Sign-painting is in my blood: I had a design-heavy upbringing, working in the family sign shop. Today, I consider myself as much an activist as an artist and I am doing my best to say what I think needs to be said. Art is a powerful tool in that regard. Art can be a weapon to protect our voices and freedoms and to point to injustices. This is where I live. My art is about giving voice to those who aren’t able to make these same statements . . . who don’t have the same rights or protections that I do.

My large-scale paintings are geared toward the black experience, giving agency to people from this community through powerful images, deconstructing, sampling, and remixing identity, civil rights, and contemporary black culture. In my work, I strive to bridge the gap between the older and younger generations by exploring and uncovering factors that contributed to the unfortunate relationship breakdown between the two. Moreover, my layered, mixed-media painting examines parallels between present-day behaviors and attitudes that date back to African

I paint my thoughts, feelings, and perceptions of the world as I see and go through it.

Marta Rodríguez Maleck is a performer, sculptor, painter, and installation artist. She employs music, disguise, and sarcasm to create alternate realities. Rodriguez Maleck’s background in education, construction, and fashion have led her to create art that challenges societal gender constructs and prescribed behaviors. With an interest in engaging a variety of audiences, Marta has exhibited her work in myriad spaces, from the Contemporary Arts Center in Atlanta and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans to DIY house shows, and everything in between.

The truth may reside behind absurdity. Fantasy may come from reality. Surrealism is more real than realism. My works do not come from my personal experience and surroundings alone, but exist as a hybridization of Chinese scenarios and Southern daydreams. I consider myself the ghostwriter of my works. In them, the “I” is reduced to a minimum.

I am fascinated by the ability of signs to flatten a location into graphic elements and to mediate our experience by manipulating expectation, language, and memory. Utilizing Florida as an influence for forms and color palette allows me to explore a sense of cultural belonging through commerce while also examining failed utopias.

I’m interested in the American Dream, the history of landscape painting, and the effects that “cultural ideals” have on both our environment and our national psyche. Persistently researching these topics has led me to create landscapes built on dichotomies: past and present, representation and abstraction, analog and digital, and stability and instability.

My current work deals with tiny people in large environments. Sometimes they are celebrities, sometimes they are me, sometimes they are imaginary people. I like to place these figures in odd situations or surroundings and see how they play off the space. I often think about how humans fit into this world and how small we actually are compared to the rest of the universe/multiverse. I am very interested in the purpose of human existence. It seems like we do a lot of weird shit for no reason.

My work often reflects upon conservative family dynamics and the challenges of overcoming biases, customs, and religious beliefs that complicated my experience of coming out as a gay Latino man in the 1990s. After my HIV+ diagnosis in 2012, my paintings became zones to escape from relentless mental anguish and crippling anxiety. I attempt to root myself in moments during which anxiety is absent and there is a sense of peace and safety, as well as narratives and portraits that celebrate these instances of quotidian intimacy and natural freedom.

Yue Li studied arts management before her formal training in studio art. Interested in addressing social issues through community-based art projects, she hopes to use these projects to discuss the issues facing artists in the twenty-first century, topics such as consumerism and status, and the complex relationship between these topics.