Studio Visits

Hannah Barrett is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based artist. The portrayal of gender ambiguity has driven their painting for over a decade, which has led to the current exploration of dandy monsters. Recent exhibitions include Bill Arning Exhibitions (2024), the Schoolhouse Gallery, Provincetown (2023), Childs Gallery, Boston (2020) and La MaMa Galleria, NY (2019). Barrett was a Co-Director of the artist-run gallery Soloway, Brooklyn from 2019 -2024 and served in a directorial capacity to the Bard MFA Program from 2020-2024. Barrett’s work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Art Forum, Time Out, and Modern Painters. Barrett holds a Masters in Fine Art from Boston University, a diploma from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and a B.A. in German literature and studio art from Wellesley College

Rebekah Chozick is a New York based arts professional with over 10 years of experience in the industry. In January 2025 she established Chozick Family Art Gallery in the Tribeca neighborhood of Manhattan, focusing on emerging artists and international perspectives, with a collaborative ethos. This initiative builds on Chozick’s dedication to fostering a dynamic, creative community by supporting diverse voices and emphasizing artist-led programming. Chozick was previously the senior director of Rachel Uffner Gallery and prior to her 7 year tenure, she held positions at Lehmann Maupin, where she worked as an Artist Liaison, and Pace Gallery as a sales assistant. 

Marcus Civin received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA in Theater from Brown University. He is Assistant Dean in the School of Art at Pratt Institute. His writing about art and interviews with artists have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers, Afterimage, Boston Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, Damn Magazine, and Maake Magazine. Poetry and short stories have appeared in The Capilano Review, Clementine, Full Bleed, Memoir Mixtapes, Mirage Period(ical), Nerve Lantern, The Paper, Urbanite, and No, Dear, among other publications. He has lectured, read, exhibited, and performed in classrooms, basements, bars, parking lots, parks, apartments, galleries, museums, and online. He is often interested in artists whose work addresses or involves politics, protest, history, community engagement, education, unusual materials, performance, text, collage, and humor. He grew up in Baltimore and appears ever-so-briefly in Prince’s last video about the city. You can find much of his writing at marcuscivinwriting.com, or on Instagram @marcuscivinwriting.

Sarah Corona is an Independent Art Professional based in New York. One of her main interests is to bring art into the public realm and to discover how technology affects art and culture, arousing that astonishment that is considered a fundamental ontological element for a work of art. She is the founder of SARAHCROWN Art Consulting, founder of the Art In Lobbies program, and specializes in private sales and business strategies in the arts. She co-founded ROOMSERVICE Gallery (2015-2017), a space for artistic and cultural production and critical discourse around the curatorial practice in Williamsburg, NY and opened her own Gallery in Tribeca in the summer of 2021.She has organized exhibitions at and consulted to private and public art galleries, not-for-profit organizations, art fairs, corporate environments, and co-working spaces as well as established active collaborations with New York based real estate developments forging the importance of art in the semi-public realm. Sarah Corona has curated extensive community-focused and public art exhibitions/festivals in the Bronx and Queens, in collaboration with New York based Organizations, and initiated several pop-up galleries in vacant spaces in Downtown, New York. She also developed the initial syllabus of the NLE Curatorial Lab For No Longer Empty, New York, teaching emerging curators the art of exhibition making and critical thinking. Writing is another fundamental aspect of her practice. Sarah Corona has published numerous exhibition catalogs, essays, and +200 reviews about art and cultural events, on different international media outlets and in different languages. She also operates as lecturer and guest curator at New York-based arts organizations. Sarah Corona wrote her doctoral thesis about Chinese Contemporary Art (Alma Mater Bologna) after completing a MA in Communication and Fine Arts in Bologna, Italy. In 2014, she successfully completed a professional program in Art and Business at NYU New York.

Susan Cross is Senior Curator of Visual Arts at MASS MoCA, where she has organized major exhibitions, commissions, and performances by Alex Da Corte, Liz Deschenes, Spencer Finch, Katharina Grosse, Allison Janae Hamilton (co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah), Steffani Jemison, Guillaume Leblon, Liz Glynn, Richard Nonas, and Simon Starling, among others. She recently curated solo exhibitions of artists Cauleen Smith and Marcos Ramiírez (ERRE) and is currently working with South African sculptor Ledelle Moe and Puerto Rico-based artist Gamaliel Rodriguez. Group exhibitions include The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night (2018), In the Abstract (2017), The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor(2014), Invisible Cities (2012), and The Workers (2011), co-curated with Carla Herrera-Prats. Cross edited the first monographs on Da Corte, Crowner, Finch, and Glynn and is the co-editor of Sol LeWitt: 100 Views. Previously, she was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has been a visiting lecturer in the art department at Williams College and serves on the board of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center and on the advisory board of the Journal of the Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. She received an MA from Williams College.

Robert Dimin was born in 1980 and currently lives in Ridgewood, Queens. He studied Art History, Fine Art, and Poetry at the New School University and has an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania. Before launching DIMIN — a Tribeca-based contemporary art gallery — in 2023, Robert Dimin worked for over fifteen years throughout the art industry sStarting out as an artist, working for a year at Creative Time, and eventually finding a home in the gallery world. Exhibitions Dimin has organized have been featured in publications like the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and Interview Magazine. He has helped place art works in museums around the US and abroad including LACMA, The Perez, and The Parrish.

Deanna Evans is a curator and gallerist who runs Deanna Evans Projects in New York City. DEP is a contemporary art gallery that presents underrepresented artists, mainly based in New York, with a concentration on painting, fiber, sculpture and the world between. In 2017, Deanna started to put together exhibitions in her own apartment and then in pop-up locations throughout NYC. Next, DEP opened their first commercial gallery space in Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2021 and is now located in Tribeca as of 2022. Deanna holds a MA in Art Business from Sotheby’s Institute of Art, New York and is a faculty member at SVA. She has also guest lectured at various institutions throughout NY.

With a resume that includes artist, writer and curator, Asya Geisberg got on the dealer track in 2010 when she opened her namesake space. Her gallery represents young emerging artists as well as international artists otherwise unrepresented in the US, many of whom work across multiple media such as ceramics, textiles, painting, photography, and sculpture, with an interest in world history, archaeology, and cultural politics from a non-US perspective. The gallery's artists have been reviewed in the New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and international publications. Asya Geisberg Gallery has shown at art fairs including The Armory Show, NADA NY, UNTITLED Miami, UNTITLED San Francisco, ExpoChicago, ZONAMACO, Dallas Art Fair, Photofairs, Future Fair, and Art Los Angeles Contemporary (ALAC). After 10+ years, the gallery has relocated to the heart of Tribeca and joined its vibrant arts community. Asya Geisberg Gallery is a proud member of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and ArtTable.

Josiah Golson (b. 1986, Tuscaloosa, AL) is an artist and the founder of 800 Collective. Golson explores personal and collective narratives of identity and advocacy through drawing, painting, poetry, performance, and video. Golson returned to his hometown of Chattanooga after earning his law degree at the University of Texas in Austin. While practicing law, he founded the 800 Collective to creatively inspire and organize civic discourse and engagement. Golson then pursued an artistic practice full time to facilitate workshops through 800 Collective and to complete The Souls of Free Folk (Polyphemus Press, 2018), an illustrated book of poetry inspired by the legacy of Black art and activism.Golson’s workshops invite participants from diverse communities to use accessible art exercises and public projects to address social issues in creative and collaborative ways. Imagining art as a means of agency, Golson designs and co-creates exercises that guide groups through inquiry and dialogue on matters concerning racial equity, healthcare, affordable housing and other issues that he hears within the communities in which he works. While prioritizing the importance and practice of listening, he draws connections and distinctions among participants and community members, and presents issues as artistic problems to engage and translate into ideas, organizing, and policy. Golson also invites communities to these conversations through workshops based in the worlds of his personal art and narratives.

Oshun Layne has served as Executive Director of Dashboard since 2022, after joining the organization in 2017 as a guest curator and quickly advancing to Managing Director. With a deep passion for the visual arts as a vehicle for inclusivity across cultures, genders, and generations, Oshun brings over 15 years of experience in arts leadership spanning institutions, galleries, and nonprofit spaces. Her work blends cultural studies, art, and policy to forge innovative pathways that connect urban communities with public and private stakeholders. Through a commitment to arts access, cultural competency, and meaningful partnerships, she strives to create lasting impact by empowering communities through transformative creative experiences.

Celine Mo, co-founder of Dinner Gallery, holds a bachelor’s degree in Art History from New York University and has worked extensively in galleries as a manager, dealer, and curator. Her experience spans from the New York powerhouse galleries like Flowers Gallery, Lehmann Maupin, and Skarstedt Gallery, where she worked on exhibitions of both emerging and well-established artists, including George Condo, Eric Fischl, and Jenny Holzer. In the fall of 2016, she partnered with Ed Victori to form VICTORI + MO, which was rebranded to Dinner Gallery in 2021. She is an active member of New Art Dealers Alliance, Independent Curators International and Young Presidents’ Organization — YNG.

Folasade Ologundudu is a curator, podcast creator and writer, based in New York, whose practice seeks to uncover ideas related to the universal human condition. She has written art criticism, profiles, interviews, and essays for ArtForum, ARTnews, Cultured Magazine, Frieze, Photograph Magazine, among other publications. Ologundudu is also the founder of Light Work, a creative media platform rooted at the intersection of art, education, and culture. Through her podcast, Everything Is Connected, she holds conversations with artists, curators, and entrepreneurs deeply rooted in visual arts, and community building. Light Work is a US-based creative media platform at the intersection of art, education, and culture. Founded by Folasade Ologundudu, Light Work, collaborates and partners with artists, curators, academics, and creative contemporaries through engaging conversation on art, and culture, and the state of our society capturing the energy and complexities of the contemporary moment. Light Work takes a ‘community first’ approach to storytelling, archiving, and building new narratives by recognizing that culture starts in communities. Confronting the challenges our society faces in an increasingly technology-driven, resources-extracting world, Light Work uses the power of conversation and deep storytelling to develop thought-provoking intellectual conversations that spark inspiration. Through intimate conversation, engaging dialogue, and stimulating content, Light Work seeks to inspire the next generation of artists, creators, and cultural producers, to lead their best lives.

Sheetal Prajapati is an educator, artist, and advisor. Through her agency Lohar Projects, founded in 2019, she and her team provide consulting services to cultural organizations in areas including public engagement, artist-centered initiatives, leadership development, and organizational change work. Sheetal also works with artists across disciplines to support their creative and professional development through individual advising and group learning at places like Creative Capital, Print Center New York and NEW INC at New Museum. Prior to opening Lohar Projects in 2019, Sheetal spent 16 years working in education and public engagement in museums and creative spaces including The Museum of Modern Art (New York) and Pioneer Works (Brooklyn) and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. She also taught in MFA programs from 2016-2021 at Moore College of Art and Design (Pennsylvania) and School of Visual Arts (New York).

Concurrent with her advising practice, Sheetal also supports organizational transition through interim leadership. She served as the Interim Executive Director at The Flaherty in New York in 2024, leading the organization to produce their 69th Annual Film Seminar in Thailand and previously served as the Interim Managing Director /Executive Director at Common Field from 2021-2022, leading their intentional sunsetting process. In summer 2024, Sheetal returned to the Pocoapoco residency in Oaxaca, Mexico as a teaching artist, bringing her creative and pedagogical practices together to make, teach and learn with some incredible artists.

Berlin Reed is an independent curator, author, community organizer, and chef based outside of Tiohtià:Ke/Montréal. A Brooklyn transplant raised near Seattle, his roots in the language of gastronomy sprouted in 2009, when Berlin began curating multidimensional pop-ups in artistic ecosystems from San Francisco to Brooklyn to Montreal — culminating in the 2013 publication of his memoir, The Ethical Butcher: How Thoughtful Eating Can Change Your World. As a 2023 fellow of both the Toronto-based Wildseed Centre for Art & Activism and the New York-based Art for Artists, Berlin creates spaces and opportunities for interactions between multiple disciplines without regard for conventional lines between curator and artist, always seeking to clear space for a more challenging, engaging, and immersive audience experience. His collaborative installations with transdisciplinary artists take advantage of the ability to infiltrate the viewer’s world through sensorial works. Berlin’s current focus is “On Rupture,” a curatorial research project consisting of experimental practice, collective projects, and exhibition development in residencies across the world in the interest of interrogating the role of independent curators in dismantling oppressive norms within art institutions.

Natasha Roberts is a seasoned curator, publicist, and art advisor with extensive experience in cultural communications, cultivating landmark exhibitions, and strategic partnerships. She currently serves as the Publicist at Public Art Fund and works independently as a curator and consultant as the Founder of The KNOW, where she advises clients on collecting, artist business development, and curatorial projects. Natasha has facilitated notable collaborations between artists, galleries, brands, and cultural institutions, and she has also held leadership roles in auction partnerships and special projects, with a focus on creating impactful cultural initiatives. An alumna of the American University (B.A. Sociology), Natasha holds graduate and professional certificates in curatorial practice, contemporary art, and perfumery, and is an active member of several arts organizations.

Laurel Sparks is a Brooklyn and Hudson Valley based painter whose work intersects queer craft, textile, occult and abstract histories. Esoteric correspondence systems are encoded in patterns and glyphs that reflect mysteries of macro and micro cosmologies. In tandem, elements of decoration and artifice pay homage to queer and feminist counterculture expressions. Exhibitions include recent solo projects at Kate Werble gallery, NYC; Knockdown Center, Brooklyn, NY and group shows at Cheim and Read gallery, NYC; Leslie-Lohman Museum, NYC; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA, Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; and DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA. Awards include a MacDowell Fellowship, Elizabeth Foundation Studio Intensive Program at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, NY, Fire Island Artist Residency, NY, SMFA Alumni Traveling Fellowship, Berkshire Taconic Fellowship, and an Elaine DeKooning Fellowship. Sparks holds an MFA from Bard College and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston at Tufts University. In 2022/23 Sparks received a project grant to produce an immersive installation for Tinworks Art, Bozeman MT and received a 2024 Chiaro Award Residency at Headlands Center for the Arts, Sausalito, CA. Sparks is an Associate Professor in painting at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY.

August Thompson was born and raised in the middle of nowhere, New Hampshire, before he attended middle school in West LA. After surviving California optimism, he moved to NYC for his bachelor’s, studied in Berlin, and taught English in Spain for two years. He recently received his MFA at New York University’s creative writing program as a Goldwater Fellow. His debut novel, Anyone's Ghost, releases with Penguin Press in July of 2024.

Carolina Wheat (b.1974, Detroit, MI) received her BFA in textiles from University of Michigan Stamps School and MFAW from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has written extensively about art, politics and culture, and has curated numerous socially conscientious large-scale exhibitions and events in Detroit, Berlin, London, Chicago, and New York. Wheat is co-founder and director of Elijah Wheat Showroom (est. 2015) and is one of the founding members of the Nasty Women Exhibition movement. Her curatorial work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, Vulture, Hyperallergic, Fast Company, MAAKE Mag, The Brooklyn Rail, Financial Times, The Guardian, and China Daily, among others. Wheat has assisted The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, liaising with institutions on reproduction of Garbage Wall, 1970. As Senior Director of Graduate and Global Strategic Enrollment Management at the Newschool, and earlier, Recruitment and Admissions at Parsons (NYC and Paris), SAIC, University of Michigan, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, Cornish, etc., Wheat specialized on application development/review for colleges of Art & Design, and trained faculty/students on standards for admission, portfolio development, art-writing and professional practice. She has served on committees for review of submissions for grants and has been invited as a special curator for studio visits to numerous NY selective residencies.  As radio producer and activist for Low-Power FM since 1997, Wheat collaborated with WCBN, FreeRadioSAIC, Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP), and from 2020-2022, the online platform Artfare where she broadcast weekly artist interviews, adding up to 80+ conversations with notable creatives.

Barbara Bourland is the award-winning author of three novels, most recently The Force of Such Beauty and Fake Like Me. A finalist for the 2020 Edgar Best Novel Award and the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, her writing has been translated into Japanese, German, Hebrew, and Mandarin. She is at work on her fourth novel, Fields and Waves, forthcoming from Dutton. She lives in Baltimore.

barbarabourland.com

After running his own art studio for 20 years, Onyedika Chuke founded Storage Gallery on the ideals of community, discovery, and connoisseurship. Storage acts as an archive of makers that work in a range of materials and come from a wide demographic background. Drawing from his decade of experience at Susan Sheehan Gallery, dealing within the modern and postmodern secondary market, Chuke cultivates a canonical perspective through the gallery's activities. Half of the roster is dedicated to seasoned artists over the age of 70, while the other half focuses on nurturing younger artists under 40.

Photo: Emiliano Granado

K.O. Nnamdie is a curator, artist, writer and advisor based in Manhattan, NY. Nnamdie works as Director at anonymous gallery, in addition to running Restaurant Projects, a curatorial project and research-driven art advisory service based in New York City. Restaurant Projects was founded in 2018 and is based on Nnamdie’s interest in the intersection between hospitality and the arts. Nnamdie is also the arts editor at Family Style magazine and makes regular contributions to Gagosian Quarterly. They are currently working on their first book Doktor.

Tessa Ferreyros is a curatorial professional with 15 years of experience managing non-profit and private arts organizations and projects. She is currently the Director and Curator of Art-in-Buildings (AiB). AiB is an international program focused on bringing contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces for Time Equities Inc., a real estate firm with over 36 million square feet of property. AiB is currently active in over 45 properties across 14 states and 4 countries.She previously served as Curatorial Manager for Madison Square Park Conservancy where she organized large-scale installations with Leonardo Drew, Arlene Shechet, and Krzysztof Wodiczko and assisted with 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, featuringMartin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà. Prior to Madison Square Park Conservancy, Tessa worked as a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where she oversaw the Adrian Piper retrospective A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016 and in the Curatorial Department at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX.

tessa-ferreyros.com

Megan Galardi is a curator and arts administrator based in Philadelphia, PA. Megan has worked with various art organizations in the non-profit and private sectors. Megan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College and a Master of Arts in Socially Engaged Art. In 2023 Megan founded Blah Blah Gallery, the only commercial gallery in Philadelphia dedicated to women and non-binary artists. She has curated exhibitions for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and works as a project manager and event coordinator in addition to her curatorial work with Blah Blah.

Welancora Gallery was founded by Ivy Jones over 10 years ago. The name of the gallery is an amalgam of the names of Ivy’s parents and older brother. Welancora is located in a brownstone in Brooklyn, New York. The purpose of the gallery is to represent an intergenerational group of artists from around the world, by placing their work with individual collectors and museums, publishing scholarly catalogs, holding exhibitions and participating in international art fairs.

welancoragallery.com

Alison Karasyk Hines (she/her) is an independent curator, writer, and editor born and bred in New York City. Her research interests focus on gender, space, memory, and materiality. Alison is currently part of Darling Green, a collaborative NY-based studio that organizes art exhibitions and provides curatorial services for art collections. She has held curatorial and editorial roles at the North Norwegian Arts Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Alison was a 2020 resident at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy and was the 2018 recipient of the Ramapo Curatorial Prize. She has curated exhibitions at the Center for Book Arts (New York, NY), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, DK), Palazzo Re Rebaudengo (Guarene, IT), the Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), and the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts at Ramapo College (Mahwah, NJ), among others. Alison's research and writing on Louise Bourgeois's monumental artwork The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved (2010) has been featured in numerous publications. She completed her BA at Oberlin College and her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard).

Marshall N. Price is the Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and serves as adjunct faculty in the university’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He received a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the Nasher Museum, Price was Curatorial Assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and from 2003 until 2014 held the position of Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Academy Museum, New York. He has organized numerous exhibitions including Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, Colour Correction: British and American Screenprints, 1967-75, Jeffrey Gibson: Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel, and John Cage: The Sight of Silence, among others.

Carolyn Salas was born in Los Angeles, CA. She lives and works in NYC and Upstate NY. She earned a BFA in sculpture from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Hunter College. She has attended residencies at the Abrons Art Center A.I.R. Space Program and The NARS Foundation, New York, NY; Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM. She has also been a Chashama Studio Space recipient, and an Elizabeth Foundation Studio Program/Space awardee. Selected exhibitions include the Berkshire Museum, Berkshire MA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; Casey Kaplan, Koenig & Clinton, Brookfield Arts, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Terrault Contemporary and Towson University, Baltimore, MD; Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico; and NADA Special Projects, Miami, FL. Salas was named a 2021 Artist-in-Residence at Google and was commissioned by the United States Tennis Association and the Armory Show to create a new outdoor sculpture for the US Open. Most recently her work was displayed on Governors Island and is currently on view at Summit Public Art in New Jersey.Upcoming in 2024 Salas will have a solo exhibition at the University of New Mexico Museum in Las Cruces, NM and will be showing work at Bemis Contemporary Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based cultural anthropologist, curator, producer, organizer, multidisciplinary artist, and musician. Her creative practice delves into the human story — through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. Niama’s aim is to leverage history, the visual, written and performative arts, chiefly those of the Global Black Diaspora, to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them and to lift us all to a higher state of historical, ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process.

In 2020, Sandy created and produced FOR/FOUR, a conversation series featuring Black women and non-binary persons in the arts and culture. Shortly after the launch of the series, she helped found The Blacksmiths, a coalition of culture workers standing together to forge support for Black liberation against anti-Black racism in the academy and at presenting institutions. Through The Blacksmiths, Niama has produced resources and public events engaging communities, activists, artists across disciplines, and more to close the gaps in appropriate opportunities for Black artists of all disciplines, curators, and administrators on the global stage. Sandy is a co-founder and active steering committee member of THIS IS A MOVEMENT, an initiative seeking to create a more equitable music industry through an intersectional Black feminist lens, centered upon non-hierarchical, collaborative and imaginative modes of creation and organization launched in 2022.

Her current visual work explores a form she calls, “The Groove.” It is a mechanism for rest, resetting, and a kind of fulcrum of survival. It launches us into life, death, and all of the pleasures in between. It is at once mathematical and a refusal against the (ac)counting that whiteness and capitalism have long waged on humanity and on Black people in particular. It resists quantification in a world obsessed with what is measurable and commodifiable. The Groove, is a gesture toward freedom, an overriding/overwriting of the arcane systems of value that have never served us. Making the gesture with paint, sculpture with hand/body is a kind of way of apprehending time - past, present and future. It is a position toward light, balance, restoration, and release.

She has participated in and convened programs at TEDWomen, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, MICA, Harvard University, Oberlin College, The Public Theater, Brooklyn Museum, & more. Niama and her work have been featured in Artsy, The New York Times, Monopol (Germany), Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Camera Austria, OkayAfrica, and other publications.

Her past artist residencies include 37d03d, The Watermill Center and Project for Empty Space. Niama is a founding curator of the Southeast Queens Biennial, as well as a member of the artist collectives the Resistance Revival Chorus and Wide Awakes. Niama is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, School of Art.

Photo: Florian Koenigsberger

Jessilee Shipman is a Director at kaufmann repetto New York, where she coordinates the gallery's exhibitions, liaises with the program's artists, and manages the gallery's participation in US based art-fair presentations. She is also involved in the gallery's external projects, such as the new upstate collaborative arts space The Campus, and in the recent past, Tribeca Gallery Walk evenings. Prior to joining kaufmann repetto, Jessilee has held positions in major galleries and arts institutions in New York, including MoMA, Museum of Arts and Design, Jack Hanley Gallery, and GRIMM gallery. She holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus in Photography and Sculpture. While in Austin, Jessilee helped run Center Space Project, a collaborative curatorial project that is responsible for programming the campus based Visual Arts Center.

Adam Parker Smith is a Brooklyn-based sculptor. He attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His work has been shown widely in the USA as well as internationally in galleries and museums including the Brooklyn Museum, Marlborough Gallery, London, Derek Eller, New York, The Hole, New York, Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco, The Donum Estate, Sonoma, Galeria Curro, Guadalajara, Spurs Gallery, Beijing, The Times  Museum, Guangzhou, China, Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, Austria, The Watermill Center, New York and the Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE. Smith’s work has been written about in, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America, The Village Voice, ArtForum, Modern Painters, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The New York Post.

adamparkersmithwork.com

Madeline Weisburg is Assistant Curator at the New Museum. At the New Museum, she has worked on numerous exhibitions, including Judy Chicago: Herstory, Mire Lee: Black Sun, Theater Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces, Kapwani Kiwanga: Off-Grid, Faith Ringgold: American People, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love's Work, and Jordan Casteel: Within Reach, among others. She served as Curatorial Researcher for 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” and has previously held curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum and in the Department of Photography at MoMA. She was 2017–18 Curatorial Fellow at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA) from Columbia University and a dual BA in Art History and BFA in Studio Art from Tufts University in partnership with the School of the Museum Fine Arts, Boston.