new.now. Curator Tour

Each year, new.now. serves as a snapshot of the newest Hamiltonian Artists fellows’ creative practices, exhibiting the work they plan to expand upon during their two-year fellowship. Join us for a guided tour with director of programs and curator Anisa Olufemi, and explore the work of our 2025–2027 fellows: Diego Borgsdorf Fuenzalida, Chidinma Dureke, Mallory Kimmel, Behrouz Vatankhah, and Tara Youngborg. You’ll have the chance to learn more about their ideas, processes, and what inspires their practices. Bring a friend and your questions!

About the Exhibition

In this presentation of new.now., each artist’s work conveys a sense of adaptability; some take on an active exercise in troubleshooting. Concerns around displacement, machine learning, information access, and class disparity are met with ingenuity and radical imagination. Here, viewers are invited to consider: when there is not enough time in the day or sufficient resources to make do, how can we get creative? How might we use the tools at our disposal to circumvent constraints and carve out new possibilities rooted in equity, healing, and human connection?

Located somewhere between imagination and memory, Dureke’s collaged paintings probe the interiors of her diasporic experience as a Nigerian-American woman raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Kimmel works across bookmaking and found-object sculpture to interrogate professionalism, hyper-productivity, and the hostile conditions of late-stage capitalism. Exploring the metaphysical, Vatankhah’s sculptural, abstract paintings reflect the tension between what is felt and what can be seen. Youngborg’s video and cyanotypes on paper transmute environmental data into scenes where the natural world, digital systems, and historical record become entangled. Drawing from domestic life and craft traditions of his ancestral Chile, Fuenzalida’s photographic arpilleras and weavings highlight everyday residues of the neoliberal, extractive economics Chileans face today.