Alicia Grullón is an interdisciplinary artist whose vision is to use art to create a world that does not yet exist. Whether through socially engaged projects, performance, works on paper, video or photography, she takes into account the use of space as a site of social construction where issues of race, class, gender, and activism open. Her involvement comes from wanting to re-write history interrupting traditional dialogues in order to show a perspective closer to that lived by people. She immerses herself drawing from intersectional feminist and critical race theories in her campaign to decolonize the world through art. What her role is as an artist in the community are questions she has been exploring in past socially engaged work and performance art pieces. She sees that art like politics questions how we establish our presence in the world. Grullón has spoken at the United States Society on Art in Education, Association of Art Historians in London and the Queens Museum for the Open Engagement Conference, May 2014. She completed residency programs with the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Arts Council Korea, and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts and in Germany. Grullón has presented at El Museo del Barrio, Performa 11, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Art in Odd Places. Her work has been funded by the Puffin Foundation, Bronx Council on the Arts, the Department of Cultural Affairs of the City of New York, and Franklin Furnace Archives. Most recently, she has conducted workshops for 350NYC.org and Naturally Occurring Cultural Districts in New York.
Gail Skudera’s painted, woven, drawn, photo-transfer, and collaged works have been exhibited frequently since the early 1980s. She has had solo exhibitions at the Williams Center Gallery, Lafayette College, Easton, Pennsylvania; Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York; Saint Mary’s College, Indiana; Lancaster Art Museum, Pennsylvania; Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago; and Sybil Larney Gallery, Chicago, among others. Selected recent group exhibitions include The Piano Roll Project: Shared Sensibilities, Bates Mill Complex at Museum L-A, Lewiston, ME (2015); Remix: Selections from the International Collage Center (traveling nationally, 2010-); Image/Clot at Zolla/Lieberman Gallery in Chicago (2012); Sporen, Textiel Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands (2010); Daughters of the Revolution: Women & Collage, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York (2009); 5th International Biennial of Textile Art, Buenos Aires, Argentina (2009); Japanese International Artist’s Society Exhibition, Spiral Hall, Tokyo (2009); and Transformation, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts (2009). Gail Skudera: W O V E N will be at the Maine Museum of Photographic Art in late 2016, and her work will be included in the Center for Maine Contemporary Art 2016 Biennial in late 2016.
Skudera received a Visual Artist Fellowship Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, DC in 1990-91. She has been the recipient of other grants, awards, and residencies including an Artist Residency, Experimental Printmaking Institute, Lafayette College (2016); Visual Artist Residency, Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA (2009); Robert M. McNamara Foundation Residency Award, Westport Island, ME (2007); New York State Council on the Arts Grant (1998); and Artist in the Arts-in-Education Residency Program, Illinois Arts Council, Chicago, IL (1992-94). Her work is in collections including the International Collage Center, NY and PA; Illinois State Museum; Baird & Warner Corpration, Chicago; Medical College of Virginia; Wilson College, Chambersburg, PA; and the Art Museum of the State University of New York, Potsdam. Skudera is active as a lecturer, juror, university and college art instructor, and was a long-time reviewer for Fiber Arts.
Skudera was born in Hackensack, NJ. She studied at Montclair State University, then Northern Illinois University, where she earned her BFA and MFA. She lived and worked in Chicago from 1981-94, northern New York and central Pennsylvania from 1994- 2010. She lives and works in Maine.
STATEMENT
In Beauty and Race I am examining how the Western European definition of beauty affects women’s self identity and self-image; the consistent idealization, objectification and over sexualized images from the media bombard women everyday. Consequently, women are altering themselves physically and psychologically and becoming disjointed and fragmented to fit into this unrealistic model.
BIO
Mira Gandy is a New York based visual artist whose paintings, collages, and installations, examine issues related to women, identity, beauty, race, history and their intersection in media and culture. Gandy studied at the American University in Paris, France and holds a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts degree from the University of Southern California Roski School of Art and Design where a Black Alumni Scholarship was created in her honor. Gandy has over 15 years of teaching experience in personal art instruction with youth and adults of all ages and is the recipient of the 2012 National Action Network Woman of Excellence Award for her advancement of women and children in the community.
Gandy’s work has been shown in numerous exhibitions and galleries including: Flux Fair Public Art Projects, Harlem, New York; Rio III Gallery, Harlem, New York, Dwyer Cultural Center, Harlem, New York; La Maison d’art Gallery, Harlem, New York; Knox Gallery, Harlem, New York; Advocate & Gochis Galleries, Los Angeles, CA; The Fisher Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; William Grant Still Arts Center, Los Angeles, CA. She has been featured on WABC -TV’s Here and Now, on NY1, Sirius XM Radio and her work is owned by actors Sam and Latanya Jackson, Whoopi Goldberg, Phylicia Rashad, playwright David Mamet, actress/singer Audra McDonald, singer/songwriter Valerie Simpson and costume designer Emilio Sosa among others.
Statement
For me, the psyche is a metaphor and a testimonial, the culmination of our personal experience and history.
As the third girl in a turbulent Iraqi Jewish family from Bombay, I felt impelled to explore the psychological legacy that shaped my perceptions, identity, and motivations. My work examines these cultural and family dynamics, with themes of vulnerability, rebirth, gender relationships, and social convention emerging across several series.
My practice encompasses two- and three-dimensional disciplines, including drawing, painting, photo-based imagery, and sculpture; the techniques are often integrated and combined with a variety of materials, found objects, and ready-mades which form layers of meaning.
Bio
Award-winning artist Camille Eskell exhibits her work extensively in solo and group shows throughout the U.S. and abroad, including Wales, Mexico, and South America. Notable exhibitions are the recent Fountain Art Fair New York 2014, The New Yorkers at Arthaus gallery/San Francisco, as well as A Book About Death at MOMA/Wales, Verge Art Fair/ArtBrooklyn (NY), Black Madonna /HP Garcia Gallery (NY), The Bold 1980’s: A Collector’s Vision at The Chrysler Museum/(VA), and Innocence and Experience at the Greenville County Museum of Art/(SC). Traveling group shows include Lines of Vision: Drawings by Contemporary Women, which was seen at contemporary art museums in Mexico City, Bogota, Columbia, Caracas, Venezuela, and more, as well at venues throughout the United States. Beyond Recognition toured throughout New England. Eskell has exhibited with artists Louise Bourgeois, Kiki Smith, Miriam Schapiro, Carolee Schneemann, Komar & Melamid, Donald Baechler, Walt Disney, and many others.
Eskell’s work is in public and private collections, including the Chrysler Museum of Art/(VA), MOMA/Wales, the Housatonic Museum of Art, (CT) and the Islip Art Museum (NY), and the Westport Permanent Collection (CT). She has received reviews in numerous publications, such as The New York Times, D’arte magazine, Art New England, The Examiner and Artslant online. Among her awards are fellowships in drawing and painting from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, and residencies at Weir Farm/National Historic site and the Vermont Studio Center. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from Queens College/CUNY, and lives and works in the greater New York area.
My name is Aisha Jemila Daniels and I’m a visual artist from Miami. I’m a senior at Howard University, where I am studying Fine Art Photography. I took my first photography class at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, FL under Noelle Flores Theard back in 2008. In 2009, I decided to enter a fine arts program at Dr. Michael M. Krop Senior High. My years at Krop resulted in my aspiration to prepare for and become a professional photographer.
My inspiration comes from Seydou Keita. He was a Malian photographer, a portraiture master, from the 1940s to ‘60s. He documented the people of Mali so beautifully, showing them as people who take pride in their appearance and are regal. I wanted to take his project further and document the authentic beauty of Afrikans throughout the continent and in her diaspora. That’s when I created Afrikans, which is an extensive photographic documentation of black people on the Afrikan continent and transplanted blacks throughout her diaspora. The purpose of the project is to unify us as one people through revealing to us our aesthetic and cultural similarities, along with restoring the authentic and regal Afrikan image in retaliation to white supremacy in the media.
From years of working on my photography project Afrikans I decided to work on more personal work, realizing that I too am a great subject. I began with a body work entitled Acceptance which focuses on my internal being, allowing self-revelation, which permits an understanding of my own reality, giving me options of ways to move forward. I am learning to be honest with myself, reflecting on how my surroundings have affected me and how I choose to heal. I began developing staged photographs in which I construct a scene of a moment in my life experience and document it. The project is my visual diary. My self-portrait series Acceptance was a pre-cursor for me to create a more complex visual diary. The project will tackle love, family, friendships, romantic relationships, social/political dynamics, spiritual dynamics and overall me. The project will confront who I am, who I want to be, what I actually end up being in that particular moment, and how I’m effected by my surroundings may it be positive or negative.
My first award was given to me back in 2013 by Scholastic, I received their Gold Key award for my ceramic work and was given an exhibition in the Miami Art Museum. During the same year I received my first photographic award, an Honorable Mention award from the Young Arts Foundation. Later in 2015, I received my first award for Afrikans, the Shutterstock Award from Worldstudio AIGA. In 2016 Afrikans was honored with the Creative Conscience Award from London, United Kingdom and the Freedom House Finalist award for capturing human rights.
While studying in the United Arab Emirates, I was fortunate to intern at Art Dubai, which is a leading international art fair for the Middle East, other parts of Asia, and Africa. Also, I received the Student Photographer of the Year Award for my Acceptance series by Martin Grahame-Dunn, one of the leading professional photography trainers of the United Kingdom. He was a judge for Photography Live Dubai, which is an international photography & videography event that serves the Middle East and North Africa. My work has has been published in Gulf Photo Plus of UAE, Femme Fotale Volume III Photo Book, which is a photographic project by women that represents women artists, ConnerSmith Gallery, In The Eleven Journal, The Street Photographer Notebook, Professional Artist Magazine, Positive Magazine, Saraba Magazine of Nigeria, and Photography Live Dubai.
My work has been show in the Miami Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami, Wynwood, Howard University, FRIDGE DC, Krikawa Jewelry Art Gallery, Studio Gallery, World Trade Centre Dubai, The Center for Photography at Woodstock, 555 Gallery, The Cube Gallery of NYU Abu Dhabi, and the Torpedo Factory in Alexandria, Virginia.
My practice explores the body through the prisms of age, gender, race, sexuality and history. I consider memory, myth, ritual, desire and the spaces the body occupies within these vignettes. The narratives move between past, present and surreal projections of the future, sometimes occupying these spaces simultaneously.
I explore the ritualized use of common objects, and architectural spaces, often queering their size, orientation or form to blur the line between memory, dream and experience, plotting the relationship between normative considerations of the body and its function in specified spaces. I use racially identified signifiers to twist and turn mythologies about the body and the spaces that it occupies. The work is at once confrontational and seductive. Graphic novels, pugilist sport, colonial portraiture and magic realism factor into the narratives.
Recent work explores home as a physical structure and repository for memories. I chronicle beginnings, departures and returns to this symbolic yet physical place, believing it to be the genesis where history, memory and myth are joined. The characters and the spaces I build for them to inhabit demonstrate the capacity in our lives for monsters, angels, heroes and giants, illustrating our reactions to occupation and absence, desire, responsibility, and obligation.
Bio
Michaela Pilar Brown is an image and object maker. She studied sculpture and art history at Howard University, though she has always been a maker of things. Born in Bangor, Maine and raised in Denver, Colorado, she cut her teeth in the halls of a museum where her mother worked as a security guard, and has been immersed in the culture of objects, their making and interpretation ever since.
Statement
My work is inspired by fragments and details of images with various textures, transparencies, and unique colors. I try to reveal hidden and potential meanings by combining techniques such as manual and digital photography, photo-collage, sewing, and painting.
My goal is to create a dynamic tension between the straightforward representation of the subject, though formally deconstructed, and the abstract composition of the whole.
By focusing on intimate detail and the specific character of a chosen subject, I question and probe its beauty in order to reveal, reconsider, or condemn its clichés.
Biography
Originally from Alsace, France, she has called Harlem, New York her home for the past ten years. Primarily self-taught in photography, she has refined her skills through classes at the International Center of Photography in New York, where she was also an Assistant Teacher. She is fascinated by details, inspired by personal interactions, and she structures her creative process with visual fragments that she collects in her daily life, travels, and relationships. She uses these fragments to create her photographic collages.
Her works have been featured in Le Temps, Destination and Le Journal des Arts. Her work has been exhibited and resides in private and museum collections in Europe and in New York. She was featured in FLUX Art Fair, May 2015 and was an award-winning artist at FLUX Public Art Projects, May 2016.
My art has always been steeped in a deep belief that through the creation and sharing of art we can transform the world. The Big Smile was inspired by the remarkable effect just one kind smile can offer from one to another. The project features the faces of residents from the surrounding communities of New York City. I capture their smiles on canvas and accompany that with text relating to mantras of self-love.
I believe that our society is steadily gaining insight and awareness in this respect and I hope to continue to build upon that with projects like The Big Smile. This series is designed to serve as a broad-spectrum educational tool for learning institutions. However, it is also adaptable to the public at large as a creative way to inspire harmonious communities. There are a number of ways to achieve this. One way is to formulate the Big Smile as a traveling exhibition, making art and its message accessible in public spaces. Another way is through social media. I am developing an interactive website around the project that will allow its message to reach a wider audience. Send me your message of self love and I will add it.
Michael Mut is the President and founder of the Love Yourself Project. He is also a life coach, practicing artist, educator, and lives and works in Brooklyn NY.
Lynn Umlauf (1942) was born in Austin, Texas into a family of artists. Lynn graduated in Austin with a Bachelor’s degree, and also spent one year at the Academia di Belli Arti in Florence, Italy, then returned to the States to receive a Masters degree from the University of Texas in 1966. She moved to New York in 1966-67. Madelon, her twin sister, introduced Lynn to the painter Michael Goldberg (1924 - 2008) in 1969, and they married 10 years later. Lynn first started showing in Italy. Her first show in New York was with the Hal Bromm Gallery, and her first museum inclusion was with the Whitney Biennial (1975). Her most recent solo Works 1998 – 2016 was at Zurcher Gallery in New York.
Kim Uchiyama is a painter who lives and works in New York City. Born in Des Moines, IA in 1955, Uchiyama studied drawing, painting and American literature at Drake University and the history of pre-Renaissance painting in Florence, Italy. She also attended Yale’s Summer School of Art & Music, Queens College and the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture. At the Studio School, Uchiyama worked with New York School painter Nicolas Carone, who had studied with legendary teacher and artist Hans Hofmann, whose ideas about pictorial structure, spatial tensions and color relationships greatly influenced postwar American abstraction and subsequent generations of painters.
Artist fellowships and grants include New York Foundation For The Arts, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Auvillar, France, the MacDowell Colony, Virginia Center for the Creative Arts at Amherst, VA and BAU Institute, Puglia, Italy.
Recent solo exhibitions include Fox Gallery, NY, Headwater Contemporary, Telluride, CO, John Davis Gallery, Hudson, NY, Kathryn Markel Fine Arts, Bridgehampton, NY and Lohin Geduld Gallery, New York. Other solo exhibitions include Janet Kurnatowski Gallery, Penine Hart Gallery and Leslie Cecil Gallery in New York. Exhibition reviews include ARTNews, The Brooklyn Rail, The New Criterion, The New York Sun, artcritical.com, Hyperallergic.com and The New York Times. Her paintings have been exhibited widely throughout the United States and are included in numerous private, corporate and museum collections, including that of Edward R. Broida.
Kim Uchiyama co-curated HeadSpace at Morris-Warren Gallery with Amanda Church and Izam Zawahra in 2016. She curated FREAK FLAG at Brian Morris Gallery Midtown in 2014 and Physical Property for Brian Morris Gallery Lower East Side in 2013. Uchiyama has also curated a series of exhibitions with the common title COLOR*TIME*SPACE with Joanne Freeman at Lohin Geduld Gallery, Janet Kurnatowski Gallery and at Hofstra University.