Paul Verdell
Paul Verdell is a painter based in Detroit, Michigan. Originally from Long Beach, California, he moved to Ohio as a teen and received a BFA from Bowling Green State University in 2018. Verdell approaches drawing and painting through the chosen media of oil and acrylic paints, oil pastels, and crayons, adding loose and instinctive marks to his two-dimensional works. He experiments freely with gesture and application through a constant cycle of creation and modification, working mutually with his material to allow it to reveal its desired form. What results from this focus on process are luminous and wild expanses of pigment that highlight Verdell’s agility and proficiency with color, a foundation upon which his practice thrives. Influencing the artist’s conceptual root is both internal discourse—an ongoing attempt to understand himself within a shifting and uncertain world through the act of painting—as well as his Black American heritage. (Credit-Library Street Collective)
Alexa Tumiko Hatanaka
Alexa Tumiko Hatanaka is a Japanese-Canadian, queer and disabled artist based in Toronto, an identity that sculpts her practice. Hatanaka draws from her training in print and papermaking techniques, connecting to her intentional use of historical land-based materials and processes. Her adaptations of traditions, in the form of large-scale print installations and wearable sculptures, address contemporary questions of climate change, mental health, and survival. Recurring motifs related to landscape, fish, and bodies of water together speak about personal and collective experiences of struggle and resilience.
Hatanaka’s practice is informed by her experience-based research and collaboration, including long term community-engaged projects in the high Arctic, and performances that integrate and reinterpret kamiko, garments sewn out of washi, Japanese paper.
Dion Rosina
Dion Rosina (born 1991) makes oil paintings based on images he collects and manipulates, from which he creates collages. By drawing on existing images and carefully sampling them, Rosina makes his works into a harmonious whole. For instance, he references works by Albrecht Dürer and Emory Douglas. Rosina is inspired by various subjects such as spirituality, alienation and history. His work balances between figuration and abstraction. In 2024, he received a nomination for the Royal Award for Modern Painting at the Royal Palace Amsterdam.
Vanessa German
Vanessa German is a self-taught artist whose work spans sculpture, performance, communal rituals, immersive installations, and photography. Her practice aims to repair and reshape disrupted systems through creativity and tenderness, addressing issues like structural racism, white supremacy, and misogynoir. German's signature power figures are assemblages of locally found objects, modeled on Congolese Nkisi sculptures and rooted in folk art traditions. These works embody Black power, spirituality, mysticism, and feminism, proposing new models for social healing.
Athlone Clarke
Athlone Clarke (b. 1956, Spanish Town, Jamaica), lives and works in Atlanta, GA. By combining acrylic painting and found objects, he creates pieces to explore the complexities and nuances of the African diaspora. His works are a reminder of our collective memories and the importance of recontextualizing and reclaiming our cultural and aesthetic legacies. Through vibrant color, texture, and composition, he seeks to challenge and disrupt traditional narratives, while also celebrating the strength, resilience, and beauty of both his individual identity and the collective experience of his community.
Mark Delmont
Mark Delmont is a multidisciplinary artist based in Miami Gardens, focusing on telling the untold stories of his community. Inspired by the music of Outkast, Curtis Mayfield, and Kendrick Lamar, and films like "Boyz n the Hood," Delmont explores themes of black identity, masculinity, and resilience.
His work blends paints, fabrics, and construction materials, reflecting his blue-collar roots and fascination with mechanics. Delmont's art celebrates the richness of the black experience, capturing everyday moments and turning them into vivid testaments of existence and cultural strength.
Lauren De La Roche
Lauren dela Roche is a self-described queer punk feminist artist whose autodidactic approach integrates a broad range of references, including zines, European modernisms, and autobiography. While largely self-taught, her consumption of visual culture and art history allows her to draw upon long traditions of art history, remixing Egon Schiele’s line drawing with the influence of transgressive cinema, Persian miniatures, Greek mythology, and folklore into her own iconic, fresh style. Growing up in the Bay Area of California, and living for a period of time in both Seattle and Asheville, NC, dela Roche has resided in the Midwest since young adulthood and currently lives and works near St. Louis, MO.
Benjamin Murphy
Benjamin Murphy is a visual artist and writer based between London and Helsinki. Born in West Yorkshire, Benjamin now exhibits globally. He holds one Bachelors degree and two Masters degrees, specialising in Contemporary Fine Art.
His current work explores themes of polarity, time, memory, and contrast – often rendered in charcoal on raw canvas.
He is the co-founder and co-director of Delphian Gallery, and is an associate lecturer at the University of the Arts London.
He enjoys reading, skateboarding, boxing, and talking about himself in the third person.
Maria Lucia Varona Borges
Maria Lucia Varona Borges, also named ‘Lulu’, lives and works between Puerto Rico and New York City. Varona learned her embroidery techniques from her grandmother growing up applying it to make works addressing contemporary conditions. She develops narratives through cross-stitching, creating stories that explore existential inquietudes as well as time, our relationship with the environment and with ourselves. She also enjoys playing music and performing with her friends.
Manal Kara
Manal Kara is a Moroccan-American self-taught artist working across sculpture, photography, installation, video, and text. Recent solo exhibitions include Sacred Topologies, Deli Gallery, New York (2023); Hypothèses, Pangée, Montréal (2022); Conjectures, Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles (2022); Xylem & Phlöem, No Place, Columbus (2021); The Viewing-Room vs. The Adoring-Gaze, Interstate Projects, Brooklyn (2020); Song of the Other Worm, Prairie, Chicago (2019), and Tearassin’ Like a Slug Outta Heaven, Basketshop, Cincinnati (2019). They have attended residencies at 8th House, Shandaken: Storm King, ACRE, Ox-Bow, September Spring at the Kesey Farm, Project Freewill, and Bed-Stuy Art Residency.
Javier E. Pinero
Javier Enrique is a Boricua interdisciplinary artist, journalist, and writer based in NYC and the Caribbean, currently focusing on photography, text, and installation. His work explores cultural amnesia and reflective narratives about religious fanaticism, machismo, and colonial culture. He received his master’s degree in public relations from NYU. Javier began his documentary work in 2016 as a United States Marine Corps unit photographer, documenting NATO exercises throughout the American, Asian, and European continents.In 2021, Javier became interested in self-portraiture and installation, balancing objects and narrative. In his ongoing project, La Jaula, he’s been utilizing elements symbolic of Christianity to create altars and objects that question their connection to holiness and divinity and how they affect/influence perspectives on self-liberation and social dynamics.
Jenny Perez
Jenny Perez has created a style which reflects the energy of street art and her admiration for formal abstraction. A strongly driven Caribbean-American artist, Perez paints with a zest for exploration, relentless reworking, editing, a tireless preoccupation with the idea of process as the focal point. Perez’s beginnings as a painter centered around her daily observations of Miami’s golden age of street art. Being heavily influenced by the street art scene and a number of hugely important artists who she befriended, Perez has taken her learned skills and carried them into the formal studio setting, creating a stylized, electric and experimental language all of her own.
Davariz Broaden
Detroit-born-and-based artist Davariz Broaden, is a self taught painter. Commonly using a muted color palette, Broaden’s paintings distill a soft essence and highlight the importance of love and beauty within the Black community, as well as nostalgic events in the Black experience. Broaden’s flourishing craft pursues the rich tradition of figurative painting, while the warm energy exuded throughout his work manifests itself onto the viewer with ease.
Sheryo & The Yok
Originally from Australia and Singapore with street art roots, Sheryo and The Yok have exhibited and painted in various countries around the world and have appeared in various international publications such as Street Art Today II, Juxtapoz, Hypebeast and more. They weave their unique brand of cultural syncretism into irreverent, riotous, mixed-media paintings, murals and sculptures. Most recently, they have been creating frivolous “temples” and “shrines” that provide humorous commentaries on societyʼs mercurial lifestyles.
(adapted from https://yokandsheryo.com/About)
Wasted Rita
Portuguese artist Wasted Rita has been developing a critical and particularly confessional practice that explores her love - hate relationship with life and the surrounding world. The self-styled “natural born agent provocateur” likes to think, write and draw, pouring forth little gems of sarcastic wisdom dipped in acid that reflect an unconventional upbringing in a Catholic school to the sound of Black Flag. Making use of a variety of media – including sculptural objects, installation, painting, drawing, and writing – her unique voice pours forth her mordant observations and poetic invectives on human behaviour and contemporary culture.
(Adapted from https://wastedrita.com/about)
Kezia Harrell
Kezia Harrell's art is a powerful blend of figurative and abstract styles, showcasing a personal and deeply connected exploration of African American identity. Her work embraces concepts of Americana while creating a timeless space for Black joy, glory, and chaos. Through materials like markers, gouache, and oil paint, Harrell meticulously layers her compositions, highlighting the embodiment and technical aspects of her art.
Kachelle Knowles
Kachelle Knowles is a contemporary artist who explores the ideas of gender identity, cultural preservation/ production, and social relations within the black community. Her approach is both masculine and feminine with the black male figure as her main subject matter.
She received her bachelor’s degree in Illustration at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, Canada in 2017. Since she has participated in numerous exhibitions in the Bahamas, and has shown with galleries such as the Central Bank of The Bahamas and The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. In 2013, Knowles exhibited in the 40-Year Bahamian Independence show held by the Bahamian Embassy in Beijing, China. She has also exhibited in the IMAGO MUNDI (Luciana Benetton Collection) show held in both Venice, Italy, and Lincang, China in 2014. Her solo show, 'Bahamian Man Since Time' was shown at the National Gallery of the Bahamas in 2019. She exhibited as a solo artist at SCOPE Miami in 2022 with The Current: Baha Mar Gallery and Art Center who is based in The Bahamas.
(from https://www.kachelleknowles.com/about)
Gabrielle K. Brown
Gabrielle K Brown is a multifaceted artist who eagerly and energetically seeks new ways to tell stories through her paintings, sculptures, and public murals. Her work retains an object like quality utilizing many folk art materials including wood and various paints, retaining a natureal and intuitive, seemingly naive yet extremely complex aesthetic. The works dissects the relationship we have with ourselves, our companions, our society, and our past with an awe and celebration of nature and the divine, shedding light on how we grow and how we suffer as human beings
(from https://www.gabriellebrownart.com/bioo)
Mahsa R Fard
Mahsa R. Fard's unique artistic approach involves transforming subjects through unconventional color choices and spatial relationships, forging new associations in the process. Having grown up in Iran, Mahsa keenly recognizes the prevalence of the rigid patriarchal gaze in both public and private spheres. As a female artist, she navigates these domains by employing subversive strategies, which are reflected in her artwork and writing. Through metaphors of censorship, sarcasm, camouflage, cover, and disguise, Mahsa explores the forced duality imposed upon women in society. Recently graduating from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, she continues to make a profound impact with her distinct perspective and artistic style.
Sophia Belkin
Sophia Belkin, born in Moscow, is a painter and textile artist based in Baltimore. Her works have been exhibited nationally, as well as in Canada and Slovakia. She is fascinated by the manner in which memories, experiences, and visions are absorbed into living organisms, in ways that defy scientific quantification. In addition, Sophia’s compositions explore biological structures, movements, and osmosis between organisms and entities. She creates using dye on textiles, accentuated with embroidery.
Amy Fisher-Price
Amy Fisher Price, a New York City-born and Detroit-based artist, is a visionary creator whose main modality is sewing. Amy weaves fabric into intricate works of art, crafting mesmerizing signs that pay homage to the urban landscapes that inspire her. With each stitch, her pieces embody resilience, urban identity, and the ever-changing face of cities, inviting viewers to experience the rich tapestry of cultures and experiences that shape our surroundings. Amy's meticulous attention to detail and artistic vision have garnered recognition in both the New York City art scene and the wider artistic community.
Rusudan Khizanishvili
Rusudan Khizanishvili’s striking paintings of mystical anthropomorphic creatures explore themes including the self, cultural memory and myths, and the female body. Drawing on the rich traditions of her Georgian heritage, Khizanishvili employs a color palette filled with electric greens, pinks, and blues to create whimsical worlds where endless stories play out. Khizanishvili has also created works centered around the transformation of human beings into a new species. By transforming moments and objects from everyday life into alternate versions, Khizanishvili invites viewers into a new reality through her canvases
G.E. Liu
Splitting her time between Taiwan and Detroit, G.E. Liu creates multiform paintings that focus on building a mythological world as a coded satire of reality. Her visual vocabulary explores the commonalities and variations between the East and West and infuses humor, sexuality, and self-deprecation. Liu is fascinated by the body-spirit cultivation of Medieval Chinese science and cosmology and sees herself as something of an alchemist as she mixes and contrasts ideas around mythology, gender, love, theology, and cultural identity.
Timo Fahler and Lara Schoorl
Timo Fahler uses plaster, ceramics, steel, wood, and found objects to construct highly visual and culturally significant works. Combining formal elements of sculpture with references to his heritage, Fahler’s work explores ideas of use and reuse through casting and manipulating found objects and combining them with relics that relate to personal experiences. Lara Schoorl is a poet, essayist and art historian from The Netherlands.
Ahmad George
Ahmad George is a conceptual Artist from Memphis, working with different painting mediums to explore scenes about transformation, human shared experience, and place making. They graduated from Memphis College of Art with a B.F.A in design with a concentration in Illustration in 2016. Ahmad’s research and inspiration spans, informative psychological texts, folktales from the American south, alchemical manuscripts and Egyptian lore.
Aliyah Bonnette
Aliyah Bonnette’s work tells the story of a black woman’s journey to find herself. She combines improvisational quilting to stitch together the stories and memories of black women across generations. Through the addition of paint, she constructs stories of her own blackness, femininity and sexuality beyond the violence and hyper sexualization that Black women face in a colonized world.
Cydney Camp
Detroit born Cydney Camp is an artist whose oil paintings and drawings investigate the Black psyche and experience in America. She deconstructs the figure to explore these complexities of contemporary life to depict Black, often femme, subjects existing in familiar, yet alternative realities. Her subjects continually come together and fall apart. Distorted perspectives, abstract compositional strategies, and a sensorial color palette form dreamlike scenes.
Taha Heydari
Taha Heydari was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland in 2014 to pursue his MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art, and continues to work from his studio in Baltimore. Heydari is interested in painting as a possibility of encountering what images do in relation to what they are made of and how they appear to us. Television broadcasts disrupted by Iranian government satellite jamming triggered his fascination with the moment of the glitch as a visible instance of the separation between the technology of fabricating and presenting images and what the images do and show. He uses acrylic and various palette knives, rollers, and airbrush to create complex surfaces which accentuate the significance of tools, material, and technology in the act of representation.
Mark Fleuridor
Mark Fleuridor was born and raised in Miami, Florida. Working with painting, quilting and collage, the artist explores his personal and familial experiences. It is important for Fleuridor to understand his family by dissecting his own memories and family narratives through the labor of his art process. Working physically and digitally with materials that reference Fleuridor's family helps him understand his community.
David Leggett
David Leggett is a visual artist who lives in Los Angeles. His work tackles many themes head on; hip-hop, art history, popular culture, sexuality, the racial divide, and the self are all reoccurring subjects. He takes many of his cues from standup comedians, which he listens to while in the studio.
Esteban “Pops” Samayoa
Esteban AKA Pops or Wulffvnky is an Oakland based artist from Sacramento CA. He uses all types of mediums but his bread and butter is charcoal/pastel. The inspiration for Pop's work is based on his trials and tribulations as a youth as well as family and old school music/pop culture. Pop's goal is to spark the conversations for mental health awareness and to bring together different cultural backgrounds.
Juan Arango Palacios
Raised in a post-colonial context in Colombia, Juan’s practice works towards addressing the lived experiences of ambulant queer identities that have been marginalized within a diasporic or migratory context. Placing emphasis on color and composition, his work aims at creating images glorifying and fantasizing the idea of safety in a queer experience.
Kate Barbee
Kate Barbee lives and works in Los Angeles, receiving her BFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin, TX in 2017. Barbee’s practice is an interdisciplinary one, ranging across hand embroidered mixed media painting, collage, drawing, and sculpture. Her subjects push and pull through a fractured composition— intimately spaced and dynamically posed, creating an energy and rhythm.
Elléna Lourens
South African artist Elléna Lourens began working on personal and collaborative creative projects while in school. Since then she has further pursued illustration, street art, painting and embroidery. Her style lends itself to the past in its representation of ancient symbols, patterns and color schemes.
Keya Tama
Keya Tama is a South African street artist living in Los Angeles who has been producing murals and participating in exhibitions around the world since the age of thirteen. He is the son of celebrated street artist Faith 47 and influential tattoo artist Tyler B. Murphy. He is a multitalented artist simultaneously producing music, filming, animating, and painting walls.
Lauren Roche
Lauren Roche is a self-taught artist who was born in Santa Rosa, CA, and now lives in Minneapolis, MN. Roche’s drawings and paintings feature female nudes in ritualistic acts, cats and dogs living harmoniously, and exotic horses. All creatures share the same stripes, spots, and gestures.
FAITH XLVII
Liberty Du, who is widely recognized as Faith XLVII, is a South African Multi-Disciplinary Artist. Her journey into art began on the streets of South Africa in 1997, as a young graffiti writer. Ranging from immersive new media installations, hand-sewn wall tapestries, to sculptural bronze works investigating hierarchies of power, paintings, and various explorations into printmaking.
Autumn Wallace
Autumn Wallace is a visual artist who works across media to create paintings and sculptures that examine human sexuality, gender, and the black femme experience. Influenced by early 90’s cartoons, Byzantine aesthetics, Baroque Style, and what Wallace describes as “low-quality adult materials”, Wallace’s work generates a sense of fluidity whereby figures defy spatial, social, physical, emotional, and psychological boundaries.
Kathia St. Hilaire
Kathia has lived in predominantly Caribbean and African American areas in South Florida. Her work is driven by both a reality and a connection to Haitian diaspora. Through an interdisciplinary process, her work affirms and memorializes controversial, historic, and political issues that deal with both marginalized and privileged communities of neo-diaspora.
Hugo Gyrl
Hugo Gyrl is the pseudonym of a street artist and curator based in New Orleans. Their work can be seen on murals and gallery walls in most major cities. While Hugo Gyrl is often cloaked in costume, and their identity remains mostly a mystery, they have generated a cult following due to the comical innuendos and femme-friendly symbolism echoed in their art. When not creating thought-provoking LGBTQIA-focused graphics, Hugo Gyrl is curating local exhibitions with performances like the celebrated drag wrestling match “ChokeHole”.
Tau Lewis
Tau Lewis' self-taught practice is rooted in healing personal, collective and historical traumas through labour. She employs methods of construction such as hand sewing, carving and assemblage to build portraits.(http://www.taulewis.com/cv)
Don’t Fret
Don’t Fret describes himself as a “vaguely anonymous human from Chicago”. While his new works pop up constantly in his hometown of Chicago (as well as New York) he’s also gotten up in Miami, San Francisco, Berlin, Sao Paulo, Prague, and Munich. Don’t Fret’s paintings and paste ups show off his distinct characters as well as the artist’s biting sense of humor.
Isaac Cordal
“With the simple act of miniaturization and thoughtful placement, Isaac Cordal magically expands the imagination of pedestrians finding his sculptures on the street.” – Steven P. Harrington, Brooklyn Street Art
Alicia McCarthy
Alicia McCarthy engages with the immediate world around her and uses a decidedly focused color palette on mixed-media panels. Sincere and intense but also playful, McCarthy transforms found wood surfaces into bursts, geometric blocks of color and woven patterns that are often emphasized by text and spray paint. (http://www.jackhanley.com/artists/alicia-mccarthy)
Rose Eken
The working practice of the Danish visual artist Rose Eken recalls comprehensive field studies in culture, history, memory and perception by an ethnographer. Spotting the potential of the immediate and the available, Rose Eken offers unique insights into our popular culture and the times we live in. Wit, personality and an acute eye for details are characteristic of her works and installations. (http://roseeken.dk/?page_id=202)
Jeffrey Cheung
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Cheung graduated form the University of California Santa Cruz and has since shown in a variety of shows throughout the Bay Area as well as Hashimoto Contemporary in New York City, Jeffrey Deitch Projects in Los Angeles, City Bird Gallery in Paris, France and V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Denmark. Alongside his visual artwork, Cheung launched Unity Skateboarding, a queer skating collective. He also plays music in local punk bands Meat Market and Unity. Cheung currently lives and works in Oakland, CA.
Know Hope
Over the past decade, Addam Yekutieli (pseudonym Know Hope) has developed a visual iconography and language used to mirror real-life situations and observations, and document the notion of a collective human struggle. By creating parallels between political situations and emotional conditions, there is an attempt to perceive the political process and dialogue as an emotional mechanism, therefore making it a process that can be understood and participated in intuitively and not solely intellectually. (https://thisislimbo.com/about/)
Forest Kirk
Forrest holds a Bachelor from California State University, Los Angeles. His figurative oil, acrylic, and mix media works are steeped in historical and sociopolitical underpinnings within a beautifully painted context. Inspired by his own life experiences, Forrest paintings inspire creativity and thought-provoking narrative that delivers timelessly in their execution.
SHOE
Born in Amsterdam in 1967, Niels began tagging in 1979, and became a graffiti legend by the time he was 18. Known as Shoe within the graffiti community, his work evolved into a business for decorative lettering and he furthered his technique by apprenticing under the Dutch graphic design master, Anthon Beeke. Meulman revolutionized the art of writing with Calligraffiti, an art form that fuses calligraphy and graffiti.
William Irving Singer
William Singer is a Detroit based Artist and Painter. He received his BFA from the University of Michigan in 2008 and his MFA in Painting from SCAD. He works mainly in paint and collage.
Jaybo Monk
Jaybo is an urban wanderer, a traveller that moves in the space of that unfinished metropolis, that is the world, among memories, fragments and traces abandoned in the urban landscape, that works like a theatre of the human joy and pain, studded with relationships that slide between first glances and deep emotions.
Dessislava Terzieva
Born in Sofia, Bulgaria, Dessislava likes the quick and seamless ability to create visual analogies, metaphors, and juxtapositions through cut and paste collage. It allows her to communicate through a visual language in ways which are both obvious and cryptic. She works in collage, mixed-media painting, sculpture, installation, performance.
Theresa Chromati
Chromati, who earned her B.F.A. in graphic design at the Pratt Institute in 2014 and now works in Brooklyn, was raised in West Baltimore. Her work has always been about black women, and by offering a multifaceted representation of one woman in particular — herself — she presents a contrast to one-dimensional stereotypes. Her work shifts the focus from her community to her own inner world, creating whirlpools of swirling bodies and floating parts — eyes, breasts, legs, fingernails — that together form a reflection of the artist herself.
Ryan Travis Christian
Ryan Travis Christian’s surreal personal narratives are fueled by the absurdity of life in his small, suburban-Chicago hometown. The untidy lifestyles of contemporary humanity are all hanging out, including heavy petting, drugs and alcohol, beaten-up cars, fireworks and death. Christian’s idiosyncratic vision — influenced by vintage political cartoons and hand-drawn animation — has recently expanded to include commentary on current crises in the nation and world at large. His small daily drawings touch upon a vast array of topics — the economy, violence, the environment, gender, class, hope, doubt, and the afterlife — as they muse on the technological and material obsolescence of his cartoon and animation influences.
Nick Jaskey
Nick Jaskey was born in Royal Oak, Michigan in 1982 and has been living and working in Detroit since 2001. He grew up skateboarding and exploring the city as a teenager. Doing this exposed him to things like graffiti, art, and photography. Painting graffiti led him to take notice of the fine details of color and composition that go unnoticed in our day-to-day lives. These details are what influenced and transitioned him into fine art. The work is a reflection of life, photographed, broken down, and reworked into a abstract form.
Richard Colman
“I make stuff”. Female forms, ceramic pots, animals, geometric and biomorphic shapes—these are all recurring elements in Richard Colman’s vividly colorful canvases. He vacillates freely between figuration and abstraction, at times focusing on pattern to such a degree that it overwhelms any recognizable components in his painting; other times he privileges figures and narratives. Also producing sculpture and installation works, Colman incorporates a variety of media, including pencils, paper, wood, porcelain, plaster, glue, nails, and tape—typically using vibrant colors.
Kandis Williams
Beauty. Motherhood. Family. Eroticism. Violence. These are the themes that emerge from Berlin-based artist Kandis Williams’ collage work. “You can take pictures from all over, from any time or place and you can mash them up and disintegrate their photographic value into a formal value,” she explains of her imagery. Williams studied at Cooper Union, where her main focus was figure painting.
Chris Johanson &
Johanna Jackson
Johanson and Jackson emerged from the late 90’s San Francisco-based skater/surf/graffiti scene, known to many as the Mission School, with portfolios of charged, figurative drawings and immersive three-dimensional environments. As a husband and wife team, the two collaborate often on projects. Chris Johanson’s wildly colorful artistic productions are musings on phenomena in contemporary life—including the psychological perils of consumerism, cult spirituality, and self-help. Johanna Jackson creates work ranging from woodwork, ceramics, textiles, paintings, and drawings.
Axel Void
Axel Void (Alejandro Hugo Dorda Mevs) was born in Miami in 1986 to a Haitian mother and a Spanish father. He was raised in Spain from the age of three, where he was strongly influenced by classical painting and drawing. Axel Void has been involved with graffiti writing since 1999. He studied Fine Arts in Cádiz, Granada, and Sevilla, and based himself in Berlin until moving to Miami in 2013, where he currently resides.
Reginald O’Neal
Reginald O’Neal (L.E.O.) (Miami, Florida 1992) began painting in 2012, soon meeting his friend and mentor, Alejandro Dorda, who would teach him classically. In 2014, L.E.O. took his first trip to Europe to complete murals in Austria, Norway, and Spain, as well as exhibit in a collective show alongside his teacher in Berlin, Germany. In the years since, Reggie has focused on canvas work, residencies, and murals that embody his community surroundings, experiences and beliefs.
(from oolitearts.org)
Carlos Ramirez
Using found materials such as discarded signs, wood and corrugated metal, Carlos’s work echoes Mexican-American heritage rooted in California pop culture. Through his unique cultural perspective as an American-born Chicano, he explores topical subjects with profound simplicity.
Julie Schenkelberg
Born and raised in Cleveland, Julie Schenkelberg learned about the beauty of objects and buildings by observing her crumbling city. She combines discarded domestic objects with industrial materials to create evocative site specific work, inspired by the Rust Belt’s legacy of abandonment—vacant houses, defunct industries, and found shabby furniture embedded with years of memories.
Swampy
For Swampy, the world is an endless living canvas. Variations on his signature “swampdonkey” tag — the skull of some imaginary tusked creature — can be found in almost every imaginable setting across America: dilapidated skyscrapers in Oakland, Calif.; train trestles in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico; gallery walls in Atlanta or Brooklyn. Though he’s best known for his graffiti, Swampy’s output varies wildly and incorporates a kaleidoscope of materials, styles and settings. His studio is almost entirely mobile, his materials are liberated as needed from large art supply chains, and he travels entirely for free by hopping freight trains.
Daniel Gibson
Born in Yuma Az. in 1977, Daniel grew up in El Centro Ca. and other surrounding towns that border Mexicali B.C. Daniel's inspiration starts while growing up next to a sheet rock factory in Plaster City Ca. where his father worked. The vast desert horizon and emptiness lent its path to imagination and wander. Gibson's output is bred by his indispensable draw towards creation, something he views as a therapeutic and expressive flow of visions and beliefs, real life situations and overwhelming dreams, comprised of a combination of elements incomparably extricated with a whiff of vato attitude.
Revok
Los Angeles-based artist Revok first became interested in art through his father’s collection of 60’s and 70’s album covers and comic books, as well as the skateboarding and graffiti scenes. For over two decades, Revok has continually pushed the boundaries—both creative and legislative—of street art, producing vibrant works that meld structured with dynamic colors and forms. A completely self-taught artist, and after years of a decidedly anti-institutional practice, Revok began making studio work, finding inspiration in his ability to refine the techniques he mastered as a street artist.
Monica Canilao &
Xara Thustra
Monica Canilao spends her days stitching, painting, printing, and breathing life into the refuse that dominates our time and place. Moving across media, sometimes with friends and sometimes alone, Canilao makes a delicate visual record of the personal and communal. She received a BFA from California College of Arts and Crafts and has shown in galleries, community spaces, and abandoned places. Both an activist and artist, Xara Thustra has been pushing the envelope socially and artistically for 15 plus years in San Francisco as part of the “Mission School”. Xara’s ever evolving creative medium has been graffiti, screen printed posters. calendars, murals, paintings, video, music, performance and protest. Socially, Xara has been responsible for anti-war actions, gay activism, feeding the hungry, anti-capitalist actions, squats like 949 Market, and much more…
ROA
Street artist Roa is a muralist from Ghent, Belgium, where he began by spraying throw-ups under bridges and walls. He is primarily known for his strong obsession for animals and rodents and combines life, death, and life after death in his murals. His animals are painted to include skeleton and internal organs, making the sight even more realistic. His preferred forms of methods to paint are by using spray paint or acrylic paint and most of his work is created through a mixture of black, white, and gray scale colors. Roa uses native animals based on the location he is painting in.
Emma Kohlmann
Emma is a born and raised New Yorker currently living and working in Western Massachusetts. Emma’s watercolor paintings feature fluid figures and are nude, reclining, having sex, and touching themselves. The eroticism of these works is a refreshingly punk, feminist take on contemporary sexuality and her zines dig even deeper with dark, personal text.
Lucien Shapiro
Dancing between life and death, Lucien Shapiro’s art is rife with found objects, textures, cast forms, manipulations, raw substances, oddities and multiple personalities. Treating forgotten objects and memories as treasure, he creates a kingdom under which new life is born through sculpture. Composed of elaborately constructed masks and ornately armored weaponry, he examines a relationship between modern waste and memories of ancient cultural artifacts. Practices and customs from the past are brought back to light through Shapiro’s revival of discarded materials, transformed into objects analogous with self protection. Behind masks and armor, we’re enabled with the power to separate and shield ourselves from reality, creating new identities through a deliberate opposition of our true selves. http://www.taulewis.com/cv
Yarrow Slaps
Yarrow Slaps is a San Francisco-based artist and musician, whose art is grounded on portraying icons of popular culture – rappers, basketball players and painters. Born and raised within a family of artists, Slaps studied at City College of San Francisco, and began expressing himself first by music, and later through paintings and drawings. Yarrow spreads positive energy among people and brings out the best in them through his dynamic music and appealing paintings. Mixing high and low culture, Yarrow’s art depicts characteristic street aesthetic, making his style unique and unmistakable.
Dal-East
Chinese-born DALeast is easily one of the most prolific street artists of our time, as well as an accomplished painter, sculptor, and digital artist.The dark imagery found in DALeast's art is woven with intricate detail while focusing on the simple subjects in his pieces. Each of his pieces of art is created using paint to look like thousands of metal shards are coming together to form beautiful shapes, often animals or humans. DALeast delivers a sense of wonder with his work every time as he manipulates his splintered lines in order to capture the movement, form, stillness or feeling of the respective subject.
Rambo
Rambo was born in Texas and studied at the San Fransisco Art Institute. Based in New York City, he employs symbolic imagery, structures, forms, color and patterns, to explore communicating certain truths and ideas. He uses mostly graphite drawings on paper and oil paintings on canvas. The finished works elevates art making itself to a subject with spiritual power.
Joe Grillo
Joe Grillo, born in Meteor City, AZ, lives and works in Virginia Beach, VA. He and his long-time partner Laura Grant founded the Art Collective Dearraindrop in 1998. Joe has exhibited works in the US & Internationally, most notably at Deitch Projects and The Hole in NYC, as well as Galleri Loyal in Sweden.
His work incorporates elements of graffiti art with psychedelic shapes and colors in drawings, paintings, and collage pieces. His art shows a kaleidoscope of fluorescent graphics and media images.
Sean Powell
Stephen Sean Powell, 46, is a Brooklyn-based artist who spent most of his formative and adult years in Austin, Texas. Never having attended art school, Powell began painting only recently, and found himself somehow in possession of a developed, coherent and original style. His bold, bright colors and child-like shapes often belie his subject matter, which tends towards despairing self-reflection, drug abuse, brooding violence and the parody of consumerist practices. Twisted and distorted faces layered with words, eyes suggested only by blots of spray paint, partial heads rendered with just a few thick strokes of color, faces that jump of the canvas like bad dreams turned into cartoons: the paintings are immediate and unstudied, yet with a high level of visual sophistication.