Exhibition dates Nov 2 to Dec 29, 2024

ARTISTS TALK

Saturday, Nov. 23, 3-5pm

Nia Andino is a visual artist, writer, and ancestral researcher born and raised in Queens, NY. Andino finds her inspiration in the stories that shaped her upbringing and formed her Afro-Boricua/Caribbean/African American identity. The vibrant colors, textures, and rhythms of Caribbean culture in her work leads the viewer into a deep exploration of the human condition. Using weaving techniques and materials selected to reflect the complexity of the nature of heritage, resilience, and personal experience, Andino's practice is an example of how one might explore these conditions for themselves. Through the use of textiles, color, and texture, Andino’s works build bridges between past and present, the personal and the universal, and inspire others to find beauty and meaning in their own stories as a celebration of resilience, memory, and the shared narratives that connect us all.

Annie Estévez is a DominiRican poet, artist, and art educator raised a few blocks from Meantime Co. in Bushwick. She has recently begun working with collage, repurposing images from discarded books and magazines to disrupt the confines of the past and infuse possibility into the present. By deconstructing found images, Estévez creates visual poetics through which memories are replayed and rewired. Influenced by the intersection of music and poetry, Estévez’s subjects are typically suspended in motion; enjambments of flight or dance. Building on repetition and rhythm, the use of primary colors evokes a playfulness that elevates the surrealism in the work. Estévez's collages are a choreography of the internal chaos of anxiety. This energy moves through the work, depicting forms that reimagine the body as a dream-sequence and a site for regeneration.

Ruth Rodriguez-Guerrero is a Dominican American artist, living and working in the Bronx.  She uses auto-ethnography to challenge and question the value of labor and art. Incorporating elements from her personal history and cultural background, she creates work that blends polarities such as the mechanical and the gestural; personal and universal. Her ongoing Exhausted Women series is inspired by her grandmother’s strength and experiences as a factory worker, as well as the contrast of Dominican cultural female norms in American society. Her depictions of intimate spaces are filled with figurative imagery incorporating her mother’s fabrics, prints, immigration papers, biographic documents, and furniture from her childhood and current home.  Recent works find Rodriguez experimenting with printing digitized reproductions of her paintings onto shower curtains and bath mats. These works reference the byproducts of colonialism, socio-economic class, the value of labor, and the distinction between valuable and valueless art. Responding to the notion that artist’s "hand" traditionally add value to art—the more physical labor by the artist, the better the work is perceived, Rodriguez's use of mechanical methods of reproduction and repetition of images, raises the question of how her hand labor as a painter confers value on mass-produced materials.

Christina M. Tapper is a collage artist living in Harlem, where she has ancestral roots. She constructs figurative collages from vintage and contemporary images, found materials, and her own personal photographs. Primarily centering Black women and girls in her art, Tapper is fascinated by the transformative act of becoming. The metamorphosis of the past self that is no longer, the current self that is, and the future self that will be. Tapper’s quest is an exploration of how impermanence, liminality, selfhood, and agency shape our understanding of becoming and belonging, and ultimately impact the human experience of evolving. Her work also gives her a space to question and challenge conventional narratives about ways of living, while imagining more expansive ways of being. For Tapper, collage is an intuitive and fluid process of the hand and heart that offers a chance at renewal.