Jennifer Small

My paintings, initially abstract in appearance, record a day in a life—a practice that starts with documentation through the lens of a camera. My eyes act as a viewfinder, narrowing down the panoramic into single frames. Compiled snapshots represent blocks of time during which I detect aesthetic significance in ordinary routines. I see curious formal elements in common things waiting to be manipulated and transformed into abstract compositions.

Iona Rozeal Brown

Born in 1966, Washington, DC. Lives and works in New York, NY. Iona Rozeal Brown's most recent paintings are an unprecedented mixture of anonymous courtesans, geisha and other Japanese subjects. She explores the theme of Afro-Asiatic allegory, addressing the global influence of african american culture as fetish. Brown's work signals the energy, critical direction and complexity of contemporary practice that is engaged in a tenuous marriage of commerce and resistance. In her paintings, Brown intertextually juxtaposes color and texture, a technique that parallels her artistry as a DJ.

Claire Howard

Title: 
Hansjörg Wyss Curator of Modern Art
Last Name: 
Howard
Head Shot: 
Bio: 

Claire Howard is the Hansjörg Wyss Curator of Modern Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She was previously Associate Curator, Collections and Exhibitions, at The University of Texas at Austin’s Blanton Museum of Art, where her exhibitions included Arshile Gorky and Isamu Noguchi: Outside In (2025), Long Live Surrealism! 1924–Today (2024), Suzanne Bocanegra: Valley(2021), Joiri Minaya: Labadee (2019), Ideas in Sensuous Form: The International Symbolist Movement (2018), and Contemporary Projects with Lily Cox-Richard (2019) and Las Hermanas Iglesias (2022).

 

She was Assistant Curator, Modern and Contemporary Art, at the Blanton from 2017–2022, a Vivian L. Smith Foundation Fellow at the Menil Collection, Houston, from 2016–2017, and a Research Assistant, Modern and Contemporary Art, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art from 2006–2010.

 

Claire earned an MA and PhD in art history from The University of Texas at Austin and a BA from Wellesley College. She has published widely on postwar Surrealism and its cultural contexts and contributed to publications by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Art Institute of Chicago, and Centre Pompidou. She is a founding board member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism.

Affiliation: 
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Yixiao Zhang

 Yixiao Zhang began his artistic journey with classical painting and sculpture during childhood. After relocating to the United States to pursue his MFA, Zhang’s current artistic practice primarily revolves around painting and involves sculpture and installation. Through magical realism paintings rooted in the influences of traditional Oriental culture, rapid societal changes, and his international experiences, Zhang explores the traces that social changes leave on different individuals.

Jam Yoo

 My initial images of selfhood were defined by uncertainty, repression, and bad faith. All around me, Confucian morality and Christian mythology laid bare a rigid social fabric, shaping my perception of power, salvation, and social responsibility. Image making became a tool of self-preservation, sustaining my queer sexuality and awakening in me the liberatory potential of figuration. Through ornamentation and narrative, my work reckons with fractured allegories to contend with the power dynamics that shape my origins and future.

Xiangjie Rebecca Wu

 Drawing on themes of memory, time, and contemplation, I convey in my paintings the personal yet uncanny moments of mundane life that often go unnoticed. They are a recollection of bitterness and freedom from my childhood in the Yangtze River village, as well as a sense of solitude and anxiety in the present. Rather than depicting a specific story, these figurative paintings seek to evoke the experience of gazing at and meditating on things as we go about our lives.

London Pierre Williams

 The tableau is a liberating love letter through the lens of my Black queer utopia. Through my own language rooted in painting, I build a fictional, multidimensional world that emerges through different materials. Large scale figurative paintings point towards a vision contemplating joy, love, and turmoil expanded through staged characters and scenes. Often in these paintings, ambiguity is found in the negative space, creating distance from the viewer, similar to that between my Blackness and the Eurocentric canon of painting.

Catherine Wang

 Coming from a Chinese immigrant family, I am interested in the narratives we attach to places and what makes a place feel like home. I see my practice as a way to build a sense of belonging that is not rooted in settler colonial poss-essiveness. My work centers around Southern California, where I grew up. The saturated, emotionally charged paintings combine personal connections to place with more recognizable characterizations of the region. My paintings also speak to how built and wild spaces are inextricably entangled, particularly in Southern California.

Ricky Vasan

 My work is a quiet celebration of the minutiae of life. I find inspiration in intimate moments and private spaces. The figures I choose to paint are often significant people in my life; it is through this autobiographical lens that I attempt to tell a story. Inventive color relationships and geometric shapes act as artifacts of our connection to culture based recollection and our individual cognizance. I am interested in creating a surface that is full of history, each mark recalling cherished experiences.

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