Doug Aitken is a multimedia artist working between California and New York. Defying definitions of genre, he explores a multitude of media, from film and installation to architectural interventions, with a focus on creating moving works intended to catch the viewer unaware, eliciting responses that are unexpected and profound. In 2013, Aitken curated and produced ‘Station to Station: A Nomadic Happening’, a tour that travelled to 10 different locations by rail on a train the artist designed as a "kinetic sculpture that acts as a cultural studio.” At each stop, Aitken held a site-specific event featuring experimental film, food, and music performances by Charlotte Gainsbourg, Dirty Projectors, and Twin Shadow among others. More recently, a unique site-specific commission for the Donum Estate in Sonoma was created, titled ‘Sonic Mountain (Sonoma)’, which consisted of three concentric circles of suspended stainless-steel pipes whose differing lengths form a wave at their base, mirroring the free Euler-Bernoulli shape that describes a wind chime’s frequency. Known to have been used since the second century in India and China, and later in Ancient Rome, wind chimes create chance, inharmonic music. Of his spectacular take on this kinetic form, Aitken said: “I wanted to create a living artwork, a piece that would change continuously and be performed by the natural environment.”

El Anatsui is recognized for his stunning large-scale assemblages consisting of discarded materials that visually resemble tapestries. Born in Ghana, Anatsui moved to Nigeria in the 1970s to teach at University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and left behind the plethora of available wood in Ghana, thus complicating his ability to continue creating wooden sculptures. As a result, his move encouraged more experimentation with different media. During the late 1990s, he stumbled upon metal seals from African liquor bottles, which began the incorporation of the found objects into his art. The shift in material began the creation of his best known works: large-scale sculptures consisting of thousands of repurposed metal pieces sewn together with copper wire. What makes Anatsui’s works particularly interesting and unique is the melding of Ghanian aesthetic and beliefs with abstraction, which is traditionally understood as having western roots. Anatsui interrogates legacies of colonialism through ideas of consumption, waste, and the environment as he contends with the ramifications of these ideas within his native continent of Africa. He is specifically discussing the importance of reuse and transformation within Africa, while also transcending the limits of place through commentary around global concerns.

Hernan Bas was born in Miami, FL to Cuban immigrants, and grew up in the north-central region of the state. Since graduating from the New World School of the Arts in 1996, he has split his time between studios in Miami and Detroit, creating figurative works filled with allegory, whimsy, and decadence. Bas’ highly detailed paintings are informed by late-nineteenth-century Romantic art and literature, and grounded in the iconography of the young male dandy. From childhood, Bas has been enamored with the paranormal, and his works often read as exotic daydreams or a page out of the Gothic novels that inspire him. Alone or in small groups, his young protagonists navigate scenes of adventure, decadence, and enigmatic sensuality. The artist employs bright colors, maximalism, and expressionistic brush strokes to create lush and highly decorative scenes for his figures, calling attention to codified aesthetics and questioning what might define ‘gay art’ in the absense of overt sexuality. This indirect approach mirrors the way in which homoerotic content was engaged as subtext in literature, particularly in the work of some of Bas’ favorite writers, Oscar Wilde and Joris-Karl Huysmans.

Andrea Marie Breiling was born in Phoenix, AZ, and spent much of her career in Los Angeles. Her earlier abstract works drew from the aesthetics and ideas within the history of Action Painting, but a recent move from LA to New York has energized an exciting deviation in her practice. In an effort to push the boundaries of abstract painting by creating work without the use of a traditional paintbrush, the artist picked up a can of spray paint to experiment. Her current practice has been referred to as less like graffiti and closer to the atmospheric, hazy works of JMW Turner. One review of Breiling’s September 2020 exhibition with Night Gallery said that the works felt as if the artist had breathed them into existence, “...like (she) made them by exhaling. They surround you like an atmosphere.” This ethereal reading perfectly aligns with Breiling’s experience during the creation of the paintings: “I finally felt the work becoming more of a psychedelic experience, wrapping up the viewer like a drug; a full-body experience, beautiful and emotional and sublime.”

Born and raised in Havana, Cuba, Yoan Capote has spent his life on the island and continues to live and work there, despite a fraught relationship with the place he calls home. Using sculpture, painting, installation, photography, and video, Capote creates parallels between the symbolic meaning of found and sourced objects and the human psyche. It may be the challenging conditions and contradictions of life in Cuba that keep him there, creating work with a deep connection to the country, and exploring oppression and migration. The objects he selects are chosen with purpose and metaphor in mind, such as within his ‘Palangre’ series of seascapes, which he fabricated from thousands of hand-wrought fish hooks. From a distance, the works read as classic paintings of sea meeting sky, but upon closer examination, the severity of Capote’s materials are poignant. As the artist describes, the ‘Palangre’ pieces are something of a memorial to the many thousands of Cubans who have taken to the water in hopes of a better life in America: “the fish hooks are a direct allegory of the water, but also an allegory of a trap, or seduction, pain or death… I wanted this series to embody that risk and that frustration; the risk of dying in the water, the frustration of accepting that geography and politics decide the limits of individual liberty.”

Trinidadian-American interdisciplinary artist Allana Clarke focuses intently on contending with the complexities of Blackness and examining colonial and post-colonial motifs. Her research-based practice consists of video, performance, photography, and sculpture, in which she incorporates socio-political and art historical text. Personal narrative is also a foundational element of her practice as she navigates American culture through Trinidadian roots. With an understanding of Afro-Carribean politics in conjunction with American ideas, Clarke’s work often challenges viewers to rethink ideas of womanhood and Black identity throughout the diaspora. Instead of delving deeply into stereotypes, Clarke focuses on redefinition in terms of breaching boundaries and ideas of belonging, often utilizing her own body as the platform for her expression.

Dominique Fung is a Canadian artist living and working in New York City. She was born and raised in Ottawa, Canada, the daughter of first-generation parents from Shanghai and Hong Kong. Like many other children of first generation immigrants growing up in the west, Fung spoke two languages—English, like her peers and friends at school, and her parents’ native language at home. Having lived all her life in North America, her sense of Chinese heritage was largely informed by the vessels and objects on display in her home as well as those in Asian Art collections at the museums she visited, in particular at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Fung cites her analysis of the Cantonese term ‘jook-sing’—a pejorative referring to persons of Chinese descent who live overseas and identify more with western culture, which evolved from the word for ‘bamboo pole’—as an early inspiration for her work. The term suggests that Chinese people born in the west are hollow like bamboo poles, signifying the lack of Chinese culture in their knowledge. Fung realized that the museum relics she admired and identified with were jook-sing like her, separated from their origins by time and distance. The relics were also coveted and reduced by the west, where objects once held in high regard for their mastery and importance in religious or cultural observance are copied and mass-produced as a shadow of the original. The use of vessels in her work became of great importance to Fung, who has also used such objects in paintings that explore Asiastic Femininity and the dangerous fetishization of Asian women in America.

When Charles McGee was ten years old, his family moved from South Carolina to Michigan, adding to the millions of African Americans who migrated from the Southern United States to more urban areas in the American Northeast, Midwest, and West throughout the twentieth century. Known as the Great Migration, estimates of about six million African Americans migrated from the south moving toward more opportunities outside of sharecropping and in efforts to escape racial segregation. When McGee moved north, he brought with him a fledgling understanding of the harmony of nature and an inquisitive spirit relating to relationships of people. He used artwork to examine and discuss his observations and ideas. Early in McGee’s career, he produced a number of realistic portraits focusing mostly on highlighting Black women and motherhood. Yet, he soon became more interested in abstraction, oftentimes featuring abstracted figures. Many of his works, however, focused completely on line and color, with no recognizable nods to figuration. He often utilized mark-making, lines, shapes, and layering to depict movement and focus on the energy of the work. Throughout McGee's extensive career, his practice shifted multiple times, ebbing and flowing from vibrant color to black and white and back again; through varying degrees of abstraction, his work invariably celebrated the creative nature of humankind and focused on what unites us all.

Allie McGhee was born in Charlston, W.V. in 1941 and moved with his family to Detroit when he was ten years old. Beginning his artistic practice with representational work, McGhee shifted to abstraction in the late 1960s, inspired by the improvisation and emotion of jazz, as well as a fascination with science and the cosmos. Fearless experimentation is at the core of his process, and at 80 years old, he continues to play with new materials, concepts, and techniques. He admits to spending 364 days a year in his studio (“every day except Christmas”), beginning work early and ending the day at dusk: “You begin slowly, until you’re deeply involved in your work. Can’t put a time clock on it. The sun is the master because it illuminates the color.” This guidance by the rhythm of the earth’s cycle aligns with his love of natural science and astronomy, and similarly, he allows his materials to lead him in his practice. Always curious, McGhee's enthusiasm to take on any surface that will hold paint positions him as a pioneer of the Detroit aesthetic, where through circumstance or an exploratory spirit, found materials are patched together to create sculpture and layered, complex painting.

Jason REVOK is a Detroit-based artist who cut his teeth as a graffiti writer in Southern California. In the pre-internet 80s and 90s, he and his crew enjoyed the underground nature of graffiti culture, taking 35mm film of their work and sending it out to independent magazines and other artists around the world. His skill and willingness to paint elaborate walls in places others would never touch (due to the visibility of a particular location and the risk of being caught) earned him a massive following, and he was invited to cities all over the globe to paint. Because of graffiti, he saw the world, and in 2011, set his sights on Detroit as a place to participate in the explosive graffiti scene as well as begin to develop a unique studio practice. “Everything I’m doing now is very much a product of the past,” says REVOK, recalling his time spent in the city. “I started going out and sampling little bits of the city and taking them back to my studio and reshaping them and assembling them into a new thing or object. It was about Detroit as much as it was about me.” He worked in assemblage in order to step back from painting and his graffiti-based instinct; after a few years, he was back in LA with the birth of his daughter and felt ready to look at paint from an entirely different perspective. Using some tools from his past in unique ways, REVOK has developed a language that is rooted in graffiti but builds a bridge to his love of minimalist artists like Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt. Now back in Detroit with his family, he continues his search to find balance between the anarchy of his past and the harmony and peace of mind he seeks in the present.

Jamea Richmond-Edwards’s paintings and collages are deeply rooted in her upbringing in Detroit, Michigan and her ancestry. Richmond-Edwards’ female-centric work consistently reveals the influence of her mother, grandmother, and sister. From aesthetic choices to the agency Richmond-Edwards affords her figures, the vivacious and bold characteristics that appear in her works through color, density, and layering are a direct reflection of the influences these family members have had on her life. Ultimately, Richmond-Edwards creates imagery that narrates stories of Black and Indigenous womanhood with themes of identity, luxury, local fashion, and agency. She situates these works on a bed of understanding her genealogy and the movement of her ancestors throughout the history of America.

Nari Ward’s artistic practice clearly communicates the influence that location can have on the ways in which one identifies and focuses their attention. Ward is best known for his large-scale installations constructed of found objects that highlight major social and cultural issues, especially within inner cities. A native Jamaican, Ward moved to New York during his formative years, experiencing the poverty and urban blight of the city, but specifically understanding the cultural tumult. Ward reveals his concerns through his artwork and encourages viewers to find their own relevance within the pieces. His installations become architectural symbols that breathe new life into everyday objects people have discarded or left behind. For Ward, these objects represent the streets he consistently traverses, and he builds narratives through their connections, focusing on themes of race, poverty, and consumer culture.