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2019-2021

Amber Eve Anderson

Amber Eve Anderson

 

Amber Eve Anderson is a multidisciplinary artist and writer whose work is rooted in ideas of home and displacement, often combining aspects of the digital and the real. She received a BFA from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2005 and an MFA from the Mount Royal School of Art multidisciplinary program at MICA in 2016. In 2019 she received an Individual Artist Award in Media from the Maryland State Arts Council. Her work has been exhibited in group shows throughout the United States, as well as in Canada, Finland, Morocco, and Peru. She has been awarded residencies at Wagon Station Encampment in Joshua Tree, CA and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City. She currently lives in Baltimore where she serves on the Advisory Board of the Institute of Contemporary Art in and is a regularly contributing writer at BmoreArt.

Artist statement

From a lifetime in Nebraska to a decade in South America, the Middle East, and North Africa, my conceptual, multidisciplinary work is rooted in ideas of home and the experience of displacement. I mine personal histories to construct universal narratives. Imbued with a sense of longing, the work is poetic and precise, playful and poignant. I attach nostalgia to the mundane—everyday objects acting as points of entry into the work. I collect and arrange—actions of accrual and order—attempts at orienting myself in my surroundings. I negotiate shifting memories and digital constructs, collapsing distances of time and space, grasping at permanence, a gesture in futility.

Tommy Bobo

Tommy Bobo

 

Tommy Bobo was born in the South, fled to the prairie, and settled in the capital. He makes art primarily with lights and computers, but also enjoys watercolors, writing, and video. His work is sometimes about people and history; the ineptitude of technology; or the color of the sky on his walk to work. Tommy received a BFA in Expanded Media Art from the University of Kansas in 2006 and his MFA in Studio Art from the Mount Royal School of Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2014. He has taught art and design at American University and the Maryland Institute College of Art. Along with that he has held many interesting jobs like painting lines in parking lots, candle making, and raising money for the Quaker lobby in DC. He has received funding and support from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities and Cultural DC. His work has been covered in Sculpture Magazine, the Washington City Paper, and the Washington Post.

Artist statement

My art training benefited from starting in Kansas. Outsiders complain about the flatness, but Kansans will tell you about the importance of regularly seeing the horizon. Now over a decade removed from Kansas, I still get claustrophobic when I have gone too long without seeing all of the sky. When the sun’s light hits the atmosphere, the rays get diffused and scattered across sky creating that pure blue sky. The light of day is not the single point of the sun, but a illuminated hemisphere that envelops us like a big blue blanket. All of this is to explain why I love working in the dark. Though my studio is small when the lights are off the space becomes near infinite. Working with light and darkness allows me to create my own horizons and blankets of color. The pieces I make are about amplifying nuance, giving light a physicality that confronts the viewer with something they may have otherwise taken for granted. Through materials that disperse and magnify, my work makes light tangible and produces an experience for the viewer that is a balance between a science fair and the transcendent.

Akea Brionne

Akea Brionne

 
Akea_Headshot.jpg

Akea Brionne is a lens-based artist whose work investigates the implications of historical racial and social structures in relation to contemporary Black life in America. With a particular focus on the ways in which history influences the contemporary cultural milieu of the Black American middle class, she explores current political and social themes, as they relate to historical forms of oppression, discrimination, and segregation in American history.

Akea received the Visual Task Force Award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Her work is also featured in the Smithsonian's Ralph Rinzler Collection and Archives, and was recently acquired by the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art Collection. She was announced the 2018 Winner for Duke University’s Center for Documentary Arts Collection Award, as the 2018 Documentarian of Color. Her series, Black Picket Fences, was acquired for their permanent collection, and is on preserve at the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book & Manuscript Library. She was nominated for PDN's 30 (Photo District News) 2018: New and Emerging Photographers to Watch. Brown was also named a 2019 Sondheim finalist.

Additionally, Akea cofounded the Shades Collective, an interdisciplinary collective aimed at creating discussions around the realities of people of color within the arts and academia.

Akea received her BFA (2018) from the Maryland Institute College of Art, in the dual degree program of Photography and Humanities. She is originally from New Orleans, Louisiana and is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Artist statement

My work investigates the implications of historical racial and social structures in relation to the development of contemporary black life and identity within America. With a particular focus on the ways in which history influences the contemporary cultural milieu of the American black middle class, I explore today's African American community, as it relates to historical forms of oppression, discrimination, and segregation in American history. In turn, this body of work became more focused and aims to highlight an often overlooked group in contemporary American culture: the black, suburban middle class. While this group has not been entirely forgotten, it is hard to define. For some, these photographs might be the first and most intimate form of contact or interaction they might have with a black household. My work (both photographic and written) is largely inspired by one central question: If the ethos of the suburban landscape is largely understood as an ideologically “white” space, how do we begin to discuss the paradox of the black suburb and the ways in which it challenges to concept of whiteness? It became important to think about the suburban landscape, not simply in terms of a continuous area, but as an object that has the ability to be altered and shaped to benefit those who inhabit it. Through examination of physical space as a manifestation of the privileges afforded by "racializing" one another, I've expanded to examine the overwhelming display of American pride in the landscape, and it's affect on the black psyche.

Yacine Tilala Fall

Yacine Tilala Fall

 

Yacine Tilala Fall is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist. She received a BFA from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Using performance, sculpture, painting and natural materials, her work investigates identity, politics, and history through the lens of the body. Her work and practice speaks to the human body and its entangled relationship with the natural environment. A Senegalese heritage and an American upbringing informs her repetitive and labor intensive art practice.

Artist statement

I am a Muslim Senegalese–Mauritanian American. My connection to my ancestry and my culture is what drives my practice and influences my perspective. I am a multidisciplinary artist concerned with the body: the body as means of creation, as material, and as a lens through which my work can be viewed. My work is political and socially conscious because my body, a black body, is inherently political. The manipulation of the body and how its internal intricacies mirror the environment we experience is a theme I continuously investigate. Our natural environment and the environment which we have built are spaces where aggressive, tense, contained and restricted relationships exist. I have developed a similar kind of relationship with my work. I allow it to manipulate my body and vice versa as a way of building a deeper connection to the material and its history.

Madeline A. Stratton

Madeline A. Stratton

Madeline A. Stratton (b. 1987, Memphis, TN; lives and works in Washington, DC) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator. In 2018, she earned her Multidisciplinary MFA in the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), where she received a Merit Scholarship. She holds an MA in History of Art and the Art Market: Modern and Contemporary from Christie’s Education in New York, NY and a BA in Studio Art and History of Art from Vanderbilt University in Nashville, TN. Stratton has experience working as a cataloguer of Prints & Multiples at Christie's auction house in New York and as a cataloguer of American works on paper at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. She has exhibited in Nashville, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and throughout the Washington, DC area. In 2018, she participated in the Keyholder Residency at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, MD. In her work, she enjoys using paint, textiles, and printmaking to explore ideas of memory and the juxtaposition of presence and absence. Stratton currently teaches upper school art at St. Albans School and works as a Printshop Associate at Pyramid Atlantic Arts Center.

Hamiltonian Artists × The Kreeger Museum: Unexpected Occurrences (2022)

We Were Here (2022)

Welcome Back (2020)

HS1 | public, private, urgent, intimate, sparse (2020)

Artist statement

My work is an investigation of the memory and importance of domestic objects and spaces. Utilizing traditional media such as paint, textiles, thread, and printmaking, I challenge myself to create representations stemming from my memory. By creating silhouettes of objects and simplified structures of empty spaces, I aim to convey both absence and belonging. I search for ways to memorialize and find comfort in the objects of daily rituals and the spaces in which they take place. While drawing from places and times specific to me, I hope the viewer can enter into a reflective journey of their own space and memory.