Bio
Ruben Natal-San Miguel –American, (Born in Arecibo, Puerto Rico) is an architect, photographer, curator, writer, art collector and consultant specializing primarily in the art of fine emerging photography.
His work has been shown nationally and internationally at Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York; Finch & Ada, New York; Kris Graves Projects, Fuchs Projects, Hous Projects, New York and Los Angeles; University of Washington, Seattle; Art in FLUX Harlem; Picture Black Friday 2009 and 2011; A Decade of Photographs 2000-2011, The New York Public Library 2010 -2014; Karyn Mannix Contemporary; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; La Maison D’Art Gallery; SCOPE NYC & Miami; Agua Art Fair during Art Basel Miami Beach; PULSE NYC; Art Chicago; Zona MAco, Mexico City; Ripe Art Gallery NY; Photo LA; and Phillips Auction House.
His photography and curated shows have been published in several publications including The New York Times, Toronto Star, New York Magazine, The Huffington Post, L Magazine, ARTnet, American Suburb X, The Bushwick Daily, Time OUT, The Atlantic, Aperture, Daily News, Wink Magazine, the Hamptons Star, Urban Italy Magazine, French Photo and The New Yorker. In 2013, he won the Photo District News Magazine Portrait competition. In 2014 he was a winner in the Castell Photography NEXT competition juried and curated by Elizabeth Avedon.
He has also collaborated on several projects with prominent artists including Magnum photographer Susan Meiselas for a project about the identity of The Puerto Rican Flag shown at the Museum Park de la Villette, Paris, France April 7- July 6, 2009.
Ruben Natal-San Miguel holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s Degree in Architecture from Boston Architectural College and Finance and Business Administration from Boston University. After 20+ years he continues to work and live in Manhattan, NYC.
Statement:
I have always been drawn to uniqueness, attention to detail, texture, patterns, bright colors, great design and self-expression. When I saw Souleo in these wearable art button shorts, created by Beau McCall, my eye went right to them and wanted to capture such a sense of unique style. I always photograph what makes an instant impression on me.
The rest of the ensemble was fantastic but the button-embellished shorts were what gave me an instant jolt and sense of remembrance. The shorts reminded me of the late great fashion designer, Patrick Kelly, who also worked with buttons. Plus the shorts reminded me that a cut off pair of jeans could be transformed into a great piece of wearable art.
In this era of aggressive gentrification when everything rich and colorful that represents a strong part of street culture is vanishing by the minute, it is important to acknowledge and celebrate the subjects and events that still have the resilience and spirit to keep marching on. This portrait photograph does just that.
Bio
Petros Chrisostomou constructs hybrid spaces, combining the concerns of artist, sculptor and curator. His work, as much sculptural as photographic, draws inspiration from concepts of hyperreality. These works not only revel in signs and symbols – the simulacra of contemporary life, they transcend that postmodernist trope of the simulacrum, offering distinct traces of the skewed realities of the Dadaists or fantasies of the Surrealists. These qualities are underpinned and stabilised by the architectural accuracy of his miniature interiors, which draw from broad influences, from classical Palladian or a White Cube gallery space, to the contemporary commercial kitsch of fast-food joints, or even a depiction of his childhood home as in the 18 Fortis Green series. The self-constructed model interiors contain life-size objects and within this context, the objects are transformed into oversized sculptures, surreal representations of themselves.
Chrisostomou’s work questions how we interpret them using a range of incongruous visual clues, obscure constellations of objects and spaces, with symbolically rich contexts. Most recently this work is made with materials collected from stores located in Brooklyn, Afro American hair extensions, grooming products, and Dollar store items, that in turn are socially connected to the communities they reflect.
Similarly the environments chosen to present these objects tell a story –through a lucid observation of Brooklyn’s subcultures- and link a thread throughout the geographical and social connotations of these works. As a product of Globalization, born in London to Cypriot parents, and now living in New York, Petros Chrisostomou explores the idea of the indigenous habitat, by creating these boxes from which to work in, and juxtaposing these items to form connections and disconnections. They become symbolic metaphors for a decentralized notion of where we find ourselves culturally grounded, and the spaces that we relate to as home.
Petros Chrisostomou was born in London, 1981. He lives and works in New York. He was a resident on the International Studio and Curatorial Program, New York, as well as the winner of The Red Mansion Art Prize, where he worked for a concentrated period of time in Beijing, China. His work has been included in public and private collections worldwide.
Recent exhibitions include ‘Miscellaneous and Blended- Art from NYC’ Museo De Arte De Sinaloa (2014) ‘Nirvana- Strange Forms of Pleasure’ MUDAC, Musee de design et d’art appliques Lausanne (2014) Vertigo, Xippas Gallery, Geneva (2013) ‘Ficciones, International Biennial of Photography, Punta Del Este, Uruguay (2011) Plastic Lemons, Spring Projects, London (2011) Fresh Faced and Wild Eyed, The Photographers Gallery, London (2009) In Present Tense-Young Greek Artists, EMST National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens (2008) 3rd Beijing International Art Biennial, British Pavilion, Beijing (2008).
Statement
Petros Chrisostomou constructs both hybrid spaces and large-scale sculptures, combining the concerns of artist, sculptor and curator. His work, as much sculptural as photographic, draws inspiration from concepts of hyperreality. These works not only revel in signs and symbols – the simulacra of contemporary life, they transcend the postmodernist trope of the simulacrum, offering distinct traces of skewed realities of the Dadaists or fantasies of the Surrealists. His work questions how we interpret the world around us using a range of incongruous visual clues, obscure constellations of objects and spaces, with symbolically rich contexts. At the same time, the relations between the real and the imaginary in his oeuvre are a commentary on the mediated images of contemporary mass media that distort the natural and immediate dimension of our relation to reality, determining, among other things, the conditions for viewing and receiving art.
Bio
Lisa Kokin creates her art with recycled and reclaimed materials she has found at flea markets, thrift stores, and recycling centers. In the past she has worked with buttons, photographs, and other found objects, but now she works mostly with books, the contents of which she shreds, blends, pulps, glues, and otherwise modifies before presenting them to her viewers in various states of recognition.
Kokin’s deft sewing skills stem from childhood; her parents worked at an upholstery company so her spare time was spent sewing unlikely materials together. Her early work involved stitching together found photographs, often resulting in startlingly surgical creations of children, weddings, and other subjects. She later worked with buttons to compose portraits utilizing the colors and shapes of the material. Kokin then began deconstructing books and using the paper and covers as her medium. She uses a blender that was handed down from her family to shred and pulp the paper so that she can morph it into various shapes, sometimes preserving select words or pieces of text, or creating anagrams from letters of the text.
Kokin’s most recent works are composed of cloth self-help book spines and covers, which she brilliantly cuts up, disguises and weaves with thread into bright, colorful wall installations. Only upon close inspection does the viewer find titles and subtitles derived from someone’s unhappiness with their body image, career, finances, or life in general. The contradiction between the cheery promises of the titles and the books’ current state of dismemberment seems to highlight the futility of the solutions they offer.
Kokin’s work offers themes of political and social subversion and commentary while conveying a remarkable respect and delicate tenderness in her treatment of these cast-off and discarded materials.
Lisa Kokin received her BFA and MFA from the California College of the Arts in Oakland, CA. The recipient of numerous awards and grants, Kokin was most recently given the Purchase Award from the Richmond Civic Center Public Art Interior Acquisitions Project in Richmond, CA. The artist teaches a variety of classes and workshops and volunteers her time as a mentor to other artists. She currently lives and works in El Sobrante, California, outside of San Francisco.
Statement
Buttons have made cameo appearances in much of my work over the years, but never were they the primary material until a few years after my father’s death in 2001 when I pulled out my collection and made a small portrait of my dad. This, as in much of my work, was a spontaneous and unpremeditated act, a confluence of material and subject.
My parents were upholsterers and my earliest memories are of playing in their shop with piles of vinyl and foam rubber. I have sewn since I was a child and the stitch plays a major role in my work, so it was natural to join the buttons together to form a reconstructed family portrait. What began as a memorial to my father soon expanded to the realm of family portraits, past and present, human and canine, and to the broader human community as I completed a three-part commission for a juvenile justice center comprised of button portraits of Rosa Parks, Cesar Chavez and Fred Korematsu.
Piecework was made in homage to my maternal grandmother who worked in a tie factory in New York as a young immigrant from Romania. Ancestor and Sleep both refer to my father in a more abstract way than the two-dimensional portraits that I made early on in the series. I made Rescue when I adopted my first dog, Chico. Although it’s generally thought that the human rescues the animal, in this case it was a sort of mutual rescue in that I gave Chico his forever home and he rescued me from the loneliness and grief that I felt after the passing of my father. Party Hat Diabolique uses as its source material a photo of my fifth birthday party in which I am looking at the camera with a characteristic melancholy look, wearing a cone-shaped party hat slightly askew. Forget the Story refers to a Buddhist phrase, which warns of the dangers of constructing narratives based on projection and speculation.
Bio
Io Palmer was born on Hydra- a motor-less Greek island off the coast of the Peleponesse. She grew up amongst the donkeys, the fishes, the clear blue Mediterranean Sea and the jazz music her parents listened to.
Through depictions of cleaning products, laborers’ garments and various other industrial and domestic forms, Io Palmer’s artworks explore the complex issues of class, capitalism and societal excess. Trained originally as a ceramicist, Palmer uses a variety of processes and materials including fabric, steel, sound and wood.
Palmer has been featured in several national and international exhibitions including Dakart-International Arts Biennial, Dakar, Senegal; Working History, Reed College, Portland, OR; Hair Follies, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec; Inside Out, Baltimore Clayworks, Baltimore, MD and solo exhibitions at Deluge Contemporary, Victoria, BC; The Art Gym at Marylhurst University, Oregon and forthcoming York College, CUNY, Jamaica, NY. She has participated in several artist residencies including the Sanskriti Foundation, New Delhi, India; the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM; Art Channel, Beijing, China and the Ucross Foundation, Clermont Wyoming. Io recently received an Idaho Commission on the Arts Grant (2014).
She holds a BFA from the Tyler School of Art (Temple University), Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from the University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ. Io is currently associate professor of fine arts at Washington State University, Pullman, WA.
Statement
Buttoned Up Cloud represents the 2300-mile journey between my small, rural hometown in eastern Washington to an equally small suburb in western Pennsylvania. To document my travels- I chose the lowly and humble white plastic button and paired it with the ephemeral ever-changing cloud image. Stopping in small town thrift stores and antique shops along the way, the white button became the dot that traced this voyage. As it suggested a tidy order to things- a way to find closure and significance. The cloud form however, reveals the opposite- as they were the constant shape during my journey but remained floating and intangible.
Hannah Battershell is a London based artist whose work is known for its small scale and its ‘playfully dark’ tone. Often reminiscent of old children’s book illustrations in their blend of humour, surreality and melancholy, her pieces range from miniature paintings on buttons to tiny paper collages framed in vintage tins.
Her work has been displayed in various exhibitions in the UK including the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2011, 2013 and 2014 and at various solo shows with The Curwen Gallery in Bloomsbury, London. Her painting ‘Crocodilian’ featured in Images 36 (Association of Illustrators’ Best of New British Illustration).
I was born in California, but grew up in the conservative Mormon town of Provo, UT. As soon as I could, I moved to what I thought of as the “big city,” Salt Lake, and left the church I was raised in. In that den of iniquity, I attended the University of Utah and received my BFA.
I received my MFA with an emphasis in printmaking from California State University at Long Beach in 2011, (on the dean’s list with Phi Kappa Phi Honors Society membership).
I now live in downtown Los Angeles with my partner and two cats and I love it here.
I’m a founding member of C. Feign Jr. Gallery, an artist collective.
Themes, emotions and visions represented in an elaborate multifaceted format. The whimsical sensation of an eclectic fusion of color, shapes and textures. The story told by a single button. These are a few of the features exemplified in the artwork of, Beau McCall. Drawing inspiration from the vast button collection of his mother and aunts, he crafts art images combining various materials such as mother of pearl, wool and decorative buttons. With deliberate focus the buttons are arranged to stimulate one’s curiosity and imagination, while simultaneously drawing attention to the unique history of buttons. Thereby McCall’s work generates a discussion surrounding many topics such as class, race and politics.
As a creative artist, McCall began his career in Harlem after arriving from his native, Philadelphia with nothing more than two hundred dollars, a duffel bag and a few buttons in his pocket from home. Two years later he made his critically acclaimed debut with wearable art at the Black Fashion Museum show for Harlem Week. McCall went on to become an established force within the Black Fashion Museum collective presenting at their shows consecutively for ten years, as well being featured in their museum exhibition and prestigious events. During this time, McCall’s visually captivating work was featured in the fashion bible, Women’s Wear Daily and on PBS.
Since then McCall has begun to focus solely on creating visual art. His work is held in the permanent collection of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture and the Cyndi Lauper True Colors Residence in Harlem. In 2015 he made his museum debut at the Stax Museum of American Soul Music in Memphis, TN. McCall was also recently selected as one of NBC’s TheGrio.com “40 Amazing Black Artists to Watch.”
Amalia Amaki was born Linda Faye Peeks on July 8, 1949 in Atlanta, Georgia to Mary Lee and Norman Peeks, a former musician with the Deep South Boys of Macon, Georgia. Amaki developed a love for script writing, drawing, bold colors and textures at an early age. She instinctively knew that she would change her name. Amaki attended Georgia State University and majored in journalism and psychology. In 1970, she won the Sigma Delta Chi Award for Feature Writing and was the first and only African American on campus to join this journalism organization. In 1971, Amaki received her B.A. degree. She also obtained her B.A. degree from the University of Mexico in photography and art history and worked as a museum assistant at the University Art Museum for two years while she pursued her degree. In 1974, she changed her name to Amalia Amaki.
In 1985, Amaki went to France as an Emory University Foreign Study Fellow. She also became a contributing writer to Art Papers and an art critic for Creative Loafing; papers local to the Atlanta area. Amaki earned her M.A. degree in modern European and American art and a Ph.D. in twentieth century American art and culture from Emory University in the Institute of Liberal Arts.
From 1987 to 2000, she taught art history at Spelman and Morehouse Colleges; Atlanta College of Art; Kennesaw State University, Kennesaw, Georgia; and North Georgia College and State University, Dahlonega, Georgia. She served as a guest curator at the Southern Arts Federation in 1996; the Museum of Fine Arts at Spelman College in 1997 and 1998; the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art in 1999; and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute in 2004. In the summer of 2004, Amaki was a visiting scholar at the Student Art Centers International (SACI) in Florence, Italy. In 2001, she became Curator of the Paul R. Jones Collection of Art and Assistant Professor of Art in the Art History and Black Studies Departments at the University of Delaware, Newark, Delaware. Amaki was also a Scholar-in-Residence at Spelman College in Atlanta for the 2005 – 2006 school year.
Amaki’s art captures the lives of African women of the Diaspora through media from everyday life (photography, quilts, buttons, boxes and household items). Her work redefines the lives of past and present African American heroines and heroes and contrasts their depiction in the mainstream media. She has published a number of articles including “Art: The Paul Jones Collection in Art” and Everyday Life: The Paul Jones Collection, an exhibition catalog by the Marietta-Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, Georgia in 1999.
Amaki holds memberships in the College of Art Association, American Association of University Professors, Emory University Alumni Board of Governors, Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts, High Museum of Art, Georgia Museum of Art, and Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts. Her solo works, Amalia Amaki: Boxes, Buttons and Blues have also been on exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
Amaki splits her time in Atlanta, Georgia and Newark, Delaware.
Alexandria Smith (b. 1981, Bronx, NY) earned her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University, MA in Art Education from New York University, and MFA in Painting and Drawing from Parsons The New School for Design in 2010. Smith is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies including, most recently, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa, A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship, the Fountainhead Residency and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship for 2013/14 and 2014/15. Her recent exhibitions in New York include a solo exhibit at Scaramouche Gallery, group exhibitions at The Schomburg Center, Thierry Goldberg Gallery and Rush Arts Gallery. Recently, she has been featured in the Huffington Post articles: “Alexandria Smith’s Adorably Grotesque Cartoons Explore What Little Girls Are Made Of”, “Black Artists: 30 Contemporary Artmakers You Should Know Under 40” and “10 Female Artists To Watch in 2013”. Smith lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.