Artist Category: Exhibited

Justin Yoon (b. 1991, Los Angeles, California) is a Brooklyn based painter. Early childhood memories of American junk food, late night old Hollywood movies on the TV, and listening to jazz in the car with his family on long drives significantly affected him to create a world of romantic melancholia, synthetic colors, and casual lostness of being. With no specific emotions provoked, the group of characters reoccur over and over in a deeply synthetic yet ambiguous dream-like landscape, continuing on this never ending “Highschool Reunion”. The viewer becomes a part of this experience, which is vaguely both universal yet deeply personal. Justin holds a B.F.A in Illustration from Parsons School for Design, NY. His work has been exhibited at The Hole, Anat Ebgi Gallery, Taymour Grahne Projects, Mindy Solomon Gallery, Fragments Gallery, Museum of Sex, Shelter Gallery, Hannah Traore Gallery, Gallery Belenius, Investec Art Fair, ART021 Shanghai Contemporary Art Fair, Felix Art fair, Hashimoto Contemporary, Jonathan Carver Moore Gallery and more. Justin’s work has been published in New American Paintings, Banana Magazine, Crotch Magazine, Math Magazine, Lezs Magazine, and more.

Muzae Sesay is a self-taught painter born in 1989 in Long Beach, California, who lives and works in Oakland, where he has become one of the city’s most celebrated artists. A graduate of San Francisco State University with a degree in sociology — a discipline that continues to deeply inform his practice — he moved to the Bay Area in 2011, drawn by its creative culture and sense of community. Working with vinyl paint, acrylic, oil pastel, and oil bars, Sesay creates vivid geometric compositions of interiors, exteriors, and landscapes built from skewed perspectives and collapsing planes of color, constructing immersive fragmented universes that explore the collective relationship between space, memory, community, and cultural identity — including his own Sierra Leonean heritage. His work is held in the public collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the de Young Museum, and Stanford Healthcare, and his public commissions include a 150′ x 100′ mural at 19th and Telegraph in Oakland and two painted basketball courts at Rainbow Recreation Center. He has exhibited internationally at institutions including SFMOMA, Tiwani Contemporary in London, V1 Gallery in Copenhagen, Berggruen Gallery in San Francisco, and Hannah Traore Gallery in New York.

Wendy Red Star (b. 1981, Billings, Montana; lives and works in Portland, Oregon) is an Apsáalooke artist whose multidisciplinary practice is grounded in the histories, archives, and lived knowledge of the Apsáalooke Nation. Raised in the district of Pryor in Montana, her work grows from the stories passed through her family, the materials she encounters in historical records, and the lineage she carries forward — research, image-making, and material experimentation operating as a single movement in which histories reassemble through form rather than explanation, and time is felt through repetition, return, and proximity rather than linear narration. She received her BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of California, Los Angeles, and her work has been recognized with numerous awards including the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award (2017), the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship (2018), the MacArthur Fellowship (2024), and an Honorary Doctorate from Montana State University, Bozeman (2025). Her first career survey, Wendy Red Star: A Scratch on the Earth, opened at the Newark Museum in 2019 and traveled to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Columbus Museum of Art, and recent exhibitions include presentations at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, the British Museum, and The Broad, Los Angeles. Her work is held in more than eighty public collections worldwide — among them MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, LACMA, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the British Museum — and in 2027, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., will present a major solo exhibition of her work.

As a black woman artist from Maryland, Murjoni Merriweather has found that the best way to create and talk about black culture is through art, especially claywork. As a student from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Murjoni creates sculpted beings that are based around real people and real experiences. Her work addresses and eliminates stereotypes through clay portraits and video work. With this, she enjoys going against the European standards of “beauty” that are placed upon people of color. (light skin, petite figure,etc.), and normalizing what is natural about black bodies; loving and accepting them as they come. Through the artwork, connections and reflections with herself and others based on shared experiences. Continuing her craft, she plans to continue eliminating stereotypes and prejudices while uplifting the black community.

Melissa Joseph is a New York based artist. Her work considers themes of memory, family history, and the politics of how we occupy spaces. She intentionally alludes to the labors of women as well as experiences as a first generation American and the unique juxtapositions of diasporic life. Her work has been shown at the Brooklyn Museum, Delaware Contemporary, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, MOCA Arlington, ICA San Francisco, and List Gallery at Swarthmore College. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art Forum, Artnet, Artnews, New American Paintings, WNYC, Le Monde, Vogue, CNN, Whitewall, Family Style, and participated in residencies including Artpace, Dieu Donné Workspace Residency, The Textile Arts Center, BRIC, Fountainhead, the Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the Museum of Arts and Design, Greenwich House Pottery, the Dora Maar Cultural Center and Cove Park. She is the recipient of the 2025 UOVO Prize by the Brooklyn Museum, the 2025 Eden Art Foundation Artists Now Award, and a regular contributor to BOMB Magazine.

Adébayo Bolaji is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in London, whose paintings merge figuration with abstraction to build allegorical compositions steeped in symbolism, metaphor, and psychological depth. Dynamic profiles emerge from a kaleidoscope of fragmented forms and radiant color, evoking a dreamlike space charged with chaos and movement — drawing from history, anthropology, religion, and popular culture to probe questions of identity, power, and cultural memory. At the centre of his practice is a dialogue of change and metaphysical conversations on what it means to surrender and let go. Bolaji has exhibited internationally in London, Zurich, Berlin, and New York, including a two-person exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery and a significant solo museum show at the Arnolfini in Bristol in 2024. He has participated in artist residencies including Yinka Shonibare MBE Guest Projects (2017) and residencies in New York, Margate, and Jaipur, India, and his work has been featured in prominent publications alongside speaking engagements at institutions such as Mall Galleries London and Penn State University. Beyond painting, he is a published poet, theatre director at Park Theatre London, and founder of Ex Nihilo Theatre Group, holding a degree from the Central School of Speech and Drama and a Law degree from London Guildhall University. In 2023, he unveiled a permanent 3m x 3m public sculpture at Central Plaza Park in Acton Gardens, and in 2025 his painting Time and Place was revealed for Darlington’s 200th anniversary, permanently installed in the station’s new waiting room to celebrate its place in history as the world’s first steam passenger and goods railway.

Ismail Zaidy is a self-taught Moroccan photographer born in 1997 in Marrakech, where he continues to live and work. A graduate of Cadi Ayyad University with a degree in International Management, he came to photography not through formal training but through a deep personal need for expression — inspired in part by his mother, who was herself a photographer. Beginning in 2017 with nothing more than a Samsung Galaxy S5, he transformed the rooftop of his family home into his primary creative space, which he affectionately named Studio Sa3ada — Arabic for “Studio of Happiness.” His practice is centered on family as both subject and collaborator, with his younger brother and sister frequently appearing as models in compositions that blend pastel colors, traditional Moroccan fabrics, and minimalist abstraction to explore themes of gender equality, unity, love, and cultural identity. His work caught international attention early, earning him the prize for best Moroccan Instagram account at the Maroc Web Awards, and has since been featured in GQ and Vogue Arabia, shown at international art fairs in Paris and London, and displayed on a Times Square billboard in New York. He has also ventured into the NFT space through platforms such as SuperRare, and participated in the Artists for Morocco earthquake relief initiative alongside some of Morocco’s most celebrated artists.

Yassine Alaoui Ismaili, known as Yoriyas, is a Moroccan street photographer, choreographer, and filmmaker born in 1984 and based in Casablanca. He began his artistic life as a competitive breakdancer, founding the celebrated crew Lhiba Kingzoo at age 16, winning multiple Moroccan championships between 2006 and 2010, and placing third at the World Finals in Copenhagen — becoming one of the first Arabic and African dancers to rank in the world’s top six B-boys. In 2013, a serious knee injury brought his dance career to an abrupt end, and he turned to photography as a new form of expression, drawing on his background in chess, mathematics, and choreography to develop an instantly recognizable visual language built on intuitive composition, bold color, and a masterful sense of movement and space. His most celebrated body of work, Casablanca Not the Movie — begun in 2014 — is a love letter to his hometown and a deliberate rebuttal of the Orientalist and Hollywood-driven images that have long defined the city’s global perception. His work has been featured in the New York Times and National Geographic, exhibited internationally at institutions including the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, the Aga Khan Museum in Toronto, and Kyotographie in Japan, and is held in the collections of the Royal Collection of Morocco, the Hermès Foundation, and the Barjeel Art Foundation in Sharjah. In 2020, he was invited to curate the inaugural exhibition at Morocco’s National Photography Museum in Rabat.

Meriem Yin is a Moroccan artist and curator whose signature work focuses on surreal interpretations of daily Moroccan scenes. She injects a sense of humor and optimism in her art by mixing hand embroidery and photography.

Yassine Sellame is a Moroccan photographer and skateboarder originally from Marrakech, whose practice was born directly out of his deep immersion in Morocco’s skateboarding subculture. He first stepped on a skateboard in 2008 and discovered film photography in 2014 — initially out of necessity, teaching himself to develop and scan film using cameras collected from flea markets. Working exclusively in analog with 35mm and 120mm film, his photography documents the skaters, streets, and communities of cities across Morocco, viewing the discipline of skating as a metaphor for life and creative practice alike. His most celebrated project, Marrakech on Skateboard — Skating Youth: Portrait of a Generation, was published as a 44-page photobook by À La Maison Editions in Paris in 2022. His work has been exhibited internationally, including in the Czech Republic at a skateboarding festival, at the Arab Fest and Transforma festivals, and in the exhibition space of artist Hassan Hajjaj during the 1-54 art fair. Beyond his own practice, Sellame is a committed advocate for analog photography in Morocco — co-founding Moroccan Dark Room to revive and democratize film developing in the country, and serving as a member of the Noorseen Collective, a pan-Moroccan group of emerging photographic artists. He has also participated in the Artists for Morocco relief initiative alongside some of the country’s most celebrated names.