Care / Condition / Control

Curated by A.E. Chapman
601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St, NYC
Feb 22 - April 27, 2025
View installation images 
Impulse Magazine review

OPENING WEEKEND

Friday, Feb 21, from 6-8pm - Opening Reception with a performance by Armando Guadalupe Cortés.

Saturday Feb 22 at 2pm - O' Canada, a talk with Vancouver-based artists Rebecca Bair and Germaine Koh and curator A.E. Chapman.

Rebecca Bair
John Coplans
Armando Guadalupe Cortés
Cristina de Gennaro
Magdalena Dukiewicz
Oasa DuVerney
Jarrett Key
Germaine Koh
Greer Lankton
Meryl Meisler
Sara Messinger
Richard Prince and Cindy Sherman
Calli Roche
Joseph Rodriguez
Cindy Sherman
Melissa Stern
Trish Tillman

Curator’s Statement:

Humans are obsessed with hair. And hair is never just hair. Intensely personal, it is quite literally how people frame themselves to signal their desired appearance to others. Individuals use hair as an expressive language to convey both their individuality and collective affiliations, and societies in turn regulate hair as a means to enforce and maintain social control, allegiance, and order. Be it conforming or rebellious, hair reflects and negotiates the social contracts between individuals and gender, racial, subcultural, and religious identities. Hair can elicit polarizing responses–from envy to repulsion–acting as a nimble proxy for culture, time, place, age, identity, growth, and vitality.

As Paul C. Taylor states in Black Is Beautiful: A Philosophy of Black Aesthetics, “The aesthetic implicates and is implicated by the political.” In other words, the aesthetic becomes an arena where political struggles and controversies are actively played out. In the contemporary United States, hegemony is enforced through discriminatory grooming policies, proposed state laws and executive orders targeting gender expression and identity, and compulsory military and prison buzz cuts. Often, those attempting to suppress personal autonomy regarding appearance cite cleanliness as their logic. In her book Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva observes that “It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules.” Given the historically compounded nature of repressions, hair can carry painful intergenerational trauma. Yet, collective resistance to these systems of oppression sparks kinship, joy, and homage. Through hair, people build spaces of community, intimacy, and specificity.

In an interdisciplinary practice deeply rooted in her subjectivity as a Black woman living on Turtle Island, Vancouver-based Rebecca Bair explores representation and identity through non-figuration. Working with ideas of trace and presence, Bair subverts the hegemonic gaze packed into historical figurative representation of Black women, often rampant with violent tropes presenting Blackness and the Black body as commodities for consumption. She disrupts this production by offering an abstract visual vocabulary built from cultural materials, hair and the effects of the sun. In Collaboration with the Sun, Bair creates a site specific installation in the front window of the gallery, using shea butter and charcoal applied with her hair. In PRESSED, she presents an abstracted tangle of hair in the form of a monotype print.

After working as a curator, writer, and editor for several decades, John Coplans began photographing his naked body in 1980. Hair is a significant and visceral character in Coplans’ images of his body; his tightly framed, often cropped poses present a stark vulnerability. Coplans, who passed away in 2003, wrote of the photographs, “A compelling influence on me has been the feminist movement and the reexamination of men’s roles in relationship to women. In response, it is not only necessary for me to deal with the historical surface of consciousness, but also to examine the deeper, unconscious drives and images of manhood.” Coplans presents his aging body as a counterpoint to the mythic idealization of youth throughout art history, particularly as depicted in the smooth, hairless, heroic bodies of Greek sculpture.

Working across performance, sculpture, and storytelling, Armando Guadalupe Cortés interweaves his personal experience with  narratives drawn from collective oral tradition and history. Cortés asserts the power of myth to transcend time, and his work embodies multiple temporalities at once. His 2017 performance El Descanso En La Gloria (Rest when I am Dead), on display as a three-channel video, was inspired by a story his mother told him of a woman named Enecleta in his hometown of Urequío, a small, rural farming community in Michoacán, México. Enecleta, who wore her hair in two braids, repeated the phrase, “El Descanso En La Gloria” as she devotedly carried cántaros of water from the river to workers who mixed it with clay to build the community’s first church. In the video, Cortés performs with vessels he himself made from clay—a material laden with history, labor, practicality, and potentiality. Clay is also the central material in Cortés’s Jauiri Kuáti  (“twin hair”), a set of adobe panels embedded with twine. The work engages with the collective trauma of forced haircutting as a weapon of social control as well as with Cortes’s own childhood memories of becoming physically ill at the prospect of a haircut.

Cristina de Gennaro’s photographic series Carol from the Medusa Portraits begins by depicting a woman whose greying hair is twisted into a neat nest where tiny eggs sit in its burrow, evoking associations with home, order, and protection. As the series unfolds, Carol’s nest becomes messy and unbound while her expression shifts from peaceful to unhinged. Alluding to the misogyny of the Medusa myth–a Gorgon with snakes for hair, so hideous she turns anyone who looks upon her into stone–de Gennaro addresses the societal stigma of aging that women face, particularly those who have moved past windows of fertility. She depicts Carol, a painter, with artistic offspring yet to hatch, refuting that archaic, yet ever present, bias. 

Magdalena Dukiewicz investigates how the body, particularly the objectified femme body, is obsessively controlled by society, and then subverts this control, reclaiming bodily autonomy while emphasizing endurance and resilience. In Object #15 and Object #11, Dukiewicz sculpts with repurposed kitchen knives and her own hair to reference the pervasive nature of domestic violence. In Object #11, a flaccid blond braid hangs from a knife handle, references tropes about virility and shapes associated with fetish and sexual pleasure. Object #4 is made of found metal and bundles of the artist’s hair that she began collecting at the age of twelve, when she first began making informed decisions about the representation of her body. Viewing femininity as a threat and the source of unwanted attention, the artist decided to cut off the very long hair that until then had been her distinguishing feature. Dukiewicz continued wearing her hair very short throughout her twenties, only recently embracing her feminine attributes.

Oasa DuVerney’s MYLFworks is a series of five videos titled A Scrubbing, Oral Hygiene, A Detangling, Digestive Assistance, and A Tucking In. In these scenes, DuVerney casts herself in roles that collapse the slippery boundaries between mother, female domestic worker, and sex worker through the subversive construction of familiar yet ambiguous scenes of domestic labor. In A Tucking In, DuVerney reads a bedtime story from a book quoting Audre Lorde: 

If white American feminist theory need not deal with the differences between us, and the resulting difference in our oppressions, then how do you deal with the fact that the women who clean your houses and tend your children while you attend conferences on feminist theory are, for the most part, poor women and women of Color? What is the theory behind racist feminism?

In DuVerney's videos, hair is detangled and used as a cleaning tool, communicating the selective visibility of care and naturalized inequities at the intersections of race, gender, and class in the domestic sphere.

Jarrett Key’s Hot Comb No. 3 “Snaggle Tooth” and Hot Comb No. 4 honor their grandmother and memories of her singing, “Your hair is your strength” while heating her hot comb over the kitchen stove. Forged of black steel, the combs stand with an anthropomorphic quality, each with distinct feet and familiar yet idiosyncratic teeth. Their textured, worked surface and gestural personality reference the personal, cultural, and historical lineage of these tools. Keys says of the work: “Some consider the straightening of hair an assimilationist tactic in a White supremacist society. Some people just want the length and the ability to flip their hair. Black joy and agency are held in tandem with pain and oppression.”

Made of sections of her hair gathered from haircuts across three decades, Germaine Koh began her ongoing sculpture, Fête, in 1997. Hung like a party streamer, each section in the indexical work reveals variations in texture and color from cut to cut—as time passes, grey hairs begin to appear in the swaths. Within each segment, the artist embroiders the year of the individual cuts. Koh’s temporal work lovingly monumentalizes the discarded hair, achieving a unique balance between the archival and the celebratory.

Greer Lankton’s If You Can Pass For A Girl, created in 1985, was inspired by the moment nineteen-year-old Lankton came out as trans to her family at the dinner table while visiting them during summer vacation in Park Forest, Illinois. Her sister responded, “You don’t look anything like a girl,” to which Greer said, “If you can pass for a girl, anyone can.” Lankton, who passed away in 1996, moved to New York City in 1981 and became a prominent member of the East Village arts scene. The artist memorializes her deadpan retort to her sister in capital letters on a vanity mirror adorned with archetypal blonde ponytails, challenging viewers to confront, within their own reflection, the oppressive attitudes toward gender and identity that persist today.

With a photography practice spanning decades, Meryl Meisler’s oeuvre weaves together autobiography and cultural shifts. Her works in the exhibition, all shot in the late 1970s, manifest a portrait of her young adulthood. BUTCH FEM BUTCH, was taken during Meisler’s first New York City Pride Parade in 1977. This was, coincidentally, the last year that the parade went up Fifth Avenue after having begun in 1970 as a protest march for gay liberation in the wake of the Stonewall Uprising. Another photograph captures a shirtless man, JJ, covered in chest hair and tossing his head full of hair while surrounded by a group of women dancing at legendary Studio 54 during its heyday in 1979. Collectively, these images capture a pivotal cultural moment in the artist’s life, NYC, and more broadly, the United States.

As an older member of Gen Z, Sara Messinger’s images present portraits of younger members of her generation expressing their perceptions of self in their everyday lives. Messinger’s image of a mother braiding her eighteen-year-old daughter’s hair could represent a peaceful daily routine shared between mother and daughter anywhere. In this case the daughter is Sofi, a trans girl living in Mexico City, one of the most dangerous cities in the world for trans people, particularly trans women. Also photographed in Mexico City, Messenger’s image of a neon blue-haired adolescent girl smiling for the camera with her grandfather–himself sporting a thick mustache, baseball cap, and tattoos on his forearm–presents a portrait of support, acceptance, and freedom within kinship. 

Belonging to a long line of dressmakers, tailors, and artisans from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora, Calli Roche troubles the boundaries between function and aesthetic, artisanship and artistry, power and community. Their work All Inclusive resembles a flogger made of blonde braids finished with aluminum foil and black beads and attached to a handle wrapped in black leather. Here, Roche emphasizes hair's associations with care, violence, and capital as a means of finding connection and healing between their internal experience and the external world.

Joseph Rodriguez’s photographs document private, domestic, and everyday moments within  communities. One image presents a group of three men and two young boys gathering on a front porch where one of the men cuts another’s hair in preparation for a job interview. Meanwhile, to their right, the other man holds a large gun playfully pointed out toward his nephew as the two boys play in the foreground. Another photo introduces a young boy with a clean, definitive crew-cut who looks directly at the camera from the driver’s seat of his uncle’s car, a car that he appears too young to drive. Finally, in a self portrait of the photographer himself as a young adult, Rodriguez echoes the directness of the boy’s gaze, staring into the lens with his eyebrows raised and a cigarette dangling from his lips. Together, these works and their timestamps highlight the role that hair plays in building masculine identity across generations.

In Cindy Sherman’s photographs, executed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, she stages herself in familiar scenes and personas. Examining the representation of the feminine in the media, she exposes its constructed quality, particularly the trope of the blonde bombshell—a fantasy construction of idealized (white) feminine beauty exported globally. Her Untitled #94 from the Centerfold Series mimics the pinup spread format commonly used in portrayals of femme fatales across print, film, and advertising. In this image, the artist wears a shoulder length blonde wig with tousled hair, posed in a reclining position. In Double Self-Portrait, Sherman’s collaboration with Richard Prince, the artists play with androgyny, suggesting that gender’s fluidity can be both seductive and transgressive.

Melissa Stern’s High School Hair, a collection of twenty framed drawings inspired by buoyant, fanciful and nostalgic hairstyles of the 1960s, features twenty young femmes posing for the camera against a monochromatic background, suggesting a yearbook portrait. The mixture of absurdity and glamour in Stern's grouping communicates an exuberance and awkwardness relatable across generational divides. She examines late girlhood as a tenuous space where hairdos are shaped by societal double standards regarding maturity and virginity.

Trish Tillman’s Character Arc 13 draws inspiration from the necktie of Snagglepuss, a cartoon character best known from the Yogi Bear cartoons of the 1960s. With eccentric attributes like bright pink fur, a lilting voice, and a propensity for theatrical references, Snagglepuss has been interpreted as queer by many viewers for decades. Tillman transforms the character’s necktie, incorporating the bright pink color of his fur, silver spike embellishments, and adding a pattern resembling chainmail or fishnet stockings. Character Arc 13 reflects the joyful and very human practice of ornamenting the body and all the neuroses packed into that ornamentation: the work is fraught with humor, stereotype, commercial desire, and trauma.

The works in this exhibition subvert notions of hair as abject, superficial, and frivolous, exploring the tensions between hair’s provocative and mutable capacity for creative expression and the enforced suppression of that expression. By reclaiming hair’s potential for transformation, subversion, and celebration, the artists consider, critique, and reimagine what it means to care, condition, and control.
 
Artist Bios: 

Rebecca Bair (b. 1995, Toronto, Canada) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Vancouver - the traditional and ancestral territories of the Coast Salish peoples. Her research aims to explore the possibilities of specific representation and of identity through abstraction and non-figuration. Bair uses multimedia approaches and Sun collaborations to illustrate her exploration of identity and intersectionality, through the lens of her own experience as a Black Woman on Turtle Island. Her artistic, professional and educational goals revolve around common themes of celebrating Black plurality, as well as enabling interpersonal and intercultural care, and her work acts as a vehicle through which the complexities of history and identity can be uncovered, redefined and expressed.

For over five decades, John Coplans was a painter, magazine editor, and museum director. The photographs he began making of his naked body in 1984 are in the collections of over 90 prestigious institutions, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Gallery, I.V.A.M. Valencia, and Centre George Pompidou. Coplans’ photographs have been the subject of numerous museum exhibitions including retrospectives in Lisbon, Paris, Sao Paulo, Edinburgh and New York. A founding editor of Artforum, Coplans became the editor-in-chief in 1971. In 1978, as the director of the Akron Art Museum, he founded the Midwest art journal Dialog. The recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships, four National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships and an award from the International Association of Art Critics, Coplans received the Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government in 2001. He authored nine books on art and photography, including Provocations, a book of his critical writings. Born in London in 1920, Coplans died in New York City in 2003.

Armando Guadalupe Cortés was born in Urequío, Michoacán, México, and was raised in Wilmington, California. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn. He attended UCLA (BA 2012) and Yale School of Art (MFA 2021). He has exhibited at the Craft Contemporary (Los Angeles), Space One (Seoul), and White Cube (London, digital exhibition) amongst other venues. Recent projects include Castillos (2021, Mass MOCA) and ¿Y la Gente? (2020, Arizona State University Art Museum). He was a Franklin Furnace Fellow (2021 – 22) and the Saint Elmo Fellow and Artist in Residence at the University of Texas at Austin (2021 – 22).

Cristina de Gennaro has exhibited her visual artworks, videos, and performances in museums and galleries nationally including the Hunterdon Art Museum (Clinton, NJ), Brattleboro Museum and Art Center (Brattleboro, VT), Glyndor Gallery at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY), Nexus Contemporary Art Center (Atlanta, GA), Portland Art Museum
(Portland, OR), Dallas Museum of Art (Dallas, TX), San Antonio Museum of Art (San Antonio, TX), The Women's Building (Los Angeles, CA), and the Center on Contemporary Art (Seattle, WA). She has been the recipient of grants and artist residency fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation (New York, NY), the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (Taos, NM), the Fundacion Valparaiso (Almeria, Spain), the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts (Ithaca, NY), and the Jentel Foundation (Banner, WY).  She was a visiting artist at the American Academy in Rome (Rome, Italy) and the GlogauAIR Artist Residency Program (Berlin, Germany). She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY and the Catskills and teaches as an adjunct professor of art at William Paterson University (Paterson, NJ), and New Jersey City University (Jersey City, NJ).

Magdalena Dukiewicz, born in Warsaw, Poland, is a visual artist based in New York. She graduated from Complutense University in Madrid (2013) and Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts (2008). Her work has been presented in solo and group exhibitions at GHOSTMACHINE Gallery, NY, NO Gallery, NY, The Immigrant Artist Biennial at NARS Foundation, Brooklyn, NY, SVA Flatiron Gallery, NY, Ivy Brown Gallery, NY The Border Project Space, NY, Bio BAT Art Space and Sci-Art Center, NY, and during the Berlin Art and Science Week. Dukiewicz has been awarded Pioneer Works art residency in Brooklyn, Nessa Cohen Grant for Sculpture, Polish Ministry of Culture and Heritage grant, Carlos Amorales Studio Residency in Mexico City, and the SVA’s Bio Art Residency in New York. She is slated to present her interactive sound installation at Wave Hill (The Bronx, NY) in the Fall of 2025.

Oasa DuVerney lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. DuVerney’s work reimagines elements from both the natural and urban, political and social landscapes as active sites in building solidarity for Black liberation; In a world where some people and places have been deemed not worthy of protection, the figures in these works are rendered with the care, compassion and understanding that the Black body deserves but isn't always afforded. Central to her artistic practice is often recalling events, people and movements that the artist believes is essential to progressing solidarity for the liberation of Black and all oppressed peoples, with a specific interest in resurfacing histories of social and political rebellion that Black women have been erased from. Selected exhibitions include: Flight Into Egypt, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY(2024); A World To Live in, Welancora Gallery, Brooklyn, NY(2022); Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine: Paradise Is One's Own Place, Weeksville Heritage Center, Brooklyn, NY (2021); Jon Gray of Ghetto Gastro Selects, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, NY, NY (2021) ;)2020 Women To Watch, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC (2020; Twenty Twenty, Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT(2020); BLACK POWER WAVE, BRIC, Brooklyn, NY (2019). Oasa DuVerney’s work is in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and The Metropolitan Museum Of Art. DuVerney Recieved her MFA from CUNY Hunter College, 2011 and BFA from SUNY Fashion Institute Of Technology, 2007

Jarrett Key (b. 1990, Seale, AL) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Jarrett grew up in rural Alabama and pursued their fine art practice in New York City after graduating from Brown University in 2013. They received their MFA in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2020. Jarrett is represented by 1969 Gallery in New York, where they had their first solo exhibition, From the Ground, Up in March 2022. In 2023, Key completed a 40ft mural commission for HMTX Industries in Norwalk, CT. One of their hair performance paintings was also the NYC Pride Grandstand Backdrop at the 2023 Pride Parade. Recent exhibitions include Full and Pure: Body, Materiality, Gender, curated by Mara Hassan, Green Family Art Foundation, Dallas, TX; Wade, Friends Indeed Gallery, San Francisco, CA; Freedom Dreams, Dorsky Museum of Art, New Paltz, NY; New England Triennial, deCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA; out, co-curated by Jarrett Key and Jon Key, 1969 Gallery, New York, NY; Young, Gifted and Black, The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and This is America, Kunstraum Potsdam, Berlin, Germany. Their work was also included in Untitled Miami Beach in 2021 and 2022. They were one of Forbes 30 under 30 for Art and Style 2020. Key’s work is in the collections of the the Green Family Art Foundation, HMTX Industries, New York Historical Society, The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection, the Columbus Museum, Brown University, RISD Special Collection, the Schomburg Center, the Museum of Modern Art Library, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art Library, among other institutions.

Germaine Koh is an artist and organizer whose work adapts familiar objects, everyday actions, and common spaces to create situations that look at the significance of communal experiences and the connections between people, technology, and natural systems. She is a 2023 winner of the Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts, was a 2023-24 Shadbolt Fellow at Simon Fraser University, and served as the City of Vancouver’s first Engineering Artist in Residence in 2018-20. Since 2024 she is an Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia.  Koh’s ongoing projects include Home Made Home, an initiative to build and advocate for alternative forms of housing; League, a participatory project using play as a form of creative practice. and the Hemlock Micro Studio artist residency focused on land-based and sustainability practices.

Greer Lankton (1958 – 1996) was one of the most significant artists to have taken part in the revolutionary art scene of New York City’s East Village during the 1980s. Lankton grew up in Park Forest, IL, where she graduated a year early from high school to attend the Art Institute of Chicago from 1975 to1978. That year she moved to New York City and received her BFA from Pratt Institute in 1981. By then Lankton had secured her reputation as a leading figure in the social ferment of NYC in the 1980s through her visceral doll sculpture, and now lesser-known performances and minimalist soft sculpture. Lankton’s exhibitions and performances included those at PS1, Club 57, Pyramid Club, Franklyn Furnace, Civilian Warfare Gallery, Hal Bromm and the Whitney Biennale, NYC. She also exhibited across the US and Europe, including the UK, Austria and the Venice Biennale, Italy. She exhibited her first full-scale installation artwork at the Mattress Factory Museum shortly before her untimely death in 1996.

Meryl Meisler was born in 1951 in the Bronx and raised on Long Island, New York. Inspired by the work of Diane Arbus and her father Jack Meisler's family photographs, Meryl took her first photography class at The University of Wisconsin-Madison. She moved to New York City in 1975 to study with Arbus' mentor, Lisette Model, and continued documenting her life and the world around her with a queer, quirky eye. Working as a freelance illustrator by day, Meryl frequented and photographed New York City's exploding nightlife scene. After retirement from over three decades teaching art in the New York City Public Schools, she started releasing large bodies of unseen photographs in exhibits and books. Street Walker is her fourth monograph. Meryl's photographs celebrate discos and strip clubs, city life and suburbia, her Jewish and LGBTQ+ extended communities, family, friends, strangers, adventures far away or close to home, and more. Sassy and comical, Meryl captures moments of pure joy at the center of daily hardships, plunging us into fascinating times that continue to this day. CLAMP, NYC, and Polka, Paris, represent her work.

Sara Messinger (b. 1998) is a New York-based photographer. She studied at NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study, earning a BA in History, Documentary, and Memory. Sara has completed special projects and portrait commissions for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and other publications. Her personal work delves into long-term stories that explore themes of gender, identity, and subcultures. Since 2021, she has collaborated with a group of teenagers in New York City, documenting their path to adulthood. This project has since expanded to Mexico City, fostering a cross-cultural dialogue about the diverse experiences of youth across borders.

Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone. Prince’s work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California (1993); “Fotos, Schilderijen, Objecten,” Museum Boymans–Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (1993); Haus der Kunst / Süddeutsche Zeitung, Munich (1996); Museum Haus Lange / Museum Haus Esters, Germany (1997); “4x4,” MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Vienna (2000); “Upstate,” MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Schindler House, Los Angeles (2000); Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001, traveled to Kunsthalle Zurich, Switzerland; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany); “American Dream, Collecting Richard Prince for 27 Years,” Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2004); “Canaries in the Coal Mine,” Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2006); “The Early Works,” Neuberger Museum of Art, New York (2007); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2007, traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; and Serpentine Gallery, London, through 2008); “American Prayer,” Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris (2011); “Prince/Picasso,” Picasso Museum, Spain (2012); and “It’s a Free Concert,” Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2014). Prince’s works are in the public collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; Museum of Fine Arts Collection, Boston; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Prince currently lives and works in New York.

Joseph Rodriguez was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. He began studying photography at the School of Visual Arts and went on to receive an Associate of Applied Science at New York City Technical College. He worked in the graphic arts industry before deciding to pursue photography further. In 1985 he graduated with a Photojournalism and Documentary Diploma from the International Center of Photography in New York. He went on to work for Black Star photo agency, and print and online news organizations like National Geographic, The New York Times Magazine, Mother Jones, Newsweek, New York Magazine, Esquire, Stern, BBC News and New America Media. Advertising Campaigns for Levi’s, AIG, Ikea. He has received awards and grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts, Artists' Fellowship, USC Annenberg Institute for Justice and Journalism, the Open Society Institute Justice Media Fellowship and Katrina Media Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation, Mother Jones International Fund for Documentary Photography, the Alicia Patterson Fellowship, Fund for Investigative Journalism, and the Konstnarsnamden Stipendium. He has been awarded Pictures of the Year by the National Press Photographers Association and the University of Missouri, in 1990, 1992, 1996 and 2002. He is the author of, Spanish Harlem, part of the “American Scene” series, by the National Museum of American Art/ D.A.P., as well as East Side Stories: Gang Life in East Los Angeles, Juvenile, Flesh Life Sex in Mexico City, and Still Here: Stories After Katrina, Powerhouse Books, Spanish HarlemEl Barrio in the 80s, Powerhouse Books, Taxi Journey Through My Windows 1977-1987, Powerhouse Books, LAPD 1994, The Artist Edition. He has taught at New York University Tisch School of the Arts and The International Center of Photography.

Calli Roche (b.1990, Nashville Tennessee) is an American artist and patternmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. Calli comes from a long line of dressmakers, tailors, and artisans from the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Much of their work is rooted in the ability to create a well-constructed object. Using practical skills, developed out of necessity, they create artifacts that bring their inner world to life. Frequently working with reclaimed objects, wood, skins, and textiles, the materials take on varied significance in each piece. Yet they often reference the fraught relationships between violence, identity, and sexuality. Calli draws from a legacy of artisanship, with much of the work serving both a very personal function while also challenging western distinctions between fine art and skilled craft.

Cindy Sherman was born in 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey; she lives and works in New York. Her ground-breaking photographs have interrogated themes around representation and identity in contemporary media for over four decades. Sherman first turned her attention to photography at Buffalo State College, where she studied art in the early 1970s, and came to prominence in the late 1970s with the Pictures Generation group. Utilising prosthetics, theatrical effects, photographic techniques and digital technologies, she has channeled and reconstructed familiar personas known to the collective psyche, often in unsettling ways, and has explored the more grotesque aspects of humanity through the lens of horror and the abject. Her later series have also touched on issues from class to aging.

Melissa Stern has worked in sculpture, photography and drawing for over twenty years, exhibiting throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.  Her exhibition, The Talking Cure has been traveling to institutions around the USA since 2012, including the Fuller Craft Museum, Brockton, MA (2022), Kranzberg Arts Center, St Louis, MO (2018), Weisman Art Museum, Minneapolis, MN (2016). Her work is featured in prominent corporate and museum collections including News Corporation, JP Morgan, Arkansas Art Center, American Museum of Ceramic Art (Pomona, CA), Racine Art Museum (Racine, WI), and the Weisman Art Museum (Minneapolis, MN). Stern also has served as a contributing writer or editor for Hyperallergic, Art Critical, and ArtSpiel.  She has covered major exhibitions on assignment throughout the world.  She served earlier as the principal art critic for The New York Press. She is a past Board Director of The Children’s Museum of the Arts in NYC, Watershed Center in Maine, and contributing curator of the Human Rights Film Festival from 2008-2015.

Trish Tillman is a visual artist who grew up in Washington, DC and now lives in New York City. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from James Madison University in Virginia, and studied at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom before pursuing her Master of Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts in New York. She is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation 2009 MFA Grant, The Fountainhead Residency in 2015, and the Visual Arts Center of Richmond Residency in 2018. Tillman is also a writer and an educator, and has been a professor and lecturer at Monmouth University, George Washington University, Rutgers University and the University of Maryland. She has been on panel discussions through ArtTable, Moore College of Art and Design, and Buffalo State College. Selected exhibitions include Asya Geisberg Gallery, NYC; Regina Rex, NYC; Emerson Dorsch Gallery, Miami, FL; HILDE, Los Angeles, CA; Present Company, NYC; Slag Gallery, NYC; Nudashank, Baltimore, MD; Civilian Art Projects, Washington, DC; Cydonia Gallery, Fort Worth, TX; and Jawahar Kala Kendra, Jaipur, RJ, India. She has been reviewed in ARTFORUM, Sculpture Magazine, Vogue, ArtFCity, The Observer, and Artsy Magazine. Tillman is represented by Asya Geisberg Gallery in New York City.

Image: Magdalena Dukiewicz, Object#15, 2023. Artist’s hair, found object, 10”x10”x1.5.” Courtesy of the artist.