Artist Category: Exhibited

Kitty Ca$h is an interdisciplinary artist that works in music, video, animation and installation. The core of her work is an exploration of self and the Black experience in relation to themes such as Black womanhood, identity, community, and Black healing, This is often explored through music, humor, and social commentary. She has collaborated with artists like Rihanna, Solange, and A$AP Rocky, and has performed at renowned institutions such as the Guggenheim Museum and Brooklyn Museum.

Rachel Martin is an enrolled Tlingít multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Queens, NY. Her work often explores tribal identity, intersectional feminism and Indigenous sovereignty through the use humor and playfulness to ensure her ancestors stories are told from a multidimensional place. Martin’s work will often merge traditional Northwest Coast iconography and modern matriarchal figures, fish and animals to tell the stories of today while honoring the oral history of her people that has been passed down from generation to generation. In addition to her contemporary art practice, Martin is a beginning level Tlingit language student. Her works are often inspired by the overlay of English and Tlingit concepts of family, home, and humor.

Martin’s work has attracted the attention and support of several prominent private galleries and collectors as well as public institutions including Anchorage Museum in Alaska and Forge Project in Upstate New York. Recently, Martin was included in an exhibition at Sealaska Heritage Institute’s ‘Native Women’s Exhibit’ guest curated by Alison Bremner. Her work is currently included in the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, Gochman Family Collection, Anchorage Museum, Forge Project Collection, and the Marieluise Hessel Collection.

Turiya Adkins (b. 1998, New York, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Brooklyn. She received her BA from Dartmouth College in 2020. Her work has been featured in recent exhibitions including Manifold, 2022, London, UK; Helmut Lang Seen by Antwaun Sargent, 2023, Hannah Traore Gallery, New York, NY; Manifold Deluxe, 2023, Frieze, London, UK; Experience 49: blue/s, 2021, El Segundo Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Parallels and Rupture, 2023, Freedman Gallery, Albright College, Reading, PA.

A New York-based artist, director, author, curator, actor, and speaker – Chella Man‘s work highlights the continuums and extends beyond binaries of disability, race, gender, sexuality, and morality. His identity includes being Deaf, trans, Jewish, and Chinese as well as determined, curious, and hopeful. Blending the genres of fine art, visual art, and performance, his mediums perpetually expand. Beyond organizing his show with Hannah Traore Gallery, Man is working on a live performance exploring his bodily autonomy through the lens of the medical industrial complex and tattooing for Performance Space NY and The Jewish Museum premiering May 2nd of 2024. He also works with Nike as an ambassador for disability and queer inclusion. Most recently, his short film exploring cyborgian identities was shown as a finalist in Cannes Short Film Festival, Newfest Film Festival, and more. This past month, he was awarded recognition in Forbes 30 under 30 for his work in the arts.

In the past, Man was a mentor and resident at Silver Art Projects located in The World Trade Center. He has shown at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Powerhouse Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum, Performance Space NY, Mana Contemporary, The Museum of The City of New York, The Abrons Arts Center this coming year. In 2021, Man published his first book, Continuum, with Penguin Publishing, highlighting how to heal from systemic oppression and the revelations he has come to growing up. Since leaving high school as a Junior to attend college early, he has shown in film festivals internationally, participated in numerous gallery shows and artist residencies worldwide, worked as a columnist for Condé Nast’s first queer publication Them, launched a radically inclusive clothing line in collaboration with Opening Ceremony, signed as the first Deaf and trans-masculine model with IMG Models, and was cast as a superhero in Warner Brothers DC Universe film Titans. He hopes to continue pushing the boundaries of what it means to be accessible, inclusive, and equal in this world.

Hassan Hajjaj (b. 1961; Larache, Morocco) creates vibrant, boldly colorful portraits of inspiring figures in his life—musicians, friends, artists—that express evolving notions of self and society in today’s globalized, hyperconnected world. The artist photographs his subjects outfitted in fashions of his own design and situated in studios he builds himself and installs on the street. The images are then fitted in a frame made from various commercial products, enshrining each portrait in an international blend of music, fashion, and consumer culture.

With a history in street fashion, Hajjaj dresses his subjects with expertly blended ensembles of modern streetwear and traditional, intricate Moroccan prints. They pose in temporary studios installed on city streets, with North African textiles and pedestrian materials as their loud, joyful backdrops. The artist’s sitters often strike playful poses bursting with energy: some sit on a repurposed plastic crate or straddle a motorcycle, others do karate kicks or balance in handstands. Hajjaj then builds custom frames for the resulting photograph, and fills them with a variety of consumer products labelled with Arabic text, from Coca-Cola cans, to tomato sauce, to tea tins. In this way, the artist mimics the repetitive motifs of traditional Islamic zellige, where each can permutates in a repetitive manner, mimicking the tiled designs of traditional Islamic architecture. Hajjaj thereby transforms these quotidian goods into elements of artistic tradition, creating an interplay of ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture, and offering a new mode of celebrating iconic cultural figures through portraiture.

Hajjaj locates his playful, distinctly contemporary style of portraiture in the traditions of African masters of studio photography, including Seydou Keïta (1921-2001, Malian), Samuel Fosso (b. 1962, Cameroonian), and Malick Sidibé (1936-2016, Malian). Learning from these artists, Hajjaj absorbed the idea of studio portraiture as a malleable vehicle for identity definition. This became the inspiration for his own process of reshuffling cultural signifiers to portray a world where individuals build identities from a broad array of international influences and media. In his own words, ”In the 80s you have to remember that London was just starting to blend. We all came from different backgrounds. We had to create something to find our space.” Hajjaj does just this in his images, blending, juxtaposing and mirroring the traditional Moroccan motifs of his heritage with contemporary signifiers of global style and consumption.

Hassan Hajjaj’s works are represented in the permanent collections across the globe, including those of the Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY; Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, CA; Victoria & Albert Museum, London, UK; Institut des Cultures d’Islam, Paris, France; Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, UAE; Kamel Lazaar Foundation, Tunisia; Musée d’Art Contemporain Africain Al Maaden, Marrakesh, Morocco; and National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia. The artist has presented landmark exhibitions at Freies Museum, Berlin, Germany; British Museum, London, UK; Newark Museum, NJ; and Leighton House Museum, UK. Hajjaj was born in 1961, in Larache, Morocco, and currently lives and works between London and Marrakesh.

Moya Garrison-Msingwana also known as GANGBOX is a Toronto born artist and Illustrator with a BDES from OCAD University. Being of mixed background Moya has a unique perspective on the world. His eclectic work explores many themes rooted in pop culture, fashion, the supernatural and the absurd. Subverting everything from simple daily interactions to social issues, he shows a deep infatuation with form and character. His art whether zines, comics, murals, editorial illustrations, sculptures or drawings often exhibit the body and its relationship with the world around it. Works by Moya can be found in galleries, private collections or in campaigns and projects associated with the likes of Google, Loewe, Adidas, XL Recordings, The Northface, Gore-Tex, Stussy and many others. Proficient in traditional painting and digital rendering, his painterly and loose style is easily identifiable and engaging. Regardless of the medium he attempts to establish a relatable, humorous and critical forum for diverse audiences.

Renee Cox is one of the most controversial African-American artists working today using her own body, both nude and clothed to celebrate black womanhood and criticize a society she often views as racist and sexist.

She was born on October 16, 1960, in Colgate, Jamaica, into an upper middle-class family, who later settled in Scarsdale, New York. Cox’s first ambition was to become a filmmaker. “I was always interested in the visual” she said in one interview, “But I had a baby boomer reaction and was into the immediate gratification of photography as opposed to film, which is a more laborious project.” From the very beginning, her work showed a deep concern for social issues and employed disturbing religious imagery. In It Shall be Named (1994), a black man’s distorted body made up of eleven separate photographs hangs from a cross, as much resembling a lynched man as the crucified Christ.

In her first one-woman show at a New York gallery in 1998, Cox made herself the center of attention. Dressed in the colorful garb of a black superhero named Raje, Cox appeared in a series of large, color photographs. In one picture she towered over a cab in Times Square. In another, she broke steel chains before an erupting volcano. In the most pointed picture, entitled The Liberation of UB and Lady J, Cox’s Raje rescued the black stereotyped advertising figures of Uncle Ben and Aunt Jemima from their products, labels. The photograph was featured on the cover of the French newspaper Le Monde. “These slick, color-laden images, their large format and Cox’s own powerfully beautiful figure heighten the visual impact of the work, making Cox’s politics clear and engaging,” wrote one critic. But her next photographic series would be less engaging for some people and create a firestorm of controversy. In the series Flipping the Script, Cox took a number of European religious masterpieces, including Michelangelo’s David and The Pieta, and reinterpreted them with contemporary black figures. “…Christianity is big in the African-American community, but there are no representations of us,” she said. “I took it upon myself to include people of color in these classic scenarios.”

The photograph that created the most controversy when it was shown in a black photography exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum in New York City in 2001 was Yo Mama’s Last Supper. It was a remake of Leonardo Da Vinci’s Last Supper with a nude Cox siting in for Jesus Christ, surrounded by all black disciples, except for Judas who was white. Many Roman Catholics were outraged at the photograph and New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani called for the forming of a commission to set “decency standards” to keep such works from being shown in any New York museum that received public funds. Cox responded by stating “I have a right to reinterpret the Last Supper as Leonardo Da Vinci created the Last Supper with people who look like him. The hoopla and the fury are because I’m a black female. It’s about me having nothing to hide.”

Cox continues to push the envelope with her work by using new technologies that the digital medium of photography has to offer. By working from her archives and shooting new subjects, Cox seeks to push the limits of her older work and create new consciousnesses of the body. Cox’s new work aims to “unleash the potential of the ordinary and bring it into a new realm of possibilities”. “It’s about time that we re-imagine our own constitutions.” states Cox.

Deborah Czeresko is a New York City-based artist and designer, best known for their work with glass. Their work references food, art history, gender, and their experiences as a queer artist. Czeresko first started working with glass at the New York Experimental Glass Workshop, now known as Urban Glass in 1987, receiving their MFA from Tulane University in 1992. In 2019, Czeresko captivated viewers as the winner of the inaugural season of Netflix’s Blown Away. As a glass artist, Czeresko creates work that challenges societal norms and speaks on queer issues. Their work references the traditions of Venetian glass blowing while also adding contemporary discussions on feminism and gender politics. Czeresko has most notably been shown in the Corning Museum of Glass, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Toyama Glass Art Museum and the Toledo Museum of Art. Czeresko is the recipient of various fellowships and residencies including Tyler School of Art, UrbanGlass, NY, LUCA School of Art, Belgium and College of Creative Studies, Detroit.

Quil Lemons is a New York based photographer, originally hailing from Philadelphia. His visual language is distinct and interrogates ideas around masculinity, family, queerness, race, and beauty. Quil’s work dances the line between the fantastic and realistic, resulting in disruptive images that feel like pure imagination, while simultaneously grounding us in references to our current cultural climate. His images can be found in publications such as Allure, Garage, i-D, Shadowplay, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, Variety, and W, among others. His clients include Burberry, Calvin Klein, Givenchy, Guess, Gucci, Moncler, Nike, Nordstrom, SSENSE, and Valentino, among others.

Quil has previously exhibited at International Center of Photography, New York, 2021, in Lincoln Center at the American Ballet Theatre’s Fall Season, New York, 2021, Aperture’s New Black Vanguard, New York, 2019, Kuumba Festival, Toronto, 2019, and Contact Festival, Toronto, 2018. He has given artist talks at Fotografiska in New York, and ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, CA. He launched a capsule collection with Sky High Farm Workwear titled “Farm Boys Do It Better” in February 2023 and is currently a Contributing Art Director at the brand.