are flattened but rendered sublime. These works somehow remind me of my childhood wish to drive my house: maybe it’s how they are utterly self-contained but reflect the artist’s engagement with the world outside her door."

Artwork Image: Friend: Becky, 2018. Gouache, paper collage, pencil on panel. 24 x 30 x 1 1/2 in.

Lauren West

Born 1989 in Oxford, MS. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

2017 MFA, New York Academy of Art, New York, NY. 2014 BFA, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS.

"Temple Grandin wrote that “animals make us human”; Lauren West’s work shows us what that might mean. Although the subject matter is dead serious—mortality, impermanence, the problematics of living in culture—I love that West risks being funny, especially in an art world that can view humor with suspicion."

Artwork Image: Giraffe and Helicopter, 2017. Oil on Wood. 10 x 10 x 2 in.

Tiana Webb Evans

Tiana Webb Evans is a writer and the founder of ESP Group, a public relations agency specializing in the strategic promotion of agents of culture, with international clients spanning art, architecture, interior design, and industrial design. Before launching ESP, she was Communications Director at Phillips Auctioneers, a Vice President at Nadine Johnson & Associates, and the Business Director of Studio Sofield. Tiana is on the boards of New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), Project for Empty Space, and Female Design Council, and the National Advisory Board for the Laundromat Project.

Miguel Colon

Born 1969 in New York, NY. Lives and works in New York, NY.

1992 BFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY.

Represented by Fountain House Gallery, New York, NY.

"Miguel Colon’s work struck a chord with me because it was immediately familiar. Inspired by Harlem Renaissance artist Aaron Douglas’s style, Colon deploys cubist techniques, manipulating line and plane, to energize highly emotional visual stories. His soothing palate defies the intensity, strife and struggle conveyed in each vignette which creating active tension and jazz-like movement in the work. I am also intrigued by his use of architecture as a silent, yet active, participant in the his stories."

Artwork Image: The Central Heart, 2018. Acrylic on canvas. 36 x 48 in.

Jaynie Gillman Crimmins

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

MS, College of New Rochelle, New Rochelle, NY. BS, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

"Jaynie Gillman Crimmins’ pieces capture the sublime nature of life. The serendipity in the act of collecting found objects combined with the rigorous mathematical order of her constructions are poetic ruminations on duality. The works call forth and magnify the intricacies of microscopic cells and bioluminescent plankton, while quietly remind you of the paper and the messages that lie within. You’re left with a seemingly tough choice of simply enjoying their beauty or engaging the artist’s call to action."

Artwork Image: The Moment Matters, 2018. Shredded non-profit and political solicitations, health care statements as well as magazine articles. 12 x 12 x 8 in.

Don Porcaro

Born 1950. Lives and works in New York, NY.

"I was immediately intrigued by Don Porcaro’s whimsical totems. The sculptures are innately spiritual and meditative. Their soft undulations defy materiality - everything is organic. There is a nod to humanity sourcing stone from all over the world bringing it all together to create new “beings.” The works are alive with concentrated movement."

Artwork Image: Talisman, 2015 (outdoor installation). Marble, limestone, brass. 90 x 240 x 300 in.

Lauren Marinaro

Lauren Marinaro is the owner and director of Marinaro in New York. The gallery opened in February, 2017 in a second floor space on the Lower East Side and moved to a three-floor space in Chinatown in September, 2017. Marinaro has put on a diverse exhibition program of emerging and mid-career artists with works across all mediums. The exhibitions have been reviewed in many publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Modern Painters, The New Yorker, and The Brooklyn Rail.

Bianca Severijns

Born 1964 in Ramot HaShavin, Israel. Lives and works in Tel Aviv, Israel.

"At first glance Severijns' works appear to be intricate ceramics vases, elegant woven tapestries or complex extruded paintings, but the works are actually constructed of paper. The basis of the works is Severijns' examination of the basic needs of displaced people: carpet, blanket and vessels. By creating these objects out of a readily available material—paper—she creates metaphors between the material and the person. Paper is vulnerable and fragile, much as a displaced person may feel, but with certain care and building they both can become strong."

Artwork Image: Scratched | Protective Blanket Series on model, 2018. Hand-torn paper, konjac, acrylic, textile, thread. 72.5 x 59 x 3 in.

Stuart Hawkins

Born 1969 in Norfolk, VA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

1996 MFA, School of Visual Arts, New York, NY. 1992 BS, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT.

"Hawkins' paintings are eery and a bit unsettling. Symbolism abounds from lights at the end of a corridor to forks and knives to birds and frogs and the viewer is left to piece together meaning. The more I looked the more exciting the works felt with layered, hazy surfaces they became a puzzle I wanted to figure out, but would be just as thrilled if I could keep guessing the answer."

Artwork Image: Little Dipper, 2017. Oil on paper. 26 x 24 in.

Alexandra Baumgartner

Born 1973 in Vienna, Austria. Lives and works in Vienna, Austria.

2004 Diploma, University of Applied Arts Vienna.

"Baumgartner uses found photographs and objects to create new images and sculpture. The use of existing images in a new context forces the viewer to confront their own existence, questioning ‘What will my legacy be? How will I be remembered? Did my existence matter?’, as they look at Baumgartner’s anonymous portraits. Baumgartner’s works are elegant in mainly black and white palettes that riff on historical representations of the body and self within a modernist aesthetic."

Artwork Image: The Weight, 2018. Oil on Canvas.

Frederick Janka

Frederick Janka is Executive Director of the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation, and has over fifteen years of experience as an administrator and curator in contemporary art museums and galleries. He was previously the Director of Development at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara and the Associate Director at SculptureCenter in New York, having also worked for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), contemporary art galleries, and as an independent curator. He received his BA in Visual and Critical Studies from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago.

Karen Jaimes

Lives and works in Peekskill, NY.

2020 MFA Candidate, SUNY New Paltz, New Paltz, NY. 2013 BFA, Manhattanville College, Purchase, NY.

"Jaimes’ ceramic sculptures speak to me of a dynamic Latinx experience through her playful riffs on Pre-Columbian vessels embellished with caricatures of what I imagine to be friends and family rather than animals as one might find in a museum. They are super funny, genuine, and smart. For me these contemporary artifacts celebrate the many incredibly dynamic and systematically oppressed cultures of the Americas."

Artwork Image: Mama Lopez, 2016. Buff Stoneware. 9 1/4 x 8 x 5 in.

Louise Glass

Born 1957, Akron, OH. Lives and works in Piermont, NH.

1984 MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI.

"Glass’ sculptural works to me evoke an abstracted human body through both form and a seductive surface texture. I enjoy her bulbous meet rectilinear forms, which are bisected, poked and prodded while exploring for the viewer the beauty in crevices, cracks, and fractures. Her works revel in the squishy, hard, fuzzy, hairy, and dry bits."

Artwork Image: Twins, 2013. Plaster cotton yarn, felted lama and alpaca wool. 10 x 24 x 38 in.

Desmond Lewis

Born 1993, Brentwood, TN. Lives and works between Nashville and Memphis, TN.

2017 MFA, University of Memphis, Memphis, TN.

"Lewis’ sculptures in concrete, steel, wood, and other base construction materials are clearly heightened by his intense physical labor. He seeks to celebrate the inherent value of black Americans in creating the country’s prosperity, those who are yet so excluded from many of the benefits of that labor. I find his works smart, sensual, and historically referential (in the best way), while vibrating with a raw immediacy that shows an incredible commitment to artmaking and indicative of a fruitful future."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2017. Carved Concrete and Forged Steel. 24 x 14 x 14 in.

Francisco Correa Cordero

Francisco Correa Cordero is the founder and director of the contemporary art space Lubov in Lower Manhattan, where exhibitions have been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Artforum, The Village Voice, V Magazine, and Office Magazine among more publications. He has collaborated on independent projects with White Columns, Recess, Silver Projects, Residency Unlimited, The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and apexart in New York, and with espace HIT in Geneva, Switzerland. He is also the executive coordinator at Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York.

Antone Könst

Born 1987. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

2014 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT. 2011 BFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, CA.

"Antone Könst’s whimsical and vibrant work features fantastical scenes, animals and other creatures interacting with, and sometimes merging into, their abstract environments. The works are product of personal mythologies; each suggesting a loose narrative with images culled “like sediment in a river bed”, as the artist explains, “floating” in the subconscious. The result is a language of symbols and characters moving and existing in multiple planes. Similarly as psychotherapy has long used drawing as instrument, Könst’s work is a way of processing his relationship with the outer world."

Artwork Image: Juggler, 2018. Oil on cast acrylic on canvas. 30 x 24 x 2 in.

Sarah Tortora

Born 1988 in New Haven, CT. Lives and works in New Haven, CT.

2013 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Phildelphia, PA. 2011 BS, Studio Art, Southern Connecticut State University, New Haven, CT.

"Sarah Tortora re-imagines the language of architecture, monuments and memorials to break down their symbolism for the viewer to put back together and reconstruct in their own terms. Flags, banners, allusions to horses and other containers of history and meaning are common subjects examined and dissected in Tortora’s sculptures. The works become playful reconfigurations that attempt to unearth deeper meaning about what they represent, and uncover how the way they are displayed plays a vital role in how they can be interpreted."

Artwork Image: Atlas, 2017. Plywood, wood composites, acrylic & latex paint 62 x 43 x 42 in.

Ian Waelder

Born 1993 in Madrid, Spain. Lives and works in Frankfurt, Germany.

2021 Meisterschüler Candidate, Städelschule, Frankfurt, Germany.

"Ian Waelder’s interest lies in how human life and inconspicuous activity is recorded in the objects around us. Pieces of linen with dirt, dozens of small scratches and smudges, probably accumulated after days or weeks of laying in the studio. Wooden boards with skid marks and footprints, possibly originally from the floor of a bar or a restaurant. Everything we do leaves something behind, which can take a variety of forms. Waelder collects these moments, discards and detritus as poetic artifacts and places them in new contexts where their memory can be reactivated."

Artwork Image: One Knee Misses the Other, 2018. Found rest of wooden chair, clay. 27 x 25 x 11 in.

Manon Slome

Manon Slome is co-founder and chief curator of No Longer Empty, an organization which engages audiences for contemporary art through site specific and community responsive exhibitions in non-traditional spaces throughout New York City. Since 2009, through some twenty-four exhibitions, the organization has harnessed the power of art to explore community narratives and key issues of social justice, collaborating and co-programming with local organizations, residents, and civic leaders to ensure relevance and highlight the cultural vibrancy and narratives of host neighborhoods. Manon recently co-curated Mel Chin’s 2018 project All Over the Place with Laura Raicovich, comprising an exhibition at the Queens Museum, public installations at Times Square and the Broadway-Lafayette Subway Station, and the downloadable Soundtrack.

Yasue Maetake

Born 1973 in Tokyo, Japan. Lives and works in Queens, New York.

2006 MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, New York.

"I am particularly drawn to the site specific nature of Yasue Maetake’s work as she investigates the properties of physical material. Maetake transforms raw material, such as industrial steel, resin, natural pulps, and wood, manipulating their breakdown and organic reconstitution. Drawing inspiration from a variety of traditions spanning Baroque sculpture to Mono-ha artists, Maetake’s forms depict the dynamics of life-like structures in relation to their surroundings. The paradoxes between freedom and physical boundary, levity and gravity, give Maetake’s work its potent strength."

Artwork Image: Easeled Idol II, 2017. Steel, animal bone. 36 x 12 x 18 in.

Arthur Huang

Born 1972 in Oakland, California. Lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.

2001 MFA, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

"I selected Arthur Huang’s work for its fine exploration of the everyday. Through photographs, lists, memory maps, and automatic drawings, Huang documents the ways in which his quotidian routine weaves into his unconscious memories. By honing in on the mundane activities that punctuate his daily life and our own - commutes, walks, grocery shopping, eating, and sleeping—the artist illuminates these often mindless meditations to reveal hidden perspectives on our lives as human beings that can give meaning in these troubling times."

Artwork Image: Daily Drawings Network, 2017. Ink, Paper, Acrylic. 114 x 259 x 275 in.

Joe Turpin

Born 1995 in Johannesburg, South Africa. Lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa.

2019 BFA Candidate, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

"Joe Turpin's work really resonates for me as someone with a history (albeit historical) of exile as he plumbs the depths of his personal history to inform his artistic practice. Reflecting on his family’s persecution as Jews in Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries and their subsequent migration to South Africa, the artist interrogates his own heritage and identity in relation to those of others. Turpin works across media to represent allegories, fables, and narratives born from the diverse environments in which he grew up, such as post-apartheid Johannesburg."

Artwork Image: The Piousness of Love in Immigration, 2018. Aerosol, oil stick, enamel on silk, ink on paper, lace, metal stands installation. 40 x 40 x 30 in.

Candice Allison

Candice Allison is a curator and writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. She is the Director of Bag Factory Artists’ Studios, a non-profit contemporary visual art organisation working at the intersection between South African and international artistic practice and discourse, offering artist studios, residencies, curatorial development, and exhibitions. She recently curated Kudzanai Chiurai’s solo exhibitions We Need New Names at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe, and Madness and Civilization at Goodman Gallery Cape Town; Kalmar konstmuseum, Sweden; and Södertälje konsthall, Stockholm. She holds an MA in Curating Contemporary Design from Kingston University London and is a PhD student at University of the Western Cape.

Natalia Forcada

Born 1981 in La Plata, Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. Lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

"Whether exploring body-object-sensory relationships; feminist activism; or beauty politics; Natalia Forcada’s whimsical mixed media works and playful performative/installations delight and provoke action. By bringing into focus the imperceptible rhythms and habits of daily life, the artist reveals the social and cultural conditioning that constricts us in our public and private interactions. Her works prod us to step back, ask candid questions, and reconnect with our self/awareness."

Artwork Image: Percussion for left leg (Prosthetics for musicians), 2017 Performative sculpture.

Sara Al Haddad

Born 1988 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Lives and works in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

2016 MFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD, United States (sponsored by US State Department as a Foreign Fulbright Grantee). 2011 BFA, Visual Communication, Graphic Design concentration, American University in Dubai (AUD), Dubai, United Arab Emirates.

"Unexpected juxtapositions of mixed media (concrete, nails and fragile embroidered thread), large scale textile installations, a restrained colour palette, and delicate watercolours expose the deeply personal emotions and experiences that inform Sara Al Haddad’s works. She simultaneously conveys the vulnerability and strength of navigating the complexities of human interactions and relationships, offering both solitude and solace in notions of quiet reflection, self-love and self-care."

Artwork Image: i am trying, 2018. Crocheted yarn.

Janet Taylor Pickett

Born 1948 in Pasadena, California. Lives and works in Pasadena, California.

1972 MFA, University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art and Design, Ann Arbor, Michigan. 1970 BFA, University of Michigan, Stamps School of Art and Design, Ann Arbor, Michigan.

"Janet Taylor Pickett’s works exist between the contemporary world she inhabits, and a history of image making spanning both European art in the late 1800s and feminist African American art from the mid- to late-1900s. Her boldly coloured works combine elements of painting, collage, assemblage and embroidery. The dress as a garment and archetype of female beauty is a thread that runs through many of her works, each one layered with feminine symbolism, multiple perspectives, and botanical accoutrements."

Artwork Image: Circe's Insouciance, 2018. Acrylic, collage, mixed media. 36 x 36 x 1 1/2 in.

Rachel Adams

Rachel Adams is the Chief Curator and Director of Programs at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts. Adams holds an MA in Exhibition and Museum Studies from the San Francisco Art Institute and a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her areas of research are varied but include a focus on the crossover between contemporary art and architecture, performance and video and new media practices. Recently, she curated Jillian Mayer: Timeshare, Ernesto Burgos: Implications, the group exhibition Light, Line, Color, Space and co-curated Introducing Tony Conrad: A Retrospective, the first exhibition of Tony Conrad’s work after the artist’s death at the UB Art Galleries with the Albright Knox Art Gallery.

Zoë Schneider

Born 1985 in Medicine Hat, Canada. Lives and works in Saskatchewan, Canada.

2018 MFA, University of Saskatchewan, Saskatoon, Canada

"Zoë Schneider’s work stood out because of its mixture of playful and grotesque. Her palette, materials and compositions allow for a somewhat humorous yet uncomfortable entry point into her critical examination of what she calls “fat identity.” In a world that is forever judging bodies, this work brings a critical eye to how hurtful and tumultuous that judgement is."

Artwork Image: Gallstones, 2018. Plaster, foam, macrame rope, powdered tempera.

Kate MacNeil

Born 1989 in Charleston, SC. Lives and works in Buffalo, NY.

2018 MFA, SUNY Buffalo, Buffalo, NY.

"Kate MacNeil intertwines a variety of media in order to examine themes including trauma, memory and loss. Through her performative mark-making, Kate imprints onto surfaces, using her body in ways to speak through the messiness of life. While recently working through confronting the silencing of traumatic events and mental health issues, Kate’s work is a powerful reminder that abstraction is an artistic tool that can speak volumes."

Artwork Image: Vicious Cycle, 2018. Performance with multi-media.

Cory Imig

Born 1986 in Kansas City, MO. Lives and works in Kansas City, MO.

2018 MFA, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Champaign, IL.

"Cory Imig’s work dynamically treads the line between two and three dimensions. Using simple, yet colorful materials including masking tape, ribbon, and ratchet straps, her work plays with architecture, form and how bodies respond to their environments. Through interventions she deems “site-sensitive,” she aims to alter her viewers’ perception and experience of space by creating new relationships that change over the time of their installation as they eventually respond to gravity."

Artwork Image: Orange Stick II (41.8441 N, 41.4382 W), 2017. Masking tape, found sticks. 144 x 432 x 16 in.

Pauli Ochi

Pauli Ochi runs contemporary art galleries in Los Angeles, California and Sun Valley, Idaho. Ochi is committed to working closely with emerging and mid-career artists offering programming that strives to engage audiences and foster dialogue around contemporary art.

Alison Causer

Born 1982 in Toledo, OH. Lives and works in New York, NY.

2021 MFA Candidate, New York Studio School, New York, NY. 2005 BFA, Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH.

"Alison Causer’s paintings hover somewhere between abstraction and landscape, occasionally hinting at figuration. They engage color and gesture with a bold palette and marked energy. Though it’s not wholly logical, her paintings employ a distinct sense of depth that draws the eye into the center of the image, and once you’ve arrived there her seductive use of color holds your attention."

Artwork Image: Eden, 2018. Oil on canvas. 54 x 70 x 2 in.

Joe Sobel

Born 1986 in Las Vegas, NV. Lives and works in Paris, France.

2012 MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI. 2010 BFA, Northern Michigan University, Marquette, MI.

"Joe Sobel’s background in photography clearly informs the way he carefully considers composition. Additionally, he seems to be interested in experimenting with contextualizing varying materials, incorporating industrial and synthetic mediums with things like packing supplies, to create objects that exist as both paintings and sculptures. And his use of color, combined with the way he layers these materials, possesses a charmingly self-aware sense of humor."

Artwork Image: Untitled, 2019. Acrylic paint, lacquer, acrylic, polyurethane foam. 16 x 20 x 10 in.

Heather Lee Birdsong

Born 1984, Spring Valley, NV. Lives and works in Portland, OR.

2011 BFA Pacific Northwest College of Art, Portland, OR.

"Heather Lee Birdsong’s paintings play with the idea of space in a surreal and narrative manner, blending folk tales, mythology, geometric abstraction and magical realism. I’m interested in how the geometric shapes she renders enter and exit seemingly varied picture planes. Paired with her unique use of color, these shapes collide and coalesce with strange landscapes in ways that suggest an underlying story."

Artwork Image: A Wary Approach, 2019. Gouache on paper. 10 x 10 in.

Yulia Topchiy

Yulia Topchiy is an independent curator and co-founder of Assembly Room, a platform for independent women curators located in lower Manhattan. Originally from Russia, Yulia has spent sixteen years in New York working for commercial galleries, auction houses, art fairs, and non–profits before launching her curatorial debut with CoWorker Projects. Yulia works with emerging and established artists and collaborates with galleries, non–profits, and independent curators on special projects and exhibitions. Until recently Yulia served as Senior Gallery Relations at Artsy and participated in several Artsy Projects initiatives.

Mark Starling

Born 1987, Harlem, Georgia. Lives and Works between Brooklyn, New York and Georgia.

2014 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. 2011 BFA, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia.

"I am drawn to Mark’s use of unusual material for his work such as casket lids (Untitled, 2016) where he continues his investigation of funerary presentation and the related themes of time, comfort, anxiety, and the mourning process as the ritual for closure. The artist grew up above his family’s funeral home in Harlem, Georgia, and involves this biography and maker’s sensibility into these meditations on death and renewal."

Artwork Image: Semi Sweet Solace, 2017. Oreo cookies, dye, clay, resin, oil paint, oil stick, acrylic, wax, colored pencil, polyurethane, glass beads, epoxy putty and iridescent powder on steel casket lid. 55 x 28 x 7 in.

Suchitra Mattai

Born 1973. Lives and works in Denver, Colorado.

2003 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.

"Suchitra Mattai's work is a network of experiences of an artist spending years in Guyana, South America, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Philadelphia, New York City, Minneapolis, and Udaipur, India. Such diverse, natural, and cultural environments have greatly influenced her work and research. She examines the complex relationship between the natural and artificial worlds, questioning of historical and authoritative narratives, especially those surrounding colonialism. I love the wide range vocabulary of materials used in her sculptures and installations; fiber, drawing, collage, ropes, and common objects, they all intertwine well with the space creating fractured landscapes for the viewer to dive in."

Artwork Image: Bound, 2018. Found objects, rope, graphite. 60 x 60 x 72 in.

Sophie Eisner

Born 1985, New York, New York. Lives and works in Detroit, Michigan.

2015 MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

"Sophie’s works are visually inviting, minimal, and exquisite. Her colors are soft, feminine, and translucent and there is a fragile component to her work. I love how she uses very utilitarian objects in her work like basins and explores the intimate and physical purpose of them in her work and in the space, flirting in the subjective realm of emotional narrative."

Artwork Image: Betty, 2017. Cast silicone with pigment, fiber board, paint. 11 x 10.75 x 7 in.

Paulina Bebecka

Paulina Bebecka is Director-at-Large of Postmasters Gallery, New York, which she joined in January, 2008. Bebecka is currently based in Rome where she started the nomadic branch of the gallery—PostmastersROMA—in November, 2017. She holds a Master's degree from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, London and a BA in economics from the American University of Paris.

Sandra Baía

Born 1968, Lisbon, Portgual. Lives and works in Lisbon.

"Sandra Baía's large public works defy gravity as well as common sense. Powerful and to the point, her works remind us of the fragility of our existence and at the same time poking fun by distorting the reflection we see once confronted with her large mirrored steel works."

Artwork Image: Entalada, 2018. Mirror Stainless Steel. 118 x 118 x 118 in.

Matthew Brooks

Born Winnipeg, Canada. Lives and works in Montreal, Canada.

2019 MFA Candidate, Concordia University, Montreal, Canada.

"Matthew Brooks is tipping his hat to Ed Ruscha in portraying North American industrial architecture, especially that of gas stations and fast food joints. When you spend a second longer viewing the photographs, you notice the distinction of the contemporary landscape within the images, the eeriness and particularity of the structures itself, and you begin to settle in the theatrical discomfort it creates within you."

Artwork Image: Dairi-Wip Drive-In, 2017. Digital C-print. 50 x 62 x 3 in.

Angela Fraleigh

Born 1976, Salt Point, New York. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2003 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, Connecticut. 1998 BFA, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts.

"Angela Fraleigh’s large scale paintings, in which borrowed figures from centuries past lie between the matrix-like abstraction remind us that nothing has changed for centuries; people are people with their worries, desires, sorrows, ambitions, mystique, and corporeal fragility."

Artwork Image: Between tongue and teeth, 2016. Oil, acrylic and marker on canvas. 90 x 90 x 2 in.

Ruslana Lichtzier

Born in Siberia, Russia, and raised in Israel, Ruslana Lichtzier is a curator, writer, and educator. Her background as a migrant propels cultural productions that aim to nest radical imagination of difference and change. Recent productions include the large-scale exhibitions The Dangerous Professors, Chicago Edition, and Houston Edition. Lichtzier is the Director of the Jewish Artist Fellowship, at Spertus, Institute for Jewish Learning and Leadership. She also wrote for numerous exhibitions and catalogs, as well as for The Seen Magazine (EXPO Chicago) and other publications. Until recently, Lichtzier Co-Directed the project space Triumph, Chicago and Triumph School Manual Project, Triumph, Illinois.

Danielle Rosen

Born 1988, Iron Mountain, Michigan. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

2013 MFA, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

"Danielle Rosen’s work tells us stories that are crowded with strange encounters; animals and nail polish; furs, salt and deer fencing. The potpourri objects communicate long, and ancient (or invented) rituals, that are aside from commodified marketability. Fetishistic, but at times loose, they are both precious and punk, Baroque style Kathy Acker."

Artwork Image: QUEER DIETY X, 2017. Cast Bronze with YSL Nail Polish. 31 x 13 x 3 in.

Lior Modan

Born 1983, Tel Aviv, Israel. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2013 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. 2009 BFA, Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, Israel.

"Lior Modan’s paintings and objects behave in this magical way, that despite them being completely still, they shimmer, mutate and transform in front of you. Some works can make you laugh, if you can follow a joke that is wild and brushes with madness. Other works can cause physical reactions, specifically, a loss of balance, or the capability to focus. At times, it may seem like the works are mute, but they speak languages that you have never heard of, yet."

Artwork Image: Therese, 2016. Steel, resin, acrylic, wood, epoxy putty, velvet. 69 x 53 x 2 in.

Will Douglas

Born 1988, Chesapeke, Virginia. Lives and works in Tampla, Florida.

2018 MFA, University of South Florida, Tampa, Florida. 2012 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

"We may read Will Douglas’ work as romanticism turned inwards; this will be a misconception. The work presents poiesis that is made of history ground to MDF. In that, it opens up a discourse that is rough and cool—in terms of temperature and humor—while it is also self-reflective."

Artwork Image: American Exchange (Berlin), 2017. Archival inkjet print, led, insulation foam, and OSB. 40 x 30 x 4 in.

Becca Hoffman

Becca Hoffman is Director of the Outsider Art Fair, New York and Paris, and the former Director of Andrew Edlin Gallery, New York, one of the foremost galleries representing self-taught and so-called outsider artists. Hoffman is also a Foundwork Advisor. She remarks that "for my selections on Foundwork, I was inspired by the theme of my personal art collection—text based art. I find the intersection of the written word and visual artistic creation to embody the perfect balance of predictability and unpredictability. The dance between these two creative media has always struck my fancy—it inherently pushes the viewer's eye and brain to function on many distinct cylinders. Each of the three artists I have chosen combine text and artistic creation into diverse commentaries on our current climate."

Gabrielle Senza

Lives and works between the Berkshire Mountains, Massachusetts, and Berlin, Germany.

"Senza’s works are spot-on ephemeral and poetic commentaries on the current socio, political, economic, and cultural state of the world. They are delicate engagements in the service of furthering the global conversation—whether it's her Invisibility Lab jar where whispered names of things are stored or the personal tracing of hands which goes hand-in-hand with a sense of inherent interactive engagement of the self as viewed from the interior or exterior; her performative and text based works inspire the viewer to step back, evaluate, and reflect."

Artwork Image: Invisibility Lab: Specimen Jars, 2017. Glass jars, labels, texts, invisible things.

Chase Ferguson

Born 1988. Lives and works in New York, NY.

Represented by Pure Vision Arts, New York

"I love Chase’s transformation on an intimate scale of everyday vehicles—one part whimsy, one part social documentary. Whether it is a fire truck or a New York City taxi, looking at the works of Chase Ferguson, you feel as though you can hear the siren roaring in the background or the Taxi Tv screen—these sculptures truly come to life, a reflection of the 21st century society."

Artwork Image: Mac Cab Forward Tower Ladder, 2017. Mixed Media. 5 x 15 x 3 in.

Ilknur Demirkoparan

Born 1978, Ankara, Turkey. Lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

2006 MFA, California Institute of the Arts, Valencia, California.

"Although hard to discern, I love how the subject hair becomes deconstructed Arabic text—self portraits exploring notions of identity, femininity, gender roles, the dynamic and distinctions between Eastern and Western cultures—a true window into contemporary Middle East and North African culture and female struggles. Demirkoparan manages to walk an elegant line between playful societal commentary and more weighty conversations of the role of gender identity in the 21st century."

Artwork Image: Hair Is A Woman's Glory (No: 1), 2018. Digital. Giclee on Cotton Rag. 24 x 42.72 x 0 in. Edition of 10.

Helen Toomer

Helen Toomer is the Co-Founder and Artistic Director of STONELEAF RETREAT, a residency and creative space focused on supporting womxn and families. Helen is also the founder of Upstate Art Weekend in New York which she launched in 2020. Previously, Helen was Executive Director of Artists in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE) and Director of PULSE Contemporary Art Fair and Collective Design Fair. Before that she used to run a gallery on New York's lower east side, toomer labzda, whose program focused on emerging artists.

Lilian Kreutzberger

Born 1984, Middelburg, Netherlands. Lives and works between Brooklyn, New York, and Amsterdam, Netherlands.

2013 MFA, Parsons School of Design, New York, NY. 2007 BFA, Royal Academy of Fine Arts, The Hague, Netherlands.

"The materiality of Lilian's work intrigues me. I like the way she disrupts the notions of recognizable surfaces, such as marble, with digital interventions and creates new forms and objects that I'd love to see in person."

Artwork Image: n.t., 2018. Digital photo of marble transferred onto plaster, wooden frame. 24 x 28 in.

Katya Grokhovsky

Born 1977, Odessa, Ukraine. Lives and works in New York, New York.

2011 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 2007 BFA, Victorian College of the Arts, Melbourne, Australia.

"I really like the look of Katya's performances, sculptures, and installations and am interested to learn further about how she uses her body through these mediums to explore notions of labor, gender, and the displacement of self."

Artwork Image: Utopia 16000, 2015. Found objects, acrylic, plaster, chair, thread, banners, performance.

Leah Dyjak

Born 1981, Provincetown, Massachusetts. Lives and works in Provincetown, Massachusetts.

2015 MFA, University of Texas, Austin. BFA, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, Massachusetts.

"I'm intrigued by Leah's photographs and the way she presents water deconstructing the urban landscape and structures we normally take for granted. It reminds me that we are at the mercy of nature."

Artwork Image: Basalt, 2017. Photography. 40 x 50 in.

Tod Lippy

Tod Lippy is the Founding Editor of ESOPUS, the non-profit annual arts publication that provides a multidisciplinary platform to a wide range of artists, from the emerging and self-taught to established figures in post-war and contemporary art. Tod is also a curator and in addition to mounting numerous exhibitions and events in connection with ESOPUS, has organized exhibitions at venues including White Columns, New York, and Pioneer Works, Brooklyn. Lippy is also a Foundwork Advisor.

Siman Meng

Born 1995, Shenzen, China. Lives and works in Chicago, Illinois.

2018 BFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois.

"The work Siman Meng has shared on her Foundwork page is compelling—so compelling, in fact, it requires little text or background info to garner my interest. What Meng is up to in the works shown here is something worth keeping an eye on. Her photos and collages betray a sophisticated eye, a playfulness, and, most importantly, a coherent vision. I am very curious to see where she goes next with her work after her graduation from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago this year."

Artwork Image: Uhaul, 2017. Inkjet Print. 16 x 20 in.

Sharon Levy

Born 1976, Atlanta, Georgia. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

2007 MFA, University of California, San Diego. 1999 BA, Bard College, Annendale-on-Hudson, New York.

"This work intrigues and excites me—Levy seems to flow effortlessly between 3-D sculptural installations and works on paper, and her desire to instill a childlike “sense of wonder” into her practice is certainly being fulfilled in the works of hers I saw on Foundwork. Her art—especially the 12 prints in the Blinds series—blends abstraction and figuration in a rigorous, yet poetic, way. It’s a potent combination, and I’m eager to see how she’s wielding it in her latest work."

Artwork Image: The Wood, 2007. Mixed media. 120 x 144 x 192 in. Installation at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, California.

Bill O'Donnell

Born 1952, Providence, Rhode Island. Lives and words in Bloomington, Illinois.

1987 MFA, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois. 1978 BA, The Union Institute.

"There are whispers of the work of other photographers, such as James Casebere or David Levinthal, in that of Bill O'Donnell, but those similarities are superficial. His photographs—particular those in the “Solid and Space” series—are very much their own thing. O’Donnell talks about the importance of mining the “quirky mind/body relationship between eyesight and memory” (a rich subject for any photographer), and this series, in particular, explores that rich territory in surprising and rewarding ways."

Artwork Image: Cube, 2017. Archival Pigment Print. 14 x 21 in.

Manuela Paz

Manuela Paz is the Director of Development and Strategic Planning at Independent Curators International (ICI), an organization that produces exhibitions and develops collaborative networks of curators, artists, and other practitioners in diverse settings worldwide. Manuela is also Co-Founder and Director of EMBAJADA, a gallery in San Juan where she works with emerging and mid-career artists from Puerto Rico and abroad. Before joining ICI, Manuela was Membership Director for the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA). Paz is also a Foundwork Advisor.

Marisa Finos

Born 1985. Lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.

2014 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia. 2007 BFA, University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, North Dartmouth, Massachusetts.

"I am drawn to the vessels and structures Finos is creating as a set for her performances about the body. The structures are reminiscent of ancestral tombs, and I appreciate their organic materiality. Marisa's practice also has an affinity with the great Ana Mendieta's work about the body and landscape, life and death."

Artwork Image: Thaw, 2017. Snow, Ice, body heat. Performance documentation.

Sacha Ingber

Born 1987, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

2013 MFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

"Sacha Ingber creates fantastical architecture with her sculptural wall works that invite one's imagination to daydream. I like how unique the work is, hovering between sculpture, painting and craft."

Artwork Image: Seven Skins, 2016. Urethane, alabaster, glazed ceramic, pigment, fillers. 23.75 x 38.75 x 0.5 in.

Jeffrey Augustine Songco

Born 1983, New Jersey. Lives and works in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

2011 MFA, San Francisco Art Institute, San Francisco, California. 2005 BFA, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

"Jeffrey describes his work as having a postcolonial queer narrative. As a gay American man of Filipino ethnicity, he has a unique point of reference that he articulates in a way that is at once playful and political."

Artwork Image: Society of 23's Locker Dressing Room, 2017. Mixed-media installation. 240 x 240 x 96 in.

Dewitt Godfrey

DeWitt Godfrey is an artist and educator based in Hamilton, New York, where he is a Professor of Art & Art History at Colgate University. DeWitt is also a former Board President of the College Art Association and is committed to the rethinking of artists' training, support networks, and modes of dissemination. DeWitt maintains an active studio practice and his work has been exhibited through numerous public and private commissions across the United States, and can be found in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Brooklyn Museum. Godfrey is also a Foundwork Advisor.

Brant Ritter

Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Lives and works in Los Angeles, California.

1999 MFA, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. BA, Architecture, Lehigh University, Bethlehem, PA.

"Brant Ritter's constructions and drawings The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good occupy a place where the precisely made parts fail to line up, their meticulous execution belying organizational failure; the work of a novice apprentice who hopes that a dazzling presentation will distract from their imprecision. In the series Slide, what appear to be carefully placed marks are uniformly smeared, glitch aesthetics elevated to controlled process; we recognize a part of a face, fingerprints in an effort to restore a lost order."

Artwork Image: Perfect is the Enemy of the Good, No. 4, hexagon, 2018. Plywood, pegboard, brass ferrules, paint. 54 x 48 x 1/4 in.

Holly Fischer

Born 1976, Missoula, Montana. Lives and works in Raleigh, North Carolina.

2004 MFA, University of Texas—Austin; 1999 BA, Meredith College, Raleigh, North Carolina.

"Holly Fischer's ceramic works quote the labial, folded geometries of anemones and shellfish but squeezed through a baroque distortion algorithm, their menacing tendrils peeking out between floridly ornamental petals. Like Ken Price's work, the hard glazed surfaces become sensuous, soft and fluid; both imbued with and apart from the natural world."

Artwork Image: Odalisque, 2016. Ceramic. 31 x 20 x 18 in. Coil constructed from white earthenware.

Dameon Lester

Born 1973, Concord, North Carolina. Lives and works in Austin, Texas.

2000 MFA, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. 1995 BFA, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, Virginia.

"Dameon Lester abstracts geologic and glacial peculiarities, complex topographies approximated as mesh polysurfaces; reduced, simplified till they resemble the micro-crystals that make up the macro-phenomenon. These shards are further complicated in their material construction, color and texture; dark and light, shiny and matte, paper and plywood, their individual faces failing to join in a complete whole. The works are at once familiar, from their post-minimalist precedents to the consistency of their digital origins, but difficult to read."

Artwork Image: Mass Balance, 2016. Abatron wood epoxy, acrylic paint, Aqua resin, brad nails, fiberglass tape, matte varnish, MDF, primer, plywood, repurposed vintage printing press paper (from the Witte Museum, San Antonio, TX), Talas Jade 403 PVA adhesive. 78 x 43 x 39 in.