Jennifer Mack’s current body of work investigates societal conformities that isolate and confine individuals into pre-defined identities. She holds an undergraduate degree in Studio Arts, a Master’s degree in art education from Tufts University, and an MFA in Printmaking from Pratt Institute. Mack was selected and lectured at the 2ndAnnual International Mokuhanga Conference, 2014, at the Tokyo University of the Arts in Tokyo, Japan. She has exhibited in galleries and museums including, Newark Museum in New Jersey, International Print Center in New York, Brooklyn Museum in New York, and Mason Murer Gallery in Georgia. She received “The Elizabeth Catlett Printmaking Award” given by Hampton University Museum in 2005. Agnes Scott College and Clark Atlanta University has recently acquired her work to add to the college’s/university’s permanent collections. Mack’s work is also included various private collections throughout the U.S. and Japan. She currently works in New York City.
Ronny Quevedo earned his MFA from Yale University and BFA from The Cooper Union. He has participated in residencies at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Project Row Houses, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Lower East Side Printshop. He has exhibited at the Queens Museum; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Carol Jazaar Gallery (Miami); El Museo del Barrio; The Bronx River Art Center; Saltworks Gallery (Atlanta); and The Bronx Museum of the Arts. Upcoming projects include Open Sessions at The Drawing Center, Rush Arts Gallery, La Casita Maria (New York), Sicardi Gallery, and Lawndale Arts Center (Houston).
Mitsuko Brooks was born in 1981 on Misawa Air Force Base in Japan, and is a NYC based artist. She is a current MFA Candidate at UCLA’s Painting/Drawing program, and earned her B.F.A. at Cooper Union in New York. Brooks is a member of The Asian American Women Artists Association and attended the semester residential program The Oxbow School in Napa Valley, California. She completed artist residencies with The Wassaic Project (2014), The Snug Harbor Cultural Center & Botanical Garden (2012), and The School of Making Thinking (2013). Brooks was awarded The Sally Van Der Lier Fellowship, the Artists’ Fellowship, Inc., The Bette Midler Scholarship, and The Resnick Grant. She has exhibited internationally and nationally at The San Francisco Art Institute, California College of Arts, SOMArts, Materials for The Arts, The Center for Strategic Art & Architecture, Rush Arts Gallery, and Stephan Stoyanov Gallery. Currently, she has works on view at The Floating Library, an interdisciplinary library of artists books aboard an actual steamship in New York organized by Beatrice Glow. Brooks’ artist books, zines and mail art collages are in permanent collections at Smithsonian’s Archive of American Art, Canada’s Artexte Information Centre and Barnard College’s Library in New York.
Michael Paul Britto graduated with a BA from the City College of New York. Michael’s works range from videos to digital photography, sculpture, collage, and performance. Britto has had residencies at the New Museum in New York as well as Smack Mellon, The Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation and LMCC. Michael has been featured in shows at El Museo del Barrio, The Studio Museum of Harlem, The Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw, The Kitchen and the Victoria and Albert Museum in England. Britto has also been written about in “The New York Times, Art In America and the Brooklyn Rail.
Kevin Bright is a self-taught artist who has been living and making art in New York City since
the late 90’s. Fascinated by random patterns that appear in the city such as ripped paper, sidewalk and subway stains and graffiti. Kevin started to make art at the same time that he began to learn about New York’s legacy of abstract paintings. Ellen Gallagher, Clyfford Still, & Donald Baechler were among the artists who made a lasting impression on him and helped define the direction of his work. His world opened up once he decided to take a break from Pratt Manhattan, and jump right into the art scene. Since his mighty leap, he has produced limited edition art wares, and curated art shows in New York and Berlin. Bright’s art practice lends itself to the everyday experience and the use of low brow resources to create high brow works of art.
Sophia Dawson, born February 25, 1988, is a talented and self-motivated African American woman. She is a Brooklyn based artist who discovered her gift while painting a portrait of her father as she studied at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School for Music, Art and Performing Arts. At that very young age of sixteen, she witnessed that her work moved and touched people from all walks of life.
Sophia soon participated in Groundswell Community Mural Project, a non-profit arts organization, as a teen volunteer. In their afterschool program she had the opportunity to direct her artistic skills towards bringing about social change through designing and creating large-scale murals. The mural projects she participated in transformed various spaces throughout the borough. Sophia took on a leadership role among her teen group and was soon asked to join Groundswell’s team of professional artists and staff where she currently works.
Sophia received her Bachelors in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in 2010. She has done group exhibitions in both New York and Los Angeles as well as solo exhibitions from 2009-2013 at various spaces. Her art has been featured in the Brooklyn Museum, Corridor Gallery, and the Fountain Art Fair 2013. She has also been published in Say it Loud magazine. Celebrities such as Lil’Mama and Tisha Campbell-Martin own her work in their collections. Sophia has given speeches, testimonies and lectures to youth and her peers about her experience as a young black artist and woman. In her talks, she educates on recent black history and emphasizes the importance of overcoming obstacles to achieve one’s goals. Through her art, she aims to raise awareness on the struggles of oppressed people throughout history.
At the age of twenty-five Sophia graduated from New York University with a Masters in Visual Arts Administration. She aims to start an art program that will create an atmosphere where minority youth can address, through art, the issues they face in society. Sophia is currently raising her four-year-old son and is determined to develop her career as both a Professional Artist and Administrator of the Arts.
Cey Adams, a New York City native, emerged from the downtown graffiti movement to exhibit alongside fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He appeared in the historic 1982 PBS documentary Style Wars which tracks subway graffiti in New York. As the Creative Director of hip hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings, he co-founded the Drawing Board, the label’s in-house visual design firm, where he created visual identities, album covers, logos, and advertising campaigns for Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., Maroon 5, and Jay-Z.
He exhibits, lectures and teaches art workshops at institutions including: MoMA, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Walker Art Center, MoCA Los Angeles, Pratt Institute, Stamford University, Howard University, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, High Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and Mount Royal University and The University of Winnipeg in Canada. He recently co-authored DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop, published by Harper-Collins; and designed Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label, published by Rizzoli. Cey’s work explores the relationship between transformation and discovery. His practice involves dismantling various imagery and paper elements to build multiple layers of color, texture, shadow, and light. Cey draws inspiration from 60’s pop art, sign painting, comic books, and popular culture. His work focuses on themes including pop culture, race and gender relations, cultural and community issues.
Wong Kit Yi is a New York-based artist born in Hong Kong. She graduated from the MFA program at Yale University and moved to New York in 2012.
Wong works because she does not understand; she works to develop a grasp of things that she cannot achieve through rational thought. She is interested in Space, and alternative ways of understanding space. Her work is about measuring, locating, and quantifying the intangible. Much of her video, sculptural and performance-based work responses to specific situations and spaces, and involves consultation with other people. She regards growing up in Hong Kong as a major influence on her work. Wong is especially inspired by the sea of her mother’s random thoughts, her spirituality and her proactive business strategy.
Wong’s projects include The Ceiling Should Be Green, P!, NY (2013); EXCHANGE, School 33 Art Center, MD (2013); now what, Microscope Gallery, NY (2013); DysTorpia Media Project, Local Project, NY (2012), lā pí tiáo, Woofer Ten, Hong Kong (2010). Her work has recently been censored by the Chinese Ministry of Culture (CMC), and is unable to be a part of 2014 China Xinjiang Biennale.
She has been selected to participate in The Arctic Circle expeditionary residency (2015), which will take place at 10 degrees from the North Pole. She has been awarded the Susan H. Whedon Award (2012), Cheung’s Creative Award in Hong Kong (2006), and was a Sovereign Asian Art Prize finalist (2005). She was invited by Asia Art Archive in America to have a conversation with American Conceptual Art pioneer Mel Bochner (2013). Her projects have been published in Art in America, ChinaDaily, Time Out Hong Kong, South China Morning Post. She speaks native Cantonese, fluent English, and hysterical Mandarin.
As a whole, my work explores in a serio-comic way how the creation of a new mythology may serve as a coping mechanism in angst-ridden times where everything and everybody seems to be “hanging by a thread” more than ever before.
My paintings, sculptures, drawings and films relate to feminism in their focus on conventional domestic and low-tech items like clothespins and through the usage of feminized materials like thread and fabric.
Living in a world that is obsessed with technology and immortality, I have always felt the urge to produce work that reclaims the use of once feminized materials and focuses on the small and unassuming. The clothespin has been grabbing my attention since 2003. Through the invention of the “clothespin freak”, a figure made of a clear plastic clothespin, doll’s body parts and sewn pieces, I have been able to create an alternate universe that is constantly changing and growing. This “universe” is as much surreal and out-of-this world as it is also a sign of our times.
Using the “four-eyed” Clothespin Freaks as my surrogates and alternate identities, I intend to enlighten and entertain the viewer by emphasizing the importance of one’s imagination in a chaotic and mystifying world. A world that is increasingly multicultural, multilingual, shape-shifting, and surreal.
Mariko Mori is an internationally acclaimed artist. Her practice explores universal questions at the intersection of life, death, reality and technology. Her works has been acquired by museums and private collectors worldwide. Mori gained recognition for her interactive installation, Wave UFO, which debuted at Kunsthaus Bregenz, in Bregenz (Austria) in 2003. The installation was subsequently shown in New York (USA) with Public Art Fund, Genoa (Italy), and was included in the 2005 Venice Biennale (Italy). It was also featured in “Oneness”, a survey of Mori’s work that opened at the Groninger Museum (Netherlands), then traveled to the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, in Aarhus (Denmark), the PinchukArtCentre, in Kyiv (Ukraine). Oneness was also exhibited at Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil, in Brasília, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil) in 2011.
Mori’s recent large sculpture includes Sun Pillar (2011). This sculpture was the very first installation realized for the project of Faou Foundation in the Continent of Asia in Miyako Island of Okinawa in Japan with the mission to bring attention to Earth-consciouness. Faou Foundation was founded by Mori in 2010 as an educational and cultural non-profit organization to dedicate a series of harmonious, site-specific permanent art installations to honor the nature of six habitable continents. The upcoming Faou Foundation permanent installation entitled Ring will be installed over a beautiful waterfall at Visconde Mauá, in the city of Resende, not far from Rio de Janerio, Brazil in 2016.
Mori’s solo exhibition have been exhibited throughout the world, including Royal Academy of Arts, in London (United Kingdom), Japan Society, in New York (USA), Espace Louis Vuitton Tokyo (Japan), The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Tokyo (Japan); The Brooklyn Museum of Art, in New York (USA); The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago (USA); The Serpentine Gallery, in London (England); The Dallas Museum of Art, in Dallas (USA). Several renowned museums have presented Mori’s solo exhibitions, as well as acquired Mori’s works in their collections, including Centre Georges Pompidou, in Paris (France); The Prada Foundation, in Milan (Italy); The Museum of Contemporary Art, in Chicago (USA); The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, in Los Angeles (USA). The PinchukArtCentre, in Kyiv (Ukraine); The ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, in Aarhus (Denmark), The Guggenheim Museum, in New York (USA);The Israel Museum, in Jerusalem (Israel); The Museum of Modern Art, in New York (USA) have Mori’s works in collection.
Mori has received various awards, including the prestigious Menzione d’onore at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 (for “Nirvana”) and the 8th Annual Award as a promising Artist and Scholar in the Field of Contemporary Japanese Art in 2001 from Japan Cultural Arts Foundation.
Mariko Mori lives in London, New York and Tokyo.