Winter Open Studios
Natalia Nakazawa, "Our Stories of Migration", 2017. Photo credit: Etienne Frossard.
Thursday, February 4, 6:30 - 8:30 pm
We’re excited to announce our virtual Open Studios, a series of conversations with our Fall artists in residence. To see video documentation of the event, please click here.
Rebecca Levitan in conversation with Gus Wheeler
Layo Bright in conversation with Niama Safia Sandy
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow in conversation with Juan Sánchez
Natalia Nakazawa in conversation with Nanci Amaka
Rebecca Levitan
“My highly concentrated paintings and works of text and image peek over the wall into lives both mundane and extraordinary in an attempt to transmute the flotsam of the world into a larger narrative. My work embraces a multiplicity of forms of image-making without judging their status. I am equally interested in Dutch Still Life, Indian miniature painting, and Chinese restaurant menus. I believe any honest accounting of our world includes all three, shows each equal care, and therefore isn’t limited to a singular style or mode of making. Thus, each work requires new techniques, approaches, and journeys down rabbit-holes. Together, my pieces form a body of work as disparate as the world that informs them, but linked by an interest in everyday moments and the vernacular image.” Artist Gus Wheeler uses painting and photography to recreate and re-embed signs like advertisements and placards within his lived environment.
Layo Bright (b. Lagos, Nigeria) addresses themes of culture, identity and family in her works. She received her MFA in Fine Art (Hons.) from the Parsons School of Design (2018). Awards include the UrbanGlass Winter Scholarship Award (2020), and the International Sculpture Center’s 2018 Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award (2018). She was a Professor at The New School (Department of Integrated Design), and has exhibited work in the U.S. and Nigeria including You Don’t See Me (2020), Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, MD; Maid in Nigeria (2019), Untitled AWCA, Lagos; Carry Over: New Voices from the Global African Diaspora (2018), Smack Mellon, NY; among others. Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based curator, producer, multidisciplinary artist and educator. Niama’s curatorial practice delves into the human story - through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual.
Jodie Lyn-Kee-Chow is an interdisciplinary artist who often stages live and lens-based performances. She constructs narratives with wearable sculptures, drawings, and prints that aim to highlight the lost traditions and stories of her own heritage(s), cultural ideologies and the effects of migration, globalization, and climate change. Using urban and natural landscapes, some of which are culturally significant, she places the audience as the role of witness to her reclaim. Lyn-Kee-Chow lives in Queens, NY and is currently working on her ongoing series, “Junkanooacome," based on the 18th-century Jamaican folk masquerade called jonkonnu. Juan Sánchez is a visual artist who has exhibited throughout the United States, Europe and Latin America. His art is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, El Museo del Barrio and the Smithsonian Institute.
Natalia Nakazawa’s work is concerned with ideas of transnationality, diasporic contexts and cultural identities, storytelling, archives, and patterns of migration. She has long been fascinated by comprehensive cultural institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but has questioned her own place and personal history within their confines. Nakazawa accumulates archival imagery by entering poetic search terms into the museum’s database, collapsing layered representations of the collection into textiles in order to reconsider the museum’s alienating structures and question national identities. In her wood panel paintings, she uses Jacquard woven ribbons that have been arranged as orthographic architectural forms to present multiple perspectives. Influenced by eastern storytelling devices and illustrated manuscripts, the works seek to present numerous viewpoints of a singular story. Nanci Amaka is an interdisciplinary artist exploring ideas surrounding trauma, ancestry, memory, and West African Animism. Working from the theory that traumatic events challenge perceptions of power, autonomy, and identity; her work explores the liminal space between these experiences and language.