Since I found the Slave Registry of Trinidad and Tobago, I have taken an interest in archival documents and images that relate to the transatlantic slave trade. I became interested in aspects that repeat themselves in varying ways in the present. Aspects such as labor, death, erasure, oppression, violence, and discrimination are profoundly present. Even though the slave trade managed to dehumanize millions of Black people, with the consequence of continuing to do so in the present, we can find hope, resistance, and resilience.

 I was (still am) deeply sensitive and a voracious reader of science fiction, fantasy, and gothic horror. I’m also from a mixed-race family, of Black and Japanese descent. My work uses my mother’s streamlined Buddhism (which says to look to nature as the highest wisdom) and the language of literary device to develop a particular ideography. Characters and symbology from family photographs, natural history, and personal memory are recast into carefully constructed tableaus.

 Through a semi-autobiographic and queer lens, Natalie Strait’s paintings explore personal and psychological lived realities of womanhood, navigating the interplay between emotional vulnerability and gendered, social media-enforced performativity. Strait’s imposing, majestic female figures make their presence known: Their sculpturally molded bodies command the full space of the canvas and their unflinching gazes directly confront the viewer.

 This work is inspired by the relationship between painting and sculpture and formed by a fascination with childlike ways of making and seeing. Moments of inconsistency leave traces of human interaction within the repetitive systems. This offers a tension between the meticulous drive for perfection and the inescapable tendency toward imperfection. A work that is suspended within the conflict of itself. By playing with baser kitsch materials and viewing them through a deconstructed viewpoint, I hope to mirror the ingenuity of intuitive childhood invention.

 Athena Quispe is a painter and poet dedicated to the cosmic endeavor of decentering modernism to privilege a Native American presence that has been displaced and regarded as “primitive art” since the beginning of colonialism during the fifteenth century. She uses long-established academic painting strategies formalized throughout Europe in order to address questions and issues around decolonizing the canon of Western art history and painting.

 In my work I seek to complicate the role of portraiture by engendering a focus on queer representation. To further establish the figures as canonized icons, I use of traditional portraiture and Americana imagery as an important strategy with which to navigate the tension of metronormativity and the journey to finding a queer utopia.

 With a background in public art, Victoria Martinez erects paintings and large-scale installations that produce similarly direct conversations with architecture. Her colorful constructions combine the durability of metal, enamel, and cement with the suppleness of textiles and the fluidity of paint. Contesting fabric’s traditional associations with craft and the decorative, she transforms swaths of cloth into structural elements. Each fragment becomes a building block of a larger assemblage that dynamically weaves in and out of space.

 My interdisciplinary practice, which branches from painting into experimental design, sculpture, and digital media, is rich with autobiographical associations to my experience as a first born, first generation child of Antiguan immigrants. The artwork is an extension of my obsessive need to record complex contemporary thoughts and issues through simple expressions. Jute rope, cigarette cartons, and paint chips take on a new world of symbolic meanings, inspired by both unconscious and meticulously researched ideas.

 My work investigates remembrances and interrogates the idea of normalcy as a preferred narrative––the sanitized idea of memory versus the messier truths and discomforts of embarrassing admissions and taboo topics. Through the use of recurring characters and appropriated childhood spaces, my work considers my own memories and insecurities as they relate to my lived experience as a young woman.

 Larry Li’s practice operates in a space of cultural contrast, juxtaposing different cultures, ideologies, symbols, and histories to illustrate the dual nature of his existence in a diaspora. He works primarily through figurative painting and collage to create works that visualize his inherited experiences and cultural identity. Drawing from archived photographs of his own family history and larger Chinese/American narratives from a contemporary perspective, his process alters his own perceived notion of what it means to be Chinese American.