Brooklyn based artist Leilah Babirye’s (b. 1985) multidisciplinary practice transforms everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights. Babirye arrived in the United States in 2015, fleeing dangerously homophobic conditions in her native Uganda after being publicly outed in a local Kampala newspaper the year before. She received asylum in Spring 2018 with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.

In this new series of monoprints created in Summer 2020, Babirye represents a composite of LGBTQI identities. The figures harken to individuals real and imagined, past and present. They create a bridge between continents and convictions, layering connections between Babirye’s own community with the ancestral kingdom of Buganda, a subnational kingdom within Uganda where homosexuality was openly accepted prior to Western colonization.

Brooklyn based artist Leilah Babirye’s (b. 1985) multidisciplinary practice transforms everyday materials into objects that address issues surrounding identity, sexuality and human rights. Babirye arrived in the United States in 2015, fleeing dangerously homophobic conditions in her native Uganda after being publicly outed in a local Kampala newspaper the year before. She received asylum in Spring 2018 with support from the African Services Committee and the NYC Anti-Violence Project.

In this new series of monoprints created in Summer 2020, Babirye represents a composite of LGBTQI identities. The figures harken to individuals real and imagined, past and present. They create a bridge between continents and convictions, layering connections between Babirye’s own community with the ancestral kingdom of Buganda, a subnational kingdom within Uganda where homosexuality was openly accepted prior to Western colonization.

From a profile in Hauser & Wirth’s 'Ursuala' magazine, Issue 6, published Spring 2020. Written by Sam Gordon:

‘At some point, I realized that I don’t want to paint a masterpiece. I want to be one,’ Stephanie Crawford likes to say. Born in Detroit (1942), with family in Tennessee and other parts of the South, Crawford became part of a group of friends - which include Frederick Weston, Shyvette Williams and the fashion designer Claude Payne - that made a splash in the house-party scenes in Detroit, Chicago and New York for their innovative fashion and music. Crawford eventually moved to New York in the 1970s, and at 36, got a scholarship to pursue an MFA at Pratt, where she became close with the influential East Village trans artist Greer Lankton. She then turned her focus to jazz—the music of modernity and self-invention - becoming well known in the ’80s as a singer who bridged the world of blues and drag, performing at the Blue Note in the Village and the Pyramid Club on Avenue A. The artist Tabboo!, who performed regularly at the Pyramid as well, describes Crawford as ‘the Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington of the queer world.’ From 1989 to 1996, she taught jazz vocals in Paris and received the prestigious award ‘Django D’Or’ for Best International Jazz Vocalist in 1993. A practicing Buddhist, Crawford now lives in Oakland, CA, where she continues to perform and teach. ‘Teaching was how I was able to survive,’ she says.

Crawford was recently included in '(Nothing but) Flowers' at Karma, NY and will have a solo exhibition at Gordon Robichaux, NY, in December 2020.

With clear indications of hand and process reflected in the finished works, Oakland, CA, based artist Sahar Khoury (b. 1973) creates sculptures outside of structured methodology. Using materials such as ceramic, concrete, steel, paper-mâché, resin, cloth and leather to construct individual units that are puzzled and bolted together, the artist bypasses the traditional center of object making and inhabits a unique space that is aesthetically raw and purposefully unruly while also formally elegant, pure and emotionally beautiful.

With humor and intelligence, Khoury consistently infuses her practice with a larger social dialogue.
Whether visible – the utilization of found or recycled objects to create recognizable cultural reference
points; or discreet – the layering in of personal mementos, indistinguishable notations of time and place;
Khoury’s works absorb the histories embedded in their discarded materials and reinvents them with new potential.

Khoury was a recipient of the 2019 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award. She was also recently featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries ‘Part and Parcel’ and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ‘Bay Area Now 8.’

With clear indications of hand and process reflected in the finished works, Oakland, CA, based artist Sahar Khoury (b. 1973) creates sculptures outside of structured methodology. Using materials such as ceramic, concrete, steel, paper-mâché, resin, cloth and leather to construct individual units that are puzzled and bolted together, the artist bypasses the traditional center of object making and inhabits a unique space that is aesthetically raw and purposefully unruly while also formally elegant, pure and emotionally beautiful.

With humor and intelligence, Khoury consistently infuses her practice with a larger social dialogue.
Whether visible – the utilization of found or recycled objects to create recognizable cultural reference
points; or discreet – the layering in of personal mementos, indistinguishable notations of time and place;
Khoury’s works absorb the histories embedded in their discarded materials and reinvents them with new potential.

Khoury was a recipient of the 2019 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art SECA Art Award. She was also recently featured in the San Francisco Arts Commission Galleries ‘Part and Parcel’ and the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts ‘Bay Area Now 8.’

Los Angeles-based artist Max Jansons’ (b. 1974) complex and multi-layered works engage viewers with beauty. His luscious and luxurious surfaces cloak the purposeful hand and acuity of mind and vision that are the core of his practice.

A keen student of art history, Jansons’ connection to and reverence of influential artists, movements and materials are embedded in his work. Jansons redefines and reinterprets the skills presented by his predecessors and creates an original vision that explores the historical tenets of still life, abstract geometry, light and color. In this newest iteration of his ongoing series of handmade ink on paper drawings, Jansons exhibits expert control with his varied and nuanced application, creating a surface both terrestrial and fluid.

Claire Oswalt’s (b. 1979) serene works belie the intricacies of their construction. For her sewn canvas works Oswalt culls from her own pool of source material, using a paper study as her guide. Elements of raw and painted canvas are pieced together, stretched and re-shaped, to compose a uniform surface. Structural stitched seam lines establish architecture within the work, delineating precise edges against a nuance and undulation in pattern and depth of color created by diluting acrylic paint to a watercolor consistency.

With clear evidence of mark and hand Oswalt’s work straddles limit and expanse. Physical environment is a touchstone, an ongoing reference point, channeling the spirit and visceral response to her own place and time; the life of the art and the life of the artist being inherently intertwined.

A seventh-generation Texan, Oswalt spent the first decades of her adult life moving between New York and Los Angeles. She co-founded the artisan quilt line Hopewell in 2013 before returning to Austin in 2015. Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally as well as featured in publications such as The New York Times, Paper Magazine, and Artweek. Oswalt is a recipient of the Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant for Mixed Media.

Houston based artist Vincent Valdez’s (b. 1977) work depicts themes of social justice, memory and representation. Of his practice Valdez writes: ‘I create images as instruments to probe the past in order to reveal an immediacy to what is occurring today. To remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras. I am alarmed by the denial of history. I will continue to create counter-images, to impede the social amnesia that incites our fateful desire to repeat it.’
A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painters and Sculptors (2016), as well as residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting (2005), the Vermont Studio Center (2011) the Kunstlerhaus Bethania Berlin Residency (2014) and the Joan Mitchell Center (2018), Valdez has exhibited widely for decades and his work is included in museum collections across the United States. Valdez was a 2019 Artadia awardee in Houston and is currently an artist fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, founded by Titus Kaphar and Jonathan Brand.