June 4
Jerrell Gibbs
Jerrell Gibbs was born in 1988 in Baltimore, MD where he lives and works. He received his MFA from the LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting at MICA in 2020.
Working from family photographs his paintings bring movement and life to his subjects with vibrant and informative settings. His paintings are distinctive for their loose playful lines and illustrative style emulating the beauty in daily experiences. His subjects are revealed through their unmistakable facial expressions, which affirm the multilayered experience of African-Americans, accentuating Black identity through an empathetic and authentic lens.
Gibbs pays homage to Matisse who similarly believed expression and decoration are one in the same. His composition focuses equally on arrangement, size and proportion, and on painterly gesture. His claim of legacy and the way it performs and displaces an audience unaccustomed to more extensive and wide-ranging portrayals of Black life is powerful.
He has exhibited at the Reginald F. Lewis Museum, The Galleries at CCBC and The Gallery at Howard University. His work appears in the permanent collection in The Columbus Museum of Art and most recently the Baltimore Museum of Art.
The artist is represented by Mariane Ibrahim Gallery in Chicago, Ill.
June 18
James Miller
James Miller was born in 1986 in San Diego, California, but raised in the Pacific Northwest. He now lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA from Laguna College of Art and Design, Laguna Beach, CA in 2009 and his MFA from Yale University in 2014.
His paintings approach the fidelity of mechanical representations and misdirect their resemblance to information. These fixed traces call to mind filmic artifacts, blueprints, x-rays, and projections. Using handmade tools, Miller records the surreal residue of his local landscape. Impressions of light and motion appear as retinal afterimages.
“Painting serves as my record of interactions with the material structures in and around the studio. Sensing potential in objects, shapes, debris, and detritus, I scavenge subjects that end up initiating drawing and compositional problems. Combining and subtracting found forms, I literally build and demolish a painting’s composition over the course of its making. As in construction work, I paint on a scale that is decided by my body, so as to become a performer or a painting implement. I am both a studio artist developing controlled methodology and an experimental researcher open to chance encounters and prompts.”
Recent exhibitions include Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NY, Mehoyas, New York, NY; Essex Flowers, New York, NY; Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, among others. He was a recipient of the Dedalus Foundation Fellowship in 2014-15 and is represented by the Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, NY.
June 29
Lisa Sigal
Lisa Sigal was born in Philadelphia, PA in 1962, she lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Sigal received her BFA from the Tyler School of Art in 1985 and her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 1989.
Sigal’s work lies at the intersection of painting, sculpture, and architecture. Her constructions insinuate themselves into the fabric of the built environment. Recently, she has been painting on walls and making forms that combine painting with architecture. Her work suggests a mutable delineation between interior and exterior and explores their meaning both socially and politically. Utilizing and expanding upon notions of space, she investigates how art can challenge set ideas about property, containment and freedom.
She received a Creative Capital grant in 2012, a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011, Art Matters Grant in 2012, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Elizabeth Foundation Grant in 1998. Her work was included in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has been exhibited at the New Museum, PS1, Sculpture Center, the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, The Albright Knox, the Brooklyn Museum, the Essl Museum in Vienna, a recent solo exhibit at LAX ART space in Los Angeles and at Samson Projects in Boston, Prospect.3 New Orleans Biennial and ”Walden,” at the DeCordiva Sculpture Park and Museum.
Sigal is the co-founder and co-curator, with Nova Benway, of Open Sessions, a program for artists run by The Drawing Center.
July 2
Dike Blair
Dike Blair was born in 1952 in New Castle, PA and lives and works in New York. He studied at the University of Colorado, Boulder; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine; and the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York before receiving his M.F.A. from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1977.
Blair has been documenting quotidian, mostly American scenes since the 1980s. Working in oil and gouache, his photorealistic tableaus derive from his own photographs, many of which are captured with flash. Blair’s sensitive attention to the ordinary and the commonplace is both romantic and ironic. Featuring cocktails, ashed cigarettes, and split hot dogs, his images cast a wistful glow on the unexceptional phenomena of daily life. Recent solo exhibitions include The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); Karma, New York (2018); Frieze, New York (2018); Secession, Vienna (2016); and Jüergen Becker Gallery, Hamburg (2016). Blair’s work is featured in the collections of the Whitney Museum, New York; Brooklyn Museum, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, among others.
In addition to painting and sculpture he has devoted considerable attention to an impressive body of critical writings and interviews that reflect on the environment and other artists works -these can be accessed at http://www.thing.net/~lilyvac/pages/writing.html.
July 13
Angela Dufresne
Angela Dufresne was born in 1959 in Conneticut, but raised in Kansas. She received her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in 1991 and her MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, in 1998.
As a contemporary lesbian painter, Angela Dufresne references other artists and films in her paintings to show connections to history and history of cultural production, as well as her personal experiences and associations. She imagines a post-human body in her paintings and drawings that comprise mythical creatures and eroticism. Envisioning painting as a co-creative process, she prompts her subjects to interact with the painting process through dictation of the backdrop and deciding when the work is finished. Her work articulates non-paranoid, porous ways of being in a world fraught by fear, power and possession. Through painting, drawing and performative works, she wields heterotopic narratives that are both non-hierarchical and perverse.
She had a solo exhibits at the Kemper Museum in Kansas City “Making Scene” in the fall of 2018 and a solo at the Dorsky Musuem at SUNY New Paltz “Just my Type” in 2019. She’s exhibited at Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York, The National Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, the Kemper Museum in Kansas City, Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York, The Cleveland Institute of Art, The Aldridge Museum in Connecticut, Sarah Lawrence College in Yonkers, NY, the Rose Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts, Mills College in Oakland, CA, and the Minneapolis School of Art and Design. She is currently Associate Professor of painting at RISD. Awards and honors include National Academy of Arts and Design induction 2018, a 2016 Guggenheim Fellowship, residency at Yaddo, a Purchase Award at The National Academy of Arts and Letters, two fellowships at The Fine Arts Work Center at Provincetown, The Center for the Arts in Sausalito, California, and a Jerome Foundation Fellowship.
July 23
Kern Samuel
Kern Samuel was born on the island of Trinidad in the West Indies in 1990, he lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut. Samuel received his BFA from the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2017 and his MFA from Yale University in 2020.
The son of tradespeople, his mother Maudlyn ran a small sewing shop from home. He found his artistic inspiration keenly observing her create outfits or just doodling quietly to pass the time. Samuel works in the mediums of drawing, painting, sewing and sculpture. His highly unique works find their form in ecological processes that privilege economy and creativity over the creation of products. Often working in a circular format Samuels explores sequences and consequences in that originate in his sensitive existential questioning. His use of materials inflects his consideration of value and ethics.
Samuels has shown his work at Bodega in New York in 2021 in an exhibition “What is Under the Sun?”.
July 27
Athena LaTocha
Athena LaTocha was born in Anchorage, Alaska and now lives and works in Brooklyn and Peekskill, NY. She received her BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1992, and her MFA in 2007 from Stony Brook University, NY.
Using monumental paper to explore the relationship between human-made and natural worlds, LaTocha finds herself in the wake of Earthworks artists from the 1960s and 1970s while rooted in a tradition that laid the groundwork for their endeavors. The artist incorporates materials such as ink, lead, earth and wood to draw correlations between mark-marking and displacement of materials made by industrial equipment and natural events. Her works are inspired by her upbringing in the wilderness of Alaska. Through her process LaTocha is immersed in these environments, while responding to the storied and, at times, traumatic cultural histories that are bound to place.
Her work has been shown at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, NM; CUE Art Foundation and Artists Space, NY; South Dakota Art Museum, Brookings, SD; New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA; and the International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, Alaska. In 2019 she had solo exhibitions at JDJ | The Ice house in Garrison, NY; the Plains Art Museum in Fargo, ND; and the MacRostie Art Center in Grand Rapids, MN. Also in 2019, she was artist in residence at the Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, LA. In early 2021, her work was on view in Land Akin at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY and ID: Formations of the Self at Shirley Fiterman Art Center in Lower Manhattan.
LaTocha is the recipient of artist grants, residencies and awards, among them the Eiteljorg Fellowship in 2021, Joan Mitchell Foundation in 2019 and 2016, Wave Hill in 2018, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in 2013.