Firelei Báez: On Imagining Positive Possible Futures

Firelei Báez

With election day upon us, I wanted to offer hope for a better future by sharing one of my favorite artists, Firelei Báez. Báez’s paintings are large-scale explosions of color and texture, which is why they appeal to me. Their fantastic scale allows my mind to wander to new realms (I’m a sucker for wandering). But Báez’s art, posthumanist in philosophy, is so much more than visually appealing—it’s a visceral reminder that things can always go differently. Drawing from and destabilizing the past, Baez presents new possibilities for the future. Hauser & Wirth (her gallery) describe it best:

In exuberantly colorful works on paper and canvas, large-scale sculptures, and immersive installations, Báez combines representational cues that span from hair textures to textile patterns, plant life, folkloric and literary references, and wide-ranging emblems of healing and resistance. Often featuring strong female protagonists, Báez’s portraits incorporate the visual languages of regionally-specific mythology and ritual alongside those of science fiction and fantasy, to envision identities as unfixed, and inherited stories as perpetually-evolving. These empowered figures’ eyes most often engage directly with the viewer, asserting individuality and agency within their states of flux.

Untitled (Encyclopedia of Gestures / Le Jeu du Monde)
2020 oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas 105 x 131 inches

The emphasis on fluidity and permeability shows us there is never one way of being or seeing, existence is dynamic.

Báez begins many of her pieces by pouring paint over large-scale reproductions of historical documents: maps, travelogues, scientific manuals—documents originally created to claim, colonize, and control. Fantastical creatures and hybrid species overrun these Eurocentric documents, defying categorization and making space for those who have been erased or excluded from the dominant narratives. And this making of space is also a making of new possibilities. As reviewer AX Mina notes, Báez reminds us “that maps advance the fiction that we could treat the earth as an object to be measured, cut up, and extracted from without consequences.” Báez reminds us that the maps themselves are also a fantasy.

The title of AX Mina’s review says it all: Firelei Báez Paints Away the World’s Borders.

And that’s the vision we need for a better future: one that embraces a global community, one that isn’t trying to push us back to a past bent on serving one monolithic identity while exploiting and destroying all others.

Constellation (Movements reimagined)
2019 Oil and Acrylic on canvas 40 x 30 x 2 in

Born in the Dominican Republic, Firelei Báez is a New York City-based artist. Báez received an M.F.A. from Hunter College, a B.F.A. from the Cooper Union’s School of Art, and studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She is the recipient of many awards, most recently the Cooper Union President’s Citation (2022), Artes Mundi Prize (2021), and Philip Guston Rome Prize (2021). 

Báez in her studio

Untitled (Central Power Station)
2019 Acrylic and oil on archival printed canvas 96 7/8 x 124 5/8 in

Anacaona (destroy the beauty that has injured me)
2024 Oil and acrylic on archival printed canvas 228.6 x 207 cm

Spring-Summer 2024 Featured Artist: Kandy G. Lopez

Kandy G. Lopez

is amazing! Who knew yarn could be so vibrant and human?

As Lopez contends in her artist statement, it is all about the people:

“As an Afro-Caribbean visual artist, I am eager to be challenged materialistically and metaphorically when representing marginalized individuals that inspire and move me. My works are created out of the necessity to learn something new about my people and culture. I am interested in developing a nostalgic dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. If I’m not learning from my materials and how it affects the message, it's not worth creating.”

Kandy G. Lopez was born in New Jersey and moved with her family to Florida. She received her BFA and BS from the University of South Florida, concentrating in Painting and in Marketing and Management. She received her MFA with a concentration in Painting from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. She has taught at Florida Atlantic University, Daytona State College, and is now teaching as an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Arts at the Halmos College of Art & Sciences at NOVA Southeastern University.

Lamenting Niki 2023 (above)
Yarn and acrylic paint on mesh canvas
50 x 60 in


Quavia 2023 (left)
Yarn and acrylic paint on mesh canvas
60 x 50 in

Sue 2021
Yarn and acrylic on mesh canvas
96 x 48 in

From an interview with Lopez on WYNC:

“I started playing around in 2016. I made really small ones. I tell people all the time, things happen in the studio by accident but also on purpose, like there's happy accidents. I like to coin that from Bob Ross. A piece of string fell on one of my prints. I was collaging at that time, and instead of drawing in power lines because I was really interested in cityscapes of these neighborhoods that don't have the resources or eventually people come in and then they gentrify them.

The string fell, and I was like, "Oh, I could just make power lines with thread," and then that turned into, "Well, I could make people from thread to see what they look like." I left that alone for a while, and I went back to painting and then I got pregnant. I was like, "Well, I can't paint my gigantic oil paints of these people anymore, so I did dabble in thread. Let's see what that can look like." That was one of the mediums where I felt like it made sense because it's fibers, like fibers of our being. It's also soft. I'm making these people look or they are confident but also vulnerable at the same time. Those are the two things that I really enjoy about painting minorities because they have that in them.”

Lori Ann 2023
Yarn and spray paint on plastic canvas

Fall 2023 Featured Artist: Inka Essenhigh

Inka Essenhigh

I stumbled upon Inka Essenhigh a few weeks ago and was immediately drawn to the other-worldly quality of her art. I confess, I like to go places, especially those fantastical off-the-grid joints. Essenhigh’s micro-macrocosms are inviting because they offer a sense that things could be different. As reviewer Lilly Wei notes in a recent issue of Art & Antiques, “Her works are not escapist but about other possibilities, accompanied, at times, with a quiver of disquiet, as if she knows how fragile all this is, how fleeting.” I highly recommend Wei’s excellent overview of Essenhigh. 

The vibrant colors, the curves, the parties…

Blue Spruce 2020
enamel on canvas, 50 x 80 inches

Born in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, Inka Essenhigh received her Master of Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts, New York, NY and her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Columbus College of Art & Design, Columbus, OH. She lives and works in New York, NY.



Purple Pods 2019
enamel on canvas, 34 x 32 inches

from the Miles McEnery Gallery:
“As found throughout Surrealism and other modern avant-garde movements, Essenhigh’s paintings tend be uniquely episodic, while still sharing themes of flora and fauna. They are touched by a curious self-containment and an interiority of the force of imagination. Her works display dimensional narratives that require close-up viewing, creating a visceral dialogue, one viewer at a time. Each is marked by bright, rich color, and a decision to revel in the “little world” schema of psychology with a fluidity between people and their things.” 

Forever Young 2020
enamel on canvas, 60 x 42 inches

Blue Sycamore 2023
enamel on canvas, 68 x 54 inches

Spring/Summer 2023 Featured Artist: Alma Thomas

Alma Thomas

My son Berkeley, who loves all things rainbow, recently introduced me to the art of Alma Thomas (1891-1978)—which provides a dose of the bright and sunny we all need right now. Her art fantastically appeals to many of Berkeley’s loves: rainbows, patterns, space, Snoopy. Inspired by NASA’s Apollo program, Thomas made several “space” paintings in the early 70s, including the Snoopy series: “Snoopy Gets a Glimpse of Mars,” “Snoopy’s Vision of Mars,” “Snoopy Sees Earth Wrapped in Sunset,” and “Snoopy—Early Sun Display on Earth.”

Born in Columbus, GA, Thomas lived and worked in Washington D.C. where she taught art at Shaw Junior High for 35 years. When she retired in 1960, at the age of 68, she was finally able to devote herself to her practice full time. In 1972, Thomas became the first African American woman to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum. Thanks in part to this exhibition, Thomas’s work was acquired by a number of major American museums.

Snoopy—Early Sun Display on Earth 1970
acrylic on canvas

The Philips Collection provides an excellent interactive tour of the exhibit Everything Is Beautiful, along with videos and information about Thomas.

I also recommend this article on CultureType: “50 Years Ago, Alma Thomas Made Space Paintings that Imagined the Moon and Mars”

Art by Berkeley Oden Zissou Welch, age 5 (Inspired by Alma Thomas)

Atmospheric Effects I 1970
acrylic and pencil on paper

The Eclipse 1970
acrylic on canvas

Fall 2022 Featured Artist: Laura Karetzky

Laura Karetzky

I find myself drawn to Karetzky’s work for many reasons—the monochromatic palette, the peephole nature of perspective portrayed, the intimate (but not) subject matter. All of these appeal greatly, but if I had to pick one thing, it would be the texture. While I haven’t seen any of her paintings in person, the digital images undoubtedly affirm scratches, streaks, drips, and chisels—a quality that, for whatever reason, makes me feel drawn into another reality. And perhaps that is the point, to visit someone else’s reality. As Emily Capone notes in her review of Karetzky’s 2021 Concurrence exhibition:

“Karetzky’s choice and application of her medium is purposeful. Each layer has a reason. The primed wood and textured backgrounds insinuate a history of use, much like finger streaks on a window or a tablet screen, while the layer itself is the first “window.” The actual windows evoke the physical engagement of the viewer, whether through a genuine representation in real time or through a time capsule. This hybridization is something Karetzky touches on with paintings such as Teal Text and Remote Screen. The play on words and the literal juxtaposition of the teal window on a digital screen is a stark contrast to the reflections through a mirror in Green Key or Points and Palms.”

Points And Palms 2022
oil on panel, 60 x 48 in

Laura Karetzky received her BFA from Carnegie-Mellon University, an MFA from The New York Academy of Art, and engaged in additional training at the School of Visual Arts, The New York Studio School, the Rhode Island School of Design, as well as extensive study in Florence, Italy. She is the recipient of several awards and fellowships including 2021 New York Studio School Artcritial Prize; 2020 New York Studio School Mercedes Matter Award; 2017 ESKFF Mana Contemporary Residency; 2014 Milton and Sally Michel Avery endowed Fellowship at Yaddo; 2011 Yaddo Fellowship; and 2009 New York Academy of Art Eric Fischl Award of Distinction. Laura Karetzky lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. 

from the Luis De Jesus gallery:
”For many years, Laura Karetzky has been interested in the effect that communicating, specifically through technological means, has on perception. Since the pandemic, we have relied substantially on live-media platforms to perform our daily functions, and now we appear to be stuck somewhere between the real and virtual – a hybridization of witnessing the world, both in and around us. 

The phenomenon of being inside our bodies and outside, on other screens, in other windows, and in other places, has changed our understanding of space forever as the boundaries of each are merging. This has led Karetzky to question the images she sees in every aspect of her visual field. With this body of work, she addresses the story inside another story, a window in a window so to speak, superimposed or inherently found; life reinstated inside itself.” 

Stripped 2021
oil on wood, 30″ x 24″

Toast 2019
oil on panel, 48” x 60”

Spring-Summer 2022 Featured Artist: Tiffany Alfonseca

Tiffany Alfonseca (b. 1994) is a Bronx- based Dominican-American mixed media artist who creates vibrant and colorful artworks that celebrates Black and Afro-Latinx diasporic culture. Alfonseca continuously taps into her Afro-Dominican roots and leverages it as a conceptual cantilever that provides a dynamic framework for her artistic practice. Moreover, her work aims to visually articulate that the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora does not exist within a monolith, but that these communities are a cultural cornucopia that is vast, varied, and complex. Alfonseca’s artwork is an intricate combination of beauty, diversity, and multilingualism that exemplifies the strength of the Black and Afro-Latinx diaspora. (from tiffanyalfonseca.com)

As a mixed media artist, Alfonseca combines acrylic paint, charcoal, and glitter for her creations, breathing life into the two-dimensional art form through texture and depth. She draws inspiration from her own background and themes present in her culture, often depicting her loved ones and objects reminiscent of her childhood. By mixing patterns, colors, and mediums, Tiffany manages to brighten those quotidian tasks like bathing or folding laundry. (from LATINA)

Alfonseca presented her first solo exhibition, De Las Manos Que Nos Crearon, in Fall 2021 at The Mistake Room.

Romi 2021
Acrylic paint, charcoal, stickers, and glitter on stretched canvas, 48x60 inches

“In the Dominican Republic it’s normal to have a trabajadora in your home, and Romi happens to be my aunt’s trabajadora for years now. Every summer that I would go back to the Dominican Republic, she would always be there to welcome me with open arms.” - Tiffany Alfonseca

Esta vez sera diferente 2020
Acrylic paint, charcoal, and glitter on stretched canvas // 30×40 inches

”For me this piece is a representation of Black and brown queer love, depicting how being queer can be challenging in the Latinx community and culture. ‘Esta vez sera diferente’ stems from wanting to change the narrative of forbidden queer love and embracing it instead in the Latinx culture.” - Tiffany Alfonseca

Summer-Fall 2021 Featured Artist: María Berrío

María Berrío

I recently discovered the vibrant work of María Berrío through this Hyperallergic review entitled: “‘These Are the Women I Want to Be’: María Berrío’s Visions of Displacement.” Inspired by Latin American Realism, narratives of displacement, and the nonhuman environment, Berrío creates giant collages using watercolor and decorative paper sourced from Japan and elsewhere.

María Berrío (b. 1982) was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and spent much of her childhood living on her family’s mountainside farm where she developed a unique and lasting connection to nature. At eighteen Berrío relocated to New York and received her BFA at Parsons School of Design in 2004, followed by her MFA at the School of Visual Arts in 2007.

Berrío describes the women in her work thus: “They are embodied ideals of femininity. The ghostly pallor of their skin suggests an otherworldliness; they appear to be more spirit that flesh. These are the women I want to be: strong, vulnerable, compassionate, courageous, and in harmony with themselves and nature. They combine the elements of women who are typically thought of as powerful – the captains of industry, resolute politicians, fiery activists – with the traits of those who are not usually thought of as such, thereby underlining the common force found in all women. The female soldier fighting on the front lines is of interest, but so too is the mother who finds a way to feed her children and sing them to sleep amid bombing campaigns and in the ruins of cities. To truly ennoble womanhood, we must discover and appreciate the beauty in every action, big or small.”

Genipa 2019
collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Cricket Song 2017
Japanese paper on canvas

The Dream of Flight 2019
collage with Japanese paper and watercolor paint on canvas, 60 x 72 inches

Spring 2021 Featured Artist: Asami Kiyokawa

Asami Kiyokawa

Asami Kiyokawa was born in Awaji Island, Japan in 1980. She held her first solo exhibition in 2001 and in 2011 became the youngest artist to hold a solo exhibition at Mito Art Tower. Asami is an embroidery artist who uses a needle and thread—along with other materials—to overlay an imaginative new world onto her photographs.

The image above comes from Kiyokawa’s “Complex Series,” of which her website notes: “Probably everyone has a complex of some sort. Something that attracts our concern, causes us to worry, and triggers our efforts to overcome it. Kiyokawa felt that way when she was working as a model. Eventually, she came to realize that her complex could become her originality, or her own distinctive quality. For this series, the artist took a number of photographs of the same model, and used them as the base for work on the theme of typical complexes that trouble women.”

I wasn’t able to obtain copies of the pieces I most admire, so I highly recommend exploring Kiyokawa’s website. I am especially fond of the “Mythology” series.

The images that follow are pulled from Kiyokawa’s social media account.

Fall 2020 Featured Artist: Felicia Van Bork

I believe I must be painting this way because I am in revolt against the unconsidered opinions expressed by people in the news these days. There is an aching need for empathy and tenderness in the world and I am teaching myself these things as fast as I can. —Felicia van Bork, March 28, 2020

Comment 17
2019, oil on canvas, 14 x 11 in.

Felicia Van Bork

Born in Toronto, Canada, Felicia van Bork completed her undergraduate studies at the Ontario College of Art and Design University and earned her MFA at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design at the Fine Arts Work Center, Provincetown, MA.

The artist's paintings and collages are widely collected in the United States and Canada and Felicia has been the recipient of numerous residency fellowships, including from the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and McColl Center for Art + Innovation, where she manages the printmaking studio. In the summer of 2017, she was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome.

But what I really love is her series of How To collages…

How to Turn the Moon
2014, collage on panel, 36 x 36 in.

How to Beckon
2015, collage on panel, 36 x 36 in.

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Watch Felicia van Bork discuss her collage process!

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How to Divide and Multiply
2015, collage on panel, 36 x 36 in.

Spring 2020 Featured Artist: Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne

Angela Dufresne is a painter, teacher and occasional writer who has shown her work in the U.S. and Europe since 1993. She has been the subject of twenty-three solo exhibitions and participated in over 100 group shows. Dufresne’s “work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non hierarchical and perverse” (angeladufresne.org).  

Maritza Ranero or Kiss the Cunt of God
2018, 72 x 66 Inches, oil on canvas

Dufresne’s paintings exuberantly weave imagery, narrative, paint, and visceral pleasure. She refers to the work as examples of non-paranoid, porous ways of being in the world. Delivered with absurdity, affection and feminist vibrato, Dufresne presents figurative articulations that feverously emerge out of the paint. Humorous, giddy, vulnerable, non-heroic, perverse, her figures revel in their destabilized relationship to their environments. Her subjects are nether man nor nature, form or formless, but allow for both to coexist in their lack of selfhood and their openness to absorb, fuse with, metabolize the world around them. In cinematic dissolves they conjure up the centrality, the ontology of humanity, as challenged. Deft in techniques of revision, erasure, overlay and addition, Dufresne deploys empathy and humor with equal parts skill and sensitivity in a commitment to painting’s ability to present, transgress and reconfigure experience and representation. (Guggenheim Foundation)

Perfect In Every way Except No Nose
2013, oil on canvas, 24 x 28 inches

See Hyperallergic for more on Dufresne:
”Beer with a Painter: Angela Dufresne”
”Angela Dufresne Queers the Portraiture Tradition”

Summer 2019 Featured Artist: Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss

Julie Curtiss is a French artist based in Brooklyn. In 2004, she studied at the Art Institute of Chicago thanks to a Louis Vuitton Moet Hennessy Award. After her graduation from l’Ecole des Beaux-arts of Paris in 2006, she lived in Tokyo. Influenced by the local art scene and Japanese graphic imagery, she started a new body of works focusing on drawing. After a brief come back in France, she finally settled in Brooklyn in 2010 and was recipient of a Van Lier Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2012. Curtiss shows her works in various venues and galleries of the New York City area.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT (From Maake)
“I enjoy associating humor with darkness, the uncanny and the mundane, grotesque shapes to vivid colors. I work from mental notes or imagination. With ideas of narration, I will utilize recurring elements from one painting to another, or leave some of the action outside the frame, thus creating a form of suspense.

My artworks are psychological. By omitting parts of an image or suggesting abnormal situations, I would like to contrast a feeling of familiarity with surrealism.

I am interested in the various aspects that female identity can take, especially through the opposite notions of Nature and Culture. I like to represent smoking teacups and cigarettes, objects that call to mind a domestic, tamed image of women. On the other side, organic, ambiguous body parts allude to the archetype of a woman fused with nature and her animalistic drive.

With faceless portraits of women, gnarled fingers and toes, and voluptuous bodies composed of hair, I would like to present the viewer with an enigmatic puzzle, an invitation to reflect on the idea of an unfixed, ever-changing self.”

The Test, 2016
Gouache on paper
12 x 16 inches

Appetizer, 2017
Gouache on paper
12 X 9 inches

Tea for two, 2016
Acrylagouache on paper glued on panel, 20 x 24 inches

Chinatown, 2018
Acrylic, vinyl, and oil on canvas, 30 x 40 inches

Spring 2019 Featured Artist: Luchita Hurtado

Luchita Hurtado

From the Hammer Museum:
“Over the course of her long career, Luchita Hurtado has maintained a rigorous commitment to experimentation—with styles, forms, and materials, and across a range of media. Hurtado’s works from the 1940s and 1950s primarily consist of paintings and works on paper that contain abstract forms, biomorphic landscapes, totemic figures, and patterns. These early works also convey Hurtado’s ideas about humanity, the universe and the cosmos, and nature and the environment, themes that continue to inform her oeuvre.

The works that span the late 1960s to the 1970s, a time when the artist primarily divided her time between Taos and Los Angeles. During this period, her work shifted from biomorphic abstraction to more figurative representations. This departure was inspired, in part, by the political and social changes occurring in the United States and throughout the world, including the women’s liberation movement and the beginnings of the environmental movement. Hurtado was particularly attuned to the activities of the women’s movement, and representations of her own body are, as she has put it, an “affirmation of self,” an assertion of her own presence and power. Many of these paintings are rendered from above, with Hurtado’s breasts, arms, legs, feet and hands partially visible against backdrops of patterned floors, planters, and woven baskets.”

Luchita Hurtado (b. 1920 Caracas, Venezuela) works in Santa Monica, California. In 1928 Hurtado immigrated to New York City, where she studied at Washington Irving High School and the Art Students League. She began her career in the early 1940s as a fashion illustrator for Condé Nast and as a muralist for Lord & Taylor. In the mid-1940s, Hurtado frequently traveled between New York and Mexico City, where she worked within an international group of artists and writers who were part of the World War II diaspora. In the late 1940s, Hurtado moved to Mill Valley, California, where she associated with the Dynaton Group. In 1951 she moved to Los Angeles, where she has resided ever since. Recent solo exhibitions include the Annenberg Community Beach House, Santa Monica (2017) and Park View Gallery, Los Angeles (2016). Prior to these, her last solo exhibition was held at the Women’s Building, Los Angeles (1974). Hurtado has exhibited sporadically from the 1950s until the present, including at Night Club Gallery, Chicago (2016); Carnegie Art Museum, Oxnard, California (1994); Tally Richards Gallery, Taos, New Mexico (1970); and Paul Kantor Gallery, Los Angeles (1953).

Untitled
oil on canvas 1970

Untitled
oil on canvas, 28 x 36 inches 1952

Read more, see more:
‘It’s All a Surprise’: Luchita Hurtado Is Enjoying a Star-Making Turn in the Hammer Biennial
The Magical Life of 98-Year-Old Painter Luchita Hurtado

Summer-Fall 2018 Featured Artist: Lee Price

Lee Price

American painter Lee Price focuses on the subject of food with the solitary female figure in private, intimate settings — figures that are always lost in what might appear to be the bliss of consumption in highly unusual environments and portrayed from a unique aerial point of view. This odd perspective creates an illusion or feeling of an out of body experience as if the subject is looking down at herself. While clearly demonstrating her amazing technical skills, the circumstance of consistently depicting female figures in the act of compulsive behavior tends to hint at an underlying message. Price’s paintings have been the subject of numerous solo and group shows across the United States. She is represented by Evoke Contemporary in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and Wendt Gallery which has showrooms in Laguna Beach, New York, Singapore, and Vienna. Lee currently lives and works in Beacon, New York.

Artist's Statement:
"There are two threads that my paintings follow: one being a discussion on women’s relationship with food, the other being a discussion on compulsive behavior. At times the two threads intertwine. The overhead perspective emphasizes the fact that the women are watching their own actions; watching themselves in the middle of their out of control behavior but unable to stop. The settings are private spaces, spaces of solitude, and mainly, unusual places to find someone eating. The private space emphasizes the secrecy of compulsive behavior and the unusual settings emphasize its absurdity. The solitude/peace of the setting is a good juxtaposition to the frenetic, out-of-control feel of the woman’s actions. 

One of the most potent messages these pieces deliver is that of excessive waste. Not just material waste but the waste of time and energy that is used up in obsession. Energy that could be directed towards productive endeavors, through our compulsive activity, is instead being used to wrap us in a cocoon. Where we could be walking forward, we instead paralyze ourselves. For the women in these paintings, even with an excess of food, there is no nourishment. Unable to sit with the discomfort/unease of the present moment, these women take in excessive amounts and in the process are shutting out the possibility of being truly nourished. 

Most women are brought up to be givers. To nurture others at the expense of our own needs. We hide our appetites, not just for food but in many areas of our lives, and then consume in secret. In my most recent works the women seem to be coming out of the closet. Eyeing the viewer — not censoring their hunger. My paintings ask what is it that truly nourishes us and how truthful can we be about the size of our hunger?"

Asleep        oil on linen, 56" x 38"      2009

Cocoa Puffs          oil on linen, 44" x 62"        2009

Spring 2018 Featured Artist: Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola

Toyin Ojih Odutola (b. 1985, Ife, Nigeria) creates drawings utilizing diverse mediums to emphasize the striated terrain of an image and its formulaic representations. She earned her BA from the University of Alabama in Huntsville and her MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Ojih Odutola lives and works in New York.

Through black ballpoint pen ink, Toyin Odutola’s drawings question physical and sociopolitical identities as they pertain to skin color. Treating skin as topography, she layers ink as a means of mapping a person’s subjective, individual geography built from real-life experiences. Her interest in surface qualities stems from the history of African textiles, which inspires the artist’s rich textures on flat planes. Concerned with historical representations of black subjects in portraiture, Odutola undermines notions of blackness in her drawings by exploring what it means to look or be perceived as black, as, while drawn in black ink, not all of her subjects are of African descent. More recently, Odutola has begun to look beyond pen ink, working with charcoal and pastels to reflect the cultural diversity and ambition of American cities.

From the SCAD Museum notes on her exhibition, Testing the Name: The artist's unusual approach to the rendering of skin and its textures is an acute and considered comment on the representation of blackness. Her velvet, seductive surfaces claim territory within the art historical canon of portraiture, which historically favored whiteness. Ojih Odutola's radical black skins seemingly bend light, resisting a logical visual comprehension that speaks as complex metaphor.

The artist’s subjects are itinerant, cosmopolitan and, while intentionally not recognizable, drawn partially from her own inner circle. Ojih Odutola places individuals and couples in opulent interiors and rich landscapes, at leisure and in social interactions. Architectural details and objects surrounding her subjects receive equal attention. Of Nigerian descent, she grew up in the American South and developed a seemingly plausible narrative incorporating themes that, in reality, might not be so straightforward. The artist’s choices are a statement and decision to self-determination and, through their representation, bring into reality a hopeful present.
 

Toyin Ojih Odutola in New York, December 2015                         Photo: Vicente Muñoz

Pregnant       charcoal, pastel and pencil on paper, 74 1/2 x 42 in.         2017

Winter 2018 Featured Artist: Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald

Amy Sherald (American b. Columbus, GA 1973, lives Baltimore) received her MFA in Painting from Maryland Institute College of Art (2004), BA in Painting from Clark-Atlanta University (1997), and was a Spelman College International Artist-in-Residence in Portobelo, Panama (1997). In 2016, Sherald was the first woman to win the Outwin Boochever Portrait competition grand prize; an accompanying exhibition, The Outwin 2016, has been on tour since 2016 and will open at the Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MO in October 2017. Public collections include Smithsonian National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Museum of African American Art and Culture, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, Washington, D.C.; Columbus Museum, GA; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, NC. Sherald is represented by Monique Meloche Gallery, Chicago.
 

From the recent New York Times article, "Why the Obamas' Portrait Choices Matter":
"Ms. Sherald’s subjects...are mostly young and come in all shapes and sizes. Her images play black and white against color in different ways, most obviously in the skin tones, which are painted on the gray scale. This recalls old photographs but mainly gives the figures a slight remove from the rest of the painting, one that also signals their awareness of the obstacles to their full participation in American life. This simple device introduces the notion of double consciousness, the phrase coined by W.E.B. DuBois to describe the condition of anyone living with social and economic inequality."

 

Maybe If I Wore a Mask    oil on canvas, 71 x 51 inches  2009

Equilibrium      oil on canvas, 100 x 67 inches    2012

Summer 2017 Featured Artist: Maria Raquel Cochez

Maria Raquel Cochez

Maria Raquel Cochez was born in Panama in 1978. In 2002, she received a BFA in Fibers from the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah, GA. In 2007, she moved to Atlanta, GA where she works mainly on conceptual photography, performance art, video, art objects, and painting. Her work is an elaborate story of the battle with self acceptance, executed through auto-referential, autobiographical, and biographical accounts parallel to this universal struggle.

Cochez has had several solo exhibitions in Panama, El Salvador, and the United States. She has participated in group shows throughout Central America, Mexico, Puerto Rico, and the United States, including the 7th Central American Biennial in Nicaragua in 2010. Her work has been reviewed in numerous publications across Latin America and the U.S. She has lectured and taught workshops in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, and Panama. In 2010, her work was acquired by the Ortiz Gurdián Art Center in Nicaragua, a museum housing one of the world’s largest collections of contemporary art from Central America.
 

Artist's Statement:
My work is an exploration of the human experience existing within all the norms established around food, concepts of beauty, self esteem, and our own personal, sometimes skewed and often limiting definitions of these. Through a variety of media I examine the actions and perceptions of myself and others reminiscent of my own behaviors and thoughts dictated by an eating disorder and body image dysmorphia. It investigates the psychology behind the forming of beauty ideals in childhood, the cultural differences in beauty canons and their subjectivity, the self harm involved in distorted conceptions of the body, the sexual dynamic surrounding bodies not currently celebrated in the media, and the impact that distorted relationships with food can have on all of these premises. I examine the act of binge eating, the physical settings in which it happens, and the secrecy behind it; the cycle of loosing and gaining weight and the physical consequences of this symptom of the condition. My work is an elaborate story of the battle of self acceptance executed through auto-referential, autobiographical, and biographical accounts parallel to this universal struggle.
 

Bree, The Fantasies      acrylic on canvas, 72" x 96"       2012

Peanut Butter, The Binges     acyrlic on canvas, 60" x 80"         2007

Spring 2017 Featured Artist: Grace Mikell Ramsey

Grace Mikell Ramsey

Grace Mikell Ramsey grew up on a farm in a small southern town in north-central Florida. She studied religion and art at Stetson University and after graduating, moved to New Orleans in the summer of 2007 to teach in the Recovery School District and make art. She received her M.F.A. in Painting from Tulane University in May 2012 and was awarded the Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant Award in June 2012. Her work has been shown at the Contemporary Arts Center in New Orleans, the University of Alabama at Birmingham Art Gallery and published in Oxford American Magazine, Artvoices Magazine, and Arkansas Life magazine.
 

Artist's Statement:
"Working loosely from my own experiences, memories, musings, introspections, and fears, my paintings function in a dreamlike narrative space between fantasy and reality. I explore themes of girlhood and womanhood, using elements of ritual, magic and religious iconography to give color and light to what is kept hidden or left unsaid. These are the secrets of an insular world, but if there are mysteries in these scenes, there may also be moments of uncanny familiarity. Though this work arises from my private thoughts, I hope that it opens itself to possibility. The narrative and emotional threads grow richer and more complicated with every viewer who might think, for a moment, I’ve seen or felt or dreamed this before."

Keep   oil on canvas   48" x 60"   2011
 

What Happens After Them     oil on wood panel    60" x 72"   2012

Fall 2016 featured Artist: Audrey Kawasaki

Audrey Kawasaki

The themes in Audrey Kawasaki's work are contradictions within themselves. Her work is both innocent and erotic. Each subject is attractive yet disturbing. Kawasaki's precise technical style is at once influenced by both manga comics and Art Nouveau. Her sharp graphic imagery is combined with the natural grain of the wood panels she paints on, bringing an unexpected warmth to enigmatic subject matter. 

The figures she paints are seductive and contain an air of melancholy. They exist in their own sensually esoteric realm, yet at the same time present a sense of accessibility that draws the observer to them. These mysterious young women captivate with the direct stare of their bedroom eyes.

"Sometimes it’s OK to fall in love with pretty things and the alluring paintings of LA artist Audrey Kawasaki may well merit adoration through their aesthetic appeal alone, but there is a bit more to the gorgeous fantasy characters she creates on wood panel after wood panel. Death via skull imagery abounds in her works and sex is always brought up. Precious, pouty, sad-eyed and sexy, Audrey’s girls most often appear before us as if in the midst of their greatest indulgence, but right alongside the slightest of hints at the ephemeral nature of it all. In the end, all Audrey leaves for us to do after is wish we had been there for that (hopefully not so very) otherworldly moment too."  —Whitney May, NY Arts Magazine

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Forget Me Not        oil, acrylic, and graphite on wood panel 36"x20"     2012

Summer 2016 Featured Artist: Aleks Bartosik

Aleks Bartosik

Aleks Bartosik presently works from her studio in Toronto.  She obtained her MFA degree from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec in 2005.  Bartosik is a two-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2004 and 2007) for her figurative painting and drawing, and is generously supported for her work by the Ontario Arts Council.  As part of Bartosik’s research and artistic development, she is an active participant in artist residencies and project collaborations all over the world. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, most recently in Canada, USA, Germany, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina.  Bartosik’s work is represented by La Petite Mort Gallery (Ottawa, Ontario) and is collected by Headbones Gallery (Vernon, British Columbia).  Bartosik is currently employed at the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Living Arts Centre (Mississauga) as a painting and drawing instructor.

"I am a visual artist working figuratively and most often large-scale, where I combine drawing elements with painting, performance, installation, sculpture, and film/video. I explore the boundaries between the real and the imaginary and investigate one’s ability and willingness to imagine, pretend, dream and suspend disbelief.  I am interested in our repressed fears and the sense of wonder engendered through curiosity and dream.  Experimentation with different disciplines, surfaces, and spaces, enables me to invite the viewer to wander the realms and playgrounds I create as my drawings transform (drawing performances). "  —Aleks Bartosik

Spring 2016 Featured Artist: Ekaterina Vanovskaya

Ekaterina Vanovskaya was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, and grew up on the other side of the ocean. Ekaterina received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana.
 

"Painter Ekaterina Vanovskaya is inspired by sharp, clear memories of places and spaces of her childhood in Russia. At first glance, landscapes and interior scenes populated with figures appear to be about a longing for a place, but extended looking begins to reveal more. Vanovskaya's figures are often depicted in the midst of ordinary movement or gesture set within visually lush environments that recapture a different sense of time altogether - one that evokes a time of childhood and the rhythms of our dreams."  

—Jennifer Riley, Henry Radford Hope School of Fine Arts MFA Catalog 2015