Artist Collaborations
OBM has a longstanding commitment to developing media that supports investment in the production and presentation of art. OBM maintains key relationships with both internationally recognized and local artists, as well as museums and institutions.
Felipe Baeza
Photo by: Rene Fragoso
Baeza is a painter and printmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Through the Flesh to Elsewhere at the Mistake Room, Los Angeles; La Emergencia de Hacer Memoria at Fortnight Institute, New York; and Felipe Baeza at Maureen Paley, London.
His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, and The Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, D.C. His work will be included in the fifth iteration of Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday we said tomorrow, in the fall of 2021. He received a MFA from Yale University and a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
María Berrío
Born 1982, Bogotá, Colombia Lives and works in New York, NY
Maria Berrio’s large collaged works—comprised of diversely sourced papers, depict surrealist narratives that blur biographical memory with South American mythology. Her work explores themes such as intercultural connectivity, migration and humankind’s relationship to nature. Maria Berrio received her BFA at Parsons School of Design and MFA at the School for Visual Arts. Maria’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Whitney Musuem of American Art in New York, The Nasher Museum in North Carolina, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas and the Ford Foundation in New York. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, participating in exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio in New York and The Nasher Museum in North Carolina, among others. Most recently, Berrio’s work was included in Prospect 4 Triennial in New Orleans and this year her permanent public art will be installed in a New York City subway station, commissioned by the MTA Arts and Design program.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Theresa Chromati
Photo by: Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.
Chromati has garnered critical and institutional attention for figurative paintings that are shaped by fragmented forms of desire and constant motion. Bursts of complex color, sensual protrusions, and texture deploy abstraction to explore various contemporary realities of black woman. These bodies are at once imaginative, bordering on grotesque, and celebratory as they convey a variety of emotional and spiritual states of being. Chromati was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, attended the Pratt Institute, and is now based in New York City. Recently, her work was on view at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and The Delaware Contemporary. She has been featured in The New York Times, i-D, Interview Magazine, Juxtapoz, Architectural Digest, and Vogue.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Ariel Danielle
Photo by: Dierra Font
Dannielle’s work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Goat Farm Arts Center, Atlanta; Dalton Gallery, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia; Trio Contemporary Art Gallery, Athens, Georgia; and Pérez Art Museum Miami. She was a MOCA GA Working Artist Project fellow in 2018–19, and her solo exhibition, It Started So Simple, recently opened at MOCA GA.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Chioma Ebinama
Photo by: Sasha Arutyunova
Ebinama has had recent exhibitions at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York; Fortnight Institute, New York; Boys’ Quarters Project Space, Port Harcourt, Nigeria; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece. Her work has been included in group shows at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; Dak’Art Biennial Off-Site, Dakar, Senegal; 303 Gallery, New York; and La Salita, New York. She is currently illustrating a children’s book written by Kevin Young. Ebinama received her BFA from Boston College and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Marcus Jahmal
Photo by: Charlie Rubin
Jahmal’s recent solo exhibitions include Double Down at Almine Rech, New York; GUMBO at CAC Passerelle Brest, France; and Solid Ghosts at Almine Rech, Brussels, as well as shows at Canada Gallery and FiveMyles in New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; and The Journal, New York, among others.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Christopher Myers
Photo by: Kamal Nassif
Christopher Myers’s recent solo exhibitions include Drapetomania at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles; The Red Plague Rid You for Learning Me Your Language at Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Nobody Is My Name, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; and Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me at Fort Gansevoort, New York. Alongside his work as a visual artist, Myers is an award-winning children’s book illustrator and heads an imprint at Random House.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Naudline Pierre
Photo by: Myles Loftin
Naudline Pierre’s work has been included in exhibitions at the The Armory Show, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest; Perrotin, Seoul; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London among others. Pierre’s works are in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Pierre was a 2019–2020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and an exhibition featuring the work of the resident artists, This Longing Vessel, recently opened at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York. In the fall of 2021 her work will be included in the fifth iteration of Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday we said tomorrow, and she will have a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Pierre holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Andrews University.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Ilana Savdie
Photo by: John Dennis
Ilana Savdie has had solo exhibitions at Deli Gallery, New York; ltd Los Angeles; and Stream Gallery, New York, and has been included in group shows at Golestani Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany; Museum aan de Stroom (MAS), Antwerp, Belgium; and Casstle, Antwerp, Belgium among others. Savdie is currently an artist in residence at NXTHVN in New Haven, Connecticut.
Initiatives involved in:
Walls for a Cause NYC
Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer is an American Conceptual artist best known for her text-based public art projects. Exploring how language is used both as a form of communication and as a means of concealment and control, Holzer has employed a variety of media throughout her career, including large-scale projections, LED displays, T-shirts, and posters. “I used language because I wanted to offer content that people—not necessarily art people—could understand,” she explained. Born on July 29, 1950 in Gallipolis, OH, Holzer received her BFA from Ohio University in 1972 and her MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1975. Her popular series Truisms began in 1977, when she started pasting ambiguous quotes such as “ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE” and “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT” throughout New York, while enrolled in the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program.
The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, among others. in 1990 Holzer was the first woman to represent the United States in the Venice Biennale She currently lives and works in Hoosick Falls, NY.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Ann Hamilton
Ann Hamilton is a visual artist internationally recognized for her large-scale multimedia installations, public projects, and performance collaborations. Responsive to the contingencies of the sites where she works, her recurring forms—cloth, texts spoken and written, animals, and people suspended or in motion—immerse viewers in an atmosphere both visceral and literary, individual and collective, animate and inanimate, silent and spoken. Noted for a dense accumulation of materials, her ephemeral environments respond to the architectural presence and social history of their sites. Whether inhabiting a building four stories high or confined to the surface of a thimble, the genesis of Hamilton’s art extends outwards from the primary projections of the hand and mouth. Her attention to the uttering of a sound or the shaping of a word with the hand places language and text at the tactile and metaphoric center of her installations. To enter their liminality is to be drawn equally into the sensory and linguistic capacities of comprehension that construct our faculties of memory, reason and imagination.
In a time when successive generations of technology amplify human presence at distances far greater than the reach of the hand, what becomes the place and form of making at the scale and pace of the individual body? How does making participate in the recuperation and recognition of embodied knowledge? What are the places and forms for live, tactile, visceral, face-to-face experiences in a media-saturated world? These concerns have animated the site-responsive installations that have formed the bulk of Hamilton’s practice over the last 20 years. But where the relations of cloth, sound, touch, motion, and human gesture once gave way to dense materiality, Hamilton’s work now focuses on the less material acts of reading, speaking, and listening. The influence of collaborative processes in ever more complex architectures has shifted her forms of making, wherein the movement of the viewer in time and in space now becomes a central figure of the work.
Genevieve Gaignard
Genevieve Gaignard (b. 1981, Orange, Massachusetts; lives and works in Los Angeles) received her MFA in Photography at Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, and her BFA in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art, Boston. She had a major solo project, Smell the Roses, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles in 2016, and more recently a solo exhibition, I’m Sorry I Never Told You That You’re Beautiful, at Susanne Vielmetter Gallery in 2019. She has participated in group exhibitions throughout the United States, including shows at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the California African American Museum, and the Houston Center for Photography. A newly commissioned work of Gaignard’s was included in the Prospect.4 Triennial, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, in New Orleans in 2017. Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, W Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Artforum, among others. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem; California African American Museum; Pérez Art Museum Miami; the Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; the FLAG Art Foundation, New York; the Seattle Museum of Art; and the San Jose Museum of Art.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Carrie Mae Weems
Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated family relationships, cultural identity, sexism, class, political systems, and the consequences of power. Determined as ever to enter the picture—both literally and metaphorically—Weems has sustained an on-going dialogue within contemporary discourse for over thirty years. During this time, Carrie Mae Weems has developed a complex body of art employing photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation, and video. In a New York Times review of her retrospective, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible. “Weems has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Frist Center for Visual Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, Spain.
Weems has received numerous awards, grants, and fellowships, including the prestigious Prixde Roma, The National Endowment of the Arts, The Alpert, The Anonymous was a Woman, and The Tiffany Awards. In 2012, Weems was presented with one of the first US Department of State’s Medals of Arts in recognition for her commitment to the State Department’s Art in Embassies program. In 2013 Weems received the MacArthur “Genius” grant as well as the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award. She has also received the BET Honors Visual Artist award, the Lucie Award for Fine Art photography, was one of four artists honored at the Guggenheim’s 2014 International Gala, a recipient of the ICP Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography, The WEB Dubois Award from Harvard University, as well as Honorary Degrees from: California College of the Arts, Colgate University, Bowdoin College, the School of Visual Arts and Syracuse University. She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and The Tate Modern, London. Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery since 2008, and is currently Artist in Residence at the Park Avenue Armory. She lives in Syracuse, New York, with her husband Jeffrey Hoone who is Executive Director of Light Work.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Jeffrey Gibson
Jeffrey Gibson is a multidisciplinary artist and craftsperson merging traditional Native American materials and forms with those of Western contemporary art to create a new hybrid visual vocabulary. Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, is forging a multifarious practice that redresses the exclusion and erasure of indigenous art traditions from the history of Western art as it explores the complexity and fluidity of identity.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
Tomashi Jackson
Tomashi Jackson was born in Houston, Texas in 1980 and grew up in Los Angeles, California. She was included in the Whitney Biennial 2019, and her first solo museum exhibition, Interstate Love Song, took place at the Zuckerman Museum of Art in Kennesaw, Georgia in 2018. Her work has also been included in group exhibitions at MoCA Los Angeles, MASS MoCA, and the Contemporary Art Center, New Orleans. Jackson was a 2019 Resident Artist at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture. She will have a solo exhibition at the Parrish Art Museum during the summer of 2020. Her work is included in the collection of MOCA Los Angeles. She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Massachusetts College of Art, Boston; and Cooper Union, NY, and she has been a visiting artist at New York University. Jackson lives and works in Cambridge, Massachusetts and New York City.
Initiatives involved in:
Art for Action
https://www.nightgallery.ca/exhibitions/tomashi-jackson/about
Nari Ward
Nari Ward (b. 1963, Saint Andrew, Jamaica; lives and works in New York) received a BA from City University of New York, Hunter College in 1989, and an MFA from City University of New York, Brooklyn College in 1992. His work has been the subject of two major retrospectives: Sun Splashed, which originated at Pérez Art Museum Miami and travelled to the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, and the ICA Boston; and We the People, which was organized by the New Museum in New York and traveled to the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver. He has had additional solo exhibitions at Socrates Sculpture Park, New York; Savannah College of Art and Design Museum, Georgia; Louisiana State University Museum of Art, Baton Rouge; The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston; and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis.
Ward has participated in group exhibitions around the world. Ward’s work is in museum collections through the United States, as well as Italy, Turkey, and Australia, and he has received numerous honors and distinctions including the Fellowship Award, The United States Artists, Chicago; Vilcek Prize in Fine Arts, Vil cek Foundation, New York; Joyce Award, The Joyce Foundation, Chicago; Rome Prize, American Academy of Rome, as well as awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Pollock – Krasner Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
Initiatives involved in:
Nari Ward: We the People
Hank Willis Thomas — Co-Founder
Hank (b. 1976 Plainfield, NJ) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY as a conceptual artist working primarily with themes related to perspective, identity, commodity, media, and popular culture. His work has been exhibited throughout the United States and abroad including the International Center of Photography, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Musée du quai Branly, Hong Kong Arts Centre and the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art.
His collaborative projects include Question Bridge: Black Males, In Search Of The Truth (The Truth Booth), The Writing on the Wall, and For Freedoms. In 2017, For Freedoms was awarded the ICP Infinity Award for New Media and Online Platform. Thomas is a recipient of the Gordon Parks Foundation Fellowship (2019), The Guggenheim Fellowship (2018), AIMIA | AGO Photography Prize (2017), Soros Equality Fellowship (2017), Aperture West Book Prize (2008), Renew Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation (2007), and the New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship Award (2006). He is also a member of the Public Design Commission for the City of New York.
In 2019, Thomas unveiled his permanent work “Unity” in Brooklyn, NY. In 2017, “Love Over Rules” permanent neon was unveiled in San Francisco, CA and “All Power to All People” in Opa Locka, FL. Thomas holds a B.F.A. from New York University, New York, NY (1998) and an M.A./M.F.A. from the California College of the Arts, San Francisco, CA (2004). He received honorary doctorates from the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore, MD and the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, ME in 2017.
Initiatives involved in:
For Freedoms: 2020 Awakening
Patrick Martinez
Born and raised in the San Gabriel Valley, Patrick Martinez’s L.A. suburban upbringing and his diverse cultural background (Filipino, Mexican and Native American), provided him with a unique lens through which he interprets his surroundings. Influenced by the Hip Hop movement, Martinez cultivated his art practice through graffiti, which later led him to the Art Center College of Design, where he earned a BFA with honors in 2005. Through his facility with a wide variety of media(painting, neon, ceramic and sculpture), Martinez colorfully scrutinizes otherwise everyday realities of suburban and urban life in L.A. with humor, sensitivity and wit. Patrick Martinez, (b. 1980 Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005.
His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York and the Netherlands, and he has shown in venues including the Vincent Price Art Museum, Biola University, LA Louver, Showroom MAMA, Providence College Galleries, MACLA, SUR biennial, Chinese American Museum and Euphrat Museum of Art. He has been covered by the Los Angeles Times, KPCC, KCRW, Fusion, Art News, Opening Ceremony Art Blog and Wired. He has work in the collections of the Cornell Fine Art Museum, Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art. Martinez has his first solo museum show at the Cornell Fine Arts Museum from May 25 to September 10, 2017. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles and is represented by Charlie James Gallery.
Gerald Lovell
Gerald Lovell is an Atlanta-based artist who has gained nationwide recognition for his distinctive style of figurative painting. Lovell’s artistic practice focuses on his own life as a means of self-discovery and self-articulation. The subjects of his vivid portraits are moments from his own life, captured in semi-candid photographs and then memorialized on canvas. Each portrait thoughtfully reflects details and expressions that create an intimate view into the lives of his subjects and Lovell’s own urban millennial experience. One of the elements that defines Lovell’s unique aesthetic style is his bold, expressive layering of paint. Background elements rendered in exaggerated flatness contrast with focal points are emphasized through thick and mottled paint. Lovell’s heavy application of the impasto painting style translates his subjects into three-dimensional figures within a flat canvas.
Gerald Lovell was born in 1992 in Chicago, Illinois, to Puerto Rican and African American parents. Lovell is a is a self-taught artist who began his career after he left the graphic design program at the University of West Georgia. Lovell is represented by P·P·O·W, New York and his work has been displayed at national institutions such as the Harvey B Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture in Charlotte, The Houston Museum of African American Culture, and Swim Gallery, Los Angeles.
Lovell has strong ties to the Atlanta art community and has displayed work at local galleries including MurMur, The Gallery | Wish, Hammonds House Museum, Mason Fine Art, and Notch8 Gallery.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Devan Shimoyama
Devan Shimoyama works in portraiture, creating works that draw inspiration from the narratives of classical mythology and drama, as well as from pop culture imagery. Shimoyama often focuses on the Black, queer male figure, reframing and reimagining terms of representation. While his primary medium is painting, Shimoyama also works in collage, photography, and installation––sometimes all together––using bold, ecstatic aesthetics to imbue images of himself and others with a kind of surreal and otherworldly magic. Shimoyama often bases his compositions on photographs or on major works of Western art history, imbuing them with a bright, saturated palette and a dynamic, contemporary energy. He uses different materials to add texture and luminosity to his canvases––including glitter, rhinestones, sequins, costume jewelry, and metallic paint––which also allude to camp, drag, and club aesthetics.
Many works show the figure in isolation on imagined grounds, amongst oversized rain drops, dense foliage, and night skies, or set upon collages of deconstructed interior architecture. The subjects of Shimoyama’s images seem both real and iconic, their strange depictions––some with fake roses for eyes, glitter for hair, magazine photographs comprising other features, and gemstones for tears––give them a timeless and fantastical appearance. The artist often works in distinct series, such as a recent body that depicts Black figures with books by Black authors in an exploration of identity and cultural formation, or a preceding group of self-portraits that show him intertwined with snakes, an allegorical motif that recurs in Western painting. Shimoyama’s works have a deep symbolic undercurrent and his images exalt his subjects while also alluding to their interior lives and the difficulty they may face within broader society. The pain and sadness that are woven into these works are a powerful subtext to the exuberant, pleasurable aesthetics that Shimoyama uses to both interrogate and reconstruct the way Black queer figures are represented.
Sadie Barnett
Sadie Barnett is an important emerging voice within the American arts landscape. Based in Oakland, Barnette mines the everyday to create works across mediums, including drawing, photography, sculpture, and installation that can make the mundane appear transcendent and reveal hidden and obscured histories. Barnette is becoming best known for her immersive installations that reimagine domestic and public spaces into spectacular, vibrant places for people to gather –– living rooms and bars conjured from metallic vinyl, shades of pink, gold finishes, and sparkling surfaces. Using pop aesthetics, the artist offers a reprieve from our day – to – day lives, literalizing and constructing an imaginative space of escape. In her two – and three – dimensional works, the artist employs found objects and often sources material from family archives –– including the 500 – page FBI surveillance file kept on her father, who founded the Compton chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968.
Barnette transforms things like speakers and empty aluminum cans through the careful application of glitter and holographic material. In so doing she makes playful, wondrous artifacts of these familiar things. Using layering, abstraction, and negative space the artist creates subtle collages –– cutting out single figures and reorienting them amidst galactic surfaces, marking on top of images with hot pink spray paint, transposing and destabilizing logos and text, and applying seemingly out of place decorative elements like rhinestones. The demand for change and the energy of unrest and potential that defined the 1960s have been major sources of inspiration for Barnette, and she leverages the personal and public histories of that moment in much of her work. Her projects call back to this past with pop and retro – future aesthetics and an embrace of glittering magic. She creates works that transport the viewer into other worlds and celebrates the spirit of resistance and possibility that can be found in the everyday.
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger is an American Conceptual artist known for her combination of type and image that conveys a direct feminist cultural critique. Her works examine stereotypes and the behaviors of consumerism with text layered over mass-media images. Rendered with black-and-white, red accented, Futura Bold Oblique font, inspired by the Constructivist Alexander Rodechenko, her works offer up short phrases such as “Thinking of You,” “You are a captive audience,” and “I shop therefore I am.” Like multimedia artist Jenny Holzer, Kruger uses language to broadcast her ideas in a myriad of ways, including prints, T-shirts, posters, photographs, electronic signs, and billboards. “I’m fascinated with the difference between supposedly private and supposedly public and I try to engage the issue of what it means to live in a society that’s seemingly shock-proof, yet still is compelled to exercise secrecy,” she explained of her work.
Born on January 26, 1945 in Newark, NJ, Kruger worked as a graphic designer and art director after studying at both Syracuse University and Parsons School of Design (where she studied under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel) in the 1960s. Her early career path directly influenced the style her art would eventually take. She currently lives and works between New York, NY and Los Angeles, CA. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, among others.
Devon Tsuno
Devon Tsuno is an artist and fourth generation Angeleno. His recent spray paint and acrylic paintings, installations, and public art focus on Japanese American history. Tsuno’s interests have been central to his work with the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Topaz Museum, Utah; Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Candlewood Arts Festival, Borrego Springs, California; LA Metro; and Gallery Lara, Tokyo. His work has been featured in the Los Angeles Times, NPR, KCET, Artillery Magazine, and X-TRA Contemporary Art Journal. Tsuno is a 2017 Santa Fe Art Institute Water Rights Artist-In-Residence, is the 2016 SPArt Community Grantee, and was awarded a 2014 California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Art. He is a member of J-TOWN Action と Solidarity and is an Associate Professor of Art at California State University Dominguez Hills.
Initiatives involved in:
Shikata Ga Nai 2022
Jiha Moon
Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, New York, NY, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA, the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN and Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, Asia Society, New York, NY, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, White Columns, New York, NY, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is recipient of prestigious Joan Mitchell foundation’s painter and sculptor’s award for 2011. Her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum has toured more than 10 museum venues around the country until 2018.
Moon’s gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify, yet stay in a familiar zone.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Alex Brewer (HENSE)
Alex Brewer, also known as HENSE, is an American contemporary artist, best known for his dynamic, vivid and colorful abstract paintings and monumental wall pieces. He utilizes unique color and composition in his installations to evoke a bold presence in the varied spaces they inhabit. Brewer, a native of Atlanta, Georgia began his career painting and writing on the walls around the city at a young age. He discovered his love for creating art in public spaces through graffiti in the 1990’s. He produces numerous public works worldwide through a combination of techniques learned through graffiti writing and the formal language of abstract painting.Conscious of the supporting architecture, Brewer dramatically transforms his environments byre-creating existing objects and surfaces and infusing his work into the existing landscape. Best known for his works in the public area, Brewer applies the same processes and techniques in his public art as he does on his interior installations. Through wall drawings and a dialogue between various shapes, color and composition, his process produces larger-than-life abstractions creating textured surfaces and a layering of forms and color. Brewer employs a great deal of thought arranging the shapes he uses, inspiring dramatic compositions and gestures in his finished products. His use of unique colors and patterns, his play with shifting shapes and surfaces, and his intense line quality are a contemporary counterpart to the post-modern masters working in minimalism and abstract expressionism in the mid-twentieth century. Brewer’s use of simplified geometric forms, un-modulated color and hard-edges common in minimalism is perfectly paired with the spontaneous mark making that was common in abstract expressionism. These influences on Brewer’s work exemplify a comprehensive look at contemporary, abstract painting.Brewer has received recognition as a contemporary abstract painter, exploring, color, form and material. His works in the realm of public art have garnered him national and international attention. He has also received numerous notable commissions internationally and throughout the United States. His largest commissioned work is in Lima, Peru amassing an impressive sizeof 137 feet tall and 170 feet wide.With the ability to transform a gallery space or City’s landscape, Brewer’s paintings can act as a unifying thread in a community. Brewer is always inspired by creative expression and process in the public realm and creates works that play an important role in the visual interactions and dialogue of a community.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Ash “Wolfdog” Hayner
From a young age, Atlanta-based Ash Hayner has been a visual artist. Hayner, who goes by the moniker Wolfdog, began his career as a graphic designer, and has progressively distilled his visual language to the bare necessities of color, line, form, value and texture, crafting images that merge the fundamental characteristics of expressionism with his personal interpretation of technological layering. An accomplished designer, Hayner has exhibited works in both public and private settings across the United States.
Initiatives involved in:
Arts & Entertainment Atlanta District
Boston Arts Academy
Boston Arts Academy (BAA) is the city’s only public high school for the visual and performing arts, serving students who reflect the diversity of Boston’s neighborhoods. Boston Arts Academy serves as a laboratory and a beacon for artistic and academic innovation, preparing a diverse community of aspiring artist scholars to be successful in their college or professional careers and to be engaged members of a democratic society.
Initiatives involved in:
Boston Arts Academy
Tony Cokes
Tony Cokes lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island, where he serves as Professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. In 2022, he was the subject of a major survey jointly organized by the Haus der Kunst and Kunstverein in Munich. Other recent solo exhibitions include De Balie, Amsterdam (2022); Greene Naftali, New York (2022, 2018); Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, Rochester (2021); MACRO Contemporary Art Museum, Rome (2021); CIRCA, London (2021); Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Barcelona (2020); ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts, Brussels (2020); Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (2020); BAK – basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands (2020); Luma Westbau, Zurich (2019); Goldsmiths Centre for Contemporary Art, London (2019); The Shed, New York (2019); Kunsthall Bergen, Norway (2018); and REDCAT, Los Angeles (2012).His work is in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Centre Pompidou, Paris; FRAC Lorraine, Metz; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Kunsthallen, Copenhagen; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Queensland Art Gallery, Brisbane; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Mikael Owunna
Mikael Owunna is a Nigerian American multimedia artist, filmmaker, engineer. He is the Director of Mikael Owunna Studios, LLC., a full service art production company, and the co-founder of Rainbow Serpent, Inc., a Black LGBTQ art nonprofit organization. Exploring the intersections of technology, art, and African cosmologies, his work seeks to elucidate an emancipatory vision of possibility that revives traditional African knowledge systems and pushes people beyond all boundaries, restrictions, and frontiers.
Owunna’s work has been exhibited across Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America and has been collected by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Nasher Museum of Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Middlebury College Museum of Art; Equal Justice Initiative; Duke University Pratt School of Engineering; and National Taiwan Museum. His work has also been featured in media ranging from the New York Times to CNN, NPR, VICE, and The Guardian. He has lectured at venues including Harvard Law School, World Press Photo (Netherlands), Tate Modern (UK), and TEDx. Owunna has published two monographs: Limitless Africans (FotoEvidence, 2019) and Cosmologies (ClampArt, 2021). Owunna’s multimedia practice includes film, and in 2021 he directed the dance film Obi Mbu (The Primordial House) with Marques Redd. Owunna’s work has been commissioned for major public art installations by organizations including the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Cleveland Foundation, Contemporary Art Museum Raleigh, Pittsburgh International Airport, and Orange Barrel Media.
Mikael Owunna Studios, LLC. is a minority and LGBT-owned business and is a certified Minority Business Enterprise (MBE) and LGBT Business Enterprise (LGBTBE).
Kenneth Alexander
Kenneth Alexander is a painter, motion artist, and curator based in Memphis, TN. He fuses anime and digital art with his traditional style to create a new vision often drawn from his dreams. Growing up in South Memphis, Kenneth was in constant pursuit of an art community. After being accepted into a local performing arts high school, he never looked back.
Alexander’s artwork has been shown in over two dozen exhibitions, including “Surreal Kingdoms” at the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, garnering him national attention. Being a juror for the 2016 and 2021 Mid-South Scholastic Art Competition — and being the keynote speaker in the former — he has changed lives of young aspiring artists by awarding them scholarships for their hard work and dedication. After curating “Unfolding: The Next Chapter in Memphis,” an ArtsMemphis exhibition for the Bicentennial of Memphis, he has spread influence and inspiration to working artists all around the city. This has, is turn, landed him more curatorial work for outside projects.
Alexander is also well known for his work as a set designer and art director on networks like NBC, Apple TV, and BET. He draws inspiration from some of the great surrealists, namely Salvador Dali, but he is ultimately pioneering the way in a new age of digital art.
Sarah Cain
Known for her exuberant abstractions, Sarah Cain (b.1979) often extends her practice beyond the canvas into immersive architecture interventions, stained glass, intimate works on paper and furniture.
Cain’s muscular, gestural painting embraces a strategically intuitive power that both undermines and expands our expectations of what has been historically considered “serious” abstract painting. Her color-soaked palette often mixes with a wide range of found objects that in turn complement her titles, which range in reference from the sweet to the erotic, from the mystical to the political. Cain redefines abstraction in feminist terms as an architecture for transformative, embodied, emotive experience. Her work emphatically insists on the value of feminine, queer, and other “othered” aesthetics, intentionally subverting male-dominated art historical traditions.
At the beginning of her career, Cain made dozens of site-specific paintings in abandoned buildings; by nature, these were ephemeral works. As her practice evolved, she has continued to create massive on-site works and preserved the impulse to treat painting seriously, but not preciously. Her work draws from sources as disparate as Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, poetry and music. She often incorporates materials as diverse as sand, jewelry, rope, crystals, beads, or clothing.
Frequently referencing lyrics from music that she is listening to during the creation of each work, she has chosen to title the site-specific painting at OBM This is the thing they call life, a line from a live version of the song “The Dream” by the Oh Sees.
Charles McGee
One of Detroit’s most acclaimed artists and educators, Charles McGee is known for his public murals and sculptures around the city, as well as for his large-scale mixed-media works that play with color, line, and patterns. A skilled draftsman, McGee often focused on depictions of everyday Black life, as in his early charcoal portraits. Inspired by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró, and Jean Dubuffet, McGee began incorporating more abstract elements in his art in the 1960s and ’70s, creating paintings, sculptures, and assemblages with scavenged objects. His black-and-white sculpture “United We Stand” (2008), installed outside Detroit’s Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, exemplifies his ability to blend divergent styles and dynamic forms into harmonious compositions. Permanently installed at sites from the Detroit Institute of Arts to the Henry Ford Hospital, McGee’s work is just one part of his legacy in his community, where he also founded numerous galleries and arts organizations to support emerging Black makers.
Initiatives involved in:
Charles McGee x Library Street Collective
Adam Brouillette
For the last 20 years, Adam has worked as a professional artist. His paintings use flat, graphic lines and colors that are simultaneously familiar and unique to his style. His works have been featured widely in galleries, museums, publications, and exhibitions.
Museum Collaborations
Museums play an integral role in preserving our society’s history and create a more equitable public understanding of art and artists. Orange Barrel Media believes in partnerships with institutions to connect communities and build a culture.
Curatorial Collaborations
Through various partnerships and collaborations, Orange Barrel Media continues to build the OBM brand among cities, artists, art institutions while expanding the boundary of art in the public space.
Educational Institution Collaborations
Coming soon!