MORE IS MORE: Visual Richness in Contemporary Art
October 2, 2021 - March 27, 2022
This exhibition aims to delight our visitors, rewarding those who observe closely and look again. Enjoy the rich patterning, ornate surfaces, and surprising details.
The artists in this exhibition add unexpected twists to historical styles and techniques. For example, refined Renaissance oil paintings on panel, robust Baroque portraits, and 19th-century miniatures take on new forms. Therefore, we’ve presented this show in salon-style hangings, the practice of filling entire walls with art.
We hope through this exhibition you gain an appreciation of the breadth of craft of artists working today.
Explore the artists featured in the exhibition.
Help us do better.
Ask us about the collection.
Torey Akers
Torey Akers is an artist and writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art and is a current Masters candidate at Hunter College for Creative Nonfiction. She has attended residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Craft, MASS MoCA, and Arts, Letters & Numbers, and shown her work at a variety of venues throughout the country, including A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn and White Brick Gallery in Detroit.
Elham Bayati has an MFA in Visual Art from Columbus College of Art & Design. She previously earned an MA in Painting from the University of Art in Tehran, Iran. Her works are about her vision as an Iranian woman, her sense of reality, and identity. She paints the many flowers that grew even though patriarchal society tried to cut them. They reflect the floral patterns that remind her of her grandmother’s scarf, and her mother’s dress-making fabrics. These patterns signify the beauty of a peaceful point in the middle of the dark life of contemporary Iran. In her works, she uses fabrics, collage, and different types of printing, and combines (layers) her drawings with prints and patterns with figures of women. She strives to illustrate a rich, colorful culture that has been faded by the dark shade of sadness.
Gavin Benjamin is a multifaceted artist who combines original analog photography and appropriated images with collage, paint, and varnish to create rich and luxurious works that call back to baroque traditions while incorporating elements of current culture to provoke, critique, and explore. Born in Guyana, South America and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Benjamin received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. During this time, he worked as an interned for the legendary portrait photographer, Arnold Newman. Benjamin also worked as black and white and color printer at LTI and Baboo color labs. From there, he went on to work at Edge Reps and Exposure NY, agencies representing commercial and advertising photographers, prop stylists, and hair and makeup artists. After Exposure NY, he worked as a freelance production coordinator/photo editor with stints at Kenneth Cole productions, Esquire Magazine, Hachette Filipacchi Media, and Good Housekeeping magazine.
Mahwish Chishty combines new media and conceptual work with materials and techniques of South Asian art and craft traditions. Her work has been exhibited at more than sixty galleries and museums around the world. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and other fellowships and awards. Chishty is Assistant Professor in the Department of Art at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a BFA with a concentration in miniature painting from the National College of Arts in Lahore, Pakistan and an MFA in studio arts from the University of Maryland in College Park.
Kristen Cliffel is a sculptor currently active in Cleveland, Ohio. Her ceramic works focus on domesticity and rising a family and are pulled from her own experiences as a wife and mother. In her pieces you will see crowns, animals, flowers, and other imagery that have a fairytale quality to it. Cliffel graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 1990 with a BFA in Ceramics, and has completed residencies at The Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada, and the Kohler Company in Wisconsin. Cliffel has given workshops at the Penland School of Crafts as well as Anderson Ranch Arts Center and the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. She has been awarded a Creative Workforce Fellowship from the Cuyahoga Partnership for Arts and Culture, has received several Ohio Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowships, and has taught ceramics in Wisconsin, Colorado, and Ohio. In 2016, Cliffel was awarded the Cleveland Arts Prize for mid-career artist in the visual arts. Cliffel currently teaches sculpture and ceramics at a grade school in Ohio, as well as giving workshops at universities and colleges across the country. Her work is in numerous collections, including the Akron Art Museum in Ohio, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts in Texas, and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arizona, among others.
Jay Constantine was born in Cleveland, Ohio and received a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Northern Illinois University. After briefly living in Chicago, he moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan to take a full time teaching position at Kendall College of Art and Design. As a full professor of painting, he have taught at Kendall for 38 years and was chair of the Kendall Fine Art Program and the Painting Program for a decade. As chair, he was instrumental in creating the undergraduate painting major and the MFA in Painting. His work is currently being represented by the on-line gallery Art-Commerce at 1stdibs. He has also shown at Brenda Taylor Gallery in the Chelsea Gallery district in New York and at Woodward Gallery in New York City. Also, his work was reproduced in the fall 2012 Direct Art Magazine vol. 19 published by Barnes and Noble, and most recently, in Studio Visit Magazine. He has received grants from Arts Midwest/Regional NEA, Art Serve Michigan, the Michigan Council for the Arts, the Arts Foundation of Michigan and I served as an Artist -in-Residence at the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art. He is also included in the NEA Artist Fellowship Archive at the Smithsonian Institute. He has had solo shows at many museums, art centers, alternative spaces and commercial galleries. His work is included in public collections such as the Grand Valley State University permanent collection, the Grand Rapids Art Museum, the Muskegon Community College collection, the Kalamazoo Institute of Art and Pratt Graphics Center as well as private collections.
Niki Crock
Nicki Crock is a conceptual artist investigating the ideas of home and community. Ignited by an interest in location and movement kindled by her nomadic youth, she makes art about domestic spaces, transition and the search for home. Having settled for the time being in Columbus, Ohio where she completed her MFA at the Columbus College for Art and Design, she makes art in varied mediums, including sculpture, painting, and installation, using both found and constructed materials. Crock’s award winning work has been shown nationally and internationally. She is the co-founder and managing member of the artist group French Leave Collective.
Christian Faur’s creative work is well known in the Columbus area, where he has had several solo and group shows over the past 20 years. He received his from the University of Danube (Kerns) in Austria and currently holds the position as Director of Collaborative Technologies at Denison University where he teaches courses in Animation and New Media. Faur’s work has been featured on PBS and American Craft Magazine. His work has been selected for display in Prague through “Arts in Embassies” and the Daejeon Museum of Art in South Korea. Faur was recently awarded the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award for 2021.
April Felipe received her BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University and her MFA in Ceramics from Ohio University. Felipe worked at Greenwich House Pottery, taught at Ohio State University and Ohio University. In 2017, she was named one of Ceramic Monthly’s Emerging Artist and began a ceramic jewelry line babyGrapes Designs. She has participated in residencies at Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and The Archie Bray Foundation. Felipe is a Co-Founder of TheColorNetwork.org. She has set down roots in Albany, Ohio with a home studio.
Trey D. Gehring
Trey D. Gehring uses a variety of textile techniques, combining modern production technology with traditional methods. Of note are his highly decorative works woven on a digitally assisted jacquard loom, which exemplify this technological juxtaposition. Gehring’s works explore themes of identity, gender, masculinity, and queerness. Earning his bachelor’s and master’s in Fine Art degrees at Kent State University, Gehring studied closely under Janice Lessman-Moss, a pioneer in creating art with digital weaving. Gehring has shown his work nationally and internationally. He was born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and currently resides in Kent, Ohio.
Samantha Giesige
Samantha Giesige born and blooming in Ohio. A childhood inclination to combine meticulous mark-making, potent color story, and perception of harmony was bolstered by learning craftsmanship and endurance attending Columbus College of Art and Design.
Terence Hammonds lives and works in Cincinnati, Ohio. Printmaker, Terence Hammonds received a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in conjunction with Tufts University. His work is informed and inspired by the struggles and determination of African-Americans seeking equality during the civil rights movement of the 60s and fuses imagery from that era with soul, funk, rap and punk music. Hammonds appropriates imagery from various movements and civil rights history and combines them with decorative motifs and patterns that adorn, memorialize and abstract histories of racial identity in America.
Mark Howard
Cleveland-based artist Mark Howard is known for his large-scale murals and installations, including one at Cleveland Hopkins Airport. Trained in both a painter and fibers at Cleveland Institute of Art, his works express a rhythmic fluidity and colorful vibrance. He often employs paper cuts in his process, often early on to plan his compositions.
Quinn Alexandria Hunter
Quinn Alexandria Hunter is a sculptor and performance artist from North Carolina who completed her MFA work at Ohio University (2020). She works primarily with hair and the African American female body as material. Hunter is interested in the erasure of history from spaces and how the contemporary uses of space impacts the way we as a culture see the past. Her work negotiates between the self and the world. Hunter’s practice is contending with the false narratives of a romanticized past and interrupting them by laying a truth next to them. Quinn is a recipient of the I. Hollis Parry/Ann Parry Billman Award (2019), a 2020 Chautauqua artist resident, and the 2020-2021 Wayne state university artist-in-residence.
Ronald Jackson studied Architecture at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo, California before joining the US Army. He served 21 plus years in the Army, retiring in 2014. He sees life as a continual experience of discovery. Contrasting things that are apparent or taught with personal discoveries creates a perspective that is unique to every individual. Being mainly a figurative artist, he seeks to capture intimate settings to use as a gateway to ponder the complexities of the human experience, as well as the society that influences them. A comprehensive catalog of unique experiences is veiled behind every silent gaze of human expression. His goal is to create work that is visually poetic; aiming to create an interactive experience in which the viewer is compelled to ponder possibilities that are likely reflections of their own experiences.
Ryan W. Kelly is an Associate Professor of Art at Western Washington University. He holds a BFA in Ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute, and an MFA from The Ohio State University. He was previously an Artist in Residence at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia where he was a recipient of an Independence Foundation Fellowship and Co-founder of Practice Gallery.
Amber Kempthorn explores time and nostalgia through drawing. She is a graduate of Hiram College, the Maryland Institute College of Art, and the Cranbrook Academy of Art where she received her MFA in Sculpture in 2009. Her work has been exhibited regionally and across the U.S. and was included in the inaugural Front International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art. In 2019 she received an Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award and a Knight Arts Challenge Akron grant for her upcoming animation project visually translating Benjamin Britten’s classical work, “Four Sea Interludes,” in collaboration with the Akron Symphony Orchestra. She holds a Lecturer position in the Visual Arts Department at the Cleveland Institute of Art. She lives and works in Hiram, Ohio.
Photo credit: Amber Ford
Caitlin Keogh
Caitlin Keogh (b. 1982 in Anchorage, Alaska) lives and works in New York. Keogh recently completed a mural in the city of Holbaek, Denmark in conjunction with Holbaek Art. Her paintings are currently included in New Time: Art and Feminisms in the 21st Century at BAMPFA, Berkeley, CA. Keogh participated in Art Basel Parcours 2019, Basel, Switzerland and has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA; Melas Papadopoulos, Athens, Greece; and MoMA PS1, Long Island City, NY. She has also exhibited at MoMA Warsaw, Poland; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Künstlerhaus Bremen, Germany; and the Queens Museum, Queens, NY. Her work is represented in the collections of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Cornell Fine Arts Museum in Winter Park, Florida.
Loraine Lynn is currently based in Toledo, Ohio. She has earned degrees from the Cleveland Institute of Art and Bowling Green State University in Glass, Sculpture, and Three-dimensional Studies. She has exhibited work nationally and internationally in South Korea, Ireland, and Italy. She has been a featured artist at the Toledo Museum of Art’s Glass Pavilion and has been awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center.
Renluka Maharaj was born in Trinidad and Tobago in 1976 and works between Colorado, New York City and Trinidad. Ms. Maharaj attended the University of Colorado, Boulder where she earned her BFA in 2015 and her MFA at The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. She has received numerous awards including Martha Kate Thomas Fund, the Presidential Scholarship at Anderson Ranch Center, and the Barbara De Genevieve Scholarship. Her works are in institutional collections including The Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Joan Flasch artist book collection, Los Angeles Center for Digital Art, special collections at the University of Colorado, Boulder as well as numerous private collections. Her work has been recognized with awards including fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Fountainhead Residency, Virginia Center for Creative Arts and Ankhlave Garden Project as well as The Golden Art Foundation and the McColl Art Center Residency in North Carolina. She will also be attending a yearlong residency at Project for Empty Spaces in Newark, New Jersey in 2022. Most recently, her work has been published in the second volume of Coolitude co-authored by Khal Thorabully and Marina Carter, an amazing volume of stories, poems and visual art which addresses Indian indentureship. Ms. Maharaj will be installing her first public work in the summer of 2021 at the Queens Botanical Gardens in NY which will also include an indoor exhibition in 2022. She is also preparing for a solo in Denver that year. Selected shows include: Unraveled, Restructured, Revealed at the Trout Museum of Art, in Appleton, Wisconsin; Encounters, at the Jamaica Arts Center, Queens, NY; Material Intentions FLXST Gallery Chicago; Right to Herself, Lincoln Center Gallery, Colorado; In The Fold, Rule Gallery, Colorado; The New Unnatural, Ukranian Institute of Modern Art, Chicago; On Violence, Pulse Art Fair, Miami Beach; Contemporary Photography Site Gallery Brooklyn, NY and EXPO Chicago 2017; Pelting Mangoes, Artworks Gallery, Colorado; Pelting Mangoes FLXST Gallery, Chicago and Home Is A Place Called Home,Rule Gallery, Denver Colorado.
Greg Martin is a Cleveland, Ohio based artist who has worked in sculpture, painting, mixed-media and photography since graduating in 1989 from the Cleveland Institute of Art. Martin’s work has been featured in a wide variety of solo and group exhibitions and his work is widely collected. Martin is a 2018 recipient of the Ohio Arts Council Individual Excellence Award.
For over twenty-five years, Liz Maugans has organized one-person and thematic exhibitions featuring regional, national and internationally known artists. Her curatorial specialization is her devotion to emerging art, social justice and local experimental practices that broaden access through social networks, and community-building initiatives. An advocate for artists and the visual arts, Maugans has served as a consultant for numerous community development organizations and art business start-ups. Her passion for cross-disciplinary partnerships includes collaborations with the North Shore Federation of Labor, The AIDS Taskforce of Greater Cleveland, Community Assessment and Treatment Services, Gordon Square Arts District, and the Support for Artist Planning Team through Cuyahoga Arts and Culture. She teaches printmaking and drawing as an adjunct intermittently at the Cleveland Institute of Art and has served on the Board of several community based arts organizations.
Emily Moores is an installation artist living and working in Cincinnati, Ohio. Moores was a recipient of the Ohio Cultural Arts Individual Artist Award, the Summerfair Individual Artist Grant, and the ArtPrize Seed Grant. She was selected as one of the Women to Watch 2020 by the Ohio Arts Council’s Riffe Gallery in collaboration with the Ohio Advisory Group of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Moores earned her MFA in 2014 from the University of Cincinnati and her BFA in 2008 from the Cleveland Institute of Art.
Liz Morrison
Liz Morrison received her MFA in New Projects and Certificate of College Art Instruction from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2013 and her BA in Fine Art from Oberlin College in 2008. For her thesis, she fabricated a planetarium to project a replica of the night sky, sprinkled with constellations of her one-word poetry. She has continued to incorporate creative writing into her visual art designs and collaborative projects. Recent exhibitions include Vessel Verses at Blockfort Gallery in 2020 and Subcutaneum at Gallery 22 in 2019. She has taught fine arts as an adjunct professor at CCAD and in community art classes. She owns and operates Painted Bouquet, a business that offers custom artwork of wedding flower arrangements. She has served on the board of the Ohio Arts League and is an active member of her arts collective, French Leave.
Jenniffer Omaitz
Jenniffer Omaitz lives in Kent, Ohio and works in Kent and Cleveland. She holds an MFA in painting from Kent State University and a BFA (2009) in painting from the Cleveland Institute of Art (2002). Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at The Sculpture Center, Cleveland; Sandy Carson Gallery, Denver; and Kent State University, Hinterland, Denver, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Cleveland. Her work was also featured at the 2010 Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Fresh Paint at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati (2017), CAN Triennial in Cleveland 2018 and was the recipient of a 2017 fellowship residency with the Akron Soul Train. In 2019, Omaitz was awarded an Individual Excellence Award through the Ohio Arts Council.
Joann Quiñonesis a Mixed Media artist who creates figurative work in order to explore Afro-Latinx identity. She was selected an Emerging Artist of 2020 by Ceramics Monthly, was a Manifest Gallery Annual Prize Finalist, and received an Honorable Mention for the James Renwick Alliance Chrysalis Award. Her work has been shown nationally, including in the 2020 NCECA Annual Exhibition, “The Burdens of History.” She has an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. She currently is an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Alfred University, NY.
Kyla Zoe Rafert is a painter and printmaker living in central Ohio. She creates highly detailed ahistorical tableaus that feature young women and girls in surrealistic, psychologically potent scenes. Her works are ultimately a treatise on the multiple, sometimes conflicting expectations society has and has had for women and girls, and the often confusing transition from girlhood to adulthood. Her love-hate relationship with feminine ideals is a foundational theme of her work. Rafert is the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards and her work has received national recognition by numerous publications including Create Magazine, New American Paintings, and American Art Collector.
With a career that launched from street art and morphed into a studio-based practice, self-taught artist Jason REVOK has continuously challenged creative and legislative boundaries. Through murals, paintings, and assemblages of urban decay, his recognizable artistic voice brings forth the minimalist art movement of the 1960s, yet REVOK adds a contemporary technique. The use of self-made tools and repetitive motions manifests artwork that is often labor-intensive and performative. REVOK has manufactured multiple tools and techniques to render his definitive works, including an instrument that allows him to spray eight different cans at once. His inventiveness and resourcefulness gives him the capacity to move beyond the limitations of the human body. Through painting multiple lines simultaneously, unconventional mark-making creates a synergy of imperfection, ultimately developing into a pattern. REVOK intentionally introduces gestural glitches that disrupt the type of exacting patterns seen at the height of Minimalism, reminding us that there is always a human being behind the work. REVOK has exhibited in multiple exhibition and gallery spaces including the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles and the Pasadena Museum of Contemporary Art. His work has also been exhibited internationally, in Europe and the Middle East, and is in a number of important private collections worldwide
Jason REVOK in the studio. Photo by Bre’Ann White. Image courtesy of the artist and Library Street Collective
Katy Richardscreates fleshy oil paintings that are concerned with the materiality of paint as well as the physicality of the human body. Her work is in the Progressive Art Collection, and many other private and public collections. Richards teaches painting and drawing at Kent State University and received a BFA from The Cleveland Institute of Art and a MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art.
Josie Love Roebuck (b. 1995) is an interdisciplinary artist from Chattanooga, Tennessee. She received her BFA with an emphasis in drawing and painting, from the University of Georgia (2019), and received her MFA from the University of Cincinnati (2021). Roebuck’s process addresses the contemporary complexity of identifying as biracial through symbolizing pain and triumph, exclusion, and acceptance. The act of Roebuck sewing together portraits has allowed her canvas to become her paper and her needle to become her pen, in order for Roebuck to draw upon the past and present to convey a story of her experiences and her family’s experiences. She has exhibited her work at Kunsthalle Krems Art Museum (AUT) forthcoming, Akron Art Museum (OH) forthcoming, Denny Dimin Gallery (NY) forthcoming, Roy G Biv (OH), Christie’s at Rockefeller Plaza (NY), NADA House (NY), LatchKey Gallery (NY), Contemporary Arts Center (OH), Made in Camp (OH), FRIGID Gallery (OH), Portrait Society Gallery (WI), Dutoit Gallery (OH), Untitled Art Fair with Denny Dimin Gallery (NYC/online), Yeiser Art Center Gallery (KY), Site: Brooklyn Gallery (NYC), BSB Gallery (NJ/online), Tabula Rosa (OH), Lupin Gallery (GA), Strohl Art Center (NY), and Fowler-Kellogg Gallery (NY).
Adrienne Slane
Adrienne Slane creates hand-cut collages from old illustrations and antique and decorative papers. She combines images of plants, insects, animals, shells, planets, and human anatomy whose diverse sources range from the 1500s to mid-1900s. The subject matter and composition of Slane’s work is inspired by the curiosity cabinet, traditional women’s craft such as folk quilts and paper silhouettes, and Christian and Eastern iconography. Her collages encourage wonder and appreciation of nature in a time when it faces great challenges caused by humans. Slane graduated from the Cleveland Institute of Art in 2010 and resides in rural Ohio.
Nick Stull received his BFA from Ohio Wesleyan University with a concentration in painting, drawing, and sculpture. His experimental portraiture has been exhibited locally, regionally, and nationally and he is represented by The Red Arrow Gallery in Nashville, Tennessee. Recent solo exhibitions include: “Vessel Verses” at Blockfort Gallery, Columbus, OH (2020); “Subcutaneous” at Gallery 22, Delaware, OH (2019); “All the Water We Have is All the Water We Have Ever Had” at Red Arrow Gallery, Nashville, TN (2017); and “Lap Lanes Closed for H2O Fit Club” at 934 Gallery, Columbus, OH (2016). Nick also produces a variety of large-scale murals, custom portraiture, and branding & design projects. Previous commission and brand partners include: Germain Cars, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Shadow Box Theatre, Aloft & Marriot Hotels, and Freigeist Brewery. Nick currently works as an exhibit designer at The Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, OH where he has overseen the design and installation of numerous exhibitions, including: “Latoya Ruby Frasier: The Last Cruze (2020), “Ann Hamilton: When an Object Reaches for Your Hand” (2019), “William Kentridge: The Refusal of Time” (2018), among many others. Past positions included: Co-Owner and Gallery Director of 83 Gallery and Gallery Director of Mac Worthington Gallery. Nick also serves on the board for The Ross Museum at Ohio Wesleyan University.
Emily Sullivan Smith is an Associate Professor and Foundations Coordinator at the University of Dayton’s Department of Art and Design. Her studio practice is interdisciplinary including sculpture and printmaking, focusing on the effects of human behavior on the natural world. Recent exhibitions include; solo exhibitions, Universe, at the Springfield art Museum in Springfield, OH and W O/A NDER at ArtLink Gallery in Fort Wayne, IN. Group shows including, Earth Matters at Watermark Arts Center in Bemidji MN where her work was awarded a juror’s prize, 4th Annual Hand Pulled Prints: The Current Practice in Printmaking at Site : Brooklyn in Brooklyn, NY, Natural Expressions and Duo / Trio at the Riffe Gallery in Columbus and Heavy Metal at the Akron Art Museum in Akron, OH. Her work is included in the collection of Sherwin Williams Global Headquarters in Cleveland, OH and the Lincoln Financial Group in Fort Wayne, IN. Sullivan Smith served on the board of Integrative Teaching International, has been featured on the Podcast, Positive Space, and views both art making and teaching as an all-encompassing and integrative human experience.
April Sunami is an award-winning mixed-media painter, muralist, and installation artist. Sunami’s work has been exhibited internationally, including at the National Theatre in Accra, Ghana, and during the Cuba Biennale in Mantanzas, Cuba. Her work has been featured in various juried group exhibits, galleries, and museums including the Columbus Museum of Art, the National African American Museum and Cultural Center, and a solo exhibit at the Southern Ohio Museum in Portsmouth, Ohio. Her work is also represented in private, corporate and public collections throughout the United States.
Dalena Tran is a media artist. Her research-based practice reinterprets applications of traditional art forms with emerging digital technologies through hybrid mediations. Engaging various media forms as semiotic storytelling, she investigates the everyday confluences of language and expression; presence and immateriality; voyeurism and surveillance; urbanism and hegemony; play and pause. Tran’s work has been featured at Assembly Point, STRP, O FLUXO, Adult Swim, Nowness, and Gallery Platform LA; with audiovisual performances at New Forms Festival, MoMA PS1, & ICA London. More recently, Dalena held a visiting professorship at Ohio State University.
Hannah Zimmerman is an artist and educator based in Cincinnati, Ohio. She earned her MFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and a BFA and BS in Art Education from Miami University. In 2020, she was awarded a 10-month artist residency at Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, which culminated with a solo exhibition of her work in the summer of 2021. Her work has been shown regionally and nationally and she is currently in her seventh year of teaching visual arts at a public high school.
Rufai Zakari
Rufai Zakari (b.1990) is based between Accra and Bawku. He completed his apprenticeship under Mozzay, a senior artist in Nima, Accra. In 2011, Rufai Zakari graduated from the Ghanatta College of Art and Design. In his work, Zakari examines consumerism, environmental pollution, labor, trade, and the perils of industrialization in contemporary Ghanian Society. The founder of Rujab Eco-Art Foundation in his hometown of Bawku, Rufai Zakari bases his practice on the recycling of the waste in the streets of Ghana. After decades of tribal conflict which took countless lives and left the city in ruins, Zakari is now looking to the future with optimism and a strong ambition to rebuild what has been lost, while inspiring hope in his community.