Nic Notion uses putty knives and industrial paint to create dynamic layers of aggressive lines on canvas.
Much of his work depicts abstract houses and structures decaying and burning, an urban landscape being overtaken by nature.
He captures a unique energy that is not typically displayed in a gallery setting. The combination of his subject matter and technique creates a stunning visual.
He is inspired by the works of Basquiat and Cezane. Nic continues to experiment with elements of street art, using non traditional methods to depict his environment.
He is creating art in a political climate of racial division and gentrification. The structures in his paintings become metaphors for dreams deferred within the community.
JAVA, Jorge A. Valdes, is a self-taught Cuban American artist, living in New York since 1992. Born in Santiago de Cuba in 1956, he began creating art as a teenager. The use of found objects & broken china in his work traces back to his native country during a period when supplies were scarce as a response to to a reality that transcended scarcity in a world where neither abundance nor scarcity can express enough the need of awareness towards a planet which requires all our attention as the only world we can exist. Over time, his use of recyclable materials became a passion and an identity that marks his work.
In 1992, JAVA moved to Miami where, despite abundance, he realized that unwanted material was as subjective and magical as in Cuba. In a reaction to the flushing shine of Miami Beach, in a hidden spot of a parking lot, JAVA created a series of found object sculptures that was shown in Atmosphere Gallery in Miami Beach. Leaving unclaimed whatever didn’t sell, he quickly rushed to NYC where he continued creating art while completing his Masters in Education at Columbia University in 1997. In addition to his incursion as a visual artist, he has published poetry in “Not Black & White” (Plain View Press, 1996) and in specialized magazines. During his career in teaching, the artist continued his passion with art.
JAVA’s art has been featured in various galleries and exhibits in Italy, Cuba and the USA. He was chosen as the artist for the national annual campaign of National Payroll Week, participated in the Southwest Minnesota State University Art Museum exhibit “Reclaimed” and was featured in a documentary of the artist by DEVA International Film during a solo show at Franklin 54 Gallery of Chelsea, New York. JAVA is a 2014 Brooklyn Arts Council grantee receiving the Local Arts Support & Community Arts Fund grants for a public commission and recently finished a solo exhibit curated by Paul Laster, a prominent writer, editor, curator and artist in the art world, at Corridor Gallery of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation in Brooklyn, New York.
He currently resides in South Bronx, New York and is active in creating public art projects and teaching workshops for local youth in addition to continuing his work in the studio.
Sheena Rose is a contemporary Caribbean artist from Barbados. In 2008, Sheena graduated with a BFA degree with Honors at Barbados Community College, and in 2016, she received her Masters in Fine Arts at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro with a Fulbright Scholarship. Sheena works with multimedias such as hand drawn animations, drawings, paintings, performance art, mixed media and new media.
Sheena has exhibited locally and internationally in the Caribbean, South America, North America, Europe, Africa and Asia. In 2011, Sheena had her first solo show “Town to Town” at the Barbados Community College and was the first passed student to have a solo show there. Sheena represented Barbados in many biennials such as the Havana Biennial, Venice Biennial, Gwangju Biennial, Jamaica Biennial, and participated in many museums and galleries such as MoCADA, Queens Museum, Turner Contemporary Gallery, Residency Gallery. Sheena has been awarded residencies at Alice Yard (Trinidad), Greatmore Art Studio (Cape Town, South Africa), Tembe Art Studio (Moengo, Suriname), and OAZO-AIR (Amsterdam, Netherlands), Art Omi (Ghent, New York) The Hermitage Artist Retreat ( Florida).
Her work has also been included in Art Fairs, Film Festivals and Auctions such as Prizm Art Fair, Third Horizon Film Festival and Rush Philanthropic Foundation Arts Auction- Art for Life. Sheena Rose’s work is also on the cover of three books, Small Axe 43. “See Me Here,” Christopher and Roberts Publisher and in 2015 her work is on the cover of Naomi Jackson’s book called “The Star Side of BirdHill”. The Cover has been awarded from Huffington Post and EPeople Magazine as one of the best book cover for the year 2015.
Born and raised in New York City of Dominican-born parents, Ros-Suárez has extensive printmaker experience, working in a range of techniques, from etching and woodcut to silk
screen printing. He began making prints at Bronx Printmakers and continued at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the Lower East Side Print Shop, and Manhattan Graphic Center, all in New York. Ros-Suárez is a member of the printmaking collective Dominican York Proyecto GRAFICA.
In high school, Ros-Suárez interned at the American Museum of Natural History, making replicas of dinosaur bones and Mayan artifacts. He also spent time studying in the Dominican Republic, where he was awarded a national prize for painting.
His artwork is identity-based, using inclusive practices that embrace the local and expand the range of cultural identity on a global scale. He is best known for intense paintings and sculptures that transforms the common in an expressionist style.
Ros-Suárez has had one-person exhibitions at museums in the United States and the internationally, including the Yeshiva University Museum, New York; the Paterson Museum, New Jersey; and the Instituto de Cultura y Arte in Santiago, Dominican Republic. He has been awarded commissions by the New York Department of Cultural Affairs and the Bronx Council for the Arts for public sculptures, and by the Metropolitan Transit Authority for stained glass windows.
Ros-Suárez recently conceptualized a group exhibition of nineteen artists, mostly Dominican, titled “Tyranny’s Tear: Mending the Dominican Trauma”, at BronxArtSpace, New York.
Ros-Suárez is a graduate of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY. and a licensed architect in the state of New York.
Melissa Matthews is a 31 year old, Brooklyn, NY born and bred, Trinidadian artist. She holds a BFA in Painting from Howard University in Washington DC. Most of her work is mixed media with a penchant for digital drawing and collage. Melissa is currently living and working primarily in Trinidad, W.I. As a first generation American, her work often deals with the duality of living between two cultures.
The current and recurrent themes within her work are the politics, irony, humour, love and violence of everyday life in specific places in the world. The artist often refers to her work as “ex-pat art” because her perspective is shaped mainly by being both insider and outsider in her two homelands.
Leslie Jiménez is a dominican multidisciplinary artist and illustrator, based in NY. Where she works and lives with her husband, daughter and two blood-parrot fish. Ms. Jiménez graduated from the prestigious Altos de Chavón School of Design, in the Dominican Republic. She was awarded a full scholarship at Parsons The New School for Design in New York City, where she graduated with honors. Leslie’s work have been exhibited in galleries, both uptown and downtown Manhattan, Washington DC, Barbados, Santo Domingo. As well as art fairs including SCOPE contemporary art fair in NY. And New York Presbyterian- The Allen Hospital. Other venues include PBS, and online magazine Mashable. Jiménez have been invited to talk about her work at El Museo del Barrio, CNN en Español, Rutgers University, City College and Parsons, The New School.
Charles Philippe Jean-Pierre is a Haitian-American Artist and American University professor who is best known for his introspective murals. He is a U.S. State Department Art in Embassies Artist and has been invited by the White House to speak on the role of the arts in Youth Justice. His work is in the permanent collection of the U.S. Embassy in Cotonou, Benin West Africa.
Jean-Pierre has created public art in Chicago, DC, Istanbul, Panama, Port-au-Prince, London, and Paris. He began experimenting with art at an early age by creating visual narratives based on classical paintings from his homeland. His work speaks to the nexus of political, social, and economic structures. Jean-Pierre holds a Masters of Arts from Howard University.
Nae Howard is a Black American interdisciplinary artist and Brooklyn native. At the moment she is currently bi-coastal working on her MFA at CalARTS. She strives to make engaging imagery that are instances of the American Black experience.
As an interdisciplinary artist, her practice examines constructs of societies views of beauty and politics in regards to the surface tensions of America within media. Her work explores the revitalization and ownership of black culture by black people. She studies colors established by pop-cultural icons in new media, reflexive ideologies in photographic portraiture, and visual disparities as a result of systemic racism, classism and gender binaries. Employing a strong background in printmaking and graphic design, her work critiques the politics of skin. Understanding the power of images, I create paintings, collages, music and animated Gif.s that evoke notions of conscious and unconscious concepts conceived through racist views that allow alternative narratives of blackness. Nae’s work illustrates all factors of the “cool” and societies consumer behavior of blackness. Currently my “Consume Us” series questions the importance of imagery in a social context and the notions of significant images such as “pop icons” in mass culture.
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. She saw that art could be used as a tool to bring people together and to create change.
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. Since then she has worked as a teaching artist in a number of New York based art and cultural organizations.
Sophia received her Bachelors in Fine Arts at the School of Visual Arts in 2010 and her Masters degree in Visual Arts Administration at NYU in 2013. She has participated in group exhibitions in both New York and Los Angeles as well as solo exhibitions at the Corridor Gallery in 2013 and Rush Arts Gallery in 2015. Her work has been featured in the Brooklyn Museum, the Bronx Museum of the Arts in 2015 and published in Say it Loud magazine. Sophia also received commissions by performers such as Lil Mama and Tisha Campbell-Martin and has presented her portraits to Alicia Keys and Kehinde Wiley.
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 six-year-old son and is determined to develop her career as a professional artist.