New York, NY
Charles Atlas has been a pioneering figure in the creation of time-based visual art for over four decades, extending the limits of his media and forging new territory in a far-reaching range of genres, stylistic approaches, and techniques. Over the years he has made media/dance works, multi-channel video installations, feature-length documentaries, video art works for television, and live electronic performances.
Throughout his career, he has consistently fostered collaborative relationships, working intimately with such artists and performers as Leigh Bowery, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, Marina Abramovic, Yvonne Rainer, Anohni, and most notably Merce Cunningham, for whom he served as filmmaker-in-residence for a decade from the early 1970s through 1983.
Since 2003, Atlas has been interested in exploring different contexts that exploit the use of live video. Instant Fame (2003–06), consisted of a series of real-time video portraits of performers and artists created live in the gallery space. Recent live video/installations include: The Pedestrians, in collaboration with Mika Tajima at The South London Gallery (2011), and Charles Atlas and Collaborators at the Tate Modern (2013).
Atlas has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, three “Bessie” (New York Dance and Performance) Awards and was the 2006 recipient of the Foundation for Contemporary Arts’ John Cage Award.
San Juan, Puerto Rico
The work of Beatriz Santiago Muñoz arises out of long periods of observation and documentation, in which the camera is present as an object with social implications and as an instrument mediating aesthetic thought. Her films frequently start out through research into specific social structures, individuals or events, which she transforms into performance and moving image. Santiago Muñoz’s recent work has been concerned with post-military land, Haitian poetics, and feminist speculative fictions. Recent exhibitions include: Song, Strategy, Sign at the New Museum, A Universe of Fragile Mirrors at the Pérez Art Museum of Miami, MATRULLA, Sala de Arte Público Siqueiros, México City; Under the Same Sun, Guggenheim Museum of Art; Post-Military Cinema, Glasgow International; The Black Cave, Gasworks, London. Her work is included in public and private collections such as the Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Kadist and the Bronx Museum. She is also co-founder of Beta-Local, an arts organization in San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Colorado Springs, CO
Born in Chicago, bred in Los Angeles, living at points in New York City and briefly Japan, Nengudi resides in Colorado. She has always been active in arts education in the communities in which she has lived. Nengudi’s disciplines include sculpture, installations and performance. There is continuing interest in her late ‘70s Nylon Mesh “RSVP” (Panty Hose) series. First exhibited at Linda Goode-Bryant’s legendary Just Above Midtown Gallery, this series mimics in abstract the sensuality and elasticity of the body and psyche, reflecting the toll that inside and outside pressures have on our mortal selves.
Recipient of the Women’s Caucus For Art-Lifetime Achievement Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and an Art Matters grant, she has received an honorary degree from Colorado College, Colorado Springs, and is in the permanent collections of the Tate, London, Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art – NYC, Brooklyn Art Museum – Brooklyn, NY, Carnegie Museum of Art – Pittsburgh, PA, the Hammer Museum – Los Angeles, CA, Museum of Contemporary Art – Los Angeles, CA and Studio Museum in Harlem – NY. Nengudi is represented by the Thomas Erben Gallery and Dominique Levy Gallery.
New York, NY
Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. Neshat’s early photographic works include the Women of Allah series (1993–1997), which explored the question of gender in relation to Islamic fundamentalism and militancy. Her subsequent video works departed from overtly political content or critique in favor of more poetic imagery and narratives. In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, Women Without Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for Best Director in the 66th Venice International Film Festival. Neshat’s recent photographic series include The Book of Kings (2012), Our House Is on Fire (2013), and The Home of My Eyes (2015). Neshat has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at galleries and museums internationally, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal; and the Detroit Institute of Arts. A major exhibition of her work recently opened at the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC. Shirin was included in the 48th Venice Biennale of Art (1999), Whitney Biennial (2000), and Documenta XI (2002). Neshat is currently working on her second feature-length film, based on the life and art of the legendary Egyptian singer Oum Kulthum.
New Haven, CT
A native of Cuthbert, Georgia, Winfred Rembert spent his childhood as a fieldworker in the pre-Civil Rights South. Brought up by his great-aunt (“Mama”), Rembert paints stories that look back to his youth in the days of segregation. Despite the grim working conditions he encountered, not to mention a near-lynching and years spent on a prison chain gang, Rembert’s works focus on the joyous aspects of black life in the 1950s South — strong family and community bonds, cultural vibrancy, and the many who lifted the spirits of those who had little choice but to labor in the region’s cotton and peanut fields.
Marked by tactile surfaces, saturated colors, and lively, rhythmic patterning, Rembert’s works are painted on leather sheets that he hand tools and then dyed. These energetic compositions — with their engaging narratives of life in the rural South — have brought Rembert comparisons to noted African-American artists Hale Woodruff, Jacob Lawrence, Horace Pippin, and Romare Bearden. Rembert, who is self-taught, lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. His paintings are represented in a number of important public and private collections, and were the subject of a major exhibition at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2000.
Over the past five years, Rembert has been the subject of several museum exhibitions across the country. His award-winning documentary, “All Me: The Life and Times of Winfred Rembert” has captured the hearts of viewers around the world. Rembert is represented by Adelson Galleries.
Chicago, IL
Laurie Jo Reynolds is an artist and policy advocate whose work challenges the demonization, warehousing, and social exclusion of people in the criminal legal system, often long-term efforts that begin at the margins of political viability. As a 2010 Soros Justice Fellow, she advocated for best practices to stop sexual abuse and reduce recidivism, educating legislators about the harmful impact of public crime registries, residency restrictions, and exclusion zones.
Previously, Reynolds focused on Tamms, the notorious Illinois state supermax prison designed for sensory deprivation. She was the organizer of Tamms Year Ten (TY10), a legislative, media and public education campaign to explain the cruelty and lasting harm of solitary confinement. TY10 was launched collaboratively in 2008 by men formerly and currently incarcerated in Tamms, their family members and artists. Illinois Governor Pat Quinn reformed Tamms in 2009, and courageously shuttered the prison in 2013. In 2014, Reynolds served on Quinn’s campaign staff. She is currently working on both cultural and policy fronts to assess the unintended consequences of the Illinois sex offender registry after 20 years, and to support efforts to bring back discretionary parole for long-term prisoners. Reynolds teaches at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
New York, NY
Satterwhite was born in 1986. He was a featured artist in the 2014 Whitney Biennial and his work has recently been included in the following exhibitions:
The Berlin Biennale 9, Human Interests at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Disguise at the Brooklyn Museum, Electronic Superhighway White Chapel London, (2016), Mirror Stage, Dallas Art Museum (2015), Disguise, Seattle Art Museum (2015) Sundance Film Festival (2014), Solo exhibition at OHWOW Gallery, Los Angeles (2014), Step and Repeat, MOCA, Los Angeles (2014), Radical Presence, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis (2014), a solo show at Stefan Lundgren Gallery, Mallorca (2013); The Matriarch’s Rhapsody, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York (2013);Approximately Infinite Universe, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (2013); AIM Biennial, Bronx Museum, (2013); Radical Presence, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012-13) ;and multiple exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.
Satterwhite’s work is in public museum collections including Museum of Modern Art, The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem and the Seattle Art Museum.
New York, NY
Stanley Whitney was born in Philadelphia in 1946 and lives and works in New York City and Parma, Italy. He holds a BFA from Kansas City Art Institute as well as an MFA from Yale University and is currently Professor emeritus of painting and drawing at Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Whitney’s works featured in a major solo exhibition ‘Dance the Orange’, at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, USA (2015), and he has been included in many prominent group shows such as ‘Nero su Bianco’ at the American Academy in Rome, Italy (2015); ‘Outside the Lines: Black in the Abstract’, Contemporary Art Museum of Houston, USA (2014); ‘Reinventing Abstraction: New York Painting in the 1980s’, Cheim & Read, New York (2013) and ‘Utopia Station’ at the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). He has won prizes including the Robert De Niro Sr. Prize in Painting (2011), the American Academy of Arts and Letters Art Award (2010) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1996. Whitney’s work is included in public collections such as the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Philadelphia Museum of Art and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
Venice, CA
Baca is a painter and muralist, community arts pioneer, scholar and educator who has been teaching art in the UC system since 1984. She was the founder of the first City of Los Angeles Mural Program in 1974, which evolved into an arts organization known as the Social and Public Art Resource Center (SPARC). She continues to serve as SPARC’S artistic director and focuses her creative energy in the UCLA@SPARC Digital/Mural Lab, employing digital technology to create social justice art.
Baca has stood for art in service of equity for all people. Her public arts initiatives reflect the lives and concerns of populations that have been historically disenfranchised, including women, the working poor, youth, the elderly and immigrant communities, throughout Los Angeles and increasingly in national and international venues.
Beginning with the awareness that the land has memory, she creates art that is shaped by an interactive relationship of history, people and place. Baca’s public artworks focus on revealing and reconciling diverse peoples’ struggles for their rights and affirm the connections of each community to place. She gives form to monuments that rise up out of neighborhoods. Together with the people who live there, they co-create monumental public art places that become “sites of public memory.”
Baca’s work channels the creative process of monument design to develop models for the transformation of both physical and social environments in public spaces. They are monumental, both in space and time: The Great Wall of Los Angeles is a “tattoo on the scar where the Los Angeles River once ran” in a concrete flood control channel. The Great Wall depicts a 1⁄2 mile long multi-cultural history of California from pre-history through the 1950’s. Plans are underway for its next four decades of evolution.
Chicago, IL
Dawoud Bey began his career in 1975 photographing in Harlem, New York. That work was later exhibited in his first one-person exhibition, “Harlem, USA” at the Studio Museum in Harlem in 1979. In addition to numerous solo exhibitions at museums and galleries worldwide, Bey’s works are included in the permanent collections of numerous museums, both in the United States and abroad, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Guggenheim Museum, the High Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other museums world wide.
His museum based projects have been concerned with using the museum as an active and collaborative space for producing work as well as enhancing the participation of often overlooked audiences and communities in the institutional space through their participation in his projects.
Bey received his MFA from Yale University School of Art and has been honored with numerous fellowships and honors over the course of his long career, including the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. He is professor of art and Distinguished College Artist at Columbia College Chicago and is represented by Mary Boone Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery and Stephen Daiter Gallery.
