Artists’ Statements

GINA ADAMS

Gina Adams, Broken Treaty Quilt Series, Treaty with the Comanche and Kiowa, 1865 Gina Adam’s cross-media studio work includes the use of antique quilts and broken treaties between the United States and Native American tribes. She is an American descendant of both Indigenous (Ojibwe-not enrolled) and colonial immigrants of Irish and Lithuanian descent.

“I have chosen to use calico fabric, as it was the first industrialized commodity that was made in the United States and then exported to Europe. The fabric was milled in the northeastern portion of the United States, while the production of cotton and its connection to slavery were intrinsically tied together. There is a deliberate choice to place the broken treaty onto antique quilts that are roughly the same age, and appear worn and broken; in fact they could have been made at the same time the treaties were drawn up and signed.

Quilting is thoroughly American. The quilt and quilting bees symbolize community and the promise to work together as a group to finish a major endeavor. While it is difficult to know for certain who made the original quilts in the project, there is reason to believe that they’d been thrown out due to their worn appearance. Sewing together injustice with an object of comfort stirs deep emotion as the burden of the broken treaty is placed on top of the hand-quilted work that symbolizes part of Manifest Destiny and the wagon trains westward. I choose to work in museum and library archives to make historical discoveries that can be reinterpreted into a visual language that has the ability to make sustainable social change.”

NATALIA ARBELAEZ

“My work takes the place of a storyteller, from my personal narratives of my Colombian family’s immigration and the research of pre-Colombian South American presence, to my American, latchkey, afterschool-cartoon upbringing. Each of these identities plays a role in my work to illustrate a self-portrait of what it is like to be a Mestizo, Colombian and American hybrid. I combine these stories with research, familial narratives and cartoon embellishments that create surreal stories, much to my efforts, of the likes of Gabriel García Márquez – a way to autobiographically narrate history with its ups and downs of humor and tears.

I use my work to research undervalued histories, such as Latin American, Amerindian and Women of Color. I work with how these identities are lost through conquest, migration and time, gained through family, culture and exploration, and passed down through tradition, preservation and genetic memory. In my research, I have found value in my histories and aim to help continue my cultures by preserving and honoring them.

I’ve embraced my use of craft and clay, not only in my process but also in historical and cultural research. In my researching of lost, conquered and overlooked communities, I have found that craft Natalia Arbelaez, Chicha con Paccha belongs in my pursuit. I relate to the role of the craftsperson, often linked to women’s work, the working class, and cultural tradition. The material also plays an important role as I examine the history of my ancestral material, like how terracotta has been seen historically as a lesser material, and Majolica glaze was brought over from Europe and used as a surface to hide terra-cotta – metaphors that I use to describe colonization.”

ANNE BOBROFF-HAJAL

Anne Bobroff-Hajal, Home Security at Any Crazy Price

Anne Bobroff-Hajal paints detailed and whimsical stories about powerful human motivations – love, greed, grief, competition, fury – as shaped by the geographic landscapes on which those humans live. Her large satirical mixedmedia polyptychs about Russia (and now, in dialogue, the United States) are influenced by icons, graphic novels, animation storyboards and political cartoons – all of which tell stories in pictures. She has developed a complex process of repeated layering of paint on digital images of photographs and her own paintings.

Bobroff-Hajal has exhibited for years in the tri-state area, most recently as part of ArtSpace New Haven’s Vertical Reach exhibition. Her previous solo show was RUSSIA THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS: Terror, Humanity and GeoPolitics Through History at the College of New Rochelle’s Mooney Gallery.

Bobroff-Hajal has been an artist all her life and earned a Ph. D. in Russian History. She was mentored by Gerda Lerner and William G. Rosenberg, and lived in the USSR to research what became her scholarly book, Working Women in Russia Under the Hunger Tsars: Political Activism and Daily Life. She recently returned to St. Petersburg, Russia for the MANIFESTA 10 Biennial, particularly its Public Programs curated by Joanna Warsza. She conducts interviews for Yale University Radio’s The Art World Demystified, and has written extensively about Russian history and art.

JENNIFER LING DATCHUK

“Hit Me With Your Best Shot is made from collectible, editioned Lenox, USA china commemorating the White House of the Confederacy. These were made in the USA in 1971 and designed by the Trustees of the White House of the Confederacy Committee and the construction of the new Museum of the Confederacy. There are about 10-12 different designs. I purchased the plates from eBay and they all come from sellers in Richmond, Virginia. They come in special boxes with pamphlets telling a brief history of the scene or general depicted with no mention of the Civil War, the enslaved people, or Black oppression. One complete set of these plates are on display at the Smithsonian.

When I was creating this piece, I listened to debates, and watched a Confederate statue be removed from downtown San Antonio and a local school go through the process of changing their name from Robert E. Lee High School to Legacy of Educational Excellence (LEE). San Antonio is a minority majority city, but the power structures are still white.

The images of these plates are of known people, places and things that played significant roles in the Confederacy and the oppression of Black people. The oppression of people of color continued after the Civil War, as did and the histories, stories and lynching of African Americans, Latinos, Asians, Native Americans and Jews in the American West and nationwide. This oppression and ideology continues to align with white supremacy, KKK, khaki brigade, voter suppression, anti-Semitism, police brutality and so much more.

I worked with a waterjet cutting business in San Antonio to cut out the main image of the plate – essentially erasing them and removing them from the collectible, and dismantle their power and value in the object. I then transformed the cut images by painting MAGA hats on them to show how history of oppression is repeating itself and we had a President that was igniting it. The images become charms on a bracelet, a collection of monuments taken down. They are attached to a Cuban link iced out chain bracelet that I purchased in Chinatown, NYC on a ‘hip-hop jewelry street.’ Each store has names of every hip-hop/pop artist who has visited their stores. They are Chinese-owned and operated and complete fakes made to look very real. Each piece has handset stones and, after the purchase, the seller stamps “14K” on the back to give the appearance of genuine gold and diamond jewelry. I am interested in the Asian labor in creating objects of cultural ownership and significance that exist in complicated conversations about pop culture.”

Jennifer Ling Datchuk, Champs and Chains

FOR FREEDOMS

For Freedoms is an artist-led organization that models and increases creative civic engagement, discourse and direct action. It works with artists and organizations to center the voices of artists in public discourse, expand what participation in a democracy looks like, and reshape conversations about politics.

In October 2018, For Freedoms launched a photo campaign entitled Four Freedoms. In collaboration with Emily Shur and Wyatt Gallery, artist Hank Willis Thomas and For Freedoms transformed Norman Rockwell’s depictions of what President Franklin Delano Roosevelt articulated, in his 1943 address to Congress, as the four basic human freedoms. Thomas wrote that “the image haunted me because of the world we live in. I wanted to imagine what it would look like today.” Through dozens of iterations of Rockwell’s original four paintings, the 82 images in the campaign attempted to reflect the immeasurable diversity of American identities today.

A summary of Norman Rockwell: At age 21, Norman Rockwell’s family moved to New Rochelle, New York, a community whose residents included such famous illustrators as J.C. and Frank Leyendecker and Howard Chandler Christy. There, Rockwell set up a studio with the cartoonist Clyde Forsythe and produced work for such magazines as LIFE, Literary Digest and Country Gentleman. In 1916, the 22-year-old Rockwell painted his first cover for The Saturday Evening Post. Over the next 47 years, another 321 Rockwell covers would appear on the cover of the Post. The family moved to Arlington, Vermont in 1939, and Rockwell’s work began to reflect smalltown American life.

In 1943, Rockwell painted the Four Freedoms paintings. The works toured the United States in an exhibition that was jointly sponsored by the Post and the U.S. Treasury Department and, through the sale of war bonds, raised more than $130 million for the war effort.

For Freedoms (Hank Willis Thomas and Emily Shur in collaboration with Eric Gottesman and Wyatt Gallery of For Freedoms), Freedom from Want, 2018

MARIAM GHANI

Mariam Ghani, Universal Games

“For a brief period in October of 2000, the two top stories on New York’s network news were the Subway Series (the Yankees-Mets World Series of baseball) and the escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (the Al-Aqsa Intifada). At the same time, The New York Times began using digitally manipulated video stills as front-page cover images, almost exclusively when reporting on the Middle East. As I watched the TV news that month, I started to notice strange similarities in the way the two stories, jockeying for top position, were reported. The relative gravity of their journalistic content did not seem to correspond to the tone of commentary or change the predictability of the camera angles. And as I turned the images over in my head, it became clear to me how they could be manipulated to support either sociocultural narrative.

Universal Games began for me with the paired images of a young boy throwing a stone and a pitcher throwing a baseball. It grew into a video database of image pairs grabbed directly from the television, each of which was taken through three stages of digital processing and retouching, and finally incorporated into black-and-white, digitally patterned graphic wallpaper in an allusion to the familiar regularity with which these very different games are played out in living rooms across the world.”

JEFFREY GIBSON

Jeffrey Gibson, I Am A Rainbow Too

This series of editions features vivid screen-printed letters in a typographic treatment developed by Jeffery Gibson that are collaged onto a printed background, each in its own artist-selected color frame. Gibson adapted lyrics from iconic dance and pop songs that he heard going to nightclubs in Korea, Germany and London in the ‘80s and ‘90s. He synthesized these expressions of queer and pop culture with the cultural traditions and motifs of his Cherokee and Choctaw heritage. Through the bright, bold declarations made in his prints, Gibson emphasizes the strength and vulnerability found within these communities, and the revolutionary act of expressing joy within a challenging larger culture.

MONA KAMAL

Mona Kamal, Drones in Waziristan

“This piece was inspired by Afghani rug weavers who, in the 1990s, began weaving war motifs in their carpets because the country had been in war for such a long time. During the time of making this work, rug weavers have begun weaving drones into their rugs. This piece is composed of all the dates of drone attacks that took place in Waziristan from the first drone that was dropped in Pakistan to the most recent during the completion of the work. Every time the piece is exhibited, new dates are added.” Mona Kamal is a multi-media installation artist who creates narratives about migration, journeys and identities. Her origins are rooted in the Indian subcontinent and has had a migratory upbringing – born in Algeria, raised in Canada and currently residing in New York.

CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER

For artist Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota), the Mirror Shield Project began out of urgency when, in the summer of 2016, he learned that the water of his father’s homelands where he grew up on the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Reservation, was under threat. The Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), a $3.87 billion underground petroleum transport pipeline that connects fracking grounds of Cannupa Hanska Luger, Mirror Shield Project: River (The Water Serpent) at Oceti Sakowin, ND the Bakken Oil Fields of North Dakota, through four states and ending at refineries in Illinois, was to cross the Missouri River just upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation. The pipeline was originally planned to cross the Missouri River, north of North Dakota’s capital of Bismarck, but the city protested for fear that it would contaminate their water supply. The pipeline was rerouted down-river and just upstream from the Standing Rock Reservation. In addition to the threat to the water, this new path of the DAPL was to desecrate several marked ancestral burial sites of both the Mandan and Lakota peoples. Over the course of nearly a year, an estimated 15,000 people from around the world traveled to the Water Protector camp areas just outside of Cannonball, ND to stand in solidarity with the protection of the water, and in support of the Indigenous-led actions in opposition of the DAPL. Luger launched the Mirror Shield Project by using art as a measure of action, and creating an open source call for participation with an instructional video, How to Build Mirror Shields for Water Protectors. The video was filmed and edited by Razelle Benally at the Institute of American Indian Arts during his Artist-In-Residence program in November 2016. This call to participate inspired people from across the nation to create and transport what has been estimated at more than a thousand mirrored shields to the Oceti Sakowin Camp near Standing Rock, ND. Once onsite, these shields were available for use by the Water Protectors in frontline actions as they stood up against the police and the DAPL. Luger’s mirrored shield design, inspired by images from the Ukraine of women holding mirrors up to riot police so that the police could see themselves, is made out of all items you may have in your garage, or which you can pick up at any hardware or big box store. The intention is to create a reflective mirror, not only for a shield of protection so that an oppressor may cause less harm, but to also utilize the oppressor’s image to reflect their own oppressive violent force back at them; to remind them that we are all human, regardless of the side of the line we are on; to force the oppressor to see themselves and the harm they are causing. This project speaks about when a line has been drawn and a frontline is created; that it can be difficult to see the humanity that exists behind the uniformed person who is holding that line. But those police are human beings. The mirror shield is a point of human engagement and a remembering that we are all in this life experience on this planet together.”

SUSAN MANSPEIZER

Susan Manspeizer, Adaptation

“Using the symbolic imagery of bras, I explore how the qualities I relate to, as a mature woman artist, have been shaped by global power dynamics during the past half-century. These qualities include being nurturing, compassionate, intuitive, productive and creative.

As an 81-year-old artist, mother and grandmother, I have spent my career channeling, translating and expressing my feminine experience into an art practice. My two primary passions have been nurturing and caring for my husband and four daughters, and expressing my sculptural concerns through a female lens. My sculptures are made of wood – a hard, living material – which I soften and bend into supple, organic shapes. The resulting works reference the female body and the ways in which it fosters protection and growth.

Bras have an intimate relationship to female breasts, which themselves occupy many roles as a source of nutrition, erotic zone, signifier of womanhood, and so on. Breasts are biological, but society expresses the expectations of womanhood through the function, appearance and material of bras. They act as supportive garments, titillating lingerie, utilitarian objects and even armature. Drawing from my own lived experience, this work centers around the shifts in feminine identity in response to decades of socio-political pressure.”

SANA MUSASAMA

“This is a story about me growing up not loving my kinky hair. Being on a block that had many different nationalities, I preferred hair that was silky, easy to comb, and blew in the wind. I called it “Wash and Wear” hair because my friends could wash their hair and run out the door soon afterwards, not needing to do anything further with it.

Around 15, I began to notice the opposite sex, and I noticed that the Black guys on the block preferred wavy, curly and silky hair, not hair like mine. We were all Black, but the ones that they preferred were the biracial girls who possessed the silken hair type. It hurt my feelings and made me sulk. My mother saw me in that state one day. She sat down with me, asked what was going on, and I confided in her. She excused herself, and soon returned with beads, fabric, earrings, a comb and a brush – all of my hair dressings. We began making a doll.

I had never liked playing with dolls. I preferred taking the doorknobs off of doors or taking apart bicycles. Still, because it was me and mom, sitting side-by-side in a crowded household, it felt really special. I was puzzled by what she was going to do with all the hair dressings, particularly my brush. What she did was begin to apply objects of mine that I found beautiful and put them on the doll. She had so much excitement, and she was talking to me about how my skin was so pretty. She took out pipe cleaners and a meat knife, and began carving indentations into the head of the doll. She then put glue onto the tips of the pipe cleaners and inserted them into the openings. I remember so vividly the way she pulled my hair out of my hair brush and wrapped the loose strands around the pipe cleaners. After that, she took the beads and created a beautiful hairdo that looked like the hairdos she would put me and my sisters in. She held the doll and we looked at it, with my wooly hair springing around, the beads making it dangle. She told me, ‘This doll is beautiful, and this doll is made of you, and you’re beautiful and don’t you ever forget it.’

What the doll did for me that day was that it taught me how to celebrate my differences instead of comparing my differences to the other girls. Not to want what they have, but to love what I have. To still appreciate what they have, but never underappreciate what I have. It taught me to see me. These are the I See Me Dolls.”

Sana Musasama, I See Me Dolls

KAMBUI OLUJIMI

Kambui Olujimi, Forgetful Long Goodbyes “In Kambui Olujimi’s large-scale watercolor paintings, monuments are in transition, broken or veiled. At their core, these paintings question how monuments participate in the construction and narratives of state power, and supplant lived memories and histories. Olujimi’s work problematizes the inability of the heroic monument to move beyond reinforcing dominant powers. While the current undoing and the removal of these monuments mark an important shift in our understanding of oppression and nationhood, this reckoning does not undo the Higures’ legacies of violence.

On February 5, 1885, Belgian Emperor Leopold II, along with a group of investors, established personal rule over the Congo Free State, as it was named. In his time as ruler, he exploited the Congolese to extract and export rubber; he was known for encouraging his army to chop off the hands of the Congolese who did not make their quota. In 2004, the hand and lower arm was removed from a bronze statue of a Congolese man gazing at this statue of King Leopold II in reference to this common punishment. In one of Olujimi’s images, it is Leopold who has no hand. It is believed that up to 15 million people died during Leopold’s rule.

In places like Charlottesville, monuments have been covered with large tarps or their faces obscured as a rejection of their continued colonial presence in the landscape. Over the course of the past five years, numerous Confederate monuments have been removed, spawning a dialogue around memoriam in American history and how we might confront our nation’s violent and colonial past.”

JORGE OTERO-PAILOS

Jorge Otero-Pailos, The Fall

“In the spring of 2020, as I sheltered in place due to COVID-19 restrictions, I began making works that used my studio as the site of practice, painting directly on the ground and then using my casting and cleaning technique to transfer the dust and paint from the floor onto the canvas. As I watched the global movement to topple monuments take place that summer, I became interested in preserving the act of taking them down and exploring the theme of falling, both as an immediate bodily experience, and as a metaphor for the loss of cultural value. My ’falling figures’ as I like to call them, are depicted on the dirty ground. Colored straps used to take down monuments pull energetically on the figures. I chose the straps and the falling figures to speak to the universality of a movement that swept through the world, from Spain to Chile, or from England to North America. I wanted to explore the straps further, as the literal tools to topple monumental symbols of the past, but also as symbols of removal, the decentering and rewriting of history as manifested in public spaces. So I began to isolate them, using them to enclose forms that we do not see but can begin to suppose. The range of my explorations include collages mined from protest documentation and painted works, all the way up to using physical straps and exploring their tension on a framed canvas.”

RIDIKKULUZ

Ridikkuluz, Nerdeen, Within Our Lifetime “This figurative portrait speaks on the duality and underrepresentation of the Arab-American. The muse is Nerdeen Kiswani, a lawyer, human rights activist and founder of [Palestinian-led community organization] Within Our Lifetime. She is a Palestinian-New Yorker and can be seen intersecting the layers of her identity by wearing a traditional keffiyeh with a New York Yankees fitted cap. The fashion history of the Palestinian keffiyeh has indeed made its way into mainstream culture. The scarf can be found in many corner stores in NYC and is appropriated on many models down the runway for major European fashion houses.”

RIDIKKULUZ is a self-taught Arab-American Queer multidisciplinary artist born and raised in New York who works in painting, sculpture, performance and video. Their work themes around identity, duality and bridging the gap between Western and Arab culture. Currently, their main focus is on the intersection between Arabness and Queerness via figurative portraiture.

ERIC RHEIN

Eric Rhein, Leaves

“Arriving in New York City in 1980, 18-year-old Eric Rhein became a part of the vital East Village arts scene, a unique community that permanently altered the city’s cultural and creative landscape, which in turn was deeply altered by the AIDS crisis. After his HIV diagnosis in 1987, Rhein began exploring themes of vulnerability, resilience and transcendence. In 1996, the year protease inhibitors restored Rhein’s physical vitality, he began his ongoing series, Leaves, which honors the lives of over 380 men and women he knew who died of complications from AIDS. As a personal response to the AIDS crisis, Rhein’s artwork highlights compassion and care as powerful life-saving instincts, reflecting continuing loss due to HIV/AIDS. Leaves serves as a means to raise awareness and educate the public about the ongoing pandemic.”

LAUREN SANDLER

Lauren Sandler, Economies of Trade Based on the Centuripe vessels from 3rd century BC Sicily, this historic form was aggregated with ornamental sculptures and imagery of everyday life. Most of these objects had no function, with content that featured women and weddings.

“This series investigates historic and contemporary narratives of power and perspective through the familiarity of the vessel, assembled as stacked parts, embedded with an accumulation of cultural objects. The recognition of the vessel form serves as an entry point to challenge the presumptive neutrality of material, and asks the viewer to step closer in order to understand layers of context. These pieces consider the extraction and production of tea, sugar, coffee, salt and other systems to examine economies of control that constitute migration, occupation, commodification and labor. With discursive content, the objects signify the monumental and mundane, function and adornment, domestic and sacred across time and place.”

ARSEN SAVADOV

Arsen Savadov, Feeling-Reason-Memory-Will-Conscience-The Post-Mortem Existence (Refrigerator)

Arsen Savadov is an important Ukrainian conceptualist photographer and painter of Armenian descent. He was born in 1962 in Kyiv to the family of Vladimir Savadov, a book illustrator originally from Baku, Azerbaijan. Arsen Savadov studied painting at the Shevchenko State Art School. A graduate of the Kyiv Art Institute, he split his time between Kyiv and New York City. Savadov, a versatile artist, has utilized techniques of installation, performance and photography throughout the course of his career. He has also exhibited in group and solo exhibitions internationally, and his artworks are in many museums and public collections around the world.

JEAN-MARC SUPERVILLE SOVAK

“Pinkster King is a memorial to the main character of the peculiarly Afro-Dutch 18th-century Hudson Valley cultural phenomenon once known as the “Pinkster Carnival.” The “Pinkster King,” as described by historian A.J. WilliamsMyers, was a well-dressed master drummer who led festive processions around the Pentecost, much like Mardi Gras before Lent. Many of New York’s enslaved took advantage of the celebrations to escape slavery until the Pinkster Carnival was outlawed by Albany in 1810. The fine-looking dress and tri-cornered hat of the figure [in this work] is borrowed from a portrait of William Lee, George Washington’s “Manservant,” whose dress resembles historical descriptions of the “Pinkster King” and is reminiscent of the way in which many free Blacks (or those who wanted to pass for free) would have chosen to appear. ‘Ju Mont sa koop Kabaj for su Rie’ is an old proverb in ‘Low Dutch’, spoken by many African Americans in Dutch households in New York (such as the Van Cortlandt family of Westchester County), which translates as: ‘Your mouth will buy you a horse to ride’. This is an allusion to the ways in which, for many of those fleeing slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries in New York, language was a harbinger for freedom. As a person of mixed race, I am always sensitive to the evidence of cultural hybridization as a result of colonization and slavery, as exemplified by the ‘Pinkster King,’ born in the cultural crucible of Dutch, African and English influences of 19th-century antebellum New York.”

HOWARD SKRILL

“The Anna Pierrepont Series has explored this landscape since its inception in 2013. These latest works, many made between 2018 through 2021, are perhaps an inevitable progression from the practice that I launched in 2013: modest plein-air drawings of figurative monuments near my home in Brooklyn. The latest studio works on paper are an unanticipated and anguished project that originates with the blood of innocents. The most recent pieces concern the splashing of extant public monuments, with a particular emphasis on graffiti. Monuments exist to promote a master narrative (in this case literally and figuratively) that speaks to the supremacy of the glorified individual (typically generals on horseback) as reflections of collective values. Elizabeth Alexander of the Mellon Foundation describes monuments such as these as ‘lessons in non-personhood’ for those victimized by the ‘great man’s worldview who are silenced in the process.’

These images document the choked voice of those who, in this contemporary moment, have regained their voice. Americans have developed, during my lifetime, a tradition of ad hoc memorialization — flowers and teddy bears at sites of tragedy. The monuments of great men on horseback, previously viewed as glorious and not tragic, were left pristine through generations until, with remarkable rapidity, they have since become recognized as sites of tragedy. The two types of memorialization have merged. The spontaneous ad hoc additions layer testaments to the continued anguish that arises from past injustices and the hope for a future of restored personhood as ‘great man’ narratives dissolve beneath the marks. The monuments are transformed into weapons against their original purpose, resulting in striking tableaus vivant in these works on paper.”

Howard Skrill, Stuart (Creepy) BRose

LEA WEINBERG

Lea Weinberg, The Separation “The central image in The Separation is a semi-abstract woman, who is surrounded by human shadows and holding two young children in her hands; a bending figure is separated from them by a torn wire mesh that looks like an open wound. The torn wire mesh is a reminder of families that were torn apart, as well as my symbol for ‘Kriah’ (‘tearing’ in Hebrew), an old Jewish act of tearing one’s cloth as an expression of grief.

My mother was 18 years old on the day she said goodbye to her mother for the last time. In 1944, Jews from Czechoslovakia were squeezed on a train leading to Auschwitz. My mother, with her parents and her four siblings, were all together for the last time as a family. In Auschwitz, men were separated from women and were arranged in two rows (for life or death). My mother was the only survivor of her family.

This artwork is describing the Separation of my mother, Paula, from her mother, Leah, and her two sisters. While embracing her younger daughters, the mother’s eyes were separating from her older daughter. An unforgettable moment of heartbroken Motherhood & Separation – a moment between life and death.”