Tommy Coleman is a Florida grown, Brooklyn based interdisciplinary Artist, Designer, and Educator who produces masterfully crafted objects, and staunchly sincere albeit witty images. Coleman’s practice implores investigations of honesty and intimacy while observing the perceptional break downs that accompany anxiety and identity in the contemporary climate- all done by way of navigating nuances of control and what is considered permissible within the internal and external boundaries of public and private space. His work has been exhibited and published internationally through institutions like The Museum of Art and Design, The Atlanta Contemporary, Homesession, and UCLA.
KCJ Szwedzinski was born in Charleston, South Carolina, and grew up in New England and South Florida before moving to Jacksonville, where she received her Bachelor of Arts degree in Printmaking and Art History at the University of North Florida. She received her Master ofFine Arts from the University of Louisville in Kentucky with a concentration in sculpture and glass. Her recent work investigates the intersection of Jewish legacy and lived experience - asking questions about what we choose to embody, embrace, or deny from our inherited legacies. She was recently the 2018 recipient of the Mary Alice Hadley Prize for Visual Art and spent part of the year traveling to do research at the Holocaust Center and The Jewish Contemporary Museum in San Francisco. She exhibits her work regularly across the country and recently received merit and juror awards for the 10 x 10 x 10 show in Tieton, Washington and The Blue Grass Biennial in Morehead, Kentucky. Recent exhibitions include In the Hot Seat at KMAC Museum in Louisville, KY and the Glass Art Society + Refract NW Member Showcase at Gallery Mack in Seattle. She has studied and assisted at Penland School of Craft and Pilchuck Glass School and has been an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Upcoming, she will be an artist in residence at the Chulitna Research Institute in Alaska. KCJ currently lives and works in Seattle, Washington.
Rachel Libeskind is a multi-disciplinary artist, often merging her installations and performances with her studio practice. Born in Milan and raised in Berlin, Libeskind is now based between New York and Berlin, Germany. She holds a B.A. with honors from Harvard University.
An artist who is constantly pushing the boundaries of available mediums Libeskind draws inspiration from themes both personal and public, creating a body of work that intelligently marries historical and contemporary notions of identity, gender, re-appropriation and reproduction, creating a situation where social commentary and materiality go side by side.
Libeskind has presented solo exhibitions, installations and performances at Center for Jewish History, New York; Watermill Center, Long Island; Pioneer Works, Brooklyn; Bombay Beach Biennale; and Mana Contemporary, Miami. She has also been included in group exhibitions at institutions such as ZKM Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe; Alabama Contemporary Art Center, Mobile; Carpenter Center at Harvard University, Cambridge; and National Media Arts Festival of Lithuania, Vilnius. She has been awarded residencies and fellowships at Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology, Kaneohe; The Watermill Center, Long Island; and The Scuola di Grafica, Venice, Italy.
Carl Joe Williams is a contemporary African American artist known for his multimedia paintings , sculpture , installations , and interdisciplinary works Williams creates paintings and painted sculpture from found objects. He describes his works as “symphonies of colors” that present a powerful visual experience. Williams’ installation, Journeys, was featured at the Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport Atlanta, GA in 2002. And his Sculptural Trees public art installation in Metairie, Louisiana was described as reminiscent of “lollipops in a Candyland forest,” with their custom acrylic light boxes attached to crepe myrtles.
Williams is one of the founders of Blights Out, a Creative Capital supported project in New Orleans along with artists Lisa Sigal and Imani Jacqueline Brown. Blights Out is a community- and artist-led initiative to activate agency in neighborhood development. This initiative was initiated as part of Prospect New Orleans, the largest biennial of international contemporary art in the U.S.
His visual interpretations are enhanced by his vision of art and music as extensions of one another. An accomplished musician as well as a visual artist, Williams incorporates his musical compositions into videos and installations. Found objects play an important role in Williams’s works by becoming elements a narrative continuum that addresses societal and historical concerns.
Williams attended the New Orleans Center for Creative Art, NOCCA where he received formal training. Williams continued his studies at Atlanta College of Art earning his BFA.
Williams is a founding member of Level Artist Collective, which includes artists Ana Hernandez, Horton Humble, Rontherin Ratliff, and John Isiah Walton.
Williams has had a variety of exhibitions including at the George Ohr-O'Keefe Museum Of Art in Biloxi, Mississippi; at Crystal Bridges in Bentonville, Arkansas; at Convergence: [email protected] Exhibition in conjunction with Prospect 3+ New Orleans, Curated by Deborah Willis and Sponsored by the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans Museum of Art, Ohr-O'Keefe Museum Of Art, at McKenna Museum of African American Art, Hammonds House Galleries, Atlanta, GA; permanent public art installations in Atlanta at Sweet Auburn Curb Market (as part of 1996 Summer Olympics) and at the Washington Park Tennis Center. In 2013 he was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Center NOLA Studio Artist Residence Program. His work is included in the Crystal Bridges Collection.
2020 exhibitions include PerSister Incarcerated Women of Louisiana at Ford Foundation NYC, MOCA Jacksonville Project Atrium, Arthur Roger Art Gallery-Art in the Time of Empathy and Gryder Gallery The Effect of Color
UPCOMING VISITING ARTISTS
David Bordett (b. 1991) grew up in an 18th century log home in Virginia’s Appalachian Mountains surrounded by his father’s eclectic collections of dubious provenance acquired at farm house estate sale including primitive instruments, tin toys, and a vertebrae bone from a wale allegedly hunted by the Essex, the ship fictionalized in the book Moby Dick. He received his BFA from the Department of Sculpture and Extended Media at VCU in 2014, and shortly thereafter moved to New Orleans to continue his practice. Following a flood in the Summer of 2017 that severely damaged the contents of his studio he moved to Brooklyn, New York where he has lived and worked since. His work invokes the visual language of road side attractions, regional music, and the roll of the journey in the collective imagination fused with the nuances of searching and longing, or witnessing something hidden in experience. Bordett has been included in exhibitions at the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, the Contemporary Art Center, and The Front Gallery in New Orleans, Monte Vista Projects in Los Angeles, Little Berlin in Philadelphia, and Orgy Park in Brooklyn. He anticipates receiving his MFA from the Sculpture Department at Yale in 2023.
Natalie Ball was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. She has a Bachelor’s degree with a double major in Ethnic Studies and Art from the University of Oregon. She furthered her education in New Zealand at Massey University where she attained her Master’s degree, focusing on Indigenous contemporary art. Ball then relocated to her ancestral homelands to raise her three children. Her work has been shown nationally and internationally, including the Half Gallery, NY; Vancouver Art Gallery, BC; Blum & Poe, LA; Portland Art Museum, OR; Gagosian, NY; Seattle Art Museum, WA; Almine Rech Gallery, FR; and SculptureCenter, NY. Natalie attained her M.F.A. degree in Painting & Printmaking at Yale School of Art in 2018.
Christopher K. Ho (b. Hong Kong) is a speculative artist based in New York, Hong Kong, and Telluride, Colorado. He is known for materially exquisite objects that draw from learned material about, and lived encounters with, power and otherness in an unevenly decolonized, increasingly networked world. He has exhibited at, among other venues, the Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, UCCA Beijing, Asia Society Hong Kong, the Guangdong Times Museum, ParaSite, Storm King, the Queens Museum, the Incheon Biennial, and the Busan Bienniale. He is currently editing an anthology with curator Daisy Nam titled Best! Letters from Asian Americans in the arts. The New York Times, South China Morning Post, Artforum, Art Asia Pacific, Yishu, Frieze, LEAP, RanDian, Art in America, Modern Painters, Hyperallergic, and Art Review have featured his work.
BFA, The Atlanta College of Art, 1991
Tony Rodrigues’ work mostly involves painting, but also includes drawing, printmaking, photography, collage and multimedia combinations. Tony has woven a rich tapestry of appropriated imagery culled from the chronicles of the 20th century such as vintage textbooks, postcards and snapshots. He repurposes and reshapes these images into scenarios and vignettes that subtly convey feelings ranging from quiet levity to somber introspection. There is often an open-ended quality in the work that offers the viewer some mystery to contemplate. While Rodrigues’ style has evolved over the years, there is a sentiment and awareness throughout his work that remains his own and is easily recognizable to those that are familiar with his art. His confident and adroit use of materials as well as his selection and juxtaposition of imagery lends a timeless quality to his work. Rodrigues’ recent exhibitions include Frail History & Future Regrets (When the Past Was What It Used To Be) a solo exhibition at University of North Florida Gallery and 1:1, a group exhibition, at The Front, New Orleans Louisiana.
Rodrigues is Cathedral Arts Project’s Artist in Residence at the John E. Goodman Pretrial Detention Facility in Jacksonville, Florida, where for over twenty years he has instructed juvenile inmates facing criminal prosecution as adults, and has been the recipient of numerous grants and support for this work, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Christina Tsantekidou is a visual artist based in Berlin, Germany. Her practice employs a wide
range of materials to address complex histories of cultural identity and universal themes of human nature. Focusing on social, political, and psychological subject matter, she explores the nature of our existence, where reflections on circumstances of the past bring an awareness of the present.
In many works, she explores historical narratives of which little may be known or where facts are opaque, misconstrued, or disputed. As these stories can frequently be lost to time, Tsantekidou gives voice to the often-unheard protagonists, and sheds light on accepted truths and denied positions present in these particular conditions. Whether autobiographical, collected from firsthand accounts, or originating through research, Tsantekidou’s works find continuity between these diverse themes and subjects, allowing for the consideration of our complex, intertwined histories. Her most recent body of work and research focuses on the Greek Genocide. As a consequence of political and social upheaval in Anatolia (Asia Minor) during and after World War I, the indigenous Pontic Greeks were systematically and methodically forced from their homeland by the Ottoman Turk government, dispersed to other countries both near and far. As many attempted to “return” to what we now know as modern Greece, the situation became highly volatile for many reasons. As is common both then as well as today, an influx of individuals to a particular place can also bring unwarranted fear, prejudice, and discrimination.
These works have been shown in exhibitions such as Common Ground (Berlin, Germany, 2019), Thresholds of Life (Nicosia, Cyrpus, 2019), and Perpetual Lines (Lahti, Finland, 2018).
Christina Tsantekidou was born in 1987 in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), Russia, and grew up in Thessaloniki, Greece. She lives and works in Berlin.
instagram: christina_tsantekidou
Malcolm Jackson (b. 1993) is an artist and street photographer born in Jacksonville, Florida. Malcolm uses photography as a universal language to study the daily nuances of life in the 21st century. His work has been featured in The New York Times, GQ, Bloomberg, People Magazine, and ESPN.
