Artist Category: Exhibited

Laetitia ‘Laeti’ Adam-Rabel is a Haitian-American artist who lives in Miami, Florida. She is a wife and mother to a toddler girl, with whom she often collaborates on art projects. Laeti studied Fashion Design at Parsons in New York and received her Bachelor of Science in Art Education at Florida International University. She uses various media to address social and personal issues like climate change, blackness, feminism, inclusion, and her role as a new mother in creating a better world. She uses painting, textile arts, photography, videography, and sound art to portray beauty, while conveying her sometimes painful emotions. Laeti is a lifelong learner who seeks to discover something new from every encounter. ‘I interpret my work as ever-evolving, just as we humans evolve. We are never the same from one instant to another; we are changed by our experiences, circumstances and wisdom. Likewise, I change through my work as my work changes by my hand.’

Kezia Harrell is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, illustration, and performance. Born in Cincinnati, Ohio, and a graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Harrell creates fantastical, hyperrealistic worlds that center Black femme freedom, joy, and self-definition. Through vibrant portraits and imaginative narratives, her work confronts histories of racism and misogynoir while envisioning spaces of healing, abundance, and liberation beyond the white gaze.

Andy Jackson is a Brooklyn-based fashion and lifestyle photographer. Originally from Delaware, his creative eye was shaped by the vibrant worlds he discovered in fashion magazines picked up at local grocery stores, sparking a vision that stretched far beyond the boundaries of his small town.

Over the course of his career, Jackson has collaborated with leading brands and publications including Ralph Lauren, Levi’s, Google, Puma, AnOther, Saks Fifth Avenue, Teen Vogue, Interview Magazine, Net-a-Porter, Vogue, The New York Times, Harper’s Bazaar, Esquire, and Vanity Fair. His photography has also been featured in Twin Magazine, GQ, InStyle, W Magazine, Elle, and i-D.

In her diverse practice, Wangechi Mutu reflects on sexuality, femininity, ecology, politics, the rhythms and chaos of the world and our often damaging or futile efforts to control it. At its core, her work emphasises the powerful and inescapable symbiotic connections that determine our common fate.

The artist was first recognised for paintings and collages concerned with the myriad forms of violence and misrepresentation visited upon women, especially Black women, in the contemporary world. More recently, exploring and subverting cultural preconceptions of the female body and the feminine, Mutu proposes worlds within worlds, populated by powerful hybridised female figures. Her practice has been described as engaging in her own unique form of myth-making, one in which the interweaving of fact with fiction opens up possibilities for another group of symbolic female characterisations, markedly different from those that appear in either classical history or popular culture.

Born and raised in Malaysia, Sheena Liam is the embroidery artist behind the acclaimed Instagram account @times.new.romance. Her subjects, usually based on herself, are depicted in a thoughtful and calm, almost bored manner. Liam’s other occupation is modelling, a job that takes her around the globe. The jetsetter modelling lifestyle comes with waiting around on shoot sets while fighting jet lags. As a way to pass the waiting times, Liam picked up her childhood hobby of embroidery.

Delicately embroidered hands are supporting tired heads, and dainty fingers are patiently braiding long pigtails. Hair is a major component in her embroideries, as the yarn is often sewn in such a way that the hair falls loosely off the embroidery hoops, creating a compelling shift from 2D to 3D. Liam has mastered embroidering a number of hairstyles: messy buns, fringes, half updos, braids – you’ll even find mid-haircut depictions. But the hair being a focal point and recurring theme was more of an organic evolution rather than a planned creative decision.

Ma Yanhong majored at the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing, China. Yanhong is known for her realistic portraits of young people, where she juggles with the intimacy of the subjects in the painting and the interest of the viewer, so there is a balance between voyeurism and exhibitionism in those seemingly quotidian scenes.

She is interested in the beauty of the human body. She begins with photo shoots with models, who are her friends, classmates and teachers, at specific sites. Then, she recaptures what was on film on her canvas. To Yanhong, a painting is an alternative existence where all impossibilities of society become possible.

Her work was shown at solo shows at C5 Art Center Beijing; Boers-Li Gallery, Beijing, and Goedhuis Contemporary, New York. Yanhong has also been part of diverse group exhibitions at museums and galleries, including Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing; Lin & Lin Gallery, Taipei; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Yunfeng Art Gallery, Beijing, among others.

Marcel Mariën (1920–1993) was a Belgian Surrealist artist, writer, and filmmaker best known for his provocative and irreverent engagement with the Surrealist movement. A close collaborator and protégé of René Magritte, Mariën worked across collage, photography, assemblage, film, and writing, often deploying dark humor and sharp political critique. He edited the influential Surrealist journal Les Lèvres Nues and produced a significant body of photomontages and object-based works that challenged bourgeois conventions and exposed the absurdities of consumer culture and political power. His film L’Imitation du cinéma (1959) remains one of the more daring and subversive works of Belgian avant-garde cinema. Mariën was also a prolific writer, producing poetry, essays, and an important memoir chronicling his years within the Belgian Surrealist circle.

Since the 1960s, J.D. ‘Okhai Ojeikere has been documenting the culture of his native Nigeria in exquisite black-and-white photographs, capturing the elegance and exuberance of its celebrations, ceremonies, and daily life. He has amassed thousands of images, which together form an anthropological and ethnographic record that is considered to be a national treasure. With his keen eye for composition and attention to detail, Ojeikere finds art everywhere, as he describes: “I always wanted to record moments of beauty, moments of knowledge. Art is life.” This approach fuels his ongoing “Hairstyles” project (begun 1968), an internationally celebrated visual taxonomy of the hairstyles and headdresses worn by Nigerian women, captured at close range, often from behind. For Ojeikere, these hairstyles—from scalp-hugging braids to stunning sculptural forms—are ephemeral works of art, a notion that his photographs clearly affirm.

Born in 1982 in San Jose, California, Brianna Lance is a self taught painter originally taught by her grandfather as a child in Texas where she grew up. Since 2004, the artist has lived and worked in New York City. Lance has had career success as polymath working in creative mediums from fashion to music to writing before settling on fine art as her primary focus in 2020. Lance has been represented by Tappan Collective since 2020 where they have shown her many bodies of work focusing mainly on watercolor paintings dealing with meditation, repetition and the subconscious to newer work that has branched into mysticism and the realms beyond. Lance has had three solo exhibitions in New York and been in countless group shows around the country since 2020 in galleries such as The Hole, Tripoli Gallery, Chandra Gallery, Elliot Templeton Fine arts and more. Lance’s subject matter has focused heavily on symbolism to convey subject matters that range from meditation, obsessive compulsive disorder, sexuality, mysticism, addiction, and more.

Jazmine Hayes is an interdisciplinary visual artist, musician and poet—born, raised and based in Brooklyn, New York. Her practice explores histories of the African diaspora and the ways they are preserved and reproduced through cultural traditions. Through this exploration, Hayes works across an array of mediums such as installation, painting, drawing, performance, video, sound, textile and writing. She is a 2023 U.S. Fulbright researcher, in which she traveled to Senegal, West Africa to explore weaving traditions and pattern as coded communication, protection and a preserver of Black American, Caribbean & West African histories. She received an MFA from CUNY Hunter College and a BFA from CUNY Queens College. Hayes is a past EFA Robert Blackburn print fellow and has been featured in Art Forum, Interview Magazine, Artnet, and several other publications for her practice. For over 14 years, she has worked with community-based youth organizations across New York City as an educator and muralist with non-profits such as Groundswell Mural, Artistic Noise, and Made in Brownsville. She believes in the accessibility of art resources for the development of Black and Brown youth.