I create paintings that remix narratives expressed within and instilled throughout Black America. My work searches for truth within surface and questions the unexamined histories across media, ranging from pigments made from food, paper towels, denim, and burlap. Having been a working chef for decades, I have always melded that world with my artistic practice, due to the intent they share about research into what can build and sustain a community.

 My interdisciplinary practice meets at the intersection of cultural myth-ologies, Critical Black Study, and Surrealism as a means of exploring methods in which physical, mental, and emotional states of being exist within and in opposition to the status quo. I work with the notion that society is monstrous to question themes of power, class, and the abject within their social, cultural, and political absurdities.

 My practice investigates the process of how we as individuals encounter our external reality and how that results in the interchangement between both. The mysterious space where they reshape each other is where my painting resides. William Kentridge said, “What one is doing in one’s own studio doesn’t sound like the same question as what is happening in the country but very often they are the same question.”

 As a painter native to the U.S./Mexico border, I explore narratives about my home city of Ciudad Juárez and its geographical, political, and cultural circumstances. I began painting during my teenage years when violence and corruption in Juárez peaked. As the city flooded with both, painting became a cathartic activity that gave me a sense of freedom I had never experienced.

 I am a visual storyteller capturing the intricate tales woven into the fabric of my subjects’ daily lives. Rooted in the principles of painting and drawing, my work is a tapestry shaped by the often overlooked narratives of the communities to which I belong. A native of New York, with a lineage that blends Southern and Jamaican heritage, I draw inspiration from the historical intricacies and layered complexities of the African diaspora.

 Dense, dreamy, and diagrammatic compositions tie seemingly disparate refer-ences together in an unwieldy knot, locking them in combat, conversation, and companionship. Metaphors are made literal, while familiar objects and lifeforms are transmuted into playful, potent symbols.

 Toledo focuses on the feminine universe, and therefore on herself. Painting from memory scenes from photographs and films to create art within her own script, Toledo’s works seek to convey fundamental emotions such as love, sadness, and loneliness through a deep investigation into the female experience with an autobiographical dimension.

 SEVEN (born Matt Ryan) is a New York City native and self-taught artist whose work is heavily influenced by early 1990s hip-hop culture and his childhood spent in the melting pot. He has always found beauty in the neglected and unconventional, which, consequently, is often his subject of focus. He recasts these uneasy truths with a more appealing palette, while still aligning with their reality of anguish.

 My work is both a rewriting and a combination of familiar or forgotten narra-tives. Visual history, folktales, human achievements (positive and negative), and “The Late Late Show with James Corden” are just the tip of the iceberg as far as inspirations. The symbolic baggage of images recombines to re-present well known stories and to create new ones; it’s as if one is looking at ideas from the other side of the page, holding it up to the light, and reading it from that side. The work connects these various accepted interpretations to either deconstruct them or rebuild them from scratch.

 TJ Rinoski’s work is an uncanny illusion that touches on a humorous edge of his memory. He paints stories without clear narratives, as memories tend to be misleading and not always truthful, yet his images are preconceived, gathered from tattered handwritten notes that only make sense to him. The words inscribed on Rinoski’s pages refer to his own experiences, and photographs, and, occasionally, a film scene.