January 18
Leonie Guyer
Léonie Guyer was born in New York City, she lives and works in San Francisco, CA. Guyer received her BFA in 1985 from the San Francisco Art Institute and then her MFA there in 1989.
Léonie Guyer makes paintings, drawings, site-based work, and books. Her work is characterized by finely honed shapes that result from both research and drawing, which are then set into a carefully considered relationship with the installation space. The finished works are both resonant and reflective.
Guyer's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at the CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts; UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; fused space/Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco; odium fati, San Francisco; Feature Inc., NYC; Peter Blum Gallery, NYC; Greg Kucera Gallery, Seattle, WA; Douglas F. Cooley Memorial Art Gallery, Reed College, Portland, OR; Lumber Room, Portland, OR; The Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, NY; Gallery Joe, Philadelphia; Mills College Art Museum, Oakland; PLUSkunst, Düsseldorf, Germany and other venues.
Guyer has collaborated on book projects with poets Franck André Jamme and Bill Berkson. Her work is held in numerous public collections including the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Reed College Art Collection, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon, and others. She has taught at the San Francisco Art Institute, California College of the Arts, University of California at Berkeley, San José State University, and elsewhere.
January 25
Meena Hasan
Meena Hasan was born in New York City in 1987, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Hasan received her B.A. in Studio Art from Oberlin College in 2009 and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale School of Art in 2013, where she won the Carol Schlosberg Memorial Prize for Painting. In 2010, she was awarded the Terna Prize Affiliated Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome.
Most recently Hasan Hasan has begun tracing the “inventory” of her South Asian American diasporic consciousness to honor and observe specific forms and patterns from her past that continued to linger and evolve in her mind - images and textiles that are both haunting and at the same time nurture her practice. Sourced from personal memories, photographs and also historic images and artworks that signify South Asia and live within the collective public, Hasan’s process collapses a sense of nostalgia as she hones a new perspective with her materials.
Hasan has participated in a number of group exhibitions including 'Sheherezade's Gift' at the Center for Book Arts, NYC, 'Premio Terna 02' at the MAXXI Museum, Rome, IT, the 'Bosch Young Talent Show' at The Stedelijk Museum, Den Bosch, The Netherlands, 'No Longer, Not Yet', curated by Sean McCarthy, at Essex Flowers, NYC and 'Good Pictures', curated by Austin Lee, at Deitch Projects, NYC. Recent two-person and solo exhibitions include 'Mangifering Chintz' at LAUNCHF18, NYC, 'Other Echoes Inhabit the Garden' at LAUNCH F18, NYC and 'Covering as much of the sky' at RISD's Memorial Hall Painting Dept. Gallery, Providence, RI. Meena has been a Part-Time Lecturer in Painting at Rutgers University - Newark, Visiting Assistant Professor in Painting at Pratt Institute's Painting MFA program, Lecturer in Painting at the School of Visual Arts at Boston University's College of Fine Arts and Teaching Artist with Studio in a School, NYC. Currently, she is an Assistant Professor in Painting at RISD, Providence.
February 8
Jim Lee
Jim Lee was born in 1970 in Berrien Springs, MI, he lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Lee received his BA from Hope College in Holland, MI in 1993 and his MFA in 1996 from the University of Delaware in Newark, DE.
February 15
Beverly Acha
Beverly Acha was born in 1987 in Miami, Florida, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. She received her BA in Studio Art (Highest Honors) and American Studies from Williams College in Williamstown, MA in 2009 and in 2012 she received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University in New Haven, CT. In she attended the 2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.
Acha makes abstract paintings, frescos, prints, and drawings that evoke shifting spatial, physical and perceptual phenomena. Her work investigates experiences that elude language and the intangible sensorial and psychological experience of space through color, shape and repetition. Often working in series, Acha’s paintings build a distinct visual language and logic in response to the environment in which they are made. Referencing architecture, diagrams, and landscape, her core concern is the perceptual slippage within these systems, the spaces between knowing and seeing, experience and memory, and the real and the imagined.
Acha’s work has been exhibited at DC Moore Gallery, 1969 Gallery, Rubber Factory, LatchKey Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, Smack Mellon, and Underdonk, among others. She is the recipient of the Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award and her work has been featured in New American Paintings, MAKE Magazine, Diacritics, and the Virginia Quarterly Review. She has participated in several residencies including MacDowell, Lighthouse Works, and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program.
Acha is an assistant professor at UT Austin and a critic in painting/printmaking at Yale School of Art. She is currently a 2021-22 resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Brooklyn, NY.
March 1
Claudia Alvarez
Claudia Alvarez was born in Nuevo Leon, Mexico in 1969. She received her BA from the University of California at Davis in 1999 and her MFA from the California College of Arts in San Francisco in 2003.
Through her work Alvarez tackle issues such as hate, fear, tolerance, human vulnerability and brutality. Her drawings and paintings depict fragmented narratives as reflection of human conduct, ethics, belief system, culture, race, assimilation, and displacement that look deeply into violence, empowerment, endurance and what they reveal about human nature. As a Mexican American, Alvarez explores identity through concepts of memory portraiture.
Her work has been exhibited in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico and Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include Boy in a Room, Edward Hopper House Museum and Study Center, Huerta, El Museo del Barrio, New York, NY, Acécate, Centro Nacional de las Artes, Mexico City D. F., Girls with Guns, Scott White Contemporary Art, La Jolla, California, Silencio de Agua, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Yucatan, Merida, Mexico, American Heroes, Blue Leaf Gallery, Dublin, Ireland. Recent group shows include Your Making Me Uncomfortable: Perspectives on Controversial Art, Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln Nebraska, New Ways of Seeing: Beyond Culture, Dorsky Gallery, New York, Mujeres, Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearney, NY, NY: CLAY, Clay Art Center, Port Chester, New York, In Pursuit of Freedom, Corridor Gallery, Brooklyn, New York, Migrantes: Claudia Alvarez, Jose Bedia, Ilya y Emilia Kabakov, Nina Menocal, Mexico City Mexico.
Alvarez has received grants from Art Matters Foundation, New York and Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, New York as well as artist residencies at SASAMA, Shizuoka, Japan, The Northern Clay Center with The McKnight Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska, SOMA, Mexico City, FUTUR, Rapperswil, Switzerland, and El Museo Del Barrio in New York City. Collections include Sheldon Museum of Art, Lincoln, Nebraska, National Museum of Mexican Art, Chicago, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Yucatan, Merida, Mexico, Museum of Nebraska Art, Kearny Nebraska, The Mordes Collection, West Palm Beach, Florida. Alvarez is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute and Lecturer at New York University. She lives and works in New York City.
March 8
Jill O’Bryan
Jill O’Bryan divides her year between urban life in New York City and the New Mexico desert. Artmaking, for O'Bryan, is not an act of representational picture-making. It is a practice of accumulating the residue of recorded time and place through the physical actions of her body. Her process is performative, specifically located in time and space, and records moment-to-moment interactions with the elements. She began a series of breath drawings in 2000, marking thousands of her own breaths, accumulated over time, onto paper until it is incised and frayed. Her large rock frottages record her body interactions with the desert--she lies down on large pieces of paper and rubs it with graphite to reveal the desert earth below. Her recent Element Paintings, which appropriate the color iconography of Tibetan Buddhist prayer flags, are made by layering watercolor pigments onto rice paper, creating deeply luminescent prayers to the elements. O'Bryan's artmaking is a method of capturing, archiving, and affirming existence.
She has an MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute, and a Ph.D. from New York University in Aesthetic Theory and Criticism.
O’Bryan has exhibited widely including at the National Gallery of Art Library, DC (2021); New Mexico Museum of Art, Santa Fe, NM (2021); Margarete Roeder Gallery, New York (2019, 2018, 2016); Center for Contemporary Art, Santa Fe (2017); The Phillips Collection, Washington DC (2014); The Hafnarfjör∂ur Centre of Culture and Fine Art, Iceland (2013); Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Washington University, St. Louis (2012); Gallery Joe, Philadelphia (2012, 2013); Zimmerli Art Museum, Rutgers University, NJ (2012); University of Richmond Museum (2012); Katonah Museum of Art, NY (2011); Danese Gallery, New York (2011); and the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Esteban Vicente, Segovia, Spain (2009).
March 29
Laura Battle
Laura Battle lives and works in the Hudson Valley. Laura studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and the Yale School of Art and has been teaching at Bard College since 1987.
Battle describes herself as an artist engaged in “exploring the potential of geometry to offer an optically charged mental space in which to explore universal visual language... informed by diagrams of the universe, mathematical configurations, codes and symbols, maps and charts of all kinds, forces in nature like the ebb and flow of water or the waxing and waning of the moon, esoteric manuscripts, and by the work of innumerable artists.”
She has exhibited her work both nationally and internationally at numerous venues including the Lohin Geduld Gallery, Rafius Fane Gallery, the Kleinart/James Center for the Arts at Woodstock Byrcliffe Guild, the Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Arts in Peekskill, the Barn at Meadowbrook Farm in Upper Red Hook, and at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Steinhardt Gallery at NYU, the Byrdcliffe Guild, the National Academy Museum, and L’Atelier du Caire. She has received grants and awards from the Peter S. Reed Foundation, the NEA, Fulbright Foundation, MacDowell Colony, American Academy of Arts and Letters, National Academy Museum, the Massachusetts Council on the Arts, and Bard College. She was commissioned by the MTA Arts for Transit program in 2008 to design windows for the Burnside Avenue subway stop. As a curator, she directed Kendall Art and Design in Hudson, NY. Selected reviews include Art in America, the New York Times, Huffington Post, among other publications and her work is included in numerous collections including the Library of Congress, Progressive Corporation, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, and as part of the Art in Embassies Program in Jedda and Kabul.
April 5
Catherine Haggarty
Catherine Haggarty was born in 1984, she lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Haggarty received her BFA from and her MFA from Mason Gross, Rutgers University in 2011.
In Two Coats of Paint Zach Seeger writes, “Catherine Haggarty belongs to a group of New York painters who blossomed between financial crisis of 2008 and the election of Donald Trump in 2016, bracketed by Zombie Formalism and the current wave of figuration. Artists of her vintage tend to be inspired by the likes of Peter Acheson, Katherine Bradford, Rick Briggs, and Chris Martin, whose formal and intuitive explorations of paint are deeply rooted in the history of New York painting.”
Haggarty’s paintings and curatorial work have been reviewed by and featured in Bomb Magazine, Artnet, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Brooklyn Magazine, The New York Times, Maake Magazine, Art Maaze Magazine, Art Spiel, Final Friday Podcast, Sound and Vision Podcast, The Black and White Project, Curating Contemporary’s book Eraser, and Young Space.
Catherine has been a visiting artist & critic at The University of Oregon (2021). Boston University MFA (2021), SUNY Purchase MFA (2020), Hunter MFA (2020), Denison University (2020), Brooklyn College MFA (2019) and in 2018 Haggarty was the Anderson Endowed Lecturer at Penn State University. Solo exhibitions include Massey Klein Gallery in NYC, This Friday Next Friday in Brooklyn, Bloomsburg University in PA, One Main Window in NYC, One River School of Art and Design’s Proto Gallery in NJ, and Look and Listen in Marseille, France. Currently, Haggarty is an adjunct professor at The School of Visual Arts (SVA). Haggarty is the co-founder and co-director of The NYC Crit Club with artist and critic, Hilary Doyle.
April 12
Sam Jablon
Samuel Jablon was born in 1986 in Binghamton, NY, he lives and works in Brooklyn. Jablon received his BA from the Naropa University in Boulder, CO in 2009 and his MFA from Brooklyn College/CUNY in 2013.
Samuel Jablon is an artist and poet. His paintings often make use of words in a formal painterly way dissolving the distinctions between disciplines. His painting profile the lyrical as his viewers grapple with words that double as lines and shapes in a colorful and active field.
He has performed and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, The Queens Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Storefront for Art and Architecture, The Kitchen, Artists Space, Blum & Poe, the Landing, and Ballon Rouge Collective. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Interview Magazine, Art in America, ARTnews, Hyperallergic, BOMB, and the Brooklyn Rail.