2022 Artists

$hady The Art Lady is a visual storyteller inspired by black culture, lived experience, and grief. Using vibrant and contrasting colors, $hady produces paintings, murals, graphic art that illustrate moments in her life and images from her dreams. Black and white figures form congregations, and combine with butterflies, suns, and moons to tell stories intended to be beacons of light, helping the artist and others process the loss of loved ones.

Amai Rawls creates collages using hand-cut U.S. currency in an effort to place monetary value on mental health. In his George Series, Rawls recreates scenes from art history and his own life, in which every character is played by George Washington. The surreal landscapes and vignettes that result explore a wide range of human emotions, while questioning society’s overemphasis on material gain and underemphasis on mental health.

Amber Zuri describes her abstract, colorful works as open journal entries, in which she has traded words for line, shape, and color. Growing up with a mother who is also a painter, Zuri was exposed to a seemingly endless flow of materials and the encouragement to use them as she saw fit. She has developed her own relationship to painting and, more recently, sculpture that is driven by emotion and instinct. For Zuri, art making is both an outlet and an arena with no rules, where she can simply be, and where nothing is required of her but vulnerability.

Amiah Mims approaches small-scale paintings as acts of self-care and personal reminders to stay gentle and open to new possibilities–a balance to her graphic design and mural work. Like Mims herself, her style is flexible and readily responsive to mood and subject matter. She compartmentalizes the human form, exploring its gestures and emotion with heavy lines and swaths of bright color. Mims refers to these works as “notes to self,” though the sentiment is commonly universal.

Anissa R. Lewis has a community-based practice that explores the power of place. For Love Letter Yard Signs, Lewis took lyrics from neo-soul songs and interjected them into signage commonly seen in her childhood neighborhood. Empty lots, often associated with blight, crime, and the failings of a neighborhood, are recast as open, with all of the freedom, possibility, accessibility, and abundance the word suggests. With this series, Lewis aims to challenge and rewrite the narrative her community has with these spaces and, ultimately, themselves.

April Bey delivers audacious critiques of the mainstreaming and monetization of radical politics through a wide range of media. Bey’s experiences living and working in Los Angeles after growing up in The Bahamas (New Providence) guide the social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, AfroFuturism, AfroSurrealism, post-colonialism, and constructs of race within supremacist systems. Portraying icons and anti-heroes of both cultures in bold, bright compositions across painting, printmaking, video, and installation allows for ambiguity in our assessments of their impact and legacies. Bey’s use of mass-produced objects and reproductive media underscores how images come to define reality in a world we experience increasingly through virtual means.

Ashley Nora has come into her own as an artist rapidly after a career as a Chemist, formal training that informs her proficient use of oil paint, gold leaf, and new age clay bodies. Nora’s current work draws inspiration from her recent visit to Africa and being in a space where she was not the minority, where “everyone radiated a blue aura.” She re-envisions being black in white spaces while radiating that same aura of empowerment and intuition. Scale, imagery, fields of color, and the concept of negative space all play symbolic roles in her representations of what it means to occupy space with beauty and grace.

Brittany Fukushima explores the intersection of drawing, painting, and printmaking through intimate, figurative imagery. In mundane, daily interactions, Fukushima experiences striking moments that replay in their mind and become cemented in memory. They then use a wide array of materials in an attempt to document and crystalize those fleeting, sublime moments. Fukushima’s works are intentionally vague and resist narrow interpretation, providing just enough information to ignite curiosity and allow viewers to revel in the artist’s evolving personal mythology.

Chris Hill makes photo-based work that stems from his interest in the way marginalized people are depicted in public spaces. From training his lens on advertising and signage in front of businesses catering to Black customers, to integrating images from art history, Hill examines the way personhood is projected and conveyed. In Hill’s words: “I find social affirmations of existence especially important among the marginalized, who in many cases are deemed insignificant or invisible.” Photography is a starting place for Hill, who also uses paint and assorted materials to extend his images into three dimensions, making work that is at once personal, political, and poetic.

Courtland Blade captures specific moments of isolation in and around various public spaces with only an occasional glimpse of a figure or a portrait. His interest lies in the psychology of space. His portrayals address a cultural shift in how our spaces are constructed, as areas designed to order and control large groups of people, while also showing us who we perceive ourselves to be or not to be.

Deonna Craig keeps a dream journal, in which she sketches and makes notes about the images and words she sees in her sleep and while meditating. When she’s in front of a canvas, Craig expounds on those ideas, transferring her visions of the world onto the painting using acrylic paint and textured media, such as tissue paper and rubber shavings. Craig travels widely and is drawn to ancient art, both for its petroglyphs and forms, which can be found in many of her paintings, and for the experience of being physically present with the art and trying to enter the mindset of those who created it.

ess mckee is a multimedia artist inspired by graffiti art and hip hop culture. Taking the form of abstract paintings, character illustrations, digital design, and murals, mckee’s work is crafted with, in her words, “the rawness of city culture, the sounds of shaking spray cans, and the smell of aerosol in mind.” mckee incorporates the foundational materials of street art—aerosols, acrylic paints, stencils, illustrations, abstract lettering, and bright colors—to pay homage to the people, places, sights, and sounds that continuously mold her style and perspective. McKee’s ongoing Mood Face series depicts women of color expressing a wide range of emotions, able to be interpreted and reinterpreted in myriad ways.

FINGERCREATIONS, as his name states, relies predominantly on his fingers to manipulate drawing media and bring his portraits to life. Working almost exclusively to capture widely-known and respected figures across Black popular culture, often spotlighting a single pivotal moment, is how FINGERCREATIONS brings their influence and stories into the everyday lives of new and long-time audiences alike. The otherwise black and white portraits are accentuated with sparse pops of color and a finishing treatment of resin and broken glass.

FITZ describes his upbringing in Indianapolis as “a rollercoaster ride” that bounced him around before landing him in Florida. There, he took his first art class. It affirmed his inherent compulsion to draw and create alternate storylines and characters for his life, an approach that still drives his work today. FITZ employs the beloved properties of cartoons–caricature, satire, and humor–in his often-large depictions of pop cultural and autobiographical realities, overlapping the boundaries of what we know to be fantasy and truth.

Gary Gee is an artist whose multifaceted work is centered in drawing, but extends to painting, ceramics, mixed media, murals, and installation. As a young person, Gee was inspired by the character J.J. Evans on the show Good Times—an artist with a signature style and sense of humor—whose on-screen paintings, Gee discovered, were actually created by the artist Ernie Barnes. Drawing from a wide range of cultural references, from early rap and hip hop culture to German Expressionism, Gee’s work reflects his interest in urban architecture, art history, and travel. His series of hand-cast ceramic heads and skulls demonstrates his continuing fascination with materials, incorporating multiple layers of glazes and luster finishes, along with acrylic and spray paint ornamentation.

Gnat Bowden is a conceptual researcher focusing on the intersections and reenactments of punk culture, repression, violence, and government influence. As a black trans queer person, Bowden utilizes music, video, and visual art to investigate Midwest brutality and their personal experiences with it. Through the persona KLEANER, Bowden explores in real time the way power influences and enacts historical rage onto Black, brown, queer, and trans people and spaces.

Hay Kidd is a moniker for Greg Rose, is an artist and curator who works to birth new narratives and experiences for marginalized folx while honoring the past, present, and futures. Their broad creative practice spans genres and applications, while their personal studio work remains grounded in more democratic and reproductive artforms including printmaking, murals, photography, and brand collaborations. Beyond their studio, Rose is the head curator and program director at 1000 Words Gallery and the in-house artist consultant at Ujamaa Community Bookstore.

Israel Solomon uses geometric patterns and the human figure to share his experiences and relationships with others. Vibrant colors pulse across Solomon’s paintings, and a variety of shapes and patterns create a sense of rhythm and movement within each composition. His recent works have featured loved ones, friends, and peers, including his ongoing series “A Seat at the Table,” which spotlights women in the art and education communities who have heavily impacted his life and work.

Johnson Simon is an artist, mentor, and disability activist. As an artist with a disability, his movement impacts him daily, and his artwork explores how he would move freely and uninterrupted. Simon is fascinated with the human body’s movement, especially that of dancers and athletes. In his paintings, he uses heavy, gestural lines and vibrant color juxtapositions to emulate that motion and flare, a conscious effort to transfer the graceful display of physical expression and athleticism. Simon marks the human body as, “both complicated and elegant,” crediting motion as what makes it, “a vessel unlike any other in this world.”

Julian Jamaal Jones inherited an appreciation for quilting, fashion, and art from his great grandmother Elsie. To create his own colorful, abstract, and gestural quilts, Jones often begins with sketching, working quickly and intuitively to process the sense of alienation he experiences as a Black man in white spaces. The resulting works bridge the mediums of drawing, textile, and sculpture, while also memorializing Black culture through the historical language of African American quilting.

Justin Brown is a multidisciplinary artist, curator, and the founder of Hoy Polloy art gallery in Indianapolis. Brown’s work is based in research, focusing on a range of public-private experiments, government and corporate surveillance programs, and archival photographs. His series “Intelligence Countered” highlights FBI surveillance files concerning persons of interest from the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. He collages images of FBI casework, and further redacts the papers through abstract painting techniques. In the artist’s words: “I paint with data and paper. I collage with history and surveillance.”

Kaila Austin stewards under celebrated and seemingly lost stories to the forefront of contemporary conversation through her work as a painter, historian, and community activist. Recently, Austin’s work has shifted from the gallery space into the public arts arena where she engages the boundaries between art, humanities, and the museum to increase access with historically neglected communities and share the creative language they need to define and tell their own stories–public art, murals, festivals, and exhibitions. Currently, she is working with the descendants of the US Colored Troops of Indianapolis’ southeast quadrant to visualize the stories of this historic Freetown and offer everyday people a way to tell our own grand narratives in the public space.

Kevin West celebrates Black figures across pop culture, sports history, and the everyday with his larger-than-life abstract acrylic portraits. In his twenty years as a professional artist, West has experimented across several mediums, methods, and concepts including broken records, teaching, collage, and technology. His command of painting specifically allows him to move through compositions with confidence, urgency, and energy his brush and line work readily transcribe. In part, that energy is fueled by West’s experience as a cancer survivor and a refusal to let life’s obstacles stop him.

Kiah Celeste uses exclusively secondhand materials to create her work, a decision born of practicality as well as a resolute commitment to sustainability. With this approach, Celeste has discovered a gold mine of free and sublime forms in heaps of forgotten waste. She constructs her sculptural works largely without adhesion or hardware, arranging and balancing industrial and synthetic materials into new abstract forms. Freed from their practical past, Celeste’s materials are transformed according to their textures and physical qualities into objects of affection.

Kyng Rhodes is called to painting by his observations of society, a long-held love of graphic expression, and his own spirituality. Formally trained as a graphic designer, Rhodes moved away from commercial work to illuminate topics he hopes to see more collective reflection and dialogue around–environmental sustainability, care, and familial relationships. Vibrant color palettes, intricate botanical borders, and stylized figures hallmark his current work, encouraging joy and optimism alongside more complicated stories.

Lyndy Bazile works to support historically marginalized communities by creating art that celebrates multiplicity and evokes pride in diverse identities. A multiracial, woman of color who was born and raised in Indiana, Bazile explores her Haitian ancestry through her art in an attempt to better connect with her roots. In her paintings and public artworks, Bazile often depicts female figures, celebrating larger body types and emphasizing feminine strength, and sets them in natural spaces, a visual recognition of her Haitian background.

Malcolm Mobutu Smith (Bloomington, IN) creates artworks that merge volumetric form with graphic flatness. Guided by improvisation in both his ceramic and drawing practices, Smith playfully engages the moves of distortion and invention he has internalized from the worlds of Jazz and Hip Hop. In his clay work, Smith’s wheel-thrown and hand-built forms explore the intersections of graffiti art, playful organic abstraction, and the graphic conventions of comic books. Since 2004, he has created an ongoing series of Cloud Cups and Scoops, cup-form abstractions that begin as thrown clay forms, and which he continuously alters and resurfaces in his studio.

Marvin D. Rouse was born in Indianapolis and started creating at age five after watching his uncle draw a race car. By 18, Rouse had completed a number of locally-commissioned projects and his artwork graced t-shirts sold at Karma Records. He recalls being written up in the 1997 edition of the Source Magazine alongside other local creatives including Russ w/ “Mud Kids”, DJ Top Speed, and DJ Indiana Jones. Shortly after, he relocated to Naples, FL to further his career and has been working there as an artist and art technician for the past 24 years. In his paintings and sculptures, he builds imaginative faces and scenes with hidden symbols and leans on primary color palettes to capture what’s universal about human perception.

Matthew Cooper describes his work as “equal parts creation and destruction.” His mixed media paintings begin in the hard-to-reach recesses of his own memory and come into form as three-dimensional examinations on canvas. The tedious, physical act of building up collected materials, paint, and cardboard, then peeling back the layers, mimics the emotional work he engages to source concepts and imagery. Cooper details his process, “as this shadow work is never completely done, I often repurpose old works to carve away something new from them.” An Indianapolis native, Cooper’s work to unearth personal truths doubles as work to access and amplify the collective memories and traumas of his community.

Morgan Robinson-Gay creates sculptural works that interact with the body, towing the lines of performance, endurance, installation, and wearable art. Commenting on trauma and her personal experience with abuse, Robinson-Gay’s works translate mental hardship into the physical, often utilizing steel and fiber. Her practice is her recovery, which she has defined as having “history and scars that tell you to not dare move forward and try again, but doing so anyway.” Through her works, Robinson-Gay gives shape and form to the idea that she may never recover from trauma, but will grow to live with it.

Note Davis-Barney paints webs of consciousness and polarities of existence as an attempt to understand meaning and realize freedom. Davis-Barney’s physical application of material and pigment to canvas reenacts and confronts our orientation to overconsumption and mechanical production. Infused with ancient and contemporary Afro aesthetics, his work explores the discourses of race, history, philosophy, spirituality and pop culture. Often layering text, pattern, and symbolic imagery with spiritual, meta-physical, and futurist concepts, Davis-Barney illustrates and calls into question our material existence.

Shamira Wilson is an interdisciplinary artist passionate about ethnobotany, herbalism, and geology. Wilson’s compositions are inspired by textile patterns and their ability to share information across time and generations. Closely observing everyday life and the world around her, Wilson practice centers learning and focuses on our connections to the environment, ourselves, and each other. Through paintings, prints, murals, and interactive installations, she explores how motifs become patterns, and how patterns tell stories.

Slim AVRE has been considering composition, color palettes, balance, and pattern since the first time she dressed herself as a child. Fascinated initially by fashion, her study of Black culture led her to furniture design, architecture, and eventually a keen interest in how design intersects with environmental sustainability today. AVRE is a community artist whose work centers around collaborative and comprehensive sustainability projects that disrupt society’s unhealthy habits. Her paintings nod to similar concerns, using playful patterns and perspectives to disrupt our comfortable sense of time and reality. Underpinning all of her creative work is a deep desire to make health and pollution consciousness part of the culture.

Tashema Davis is a painter shining light on African American individuals and experience through expressive color and skilful painting techniques. While studying art history and spending time in Italy, Davis was dismayed to see no representation of herself in the art she encountered, neither in terms of skin color nor in the feeling of freedom she experiences in life. Davis was determined to create the images she wanted to see: beautiful Black faces depicted in affirming and joyful ways. Her portraits often incorporate organic elements such as abundant plant life, flowers, fruits, and birds, while also reveling in intricate patterning and texture.

Terry Flores thought of the drawing plane not as a surface, but as a window. He wanted to create a place. His post graduate work explores abstraction and hyper-realism in painting and mixed media with commentary and analysis of religion, capitalism, politics, and racism. While most of his formal artwork is figural and painterly, his love for science and mathematics imbued the work with underlying geometries and mechanical sensibilities. In Indianapolis, his demonstrable and prolific talent was supported best by his Irvington neighbors and fans who celebrated Flores as an institution in Halloween décor. Reflecting on the concept of making art, he once shared, “it has become less something that I am doing and more something that I am.”

Exhibited in memoriam with assistance from Kristan Weatherford

Theda Sandiford uses racial trauma as a starting point for her fiber-based sculptural and installation artwork. Sandiford juxtaposes various fibers with a variety of found materials through free-form weaving, coiling, knotting, crochet, and jewelry making techniques. In her community-based work, Sandiford pairs people, sound, and art making to co-create safe spaces for the exploration of equity, inclusion, sustainability, and personal wellbeing. Transformed by collective memory, meticulously gathered materials and community contributions weave together contemporary issues and personal narratives to become a “social fabric.”

Wavy Blayne shares his personal journey with mental health through painting, an avenue for vulnerability that he hopes can help others with their own journeys. Working primarily with acrylic and oils, drawing on elements of Afro-futurism, and influenced by the work of Akira Toriyama and Jim Lee, he blends materials and techniques that bring him joy into a style he calls “Wavy.” Painting is a salve for his struggles with anxiety and self-confidence, and exhibiting finished work acts as a bridge to others, offering them a similar opportunity to look inward and heal.

Will Watson interrogates the fate of our memories and affirms upbeat moments of existence, family, travel, and leisure with his paintings. Watson’s work is both autobiographical and aware of art-history and pop-culture references. Expressionist mark-making and quick, gestural paint strokes are sourced from real life, photographs, and memories. They emphasize values and life lessons passed down through generations. Painting is a way for Watson to honor the spirit of times and individuals we hope to learn more about and remember forever.