Past, Present, Future VII

Supermrin is an Indian artist working at the intersections of architecture, art, and design. Through research-led, speculative, and site-specific interventions, she constructs space as a living host and embodied nurturance. She is interested in conceptions of reality, pleasure, and nature within eastern practices. Supermrin is a Visiting Scholar at Pratt GAUD, and an Assistant Professor of Fines Arts at the University of Cincinnati. She is the founder of Streetlight, a critical spatial laboratory for decolonizing design within public space. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale Italian Virtual Pavilion, Governors Island, the Headlands Center for the Arts, the San Francisco Mint, the First Presbyterian Church of New York, ChaShaMa, and the India Habitat Center.

Jessica Fertonani Cooke is a Brazilian socio-political researcher, indigenous activist and multidisciplinary artist. She completed her Absolvent in fine arts at the Art University of Berlin (UdK) and her MFA at the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work utilizes performance, video and installation to speak of the 3rd place of mixed bloodedness and the concept of ‘border-crossing’ through landscapes, politics, mythology, ancestry, history and the people of a specific territory. Concerned primarily with the decolonial movement of the Americas she has participated in selected exhibitions, such as, the San Francisco International Art Festival (SFIAF), Discovery Art Fair in Frankfurt, the 55 project in Miami and Nars Foundation in Brooklyn. As co-creator and performer she have participated of the Pratt SoA at Governor’s Island, NY with Streetlight, Backslash performance festival in Zürich with Jorge Raka, the Taos Paseo Festival with Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s La Pocha Nostra, The Lab in San Francisco with Cristobal Martinez and Guillermo Galindo and for Agora Collective for the Month of Performance Art festival in Berlin, Germany. Fertonani-Cooke is currently working on a collaborative feature film called La Malinche 2020 with Guillermo Gómez-Peña.

Zeelie Brown’s first art museum was the pine woods in Alabama. She makes Black, queer refuges called “soulscapes”, borne from this sense of wilderness. Soulscapes are a gumbo melding sound, cello performance, installation, electronic, culinary, textile, process and performance art. These media, these soul-foods simmer together with the Alabama folk arts they learned as a child on their rural homestead to, somewhere deep within the viewer, lay a road down home.

She is currently working with the MIT Department of Architecture, NOMAS, and Group Project to create sustainable human waste solutions to environmental racism in her native rural Alabama. She will hold her first solo show in 2022 at the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. She is an inaugural Forge Arts Fellow. She was a 2018 Create Change Fellow with the Laundromat Project; has been shortlisted for a Fulbright; was a 2019-2020 Coalesce Fellow with the University of Buffalo; a curated show at Flux Factory and held numerous fellowships there; performed/collaborated at Elsewhere Museum, MoMA, Powerhouse Arts, Gavin Brown, The Shed, Recess, Pioneer Works, Swale, and Governor’s Island.

Armando Guadalupe Cortés (MFA Yale School of Art 2021) was born in Urequio, Michoacán, México and raised in Wilmington, California. He is number 6 in a lineup of 7 children. His family hence encompasses multiple generations in one: farmers, migrants, manufacturers, office professionals, professors, artists, and more. 

Growing up in two worlds, sharply contrasted yet running parallel, leads Cortés to a fantastical take on the quotidian. Within the everyday of the rural and the industrial lie subtleties that inform his work, that build stories, propagate myth, and create room for histories, magical and otherwise. This myth-making challenges notions of spectacle and viewership while raising the question of myth as antonym to history. In questioning this dichotomy, Corte’s seek to upend the idea of myth and lore as fiction.

Liz Ferrer and Bow Ty Enterprises Venture Capital’s collaborative work spans film making, photography, video and performance art. Through a queer and comedic lens, their work together has been building a reputation for critiquing American and Latin pop. Their most recent projects together are feminist reggaeton band Niña and new media collaborative LIZN’BOW. 

Their work has been featured at Mana Contemporary, Squeaky Wheel, Borscht Film Festival, ICA Miami, The Bass Museum, The Satellite Show Art Fair Art Basel, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Cincinnati Art Museum, The Koubek Center, MOCA Miami, Museum of Modern Art Santo Domingo, Index Performance Art Festival Santo Domingo, Albright Knox Center Buffalo, and The Art Institute of Chicago.

Liz and Bow are recipients of a Locust Projects WaveMaker Grant, Oolite Arts Ellies Award, Knight Sundance Short Film Miami Intensive Fellows, Squeaky Wheel Fellowship and Residency, Borscht Film Festival Grant, En Residencia Fellowship, Tempus Projects Residency Fellowship, Acre Residency, Here & Now Fellowship, and La Sierra de Santa Marta Residency.

Caroline and Gaby are compelled to respond to urban spaces with site-specific, live interventions that include movement, installation, and dialogue to address tensions between feminism and place. Their budding collaboration integrates aspects from their individual art practices: Caroline, as a performance and new media artist from Australia, and Gaby, as an architect and spatially engaged artist from Mexico. 

They began working together in 2018 when Gaby, a fellow at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, curated Caroline in ‘Feminist Manifestos,’ a series of readings and performances exploring how systems of oppression spatialize. This collaboration, published in ‘Studies into Darkness: Artists and Activists on Freedom of Speech’ (VLC, 2021), led to ‘Strategies for Survival,’ a second iteration of the project commissioned by Weeksville Heritage Center. 

In New York, Caroline has presented at The Shed, Movement Research, Smack Mellon, Creative Time SummitX, A.I.R. Biennale, and completed residencies at Pioneer Works, EMPAC, and ISCP. Gaby has shown work at Robert H.Siegel Gallery, the Emily Harvey Foundation, and A.I.R., and has completed residencies at Tokyo Arts and Space and 3331 Arts Chiyoda in Japan. They are currently working on the exhibition ‘orientations for a feminist city’ scheduled for spring 2022.

Sungjae Lee (He/they) is a Seoul-born, Chicago-based artist who makes performance, installation, text, video, and sound. He received his B.F.A. in Sculpture from Seoul National University in 2014, during which time he discovered his deep interest in immaterial and time-based mediums to represent the voices of marginalized groups. To further develop his practice as a performance artist, he pursued his M.F.A. in Performance Art at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and graduated in 2019. Throughout his residing in the US, his practice has centered on the need for visibility and representation of queer Asians in a Western context. His work has been presented globally in South Korea, Sweden, Canada, New Zealand, and the US. His performance pieces were shown in “Emergency INDEX” by Ugly Duckling Press and “A Research on Feminist Art Now” by No New Work. He has attended residencies at ACRE, High Concept Labs, Vermont Studio Center, Millay Colony for the Art, and the Corporation of Yaddo. Recently, he was selected for the 2020 AHL Foundation Artist Fellowship and SPARK Grant by the Chicago Artist Coalition. 

Ogemdi Ude is a Nigerian-American dance artist, educator, and doula based in Brooklyn, New York. Her performances focus on Black femme legacies and futures, grief, and memory. She aims to incite critical engagement with embodied Black history as a means to imagine Black futurity. Her work has been presented at Recess Art, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Danspace Project, Gibney, Center for Performance Research, Movement Research at the Judson Church, Streb Lab for Action Mechanics, and for BAM’s DanceAfrica Festival. In collaboration with Rochelle Jamila Wilbun she facilitates AfroPeach, a series of free dance workshops for Black postpartum people in Brooklyn. She serves as Head of Movement for Theater at Professional Performing Arts School and is most recently a 2021 Laundromat Project Artist-in-Residence and 2021 Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Creative Engagement Grantee. She graduated Magna Cum Laude with a degree in English from Princeton University.

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist and writer from Newark, NJ who works fluidly across performance, sculpture, video, and 2d realms. Rooted in a process-driven practice, they are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective bodies.  

Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Anderson Collection at Stanford University, Recess Art, The Shed, and more. Forthcoming projects include exhibitions with Center For Book Arts and Public Art Fund.

DRAGONFLY aka Robin LaVerne Wilson [she/they] was born in Detroit, Michigan; raised in San Antonio, Texas; and has been a resident of the NYC Metro since 2003. The intergenerational traumas of race, class, gender, and sexuality inform her work as a conceptual performance artist. Their canon interweaves experiences in media, theatre, photography, design, journalism, poetry, music, activism, facilitation, archiving, and guerilla marketing. 

Dragonfly boasts a decade of leadership with Reverend Billy and the Stop Shopping Choir. Her tambourine-wielding alter-ego, Miss Justice Jester, originated during the first Black Lives Matter uprising. She is a board member of E.A.R.T.H. Lab SF with Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stephens. For The Opportunity Agenda she embodied Helvetika Bold, a social justice comic book super-shero. Upon request by the Green Party New York, Robin accidentally ran for senator in 2016.

ABSCONDED PROJECT has received coverage by Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn Rail and Ecumenica. Her first gallery exhibit ABSCONDED :: #PRECEDENTSDAY debuted virtually at the Guggenheim Gallery at Chapman University. 

Robin has been arrested thrice for non-violent direct actions. They earned a $41,000+ debt for her honors degree from Rutgers University, and completed coursework for an MA in Applied Theatre from CUNY.