Firelei Báez
Firelei Báez was born in 1980 in Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic, to Dominican and Haitian parents. She immigrated to the United States at the age of nine. Báez received a B.F.A. from
The Cooper Union for the
Advancement of Science and Art, NY, in 2004, attended the Skowhegan School Of Painting and Sculpture,
Skowhegan, ME, in 2008 and graduated from Hunter College, NY, with a M.F.A. in 2010. She has held residencies at The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace, The Lower East Side Print Shop and The Bronx Museum’s Artist in the Marketplace and presently lives and works in New York, NY.
"My artwork consists of paintings, drawings
and prints that regard my physical self, my personal history, and
Caribbean folklore. Caribbean folklore allows for malleability in the
creation of the self, but I find my status as an Afro-Latina in the
United States static and limiting in comparison. In response, I try to
disrupt the current system of social categorization through the creation
of characters that refuse definition. As more people become
multiracial, skin tone is no longer a sufficient signifier. Growing
media presence and more commonplace interactions via technology in our
daily lives reduce each individual to a small part of a larger
demographic. I use symbolically loaded scenarios to metaphorically
illustrate the multiplicities and hypocrisies that make up the current
discussion about race and class within popular culture."
Ebony C Patterson
Ebony G. Patterson is a Jamaican artist born in Kingston in 1981. She has taught at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica, the Sam Fox College of Design & Visual at Washington University in St. Louis. She has taught at the University of Virginia and is currently an Assistant Professor in Painting at the University of Kentucky. She lives and works in Lexington, KY and Kingston, Jamaica.
Her work includes paintings, drawings, collages and recently she added photography, installation and performance. The female body as an object is the subject of her early works with her "Venus", a search for "beauty through the use of the grotesque but visceral, confrontational and deconstructed."
One of Patterson's most recognized body of work, is a series entitled
"Gangstas for Life," which explores conceptions of masculinity within dancehall culture and subjects related to this, like homosexuality within a predominantly homophobic culture, race, stereotypes and beauty.
She has shown her artwork in numerous solo and private exhibitions, such as
Infinite Island: Contemporary Caribbean Art, Brooklyn Museum, (2007). National Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica,(2006,2008,2010),
Ghetto Biennale , Port-au-Prince, Haiti,
Rockstone and Bootheel, Real Artways, (2010) Wrestling With the Image, Museum of the Americas,(2011)
link to National Gallery of Jamaica
blog
Tavares Strachan
Tavares Henderson Strachan (born in Nassau in 1979) is a contemporary, conceptual artist whose multi-media installations
investigate science, technology, mythology, history, and exploration. He
lives and works in New York City and Nassau, Bahamas.
Initially a painter, Strachan earned his Associate of Fine Arts degree from the College of the Bahamas in 1999. In 2000, he moved to the US to enroll in the glass department at the Rhode Island School of Design and completed his Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 2003. Strachan went on to earn his Master of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture from Yale University in 2006. In 2006, Strachan joigned the international art scene with his piece titled "The Distance Between What We Have and What We Want" which involved a 4.5 ton block of ice from the Alaskan Artic displayed in a solar-powered freezer in the courtyard of his childhood elementary school. The work was later exhibited at Miami Art Basel and the Brooklyn Museum.
Strachan developed further the themes of exploration, displacement and the idea of pushing the body’s physical extremes, with a four-year, multimedia body of work "Orthostatic Tolerance" which documented Strachan’s experience in cosmonaut training at the Yuri Gagarin Training Center in Star City, Russia and experiments in space travel conducted in Nassau under the Bahamas Air and Space Exploration Center (BASEC), the artist’s version of NASA for his native country, with photography, video, drawing, sculpture and installation.
Last year a 20,000-square-foot overview of Strachan’s work from 2003–2011, subtitled
Seen/Unseen,was presented at an undisclosed New York City location and was closed to the public.
Tavares Strachan: seen/unseen is fully documented with a forthcoming catalogue, designed by Stefan Sagmeister. Strachan’s solo exhibitions include
Orthostatic Tolerance: It Might Not Be Such a Bad Idea if I Never Went Home Again,
MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA (2010); Orthostatic
Tolerance: Launching from an Infinite Distance, Grand Arts, Kansas City,
MO (2010);
Tavares Strachan: Orthostatic Tolerance, the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2009);
Where We Are is Always Miles Away, The Luggage Store, San Francisco, CA (2006); and
The Difference Between What We Have and What We Want, Albury Sayle Primary School, Nassau, The Bahamas (2006).
In 2013, Tavares Strachan represented The Bahamas in
the country’s first national pavilion at the 55th International
Venice Biennale.
link to
Artsy
link to
Prospect.3
Antonio Vega Macotela
Antonio Vega Macoleta was born in Mexico-city, Mexico, in 1980. He attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas, Mexico City, Mexico and obtained his BA in 2005. In 2011 he was accepted for a residency at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, in Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
The
conceptual artist worked several years with the inmates of a prison in Mexico City and set up a "time exchange project" which resulted in a Series of works called
Divisa , 2006-1010, a reflection on the concept of time. He also produced series like
The Ungovernables for the Second New York Triennial, at the New Museum in 2012,
He participated in several group exhibitions, the latest at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Summer 2014.
Un Monumento às Fantasias Descartadas ( A Monument to Discarded Fantasies) from Andrea Fraser is a festive introduction to the Prospect.3 show at the Newcomb Art Gallery on the Uptown Tulane campus. The site specific work is an accumulation of left over beads, baubles, clothes, feathers, garlands from the Rio Carnival and the heap of abandoned objects instills melancholy. Assuming it is intentional, the Christmas tree shaped composition refers not only to Mardi Gras but also to the quasi secular celebration taking place two months before. However, the pile of shiny, decorative, lifeless objects feels contrived. Soiled, crushed, shattered trinkets would bring spontaneity and genuineness to the installation.
In keeping with her quest, Ebony Patterson fills a room with a new body of works created for P.3. Mixing paint, beads, glitter, flowery wallpaper, she stages black bodies lying in a lush nature or overtaken by raucous celebrations. The human form dissolves in the luxurious vegetation or the party's decorations. Primal calls lead to Mardi Gras festivities or a search for paradise in a communion with nature. Paterson keeps us guessing and wandering in her celebratory landscapes.
Black is for funerals. According to Hew Locke, black is also for parades. In his site specific installation The Nameless, mythical heroes drawn with cords and beads on a starry background, come alive on the four walls of the room, encircling the visitor. Referring to our collective memory, childhood's nightmares or fairy tales, the overpowering figures (about twice my size) are a mixture of symbols, cultural and historical references like the demon with angel's wings or the Medieval warrior riding a lion. In a new world, the pageantry of semi-gods brandishes Kalashnikovs, the symbol of modern weaponery.
