Positive/Negative 39 Curated by Michelle Fisher, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston February 12 – March 8 at Slocumb Galleries East Tennessee State University 325 Treasure Lane Johnson City, TN 37614
Positive/Negative 39 exhibition will be held from February 12 to March 8, 2024 at the Slocumb Galleries. A juried exhibition is a survey of diverse, creative, innovative and excellent examples of contemporary art created in the American South.
Luna (Debris from a Lunar Paraphrase) 2020 Mother Mold cast of Catherine of Liberty City in domestic construction materials 36.5 x 34.75 x 13.25
About the Juror:
Michelle Millar Fisher is currently the Ronald C. and Anita L. Wornick Curator of Contemporary Decorative Arts at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Her work focuses on the intersections of people, power, and the material world. At the MFA, she is working on her next project, “Craft Schools: Where We Make What We Inherit” which took her on a train journey across all 48 contiguous US states, as well as the upcoming contemporary collection reinstallation called “Tender Loving Care.” As part of an independent team, she leads “Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births,” a book, touring exhibition, and series of programs. Find it on Instagram at @designingmotherhood. The recipient of an MA and an M.Phil in Art History from the University of Glasgow, Scotland, she received an M.Phil from and is currently completing her doctorate in art history at The Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is widely published, and has received numerous fellowships, including from the Pew, Sachs, and Graham Foundations, and DAAD. Previously, she was The Louis C. Madeira IV Assistant Curator of European Decorative Arts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art where she co-organized “Designs for Different Futures” in 2019. From 2014-2018 she was a Curatorial Assistant at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where she co-organized, among other exhibitions, “Design and Violence” and “Items: Is Fashion Modern?” In 2010-11, she was a research intern in Arms & Armor at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In 2011, she co-founded ArtHistoryTeachingResources.org, a Kress Foundation-funded project now used in over 185 countries. In 2019, she co-founded Art + Museum Transparency, home to the Salary Transparency Spreadsheet. She was part of the 2022 fellow cohort at the Center for Curatorial Leadership.
The Slocumb Galleries are educational exhibition venues of the Department of Art & Design under the College of Arts and Sciences at East Tennessee State University.
Our Mission is to develop creative excellence, foster collaborations, promote inclusivity and encourage critical thinking by providing access to and serving as inclusive platforms for innovative ideas and diverse exhibitions. The Slocumb Galleries promote the understanding, presentation and appreciation of contemporary art in support of the academic experiences and the cultural development of the region, through collaborative programming with various units and community institutions.
Karlota I. Contreras-Koterbay is an Appalachian-based Filipinx curator, artist advocate and arts administrator. She is gallery director for the ETSU Slocumb Galleries and its satellite venue in Downtown Johnson City, Tipton Gallery. She has organized and curated numerous exhibits both nationally and abroad, juried regional exhibitions and has lectured in the Philippines, Japan and the United States. Contreras-Koterbay graduated with honors from the University of the Philippines with a B.A. in anthropology and an M.A. in art history. She is former director of the MidSouth Sculpture Alliance, and member of the IKT International Association of Contemporary Art Curators, International Council of Museums, Southeastern College Art Conference, and International Association of Aesthetics. Grant recipient of the Tennessee Arts Commission APS and ABC grants, Hope in Action and Arts Fund of East Tennessee Foundation, Tennessee Craft and SouthArts as well as the Andy Warhol Legacy grant. Contreras-Koterbay received the ETSU Distinguished Staff Award in 2013 and the Jan Phillips Mentoring Award in 2015. She is Director of the Crafting Blackness Initiative, a five year collaborative research, publication and exhibition series to advance the visibility of Black Craft and African American artists in Tennessee since 1920 up to present. Her BIPOC and diversity art proigramming received numerous awards from the Tennessee Assocation of Museums (TAM).
Cornelius Tulloch, visual mockup for Poetics of Place (2023) installation at Locust Projects.COURTESY THE ARTIST
As the latest edition of Art Basel Miami Beach touches down in South Florida this week, local galleries and artist-run spaces have put on a visual feast across Miami, claiming their space as a self-standing arts ecosystem and beacon in its own right. These shows are unique to Miami, ranging from major showcases for Caribbean, Latinx, and Black artists to exhibitions on some of the city’s most pressing issues like rising real estate prices and climate gentrification crisis. Some of these local gems are on the mainland, and further away from Miami Beach, so less traffic is guaranteed.
Here is a brief glimpse of five of the city’s most exciting local shows to see during Art Basel Miami Beach, as well as several honorable mentions.
“Making Miami” in Design District
Antonia Wright and Ruben Millares, Patria y Vida, 2022, part of “Making Miami” sculpture garden.
Photo : Courtesy the artists and Spinello Projects
There continues to be an outsider narrative about Miami’s art history beginning when Art Basel first arrived in 2002. Part exhibition, permanent digital archive, and book, “Making Miami,” curated by Katerina Llanes and produced by Vivek Jayaram, aims to challenge this narrative. Some of Miami’s longest-running nonprofit spaces date back to the 1980s and ’90s: Locust Projects, Dimensions Variable, Bass Fisher Invitational, and Diaspora Vibe have long showcased the artists who made Miami’s arts community and helped shaped the city. Focusing on the period between 1996 and 2012, and featuring some 50 Miami-based artists, the exhibition, has five distinct parts in a 20,000-square-foot lot in the heart of the Design District.
Artists have re-created and rebuilt 4 of these artist-run or nonprofit gallery spaces that are still standing strong. Each gallery will curate their own shows of Miami artists from a specific era. An outdoor sculpture garden will feature large works by artists such as Jen Stark, Friends With You, and Daniel Arsham’s Snarkitecture. The accompanying book contains about 90 conversations with artists, curators, gallery owners, collectors, and others who were active during that period.
December 6–December 26, in Miami’s Design District, at 75 NE 39th St, Miami.
“Bridge Deconstruction Site” at The Wolfsonian–FIU
Loni Johnson, 5:31 Sundown Procession (performance still), at the Wolfsonian-FIU, as part of “Bridge Deconstruction Site.”
Photo : Photo Diana Larrea
Jim Crow–era zoning laws once divided Miami, and Black people could only access Miami Beach to work but had to leave by nightfall. Multidisciplinary artist Loni Johnson, who was born and raised in Miami, sees her work as creating space for self-realization and dialogue that honors Black women and ancestors through rituals, silence, beauty, and song. Her performance, 5:31 Sundown Procession, honored a century of Black service workers who passed through Miami Beach, never being able to claim that space as their own. The gathering on December 1 met at the beach and processed into the the Wolfsonian’s Bridge Tender House building, where Johnson activated a high-spirited altar, followed by a panel. 5:31 Sundown Procession is part of an ongoing series of projects titled “Bridge Deconstruction Site,” organized by Department of Reflection, a Miami artist collective that creates art in public spaces founded by Misael Soto.
Through February 4, 2024, at The Wolfsonian–FIU, 1001 Washington Avenue, Miami Beach.
“Reginald O’Neal: And I Think to Myself” at Spinello Projects
Reginald O’Neal The Entertainer, 2022.
Photo : Courtesy the artist and Spinello Projects
Miami-based painter Reginald O’Neal’s solo show at Spinello Projects comes hand in hand with his participation in ABMB’s Meridians section, for larger-scaled projects. Growing up in Overtown, Miami’s historically African American neighborhood, O’Neal has painted murals and artworks about how incarceration impacts the families of those incarcerated and the overpolicing of Black communities across the US. O’Neil’s art has a specific and unique texture that resembles bodies at nightfall, half-lit rooms, and the intimacy and vulnerability of tight-knit relationships. There is a fading effect in some of his paintings, which are full of emotion if one looks closely. “Painting found me,” O’Neal, who was an artist in residence at the Rubell Museum in 2021, has said.
Taking its name from a line in Louis Armstrong’s song “What a Wonderful World,” O’Neal’s exhibition, “And I Think to Myself,” reckons with modern and past struggles. O’Neal frames Blackness in all its humanity and simultaneously as it is stripped off through contemporary commodification. Video stills of a Louis Armstrong performance, a large-scale bouquet of cotton, several ceramic jazz player figurines, the shadows of half-light rooms, and shiny and sticky visual textures become a visual path toward this young artist’s reckoning with his own experiences, culture, and history.
On view December 4, 2023–January 13, 2024, at Spinello Projects, 2930 NW 7th Ave, Miami.
A.I.M Biennial
Michiko Kurisu, No great distant day, Delray Beach, FL, 2023.
Photo : Courtesy the artist
Get ready to see less commercial and more underground art popping up everywhere across the city. The artist list is chock-full of Miami magic: Charles Humes Jr, Onakide Shabaka, Najja Moon, Sonia-Baez Hernandez, and more. Founded by the artist william cordova and organized this year with Gean Moreno, Marie Vickles, and Amy Rosenblum-Martin, the A.I.M Biennial will feature 56 site-specific installations spread across South Florida, as well as other cities around the world.
In Florida, don’t miss VantaBlack’s To What Lengths activation, reflecting on legacy building and preservation as foundational to Black and diasporic culture, or a solo show for Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, an Indigenous Colombian American artist who has been exploring embodied motherhood for years. Likewise, out in the Everglades, approximately an hour’s drive from Miami Beach, the exhibition “Our Future’s Heritage,” curated by Voices of the River of Grass, a collective of Indigenous artists of Florida, stands as a powerful testament to the rich tapestry of Indigenous culture and heritage in the city with 13 artists displaying works.
“VantaBlack: To What Lengths,” at the outdoor plaza of Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami (MOCA). Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, at 3225 NW 8th Ave, Miami. “Our Future’s Heritage,” at 500 US Hwy 41, Miami. On view through January 14, 2014, at various venues throughout Miami and elsewhere. Specifics are detailed in the accompanying online catalogue.
“Cornelius Tulloch: Poetics of Place” at Locust Projects
Cornelius Tulloch, visual mockup for Poetics of Place (2023) installation at Locust Projects.
Photo : Courtesy the artist
A community space of nourishment that is fading in Miami, and across the US, is the front porch. As cities like Miami continue to be gentrified, and real estate developers continues to demolish older homes and replace them with luxury buildings or modern builds, the porch is quickly becoming an architectural feature of the past. “People and artists who had to move from Miami will come back to activate the space,” Tulloch told ARTnews of his project that will be activated this week. Through projection, video, photography, collage, performance, and architectural interventions, this exhibition will transform the gallery’s project room into the porch of a left-standing Miami home.
Tulloch focuses on space, presence, and absence and wants to recognize the history of vacant spaces in Miami, along with the history of walls and divisive infrastructure. His work opens dialogues about architectural language, Black and Caribbean aesthetics, and color palettes that make Miami what it is—but which are being slowly erased by continuous development and gentrification.
December 5, 2023–February 10, 2024, at Locust Projects, 297 NE 67th St, Miami.
Honorable Mentions
Jonathan Carela’s BAUTIZO DE FULACALETA (2023) will feature in “Hormiga Caribe” at Homework Gallery.
Photo : Courtesy the artist and Homework Gallery
Green Space Miami’s group show “DISplace” will feature 10 emerging artists exploring the theme of displacement and what home, identity, and resilience mean in Miami.
At Tunnel Projects, a small room in a basement parking lot in Little Havana, artist and architect Cornelius Tulloch (see his Locust Projects show above) will curate the group show “Woven Ecologies,” centered on the enmeshed relationship between humanity and Miami’s built and natural environments.
Artist-run space Collective 62 will present “Archipelagic Narratives of Female Metamorphosis,” curated by art historian Aldeide Delgado. The show is an ode to Miami’s diaspora, honoring life rituals, fantastical imagery, natural environments, and political bodies guiding transformation and change.
The Historic Hampton House in Brownsville will explore the meaning of refuge and congregation with the exhibition “Gimme Shelter,” curated by ARTnews Top 200 Collector Beth Rudin DeWoody, Zoe Lukov, Maynard Monrow, and Laura Dvorkin.
At Miami Beach’s Regional Library, “The Vasari Project”will trace Miami’s art history from the 1970s to the present, while also exploring new perspectives in the archives with a lineup of artists and photographers.
“Hormiga Caribe” at Homework Gallery, an experimental art space, will feature the work of several Caribbean artists whose work is a testament to the spirit of Miami.
And don’t miss “Sydney Maubert’s “Queen of the Swamp,” an installation at AIRIE Nest Gallery that acknowledges Miami’s Bahamian history and its vital ties to the cultural geography of Caribbean and Southern aesthetics, its second activation at Greenspace, Miami.
3225 NW 8th Ave Allapattah Miami FL 33127 Reception Fri Dec 8 2023 11am – 2pm On view December 1 2023 – January 4 2024
FREE & open to public unlimited RSVP on Eventbrite
Nesting voyeurs within a verdant Foliage Obscura retablo from artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s multidisciplinary Mama Spa Botanica collaborative project (2007-present), Lenguas Espinas Descolumnas reflects the neon rituals, fertile flora, vulnerable fauna and endangered activists vibrating in Queer, Latinx and Caribbean diaspora immigrant communities in America. A tropical sanctuary installation of Mother Mold monuments at the Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum in Allapattah Miami FL for AIM Biennial and Linea Negra photographs at Prizm Art Fair during Miami Art Week 2023, illuminates full spectrum cultural care from Indigenous American mummification rituals from the Andes to Caribbean fertility effigies of the Caribbean preserved by Miami matriarchs. The Mama Spa Botanica documents in Mother Mold sculpture, Linea Negra photography and immersive Foliage Obscura retablos, conflicting reproductive health and climate crisis in America where LGBTQIA+BIPOC pregnant people are dying at 10x the rate of white women birthing in Miami hospitals. Fertility effigies are monuments to survivors made by, of and for diasporic families in agency building workshops lead by matriarchs, doulas, historians, herbalists, midwives, griots, quipucamayocs, educators, archivists, advocates & environmental activists. The Mama Spa Botanica workshop builds civic agency, restores dignity to under-resourced yet unvanquished colorful communities in a co-creative photography and pregnancy casting process. Transgressing violent American statutes and deadly statistics with vibrant fertility effigy statues; the works critique structural violence in American mythology while celebrating ancestral life cycle traditions that preserve and restore social habitats to historically redlined communities hovering above tidelines. Artist Coralina Rodriguez Meyer’s social justice practice in collaboration with full spectrum Doula/Griot Nicky Dawkins (Menstrual Market, Period Miami, Southern Birth Justice Network) delivers lifesaving reproductive healthcare and matriarchal interdependence strategies through cultural advocacy and direct-action community organizing on the front lines of democratic fertility in America. Linea Negra photographs are on view at Prizm Art Fair at Omni Building 1501 Biscayne Boulevard Miami and Mother Mold monuments are on view at Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum 3225 NW 8 ave Allapattah Miami Dec 5-10 2023 10am – 5pm during Miami Art Week.
ARTIST BIO Born in a car in an Everglades swamp, and raised Tinkuy (queer) between a rural US Southern immigrant neighborhood and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andinx (Colombian Muisca/Peruvian Inca), Brooklyn and Miami-based Quipucamayoc artist, architect, activist. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, Coralina has collaborated with reproductive justice and climate leaders working across disciplines including architecture, activism, archives, education, documentary sculpture and moving images. She studied painting at MICA and anthropology at Hopkins and holds a BFA in Architecture from Parsons and MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College. Rodriguez Meyer received awards from National Latino Arts & Culture, Oolite Arts, VSArts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, NYFA, South Arts, Miami Dade, and Young Arts. They have been a resident of Mildred’s Lane and the Bronx Museum AIM program. She was a research fellow at Museo Machu Picchu Peru, Syracuse University Florence, Artist’s Institute NYC and Universitat Der Kunst Berlin studying Nazi Utopian urban design with Hito Steyerl. Coralina taught architecture and urban design at Florida International University prior to completing a recent artist & scholar in residence program at Miami Dade College where her work in the University of Miami Kislak Americas collection culminated in her 2023 Voladores solo show at MDC Koubek Memorial Center. Rodriguez Meyer has exhibited at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Perez Art Museum Miami, Smithsonian Museum, Kunsthaus Brethanien Berlin, Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum, CAC New Orleans, and Bronx River Art Center among others. Coralina’s current Mother Molds solo show at University of Maryland (Sept 13- Dec 8 2023) combines 2 decades of her Mother Mold monuments, Linea Negra photographs & Foliage Obscura paintings from the Mama Spa Botanica with 2 centuries of African Effigy Figures from the Jackson collection archives.
HOST PARTNER The Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum includes a collection of Spanish Colonial art featuring works from throughout South and Central America and the Caribbean, particularly the art centers of Cusco, greater Peru and of Mexico City, and Europe during the Colonial Period. A significant portion of the William Morgenstern Estate collection was gifted to the museum recently. Dating from the pre-hispanic period in the Americas, as well as late 16th to the early 19th century paintings and sculpture express the unique heritage of Latin America with an. Often Baroque aesthetic. The art installed at La Merced Chapel is complemented by the Chapel’s hand-carved architecture and 23.5 karat gold-leaf decoration, applied by master Cuban artisans on site. The wide-ranging collections at La Casa include: Colonial and European Paintings, Icons, Engravings and Sculpture along with a research library of original books related to the social and political history of Florida, the islands and the Americas. Uniquely situated in the Allapattah neighdorhood of Miami on site of the Catholic Archdioses, the museum encompasses works from waves of families who call Miami home. The collection includes documents and memorabilia related to Cuba from its beginnings through Independence original documents and manuscripts such as a 1492 letter from King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, memorabilia related to the Spanish American War and the relationships between the United States and the Philippines. Polymitas, Machetes, the lost art of tobacco: engravings, posters, prints, tools of the Cuban revolution are a view into the complex story of Miami’s heirlooms. Accesible by appointment are also original maps including the newly-discovered New World. Decorative Arts: silver, porcelain, furniture, tapestries, religious vestments made or used in the Americas, from XVII to XX century. The Colonial Florida Cultural Heritage Museum collection is directed by Ray Zamora. Contact RRGZamora@aol.com 305- 303-5855 to schedule an appointment. https://www.corpuschristimiami.org/culturalcenter
ORGANIZER The AIM Biennial The 2023 A.I.M. Biennial, returns during Miami Art Week 2023 and will feature 56 site-specific installations throughout South Florida, created by diverse group of visual artists, dancers, activists, and performers. The A.I.M. Biennial is an alternative to more mainstream commercial ventures. The mission of A.I.M is to disrupt and realize different ways of perceiving how art can be realized and function in public places through independent channels of distribution. The A.I.M. Biennial is a conceptual program promoting outdoor ephemeral, virtual, and physical art projects by cultural practitioners based and affiliated with the state of Florida. The A.I.M. Biennial proposes a democratic platform and outlet for artists and public that mediates on current themes addressing, ecology, migration, economy, race, violence, survival, healing, closure,and transcendence. Participants created temporary installations, performance, or documentation of existing three-dimensional work that relates to the A.I.M. Biennial concept. Physical address location and maps invite the public to seek and experience each piece through out South Florida and partnered cities, States and Countries. The A.I.M. Biennial was founded by cultural practitioner, william cordova and initially developed with artists/curators, Gean Moreno, Marie Vickles and Amy Rosenblum-Martin.The A.I.M. Biennial is sponsored by the organizers and generously supported by The MIA (Miami Individual Artists) Grants Program. Our goal is to creatively channel collective concerns and ideas utilizing practical and resourceful methods to realizing works that provide greater artistic agency between artists and community. AIM Biennial is curated by william cordova (founder, cultural practitioner, NY/Miami); Marie Vickles (Senior Director of Education, Pérez Art Museum Miami / Curator-in-Residence, Little Haiti Cultural Center); Gean Moreno (Director, Knight Foundation Art + Research Center at Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami). Amy Rosenblum-Martin (Independent Curator and Guggenheim Museum Education Staff). http://aimbiennial.org/
A visitor checks out the artwork on display at the University of Maryland Art Gallery’s two new exhibits, “African Art from the Dr. Gilbert and Jean Jackson Collection” and “Mother Molds,” which offer different perspectives on maternity.
Photos by Pete Duvall
In one corner, a centuries-old wooden figure depicts a mother carrying a child on her back. In another, a contemporary foam mold covered with glitter, acrylic paints and resin shows the outline of a pregnant body, belly bulging with new life.
A pair of new exhibits in the University of Maryland Art Gallery, up through Dec. 8, highlights the eternal theme of maternity. “African Art from the Dr. Gilbert and Jean Jackson Collection” and “Mother Molds” by Coralina Rodriguez Meyer approach the subject matter from different perspectives, one traditional and one modern.
This figurine, “Mother Holding Child,” is by an anonymous artist from the Mekoto people in present-day Democratic Republic of Congo. It is crafted from a single piece of wood.
“In African art, there’s a prevalence of the mother-child motif,” said Taras W. Matla, director of the UMD Art Gallery. “I wanted to see what kind of response the gallery could have in the form of an exhibition that could add to the conversation about motherhood in a meaningful and robust way.”
The African art on display hails from a range of tribes, including the Baule peoples from present-day Côte d’Ivoire, the Pende people from present-day Democratic Republic of Congo, the Yoruba peoples from present-day Nigeria and the Bangwa peoples from present-day Cameroon. The works come from the extensive holdings of Gil Ph.D. ’72 and Jean Jackson ’71, who have been collecting pieces from African tribes since the 1970s.
“What speaks to me about the art is both the spirituality of it and the texture—the artists use all sorts of textures: woods, metals, stones,” said Gil Jackson. “The artist has the ability to depict in their own way the traditions of the tribe. You can’t vary much from the tradition, but you can reflect your own style in that tradition.”
In the two exhibits, which are adjacent to one another, the newer artwork picks up on the maternal themes of the older pieces. In light of last year’s Supreme Court decision to reverse Roe v. Wade, disproportionately high maternal mortality rates among Black women, and ever-increasing costs of child care, Matla and Melanie Nguyen, curator of the “Mother Molds” exhibit, felt that Rodriguez Meyer’s work highlighting pregnant bodies was important to include.
(Photo by Taras W. Matla)
Based in Brooklyn and Miami, Rodriguez Meyer first began making molds of pregnant people when she became pregnant with her daughter in 2018, 10 years after doctors said she’d be unable to conceive. Inspired by the traditions of her own Inca, Muisca and Moche ancestors, she made a mold of her own swollen abdomen and began working with doulas to create molds of other people.
Rodriguez Meyer “uses those casts to make beautiful sculptural works of art that she decorates with all kinds of found ephemera that she picks up on nature walks, borrows from the people sitting for the molds or finds at thrift stores,” said Nguyen. In one piece, called “Citrus Skin” (at left), Rodriguez Meyer uses paint to create an effect that looks like the rind of an orange—a reference to an old wives’ tale in the Caribbean that a mother-to-be’s cravings for certain citrus fruits can indicate the sex of the baby.
Nguyen hopes that the exhibits will inspire conversations about “the importance of these kinds of traditions and rituals for the birthing people,” she said. “Hopefully honoring those alternative forms of knowledge is something that visitors will come away with.”
@ Latchkey Gallery, 173 Henry Street, New York City
Opening Reception Friday June 16, 2023 6-9pm
LatchKey Gallery and co-curator Molly Davy are pleased to present After Eden | the divine feminine, a group exhibition featuring works by Brianna Bass, Deeya Bhugra, Erin Collinge, Dana Davenport, Dominique Duroseau, Alanna Fields, Katinka Huang, Shara Mays, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, Daniela Gomez Paz, Chloe Luisa Piñero, Lina Puerta Sharmistha Ray, Jasmin Risk, Josie Love Roebuck, Defne Tutus, Lauren MuraoWalkiewicz and Ibitsam Tasnim Zaman.
After Eden explores a wide range of artists and mediums that depict the divine feminine in various forms, including the Great Mother Goddess and Mother Earth. The artworks are sourced from different perspectives of race, religion and sexual identity to provide a diverse representation of the divine feminine in different cultures.
Through this exhibition, the significance of the divine feminine is brought to the fore in how it is associated with the concepts of fertility, creation, and nurturing and the significant role womxn played in ancient societies as priestesses and religious leaders.
After Eden highlights the contrast between society and most major religions of the world today. The works serve as evidence of a completely different way of life that celebrates the sacred female, reflecting on the implications of the shift from matriarchal to patriarchal societies.
Brianna Bass (1990) earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2022, and BFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in 2013. She has presented in lectures with Missouri State University, Pratt Institute, and Yale University. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery (NY), Latchkey Gallery (NY), Ladies Room (LA), Noh-Art in Naples, Italy, and Tree Art Museum in Beijing, China. She co-founded Mineral House Media, an artist-run platform designed to enrich emerging artists’ practices through exhibitions and an engaged online media archive. She currently resides in Hartford, CT and is represented byLatchkey Gallery.
Deeya Bhugra was born in New Delhi, based in New York. She graduated from School of Visual Arts (SVA) with an MFA in Fine Arts. Primarily a painter, she uses stippling as a technique for its meditative quality. It is during the process that she begins to lose herself in intricate labyrinths of thought; and subtle, ethereal revelations surface. As she delves deeper, the amorphous form disseminates grain by grain into its surrounding; and synchronically her rationale starts transcending into an infinite space.
Erin Collinge graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York with her B.F.A. in painting and an emphasis in printmaking. Her work focuses on femininity, predation, and emotion through color. Using the artist’s own experiences, her symbolic imagery comes together with watercolor, ink, gouache, and dry media such as colored pencils, pastel, and graphite.
Dana Davenport is a Korean and Black American interdisciplinary artist shifting between installation, sculpture, video, and performance. Within her practice, she addresses the complexities that surround interminority racism as a foundation for envisioning her own and the collective futurity of Black and Asian peoples. Davenport utilizes synthetic hair as a proxy for her body to discuss the strained relationship between Black and Asian peoples, specifically in America. As a product overwhelmingly sold by Koreans to Black Americans, she considers the implications of the material as it sits on the beauty supply shelf and how it is activated in the hands of Black folks through love and labor.
Dominique Duroseau earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023 . She is a Newark-based artist born in Chicago, raised in Haiti.
Her interdisciplinary practice explores themes of racism, socio-cultural issues, and existential dehumanization. Her exhibitions, performances, and screenings include SATELLITE ART and PULSE Play in Miami; The Kitchen, The Brooklyn Museum and the New Museum (BWA for BLM), El Museo del Barrio, A.I.R. Gallery, BronxArtSpace, Rush Arts Gallery, and Smack Mellon in New York City; The Newark Museum, Index Arts, Project for Empty Space, and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ. Her recent exhibitions and talks include: solo exhibition at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, panelist at Black Portraiture[s] at Harvard and lecturer at Vassar. She was a fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, and received artist residencies from Gallery Aferro, Index Art Center, the Wassaic Project and Shine Portrait Studio. Duroseau holds a Bachelor of Architecture and a Master of Arts in Fine Arts.
Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work unpacks Black queer history through a multidisciplinary engagement with photographic archives. Fields’ work has been exhibited at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, MoCADA, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair in LA, and UNTITLED Art Fair in Miami. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Arts Projects, Light Work, Baxter St. CCNY, and Gallery Aferro. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and is a Lecturer of Photography at Howard University. Fields has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parsons New School, Syracuse University, and Stanford University. Her work has been published in The New York Times, Aperture Magazine, FOAM Magazine, and The Atlantic amongst others. Fields lives and works between Washington, D.C., and New York City.
Katinka Huang moved to England from China at a young age – not with her family – but on her own. Katinka attended an all girls boarding school whose Western ideology about gender and propriety conflicted with the eastern ideology of femininity that she was brought up with in China. Katinka’s upbringing at a British boarding school dominated by girls ignited her interest in examining the female psyche. In response to the artist’s state of confusion and alienation, she created alter egos as the means of dissociation, which have now become the mould in which she creates. Katinka re-imagines these alter egos into stories of absurdity, she transforms a tempestuous personal diary into tales full of fantastical characters, depicting people and places as monstrous or saccharine creatures, as antagonists and protagonists. The cast of self-referential characters functions as recurring motifs which unabashedly reveals a mutilated female psyche. Katinka grew up in London, UK where she attended Central Saint Martin and studied graphic design. She later moved to Paris and earned her BFA at Paris College of Art, majoring in Fine Arts, she has recently attained her MFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Shara Mays is an Oakland-based visual artist whose work addresses systemic racism through an autobiographical approach. Using abstract expression and intuitive impression, Mays’ paintings and installations invoke landscapes and emotions connected to her family history in North Carolina. Her latest work speaks more broadly to selfhood, memory, and identity. She holds a Master’s of Fine Arts in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Mehari Sequar Gallery in Washington, DC and Chandran Gallery in San Francisco, California. Notable group shows include Considering Female Abstractions at the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, Texas, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco, California. Her work is included in the International African American Museum, the Green Family Art Foundation, and select private collections.
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer was born in a car in an Everglades Florida swamp, raised queer between a rural Southern immigrant community and the Caribbean, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a Tinkuy mixed race, indigenous Andinx (Muisca Colombian /Inca Peruvian), Brooklyn based Quipucamayoc artist. Spanning 20 years and 30 countries, she works across disciplines including architecture, community organizing, moving images, documentary sculpture and urban design. They studied painting at MICA, anthropology at Hopkins, prior to receiving her architecture BFA at Parsons and MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College CUNY. She has worked as an architect and urban designer in NYC for 2 decades while a guest critic at Parsons, Pratt and FIU.
Daniela Gomez Paz earned her MFA from Yale School of Art in 2023. Her work intersects between weaving, drawing, painting, collage, and sculpture. Born in Cali, Colombia, she immigrated to Queens, New York. She pursued path in the arts and background in pedagogy led her to facilitate a wide range of programs with children, youth, seniors and families in schools, museums, and community centers. She acquired a Double Degree: BFA [Printmaking/Painting] & BA [Art History] from SUNY Purchase School of Art and Design and a MAT [Masters in Art Teaching] from Queens College.
Chloe Luisa Piñero is an interdisciplinary artist and educator from Philadelphia, PA, who works in mixed media painting, collage, and sculpture. Reflecting on her own experiences and familial histories from both her native home of Philadelphia, and her ancestral home of Puerto Rico, Chloe aims to preserve stories and memories tied to place, while exploring themes of gender, queerness, and desire as they relate to her own identity. Piñero earned a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Painting and Drawing from Tyler School of Art at Temple University in 2018. Chloe has taught in art education and public programming at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and continues to teach in the Philadelphia area.
Drawing from her experience as a Colombian-American, Lina Puerta’s art examines the relationship between nature and the human-made, and engages in themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. She creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade-paper paintings and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal and recycled objects.
Puerta was born in NJ, raised in Colombia and lives and works in NYC. She holds an MS in Art Education from CUNY and has exhibited internationally. She has been honored with numerous awards including the 2019/2020 Artist-in-Residence at the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling in Harlem, 2017-NYFA Fellowship in Crafts/Sculpture, Fall 2017 Artist-in-Residency at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, the 2016 Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, Artprize-8 Sustainability Award, 2015 Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2015 Kohler Arts Industry Residency (WI), 2013-14 Smack Mellon Art Studio Program among others. Exhibition venues include the Barns Art Center, The Sugarhill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, the Ford Foundation Gallery, The Museum of Biblical Art, El Museo del Barrio, Socrates Sculpture Park, Wave Hill and the Hunter East Harlem Gallery in New York City; 21C Museum Hotels in Louisville, KY and Bentonville, AR; Pi Artworks in London and Ponce+Robles in Spain. Puerta’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, The New York Times, The Brooklyn Rail, and Artnet News among others.
Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist, art critic, curator, and professor at Carnegie Mellon School of Art. They make paintings and drawings that examine the complex inheritance of multiple cultures through the lens of gender and abstraction. In 2020, they co-founded the feminist artist collective Hilma’s Ghost as a participatory and collaborative model for research, exhibitions, and pedagogy. Ray’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions internationally.
Jasmin Risk is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator whose work uses discarded textiles to examine healing and repair. They champion fragmentation, allowing for imperfections, and stake out territory in less definable, in-between spaces to embody their queer, non-binary, autistic identities. Their art practice incorporates textiles, performance, writing, video, book-making, and materials-based research. Within textiles, they use knitting, needle felting, wet felting, and paper-making, alongside destructive mark making techniques implementing cheese graters, blades, and ripping by hand. By embedding fragments in textiles, paper, books and installation, Risk reconsiders what constitutes “wholeness.”
Josie Love Roebuck is an interdisciplinary artist from Chattanooga, TN. Roebuck received her M.F.A from the University of Cincinnati (2021). She received her B.F.A with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Georgia (2019). Roebuck is currently a Visiting Lecturer in Drawing/Foundations/Printmaking at the Northern Kentucky University. Roebuck’s process addresses the contemporary complexity of identifying as biracial through symbolizing pain and triumph, exclusion, and acceptance. The act of Roebuck sewing together portraits has allowed her canvas to become her paper and her needle to become her pen, in order for Roebuck to draw upon the past and present to convey a story of her experiences and her family’s experiences.
Defne Tutus is an artist, writer and curator based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her B.A. in Art History from Tufts University. She also studied fashion design at FIT, fiber art and metal working at SVA and participated for many semesters in NYC Crit Club. She has shown her work at SVA, Copeland Gallery in London, ABC No Rio, Tussle Magazine Projects and Site:Brooklyn. She has participated in fundraisers for Open Source Gallery, Textile Artists for Movement Voter Project, and Thirst: a fundraiser and art auction in association with No More Deaths. She is a member of Incredible Incubator, an artists collective born in 2020 with an interest in work which interacts with the surrounding environment in unexpected ways.
Lauren MuraoWalkiewicz (b.1991) is a painter and installation artist who explores futuristic mythologies of a world after the climate apocalypse. Using intricately cut wood or pvc panel and acrylic paint, Walkiewicz’s non-linear narratives explore the new denizens of earth, and their sensual and violent world. Walkiewicz earned a BFA from the University of Michigan Stamps School of Art and Design and currently resides in New York City. She has shown with SPRING/BREAK art show, 550 Gallery, The Locker Room in New York and Practice Gallery in Philadelphia. She was featured in I Like Your Work’s Spring Catalog “Through Mossy Ways” and Create Magazine issue #32. Walkiewicz has been an artist in residence at RUC residency in Valcamonica, Italy, and is currently an artist in residence at the NARS Foundation International Residency in New York.
Ibitsam Tasmin Zaman is a Black Lesbian American, conceptual, multidisciplinary, intersectional feminist and self-taught artist. Her art practice consists of creative writing, spoken word poetry performance, narrative painting of BIPOC people, community art projects, and soft sculptures/installations. Her work draws inspiration from Persian Islamic geometric art, Indian classical art, surrealism, and magical realism. Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ibtisam moved at age six to England, followed by the UAE. Her mother made the decision shortly after 9/11 to escape the violence that Muslims and BIPOC are still facing today. From thirteen onwards, she lived between the UAE and India over the proceeding nine years. Ibtisam’s work has been exhibited nationally with New York Health and Hospitals Arts and Medicine Program in collaboration with Residency Unlimited, funded by the Laurie M TischIllumination Fund.
ABOUT THE CURATOR:
Molly Davy is a writer, researcher, and educator interested in the intersection of performance and the archive. Her work focuses on the relationship between natural and built environments, and the potentialities between Environmental Science and the Humanities. Davy is Associate Director, Operations and Part-Time Faculty at Parsons School of Design | The New School. She is Visiting Associate Professor in the department of Humanities and Media Studies at Pratt Institute where she teaches in collaboration with Architecture faculty.
Davy holds an MA in Media Studies and Visual Culture from New York University and a BA in Art History and Gender Studies from St. Catherine University. Recent curatorial work includes the group show “if you surrender” co-curated with Daniel Johnson at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, New York (January-February 2023).
LatchKey Gallery supports emerging artists who challenge historical narratives; helping shape cultural conversations to create a more diverse and dynamic society that reflects the complexity of our world.
Past exhibitions include Sweet Castrator, a solo exhibition by Wynnie Mynerva, Both at Oncewith John Rivas and Raelis Vasquez, and MIRROR MIRROR with artists February James and Shona McAndrew. A Bronx Tale was a unique studio exhibition experience for collectors, creatives and art enthusiasts including artists Dario Calmese, Alteronce Gumby, Lucia Hierro and Tariku Shiferaw. 100 Workswas produced in collaboration with ElectroPositive and Art Noir featuring works by Derrick Adams, Mario Moore and Shervone Neckles.
LatchKey Gallery began as a nomadic contemporary art gallery in 2018 and has since taken residence at 173 Henry Street in the LES under the stewardship of Amanda Uribe . LatchKey Gallery is a proud member of the New Art Dealers Alliance.
Opening in September 2023, a curatorial platform where cultures clash and merge, The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023: Contact Zone presents 48 artists from 35+ countries across seven venues in New York and New Jersey. Programming will continue through January 2024.
TIAB 2023 Artists
Erika DeFreitas, Pritika Chowdhry, Maria Kulikovska, Rafael Yaluff, Golnar Adili, Keli Safia Maksud, Mila Panic, Jovencio de la Paz, Marcelo Brodsky, Young Joo Lee, Slinko, Emilio Rojas, Kathie Halfin, Francesco Simeti, Carlos Franco, Masha Vlasova, Umber Majeed, Keren Anavy, Sanié Bokharie, Sa’dia Rehman, Magdalena Dukiewicz, Jonathan Ojekunle, Bonam Kim, Mia Enell, Coralina Rodriguez-Meyer, Ala Dehghan, Felipe Baeza, Alexander Si, Nida Sinnokrot, Raul de Lara, Joiri Minaya, Selva Aparicio, Lilian Shtereva, Nyugen Smith, Anina Major, Tariku Shiferaw, Dominique Duroseau, Anna Ting Möller, Linnéa Gad, Maya Hayuk, Leila Seyedzadeh, Nicholas Oh & Ayoung Justine Yu, Jamie Martinez, Neema Githere, Juna Skënderi, Ana Armengod, and Christopher Unpezverde Núñez.
The second edition of The Immigrant Artist Biennial is curated by Bianca Abdi-Boragi, Katherine Adams, and Anna Mikaela Ekstrand and centers U.S. and international immigrant and exiled artists. The programming explores how storytelling, embodied memory, and projections of diasporic futures can be strategies for navigating conflict and straddling different political terrains. With an aim to voice immigrant experiences to build solidarity, the biennial will present Contact Zones (exhibitions), Field Work (panels), and Arena (performances and screenings) in addition to a Field Guide (catalog). Group exhibitions and their public programs will take place at EFA Project Space, NARS Foundation, Accent Sisters, and Alchemy Gallery; solo presentations at Artists Alliance and Accent Sisters, and public programs at Brooklyn Museum and Wendy’s Subway. The artist-run blogazine Artspiel will return as the biennial’s media partner alongside Cultbytes who is partnering for the first time.
Building on the concepts of TIAB 2020 — in which they were involved in different roles — the curatorial team has through reading circles, studio visits, and meetings collectively curated the 2023 biennial. “I hope that using Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone as a site prepares the audience that its outcome is based on its participants (artworks, artists, visitors, and media) and how they relate to and dialog with each other,” co-curator Bianca Abdi-Boragi who was a participating artist in TIAB 2020 comments.
“Since our biennial is organized around — and for — artists experiencing displacement in real time, part of our work was to challenge the traditional frameworks by which biennials set up ideals of “local” space, and to find exhibition forms that accommodate multifaceted relationships to place. The overarching theme of the biennial — “contact zones” — allowed us to work with a productively fractured relationship to place. It also encapsulates our attempt to find an organizational concept for artistic infrastructures that are diasporic in form and not only content — that can deal with effects of situations such as exile, alienation, or simply the elusive concept of home,” co-curator Katherine Adams, who was TIAB 2020’s Exhibitions Manager, comments.
“Having worked with TIAB since its inception, it was necessary to respond to the time by extending its conceptual framework to include artists operating beyond the borders of the U.S., especially Ukrainian artists — the ongoing war prompted us to question what it means to live in exile and its effects on art making. Through the curatorial framework the term ‘immigrant’ transcends geographic borders and at times, in at least two of our exhibitions, disappears completely. What remains is visualizing the need to survive and thrive; broadcasting political issues, armed conflict, and human rights violations or feelings of uncertainty while also creating new cross-sectional communities to meet these needs. Something that can be felt by immigrants and non-immigrants alike,” co-curator Anna Mikaela Ekstrand, who also serves as TIAB’s Associate Director, comments.
“This year, TIAB is as relevant, if not more urgent, as ever. Taking some time to decompress, heal and rebuild after 2020, I invited three curators to collectively co-curate the second iteration, broadening the notion of an immigrant through incorporating exiled and nomadic artists, displaced by ongoing wars and global conflicts. TIAB 2023: Contact Zone highlights the need for compassion, humanity and acceptance and proposes a platform, where complex relationships to place, body, trauma, home, cultural identity, and belonging can develop and co-exist. As the war in my native Ukraine rages on, I am inspired, uplifted, and re-energized by the team’s unrelenting passion for maintaining a critically engaged and necessary dialogue and vibrant exchange of ideas within the concept of The Immigrant Artist Biennial.”
– Founding Director, artist Katya Grokhovsky.
The Immigrant Artist Biennial 2023 is supported by Brooklyn Arts Council, American Immigration Council, Define American, The Immigrant Artist Biennial’s Patron Circle, host partners, and through donations with fiscal sponsorship from New York Foundation for the Arts.
Biennial Highlights
First panel on DACA and undocumented artists at major New York museum
The biennial will continue its mission to broadcast the legal frameworks in which immigrant artists operate by centering DACA-recipient and undocumented artists in a panel moderated by Danilo Machado Producer of Public Programs at Brooklyn Museum sponsored by advocacy organization The American Immigration Council and Define American. The panel marks the first on the topic at a major New York museum. Shedding light on visa statuses and their ramifications for immigrant artists is part of the biennial’s mission; the first biennial was curated by its founding artistic director Katya Grokhovsky, then a current 01-visa holder, Here, Together! and presented discourse on 01-visas through a panel and legal clinic.
A special highlight on Ukraine
Four Ukrainian artists (NYC-based immigrant diaspora artists Maya Hayuk, Slinko, and Kathie Halfin, and Maria Kulikovska who has been transient since she fled the war in Ukraine in 2022) will be participating in the biennial. A panel on the ongoing war and the cultural sector in Ukraine and Ukrainian arts beyond the country will be held at EFA Project Space. An essay on Ukraine will be published in the Field Guide (catalog).
Contributions from leading scholars in the Field Guide (Catalog)
Thomas Keenan, Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of the Human Rights Program Bard College and the Berlin-based Ukrainian curator Valeria Schiller will be contributing to the Field Guide (catalog).
News from Artists
Mila Panic is included in the 4th Autostrada Biennale All Images Will Disappear, One Day; Felipe Baeza was part of Milk of Forgotten Dreams at the 59th Venice Biennale; Neema Githere is currently a Technology & Racial Equity Practitioner Fellow at the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University; Selva Aparicio was recently appointed the International Chair of Sculpture at Alfred University; Coralina Rodriguez-Meyer work with African fertility effigies and contemporary American indigenous heirlooms will be on view at the University of Maryland Art Gallery concurrently; Raul de Lara will be creating new work for the biennial and is currently collaborating with Hermés with work on view in their Aspen location; Keli Safia Maksud is the 2022–2023 A.I.R Fellow; recent MFA graduates included in TIAB 2023: Contact Zone are Dominique Duroseau (Yale ’23) Anna Ting Möller (Columbia ‘23), Rafael Yaluff (Hunter ´23), and Linnéa Gad (Columbia ‘22); Gad will release her first artist-research book with RSS Press this fall; current student Lillian Shtereva (Hunter BA ‘24), and Christopher Unpezverde Núñez who was featured in TIAB 2020’s opening night at the Brooklyn Museum will return to speak on a panel on undocumented and DACA-recipient artists at the same venue.
Image: Erika DeFreitas. Her body is full of light (often, very often, and in floods). 04:22 minutes single-channel video. 2016. Image courtesy of the artist and Christie Contemporary.
Voladores: Sanctuary exhibition Coralina Rodriguez Meyer solo show featuring Mother Mold monuments & Linea Negra photographs from the Mama Spa Botanica
Miami Dade College Koubek Center 2705 SW 3rd Street Miami FL 33135 Little Havana
Opening Saturday May 13, 2023 12-6pm
On view May 13 – June 10 2023
Celebrating the fertile lessons from equatorial fertility traditions such as the Voladores in Peruvian vernal danzas (the artist’s biological ancestry) or the Vanuatu Gol Land Diving ritual in the South Pacific; the installation of Mother Mold monuments & Linea Negra photographs from the Mama Spa Botanica is a warning sign rendered in weathered procreative effigy figures hovering above Miami’s redlined waterlines threatened by intersecting man made and climate crisis.
5 prismatic pregnant bodies (cast in the Mama Spa Botanica workshop where the works were collaboratively created with the artist’s Q+BIPOC neighbors)- sway in Sea Grape leaves, Sabal Palm fronds, Flan Boyan seed pods and Banyan roots above the Miami Dade College Koubek Memorial Center campus sanctuary near Calle Ocho in Little Havana. Situated in Miami’s predominantly Cuban diaspora neighborhood where the former US president was arrested, the works honor a formerly progressive stronghold currently under political, economic and censorship threat due to aggressive legislation the artist has fought for the past 4 years. Figurative monuments cast intimate ephemera, environmental waste in domestic construction materials are suspended from trees acknowledging the traumatic legacy of post-reconstruction America and its legacy today in constructing American mythological violence where Florida has become the central political target. The polychromatic bodies offer an alternative ritual celebration, recalling the indigenous millenary traditions from the Andes to the South Pacific where the artist spent time as a child involved in indigenous lead environmental protest movements.
The retablo installation is a culmination of a year long artist residency at Miami Dade College Koubek Memorial Center where the artist involved students, staff and surrounding neighbors into her collaborative practice. The exhibition’s title draws from a tradition celebrated in the anthropological objects located in Miami Dade College & University of Miami’s Kislak Americas collection. Fellow resident Kuyayky ensemble will perform with 3 generations of musicians, harnessing over a hundred years of sonic tradition for the exhibition opening. Photographs & Footage of the exhibition shot by Darmyn Calderon.
Voladores Mama Spa Botanica opening video by Darmyn Calderon 2023
@ Kitasenju Buoy 49-11 Senju Nakamachi, Adachi-ku, Tokyo
July 22 – August 6 2023
4th wave Asian feminist collective Tomorrow Girls Troop launches a retrospective exhibition and catalog in Tokyo of their activist interventions across Asia and the Americas, including a 2019 collaborative protest and Stitch n Bitch Arpillera Salon with Colchas Conchas (Cunt Quilt) Arpilleras Americanx. Reflecting on a pivotal juncture in direct action intersectional feminist movements, Tomorrow Girls Troop is the subject of a retrospective opening in Tokyo this Summer including an extensive catalog on their activities from 2015-Present.
In January 2019, I hosted a direct action community organizing event in the form of a Stitch n Bitch arpillera salon in collaboration with TGT, that was lead by Journey Out human trafficking organization and a protest in downtown Los Angeles, focused on the impact of Human Trafficking on US born femmes and those forced into US slavery. The group of intersectional femmes who participated in creating the textured quilt, then bore it on their backs at a protest from Cal Trans to the DTLA Courthouse. One of the Femilia (City of Today for Feminine Urbanism) flag bearers was a recovered sex trafficking victim who was healing from an unrelated, violent rape attack. The emotionally charged march was the most memorable of the dozens of Cunt Congress protests I had participated in since our comrade’s black eye was swollen on an otherwise picturesque physique. Her gaze was a stark reminder that the stained, worn out women’s underwear were the embodiment of a mournful, complicated and ongoing lucha for basic survival. Our dear comrade lost her life during the pandemic- almost a year after the 2019 protest- when her stalker / attacker drove her to take her own life. It was in a state of monstrous mourning and profound regret that I created the Wife Beater / Lechera Luchera series of embroidered photographs on cotton white “wifebeater” tank top shirt in the Winter of 2020.
During the pandemic, Tomorrow Girls Troop hosted a conversation featuring my studio practice and the collaborative march broadcast to students in Japan. The interview was an attempt to culturally translate across movements, geographies, classrooms, generations and racial/ethnic lines. I’m honored to have built solidarity with such a powerful Asian feminist movement, while working to dismantle US and international human trafficking and its escalated violence especially targeting Asian and Latinx communities in the US. The exhibition catalog featuring Colchas Conchas (Cunt Quilt) is forthcoming in Fall 2023 upon the launch of the exhibition in Tokyo. To support TGT’s mission to transform the living conditions for Asian femmes globally, consider supporting their work here.
Group Exhibition tackles vital environmental issues Exhibition Features 28 Artists with Artworks Spanning 5 Disciplines
MIAMI, FL (March 30, 2023) – With the exhibition Megafauna Land Dwellers, YoungArts presents an exploration of pressing environmental issues through art created by 28 dancers, designers, photographers, visual artists and writers. Curated by Naomi Fisher (1994 Visual Arts), artist, curator and co-founder of Bas Fisher Invitational (BFI), the group exhibition highlights works that respond to vital topics such as eco-feminism, nature and wildlife conservation, artificial landscapes, activism and biodiversity.
Fisher’s artistic and curatorial practices are defined by humanity’s interaction with nature and its’ impact on the planet, as well as the inspiration natural forms have on how humans build and decorate dwellings, design functional objects and inspire art. For Megafauna Land Dwellers, these considerations are expanded into a larger and more textured dialogue through interdisciplinary and intergenerational voices.
“We are at a critical time on planet earth, the urgency to change our lifestyles to combat climate change is clear based on many scientific reports, yet not enough action to reduce carbon in the necessary timeline is underway,” says Naomi Fisher. “Sometimes there is despair, and art brings us back to a place of contemplation through visual explorations of ideas rooted in many mediums. Art enlightens our awareness of how we perceive, interact with, and rely on nature.”
YoungArts’ annual spring exhibition provides a space for an intergenerational group of artists across disciplines to present work that contemplates pressing issues from our past and present that affect our future. Invited guest artists or curators expand on the idea of conventional exhibition-making to embrace the idea of mentorship and peer-to-peer exchange between artists that are part of the YoungArts community and beyond.
Participating artists, who are all YoungArts award winners from the last 40 years are:
Priscilla Aleman, 2009 Visual Arts & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts
Lizette Avineri, 2007 Visual Arts
Andie Aylsworth, 2018 Visual Arts
Marcus Bui, 2023 Photography
Liza Butts, 2012 Visual Arts
Catherine Camargo, 2017 Visual Arts
Michelle Chen, 2016 Writing
Juan Jose Cielo, 2015 Visual Arts
Zoe Dorado, 2023 Writing
Mackenzie Duan, 2023 Writing
Nicole Eisenman, 1983 Visual Arts
Charlotte Gagliardi, 2023 Design Arts
Ave Tiye Kinsey, 2004 Writing & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts
Smriti Krishnan, 2012 Dance
Olivia Le, 2023 Writing
Michael Loveland, 1991 Visual Arts
Jonathan Lovett, 2019 Photography
Lilly Mitrani, 2023 Photography
Zora Nooks, 2023 Photography
Isabel Oliva, 2017 Visual Arts
Lee Pivnik, 2014 Visual Arts
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, 2000 Visual Arts
Vinicius de Aguiar Sanchez, 2007 Visual Arts
Nicole Salcedo, 2006 Visual Arts
Zoe Schweiger, 2018 Visual Arts
Nadir Souirgi, 1994 Visual Arts
Cornelius Tulloch, 2016 Design Arts & Visual Arts & U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts
Gabrielle Vitollo, 2008 Visual Arts
This exhibition, and all YoungArts programming, is made possible with the generous support of numerous corporations, foundations, and individuals. Please visit youngarts.org/donor-recognition for a complete list of donors.
About YoungArts
Established in 1981 by Lin and Ted Arison, YoungArts identifies exceptional young artists, amplifies their potential, and invests in their lifelong creative freedom. YoungArts provides space, funding, mentorship, professional development and community throughout artists’ careers. Entrance into this prestigious organization starts with a highly competitive application for talented artists ages 15–18, or grades 10–12, in the United States that is judged by esteemed discipline-specific panels of artists through a rigorous blind adjudication process.
Explore over 300 artist studios across Miami-Dade County on this one-day-only event, and get to know your city from the perspective of the artists who create in it every day.
Artists Open facilitates creative exploration and celebrates the city’s rich diversity, with studios located in North Miami and El Portal, Little Haiti and Little River, Liberty City, Wynwood, the Design District, Allapattah, Miami Beach, Little Havana, Coral Gables, Coconut Grove, Palmetto Bay, Hialeah, Doral, Sweetwater, the Bird Road Arts District, and Kendall.
Want to learn more about the program? Watch the film we created in collaboration with local filmmaker Karli Evans, explore our site with a totally interactive artist directory that will lead you right to the studios you want to see, and sign up to join us.
Artists Open is a Miami Dade County-wide open studios event welcoming the public into over 300 artists studios. Learn more about the event and browse the online directory at www.artistsopen.miami.
Artists Open is designed to eliminate barriers of entry into the arts by inviting the public to engage with artists in their studios – a perspective of the artist’s practice that is rarely seen. This open studios event encourages locals to see artists as approachable and accessible, and facilitates a more intimate relationship between artists and local audiences. With many artist studios located in areas that lack significant cultural offerings, Artists Open ensures that people across Miami-Dade County can form bonds with the art-making that takes place right in their own backyard. Many of the works within artists’ studios will be available for sale, further cementing the program’s intent to make artists’ careers more sustainable.
To make each location easy to find, studios are clearly marked with an Artists Open pink banner. Fountainhead Open Studios sponsored by Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs
En Residencia was launched in July 2021 with the goal of nurturing Miami’s cultural ecosystem by engaging local artists and facilitating the dialogue between creators and the local community. En Rez is a residency program at the Koubek Center designed for local creators regardless of their discipline or career stage. As part of the program and to facilitate the development of new work, they have access to Koubek’s classrooms and rehearsal studios. The Center also invites the Residents to join in one of its many programs and activities on a case-by-case basis.
“En Rez is a pillar of the Koubek Center’s mission of building community through the arts,” said Melissa Messulam, the Center’s manager. “Through this program, we hope to provide a space that inspires artists to be creative, helps them sustain their practice, generates new possibilities, and builds connections with each other and the community.”
We are proud to highlight our current En Residencia class, which has been part of the program since June 2022 and include:
Lambastic 