Aika Akhmetova is a New York-based artist originally from Almaty, Kazakhstan. Their work references indigenous Kazakh traditions and rituals, often manifesting in sculptures, videos, performances, and writings. Finished pieces bring up themes of queerness, abject, tradition, norm, and violence. Akhmetova has exhibited in the US and Kazakhstan. Their work is in the Public Collection of Art of Kazakhstan. Akhmetova studied Painting at Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University. They currently live and work in NYC.

www.aikaakhmetova.com

Henry Anker is an American landscape painter. He grew up in Northern California where the natural geography, political culture, and environmental crisis shaped his perception of the world around him. He moved to Los Angeles in 2013 where he received his BA in Visual Art at UCLA. In 2018 he moved to New York City to pursue his MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts.

Catalina Antonio Granados was born in Mexico City in 1990. She received her BA in Spanish Literature at UNAM and did her BFA at NYU Steinhardt. Currently she is pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. She is interested in analyzing the performance of colonial tools that the US empire uses over Latin America and its people, especially the control of discourse through politics of translations in asylum applications of Latin Americans in the US, and the narratives imposed on immigrants within the courtrooms. She approaches this by trying to develop tools influenced by radical theories from Latin American pedagogues, Greek theatre and toys.

She currently lives in Crown Heights.

www.catalinaantoniogranados.com

Roni Aviv is a lens-based artist living and working in New York. She uses photography combined with text, drawing, and household materials to pose questions about the acts of looking, noticing, touching, ignoring, and erasing. Her work takes form as large-scale installations as well as handheld artist books: it is a visual and psychological inquiry into the unaddressed surfaces and experiences that are inherent in the domestic everyday.

www.roniaviv.com

Patrick Bayly (b. 1994, Charleston, West Virginia) earned a BFA at West Virginia University in 2018 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture that same year. He then started the MFA program at Columbia University in New York, marking the first time he lived outside West Virginia. Since the university’s studios were shut down in mid-March, Bayly has been painting in his apartment in New York.

www.patrickbayly.com 

Eric Brittain is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in New York City.

Rosana Cabán is a Puerto Rico–born, Florida-raised artist based in Brooklyn. Using sound, sculpture, and performance, she probes the problematic binaries of masculinity and femininity, good and evil, and technology vs human progress. As a producer and recording artist, Cabán has released influential music for artists in the Brooklyn DIY scene including Primitive Heart, Shrines, GhostPiss, SPRNGVLVT, Prima, and Psychic Twin. She has most notably performed at the Brooklyn Museum, National Sawdust, the Fillmore, Webster Hall, and over 80 rock venues across the US and Canada. Cabán was a Marble House Project Artist in Residence in 2018, an Ace Hotel AIR 2017, and a guest collaborator for Lucas Artists Fellow Xandra Ibarra at Montalvo Arts Center in 2020.

www.rosanacaban.com

Fontaine Capel (b. 1990) is an interdisciplinary artist born and based in New York City. She uses performance, video, monumental drawing, sculpture, installation, and speculative proposals to consider our present roles and to imagine our possible futures.

Capel is a frequent collaborator, and has founded and led several community-centered artist-run projects, including Hume Chicago and Sill Space Projects.

She has performed and exhibited works at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Jewish Museum; Tiger Strikes Asteroid; The Wallach Gallery; and Steve Turner Exhibitions. She has recently been in residence at the Hemispheric Institute; Residencia Corazón Argentina; ACRE; and the Chicago Artist Coalition. Capel was a fellow at the Cuba One Foundation and is a current Annual Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park.

Capel studied Art and Art History at Oberlin College (2012) and is a member of Columbia University’s MFA in Visual Art Class of 2020. Lack of diploma notwithstanding.

www.fontainecapel.com

Susan Chen (b. 1992, Hong Kong SAR), a first-generation Asian American, paints portraits of her racial community to investigate the psychology of race, and the varying viewpoints her sitters have on ideas of home, immigration, prejudice, identity, family, longing, love, and loss. She usually finds her sitters, who are strangers, on various community social media groups on the Internet. Chen received her BA Hons from Brown University (2015) and is currently completing her MFA at Columbia University (2020). In 2019, she was a finalist for the AXA Art Prize, and was also featured in “New American Paintings” #141 and #147 juried by Beth Rudin DeWoody and Amber Esseiva. Recent group shows include Steve Turner Los Angeles, Art Toronto, Nancy Hoffman Gallery, Ki Smith Gallery, and Spring/Break Art Show.

www.susanmbchen.com

Joanna Cortez (b. 1990, Escondido, CA) received their BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design (2017) and is currently a class of 2020 MFA candidate at Columbia University. Joanna works in ceramics, printmaking, and sculpture. They currently reside in California.

www.joannacortez.com

Lauren Covey creates thought-provoking work in a wide range of media including video, sound, installation, photography, and performance. Her work intuitively pulls from the public and private worlds of psychoanalysis, self-help literature, and therapy to produce enigmatic narratives using appropriated found material to create a series of invented self-reflective characters. She often utilizes an isolation booth to record the audio and video content of her stories. Her improvisatory process reveals accidental expressions of unconscious truths. Her art practice is not dissimilar to a torrid love affair that constantly occupies her mind, day and night, generating more and more fiction and fantasy as her mood is strung along, oscillating between ecstasy and self-doubt. Her work embodies and also attempts to embrace her self-consciousness, but continues to exude a stinky aura, like a repellent that makes people run towards a pony’s turd. Why? Because confidence is key.

www.laurencovey.com

Julian Day is an Australian artist, composer, and writer. Their work treats sound as a promiscuous energy that transgresses human borders by stealth, unveiling the relational and territorial complexities of civic spaces and infrastructures. 24 Hour Choir, for instance, invites a temporary community to sustain their collective voice within an historic bandshell. The Weight of Air floods an abandoned town hall with ebbing and surging organ tones, generating a densely turbulent airspace. Their strategies vary from site-responsive assemblages to memorized scores and audio guides. Day has presented work in the California Pacific Triennial; Asia Pacific Triennial (Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art); Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art (Art Gallery of South Australia); Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival; Jewish Museum; Fridman Gallery; Institute of Modern Art; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. Their work has been collected by Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Orange County Museum of Art, and Wollongong Art Gallery.

www.julianday.com

Mónica Félix (b. 1984) is an interdisciplinary artist, professional photographer, and yoga instructor born and raised in Cayey, Puerto Rico. She has a BA in Communications from the University of Puerto Rico, a Photography Certificate from Pratt Institute, and is currently finishing her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. She moved to New York City to pursue a career as a visual artist and professional photographer and has been based in Brooklyn since 2010. In 2013 she was the recipient of the Lexus Grant for Artist at the Museum of Art of Puerto Rico. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in Puerto Rico, New York, California, and Spain. Her work is a personal account on the representation of the migratory experience of one female body—the fantastically compromised corners of this traveled life. The devices for this identity study are photography, video, installation, writing, and performance.

monicafelix.com

Baris Gokturk is a Turkish artist living and working in Brooklyn, New York. He is currently an MFA candidate in sculpture at Columbia University. He teaches studio art at Pace University and runs an art program for Johns Hopkins University’s neurology department. Gokturk recently completed a mural for Columbia University’s Butler Library. He was the ApexArt fellow in Korea and the artist-in-resident at YADDO and LMCC, as well as participating in SOMA Mexico and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine.

Gokturk reconstructs two-dimensional historical photographs and archival imagery about events or individuals overlooked by mainstream history in three-dimensional layers—hybrid fragments and installations that oscillate between drawing, painting, and sculpture. He rebuilds the photographic image as a physical surface first and then peels it off as a displaced piece of skin that he reapplies to other found or sculpted objects in relation to a specific event.

www.barisgokturk.com/

With a background in experimental music, Joan Hacker uses performance to confront cognitive dissonance surrounding notions of oppression and liberation. Her video work examines sexuality and gender, drawing upon propaganda techniques to criticize corporate media culture and its values. Hacker has exhibited and performed through online advertising at the New York Public Library, Times Square, Anthology Film Archives, Taipei Economic and Cultural Office, Fridman Gallery, Experimental Intermedia Belgium, Garner Arts Center, Governor’s Island, and Q Galeria Brazil, and her work has been featured in publications including Vice, The Wire, Kerrang!, Detroit Metro Times, Bizarre, Decibel, Brooklyn Vegan, Denzatsu, and Cvlt Nation, among others.

www.joanhacker.com

Jenn Hassin (b. 1986, Texas) served in the United States Air Force before receiving a BA from Saint Edward’s University and is a current MFA candidate at Columbia University (2020). She has had solo exhibitions at the United States Military Academy (2018–20); Texas A&M University (2018); Long Island University (2018); Elisabet Ney Museum (2016–18); and The Pentagon (2015–18). Hassin uses found materials such as clothing, paper, metal, ceramics, and glass, that she transforms and manipulates to create a visual for her subject matter, giving the material itself a voice in her art. Since leaving her studio at Columbia University due to COVID-19, she has been working from a family home in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

www.jennhassin.com

There is something strange about walking around and being human. We use mouthy movements to talk to each other, to eat, to get to the moon, to sing, and to kill each other. Chairs are shaped like butts. There are billions and billions of butt-shaped objects across the globe.

Born in Tianjin, China, Yifan Jiang is a Canadian artist based in New York City. Jiang is a conceptually driven, project-based artist who works across painting, animation, sculpture, and performance. Drawing on strategies of pataphysics and magical realism, she creates images and narratives by weaving together personal, everyday experiences with idioms of philosophy, history, and science. Taking an irreverent approach to epistemology, Jiang considers the multitude of sentiments (meaninglessness, happiness, humility, wonder...) of a human being thinking about their own being in the world.

www.yfjiang.com

Clare Koury (b. 1993, Kentucky) received her BA from the University of Chicago and is currently a visual arts MFA candidate at Columbia University. She works in sculpture, video, and sound and currently resides in New York City.

www.clarekoury.com/

Yushan Liu (b. 1987, Rizhao, China) received a BA from Tsinghua University in Beijing (2011). She is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University, New York City. Her work has been shown in Lenfest Art Center, New York (2019); Zhuzhong Art Museum, Beijing (2018); The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (2015); and Tsinghua University Art Museum, Beijing (2015). Since vacating her studio at Columbia University in March 2020, she has been working from her studio apartment in Harlem, NYC.

www.liuyushan.com

Paula Lycan was born in 1992 in Pensacola, FL and grew up in San Diego, CA. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz and has spent her time in community darkrooms across the country. She is currently pursuing an MFA in Photography at Columbia University, 2020. Paula makes photographic work exploring queer identity through themes of intimacy, vulnerability, and love. Paula works primarily in portraiture and black-and-white darkroom printing to develop a visual language of the unapologetically personal.

www.paulalycan.com/

Cara Lynch makes installations that center on the psychological and sensory experience of the viewer, incorporating objects, prints, sound, video, and motion. Using her own memories and emotions as points of departure, Lynch explores intermingling states of longing, disappointment, fear, anxiety, relaxation, and bliss in relationship to contemporary life and the limitations of the American dream. Concerns surrounding agency, animism, and wish fulfillment are fundamental to the work.

Lynch studied at Columbia University (MFA 2020) and Adelphi University (BFA 2012). In addition to her studio work, she has created public installations in the New York area, including a permanent stained glass installation in the NYC subway system for MTA Arts and Design.

www.caralynchstudio.com

Erica Mao is best known for her atmospheric, layered paintings that stitch together disparate spaces into alternate realities. Depictions of desolate Americana landscapes explore feelings of fear, tension, and suspense and depict characters as they weave their way in and out of the narrative. Mao has exhibited in galleries such as International Print Center New York and Madison Park Gallery. Awards include a Keyholder Residency at Lower East Side Printshop, the Leroy and Janet Neiman Award at the Leroy Neiman Center for Print Studies, and the Glasier Fellowship at Columbia University. Born in Maryland, Mao attended Parsons School of Design and received her BFA in 2016. She is currently a candidate for her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. She lives and works in New York City.

www.ericamaoart.com

James J. A. Mercer is a New York–based artist who makes paintings, drawings, and videos that are strange in a calculating way. By arranging counterintuitive images into grids and other troubling geometries, he explores a dissonance between subject matter and form. Inspired by the nuances of alienation in urban and suburban built environments, he paints situations which appear to be their own glitch, hovering on the edge of relatability.

A recent series uses hand-drawn graph paper as a foundation for smudgy schematics, evoking the lived experience of New York. Wavering, gridded marks reflect rectangular (yet tender) spaces of daily life such as apartments, showers, studios, books, and beds.

James received a Bachelor’s degree in Printmaking from RISD and is an MFA candidate at Columbia University. In 2014 he was a resident at Clocktower Productions and has exhibited at Pioneer Works and the Drawing Center.

www.jamesmercer.net

Upon pursuing her MFA at Columbia (2020), Kathryn Ann Miller studied at the University of Tennessee where she received her BA in Anthropology (2013) and BFA in painting, drawing, and ceramics (2017). Everyday objects and household ingredients are embedded and transformed into her paintings, drawings, sculptures, large-scale installations, and video works. Her works are inspired by the wonder and curiosity of child-like perspective and the innate desire to create.

Inside the wasteful consumption of a commodified society lie elements of primal and cultural survival. There is a predisposition to retreat from threat and danger into an elusive universe driven by impulse and necessity. Not only is nature emulated, it is then collected, brought inside, put on a shelf, or plugged into proximity. Simple functions of manmade products bring comfort and security—but can also illuminate imagination and desire. It is within these constructs that the potential to disrupt the cycle lies.

www.katiemiller.art

Bradley Pitts’ work speaks to loss without physical absence—related to both the precarities of the current moment as well as his experience growing up around addiction. His materials (whether found, purchased, made, harvested, or acquired for personal use) are employed as residue—of systems and cultures, of thoughts and beliefs, of lives lived and actions performed. The resulting sculptures are pile-ups of physical and mental forms in which the histories and associations of his materials are forced to meet and grapple with one another, producing moments of harmony, conflict, and/or contradiction. The internal tensions are often emotional, funny, serious, and ironic at the same time.

Educated at MIT, the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (NL), and Columbia University, Pitts’ work has been shown at the Netherlands Institute for Media Art (NL), Kunsthalle Bern (CH), UC Riverside, Pioneer Works, and the Jewish Museum, among other venues.

bradleypitts.net/

Stipan Tadić was born in Zagreb in 1986. He graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Zagreb in 2011 with an MA in Painting. He had his first solo show in 2009 and has since had over twenty solo presentations and participated in forty group exhibitions. He has completed numerous public murals since 2012, both in Croatia and abroad. In 2014 he published his first comic book, Parisian Nightmares. He is the co-organizer of the Biennial exhibition of Antisalon and has led several curatorial projects. Tadić is the recipient of several domestic and international awards. Currently, he is a 2020 MFA candidate at the Columbia University School of Arts, New York.

www.stipantadic32.blogspot.com/

Kiyomi Quinn Taylor (b. 1995) is an artist born and raised in South Orange, New Jersey. Taylor received her BFA from New York University in 2017 and will receive her MFA from Columbia University in 2021. Her work examines her family’s narrative history as well as the iconography of her mixed race heritage—Black and Japanese. Taylor is a mixed media artist working in drawing, painting, installation, video, and performance. She uses these mediums to meditate on time travel, ancestral memory, and the chaotic force of love. She currently lives in Harlem. Since vacating her studio at Columbia, she has been working out of her parents’ house in West Orange, New Jersey.

www.kiyomitaylor.com

Born in Hong Kong, Wai currently lives and works in New York and Hong Kong. Her work utilizes photography, video, drawing, and sculpture, exploring the multilateral constructions of identity in relation to race, gender, and the notion of belonging. She attempts to investigate how history, fiction, memory, and virtuality collide in the process of identity formation through personal and historical archives, cinematic imagery, popular culture, and digital media. Her works are in the permanent collections at M+ (Hong Kong) and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas). Her works have been exhibited in Europe, Asia, and the United States, including Kunstmuseum Brandts (Odense); Power Station of Art (Shanghai); Para Site (Hong Kong); Tai Kwun Contemporary (Hong Kong); Kuandu Biennale (Taiwan); Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale (Niigata); and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Texas). She is also participating in the Yokohama Triennale 2020.

www.wai-lau.com

Meredith Pence Wilson (b. 1992, Jefferson City, Missouri) received a BFA from Pratt Institute in 2014. She worked on the crew of City Museum in St. Louis and had a solo show there at Grease 3 Gallery in 2018. She is pursuing an MFA at Columbia University, though currently working from her parents’ house in Missouri. 

Mark Yang (b. 1994, Seoul, South Korea) is a painter based in New York and Los Angeles. He immigrated to Los Angeles with his family when he was nine years old. He earned his MFA candidate at Columbia University (2020) and BFA from Art Center College of Design (2017). Recent group exhibitions include Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles (2020); Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York (2020); CP Projects Space, New York (2019); and Ki Smith Gallery, New York (2019).

www.markyangstudio.com

Yi Sa-Ra is a video artist based in New York and Seoul. Through female characters experiencing the trials of unemployment, immigration, and alienation, Yi’s trilogy consists of narrative videos, which detail the psychological effects of the current economic landscape in the US. The first video in the trilogy, Clinch, portrays an intergenerational, inter-Korean conflict between landlady and tenant who share a small NYC apartment. Engaging both characters’ fear of displacement, the short film reveals the tension between them through a series of domestic still lifes. Following up on this work, Yi is currently producing a new short film, when stretched too thin. This work follows a fictional character who has moved to NYC from South Korea as she secretly records her job interviews. Through recordings of actual job interviews, narration, and the layered sounds of the city, the character discloses her most intimate thoughts while acting out a silent rebellion.

www.yisara.com

Rasel Ahmed is a New York–based conceptual filmmaker, organizer, and political archivist. In his research-based filmmaking, Ahmed uses archival audio, text, and imageries to explore dialogical relationships with body, border, citizenship, and culinary memory. His transdisciplinary practice comprises of political campaigning, zine/comics making, theater production, public lecturing, and fundraising. Ahmed’s archive of historic records, personal materials (diaries, images, letters), and documentary footage of the Bangladeshi underground queer movement often functions as the pedagogical foundation for his hybrid storytelling. His recent work is a futuristic murder mystery film where homicidal fantasy functions as a speculative lens to interrogate public/private queer morality and homo-fascism.

Lindsey Brittain Collins is a painter working across multiple mediums to explore how architecture, economic structures, history, and aesthetics shape urban environments. Her work confronts the erasure of blackness and spaces of blackness in history, raising questions of visibility and invisibility. Brittain Collins places particular importance on her choice of medium, often incorporating building materials, natural materials, and found objects in her work as a way to examine their loaded histories and cultural associations. Though there are many meanings in her work, she is ultimately concerned with exploring the past to better understand the present in hopes of sparking conversations to lead us to a better future.

www.lindseybrittain.com

Ivana Carman (b. 1991, Hollywood, FL) is an American contemporary painter and printmaker. Drawing inspiration from her studies in psychology and philosophy, her recent work explores the nature of reality, perception, and the mind through the medium of paint.

Her paintings often depict seductively colorful domestic spaces and objects that, though seemingly familiar, lead us into an uncanny world only known by the unconscious. Often using windows and mirrors as symbols for our inner and outer worlds, she reveals the layers of meaning that live within our daily lives in the domestic space.

Carman earned her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is currently an MFA Candidate at Columbia University in New York.

www.ivanacarman.com

Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New York City. Combining text, imagery, and installation, Chambers examines an absurdist desire to define and quantify healing; a frantic need for (and, sometimes, failing of) structure in times of personal crisis, and the language constructed around that need. Chambers received her BA in Visual Art & Art History in 2015 at Barnard College, and is currently a Visual Art MFA candidate at Columbia University, concentrating in printmaking. She is a named Neiman Fellow at the LeRoy Neiman Center for Print Studies and a recipient of the Glasier Fellowship. Prior to pursuing her MFA, Chambers taught foundation-level art and design courses as an adjunct professor at Kean University for four years. Most recently, Chambers’ work has been exhibited at Lower East Side Printshop and ICPNY’s Printfest.

www.kaelachambers.com

Kevin Claiborne (he/him, b. 1989, Washington, D.C.) is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist currently living and working in New York whose work examines and questions intersections of identity, environment, and mental health within the Black American experience. Using photography as a foundation, his work weaves poetry and video together, often using language as material. Kevin views his art as tools, primarily functioning as both weapon and armor. He is a graduate of the historically Black college North Carolina Central University (B.S. Mathematics 2012), Syracuse University (M.S. Higher Ed Administration 2016), and currently an MFA Visual Arts Candidate at Columbia University (2021).

www.kevinclaiborne.com

Avishag Cohen Rodrigues is a musician and multidisciplinary artist from Tel-Aviv, currently living in New York. She is pursuing her MFA in Sound Art at Columbia University. Her main mediums are sound, sculpture and animation. She creates interdisciplinary sculptures and installations that function both as instruments and amplifiers using ceramics and found objects.

Noga Cohen is an Israeli born, New York City–based artist currently completing her MFA in photography at Columbia University. She works in photography, video, sculpture, and installation to explore representations and perceptions of the human body through a social and political lens. She is interested in the tense relationships between alienation, familiarity, and the absurdity of the body in capitalist, consumerist culture. Through deconstructed images and videos of found footage pornography, she rebuilds representations of objectification and violence, and examines the human body as a dematerialized, disembodied matter. Cohen integrates sculptural objects made of available materials such as plastic and trash, which resemble disposability and materiality, and projections of appropriated pornography, to explore interiority and exteriority of the body, and to question the meaning and the value of the human body in the current time.

www.nogacohen.com

Ian Decker is interested in the mass-produced icon of American idealism and identity epitomized through moments of spontaneous, violent change. Cars of twisted metal, dead birds under a rainbow, a house on fire in the woods, or a wooded view of thrown and speckled paint all forward a sense of play; a looking at the world that is sincere without being serious and a glimpse of an organic presence that underlines it all.

Ian Decker is currently completing his Visual Arts MFA in Painting at Columbia University. He graduated from Wayne State University in 2016 with a BFA in Painting.

www.iandeckerart.com

Danielle Gottesman’s work engages with the primal, physical language of utility and its relationship with the body. Even tools with an unknown purpose continue to evoke cultural content embedded in our collective memory, for they are instinctively recognized as extensions to our bodies. In addition to objects of utility, Gottesman draws on various sources of technical language as a point of reference for her work. Hieroglyphics, digital icons, graphical symbols, and architectural notations, for instance, have served as catalysts for her works in various media.

Through interpretations of objects, spaces, images, or languages, the artist seeks to readdress the way we make sense of our surroundings, and searches for parallels between ancient and modern technologies. For it is technology that defines humankind, and the ways we contemplate our existence as a species: our primitive beginnings; our progress through the ages; and the theories or prophecies of our demise.

www.daniellegottesman.com

Juan Hernández explores the potential of household objects to reveal underlying psychological connections—such as intimacy, memory, or segregation—inherent to the way we dwell in our domestic and urban environments. His most recent work considers objects as signifiers that make part of a precariously balanced system on the verge of collapse. In addition, Hernández reflects on the human relationship with our natural surroundings, looking for the poetics that may result from recontextualizing and juxtaposing his unfamiliar objects into natural landscapes.

Born in Bogota, Colombia, Hernández studied architecture at the Universidad de Los Andes, where he graduated Summa Cum Laude. He is currently undertaking an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University in New York City.

www.juanhernandez.art

Erin Holland is a filmmaker, artist, and writer. Originally from Texas and now based in New York, she bridges the disparate viewpoints of these regions with narratives told through performance, video, and social media. Her practice weaves service, empathy, and emulation into deeply personal works, most recently seen in the Instagram series Mother Daughter, about the hardship and richness of long-term caregiving. Holland formerly worked as an art director and producer for The Museum of Modern Art, participating in performances written by such artists as John Cage (4' 33", 2014) and Jérôme Bel (MoMA Dance Company, 2016), while engaging in community projects led by Creative Time (Duke Riley, Fly by Night, 2016; Phil Collins, Bring Down the Walls, 2018) and Public Art Fund (Spencer Finch, Lost Man Creek, 2016). She will receive her MFA in Moving Image from Columbia University in 2021.

www.instagram.com/erineliseholland

Priscilla Jeong (b. 1990, College Station, TX) is a Korean-American artist based in New York, NY. Jeong’s works are informed by ephemerality of materials and its vulnerability in stasis and sensitivity in time. From anthropological sets to laboratories, she explores the nuanced ways that nature, human emotions, technology, ephemerality, organics, and synthetics intersect and mutate one another.

www.priscillajeong.com

Born in Hebei, China, Bicheng Liang now lives and works in New York. He received his Bachelor's degree in Fine Art at the Central Academy of Fine Arts where he developed the printmaking concept into multisensory space. He is an MFA candidate in Visual Arts at Columbia University. An interdisciplinary artist, his work includes large sculpture installations, photography, ceramics, and printmaking, focusing on the subtle traces of time in landscape and natural materials. Liang’s work has been exhibited at museums both nationally and internationally, including Curatorial Practice in SVA, New York; CAFA Art Museum and Tsinghua University Art Museum, China; and the International Print Triennial Society in Krakow, Poland.

www.liangbicheng.com

Joseph Liatela is a multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Through a transgender lens, his work explores the institutional, cultural, and medico-legal notions of what is considered a “correct” bodily formation. Using performance, video, sculpture, and writing, he makes work that examines issues of representation, biopolitics, embodiment, and questions of authenticity.

They have exhibited internationally, including at SOMArts, Denniston Hill, Human Resources LA, LACE, Paul Robeson Galleries, Field Projects, Monmouth Museum, BRIC, EFA Project Space, and PS122 Gallery, among others. Liatela’s work has been featured in Artsy, The Leslie Lohman Museum Journal, SF MoMA’s Open Space, KQED Arts, Strange Fire Collective, Revista De La Universidad De México, and ArtNews. They are a recipient of awards and fellowships from the Zellerbach Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, The Wassaic Project, Denniston Hill, California College of the Arts, the Banff Centre, and Columbia University where he is an MFA candidate in New Genres.

www.josephliatela.com

Keli Safia Maksud (b. 1985) is a Kenyan-Tanzanian-Canadian-Muslim-Christian visual artist and writer based in New York. Concerned with the histories of the colonial encounter and its effects on memory, Maksud’s interdisciplinary practice uses multiple voices, rather than one narrator, to work towards destabilizing received histories and manufactured identities.

Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Her work has shown in a range of venues including the Bamako Biennial (Mali), National Museum of Contemporary Art Seoul (South Korea), Galería Nueva (Spain), and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil (Brazil).

www.kelisafiamaksud.com

IMAGE: LIQUID LEAKING, UNABLE TO CONTROL. Latest page on notebook says: staying alive requires collaboration, imagining other worlds that are not gonna be built, lava, contamination, precarity, diagrams, words scattered on studio’s messed floor, unsettled, unshaped, resin walls seem wet, latex drapes, cultivate - learn - build. I’m interested in dealing with scale, space, structures, (how to) inhabit, coexist, environments, complexity of materials, erotism, bulges and holes, architecture, and bodies. With a BFA in Visual Arts from FAAP (’16), and currently enrolled in Columbia’s Visual Arts MFA program (’21). Recent exhibitions include “Feche os olhos e veja” (Galeria Almeida e Dale, São Paulo, 2019), “Eco Shifters” (Fondazione La Fabbrica del Cioccolato, Blenio, 2019), and “RECIPES FOR B_R_Z_L?,” (Spring Break Art Show, New York, 2019), and solo “investigations in VIDEO: register, displacement of view and WAYS OF THINKING” (MIS, São Paulo, 2016).

www.raphaelamelsohn.com

Sergio Miguel (Mexicali, 1992) is a Mexican-born artist based in New York. Informed by colonial and modern Mexican art as well as the New Objectivity, his work explores ideas of personhood, symbolism, and sexuality.  After completing studies in Art History and Criticism in San Diego and Paris, he lived in Santiago, Chile where he began painting. He is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University.

www.sergio-miguel.com

Farah Mohammad is a printmaker and former family support worker based in New York City. She creates intaglio prints, monotypes, and screen prints to process the complex feelings that arise from working with underprivileged communities while negotiating her own presence in the US as a Pakistani immigrant. Farah draws inspiration from photos she captures of spaces undergoing change to track the impacts of development on local communities. Her prints depict architectural structures that symbolize resilience. Through monotyping she dissects spaces into shapes that represent different components of a memory and rearranges those components to enhance the ones that are most meaningful.

www.farahmohammadart.com

Keika Okamoto is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Japan and currently resides in New York to pursue her MFA at Columbia University School of the Arts (2021). Her works are often inspired by literature, cultural anthropology, news, and archives, exploring images and objects in relationship to interpretation, space, and time.

www.keikaokamoto.com

Diana Palermo is an American born artist living in NYC. They got their BFA in fibers from The University of the Arts and is currently an MFA candidate at Columbia University. Palermo is interested in abstract photography’s link with psychology and spirituality. Their work continually probes concepts related to power, intuition, gender, and psychosexual experience through various processes and mediums.

www.dianapalermo.com

Júlia Pontés is a visual artist, photographer, researcher, and activist based between São Paulo and New York. She is currently an MFA Candidate at Columbia University. She holds an LLM in Law and Economics and is part of a group of scholars and researchers studying mining impacts in Brazil.

She studied photography at the International Center of Photography and was chosen twice for the Emerging Immigrant Artist Program by NYFA.

Her aerial photographic survey of mining activities in Brazil has been recognized by Harvard’s Planetary Health Alliance, for which Pontés is currently an Ambassador. Images from it have been published by Bloomberg Businessweek, Geo Magazine, Collab Magazine, Musée Magazine, and Zone Zero.

Her work has been exhibited in New York, Brazil, and Argentina. It is also shown in collaboration with social movements, universities, and independent spaces to raise social and environmental awareness. Pontés is currently represented by Front Room Gallery.

Ava Ravich probes the relationship between memory and the physical remnants that those memories become affixed to. Through reflecting on this occurrence, she has realized that flat, domestic, decorative surfaces are particularly susceptible to becoming a memory-host. These surfaces, even with decoration and ornament, retain their flatness, and the images that decorate them become a way to realize their flatness—yet they also act as a way past the walls and out of the space. They become non-images in the way you look at and past them simultaneously—you fixate on them for so long that they take you out of what they are and out of where you are. The human mind is clever, and memories need to be remembered to survive. By affixing themselves to something physical, something outside of the mind, they can survive, and these non-images scattered around our homes are the perfect hosts.

www.avasnowravich.com/

Straddling the lines of assimilation, refuge, and self-preservation, Denisse Griselda’s current work interrogates the boundaries of representation by publicly engaging with memory. She invites her audience to witness her attempt to suspend her memories in time through ritual reflections to the past. Denisse is dedicated to investigating how to archive marginalized histories poised between fiction and reality—the histories that are manufactured as (in)visible, which lend themselves to their representation and mystification.

Denisse Griselda Reyes is a performance artist, animator, and filmmaker working in New York, NY. She graduated from Wesleyan University in 2015 with a BA in Art History. Currently, she is completing her MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University.

www.denissegriselda.com

Based in New York and born and raised in Tianjin, China, Yixuan Shao was trained as a classical violinist. Upon immigrating to the United States with her family at the age of 15, she began studying improvisation and jazz performance, and later received her Bachelor’s degree in Music Composition at UC San Diego. She is a MFA candidate in Sound Art at Columbia University, working in sound and visual arts to address self-eradication as both cultural survival and environmental preservation. 

Yixuan was a 2019–20 artist-in-residence at Arts Letters & Numbers, and her research-based sound installation in collaboration with oceanographers and computer engineers was featured in the San Diego Tribute. Yixuan’s works have been performed and shown at Arts Letters & Numbers; Spectrum; Lenfest Center for the Arts; Betalevel; The FRONT Arte Cultura; the Semana Internacional de Improvisación in Ensenada, Mexico; the Athenaeum Art Center; and the Conrad Prebys Music Center. 

www.yixuanshao.com 

Christen Shea invokes uncanny specters and builds portals into hidden interior spaces through language, simulation, and physical materials.

www.christenshea.com

My name is Khari Turner. I was born and raised in Milwaukee, WI until 2015, when I moved to Clarksville, TN to get my BFA and work as a cheerleader and mascot. My work right now is a diary of struggle and overcoming struggle. I’m exploring the history of black defeat, black revolutions, and black accomplishments coalescing through mark-making, realism, and expressionism. I pull from my life growing up in Milwaukee, WI. Water is very important to me, living so close to water now and growing up next to Lake Michigan. It makes a continual appearance in the work. My ambitions are to render my connection to blackness and to have a conversation about black issues without creating images displaying the pain black people have gone through or go through. For the future I want to create programs dedicated to giving back to the communities I draw from and grew up in.

www.kharirahim.com

The paintings of Raelis Vasquez function as platforms for engaging in conversations, coalescing personal and political themes regarding his experience as an Afro-Latino artist in the United States. By using the Western style of painting as a means of protest, he more accurately depicts the narrative of people of color, unveiling historical silences of family, societal life, and the traumatic and disruptive experience of immigration.

The painting Si Dios Quiere was inspired by his family history and his experiences as a Dominican immigrant in the United States. He has included several secondary signifiers in this work that hint at a specific narrative that Vasquez is exploring—the sugarcane outside the window, the transfers of the photographs in the frames, the couch, his family’s posture.

Raelis Vasquez is a visual artist based in New York and is currently an MFA student at Columbia University, New York.

www.raelisvasquez.com/

Yuri Yuan is a Visual Arts MFA candidate at Columbia University School of the Arts. She was born in China, grew up in Singapore, and gained a BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yuan explores existentialist themes of loneliness, life, and death through painting from memory. These memory paintings investigate surreal narratives and the psychological and emotional space they occupy. The different senses of time in the paintings teleport the viewer into their own memory of nostalgia, alienation, and loneliness.

www.yuriyuan.com/