10 artists / 10 years

Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican artist and filmmaker living in New York whose work includes experiential installations, photography, film, and sculpture. Through research, oral history, and critical fabulation, he calls attention to the contradictions entangled in the enduring myths and images of the Caribbean as a tropical paradise. This carefully constructed imaginary replaced the harsh reality of the exploitative plantation. To move beyond critique and point to systems and power – he creates open-ended poetic moving images and objects, which bring together the immaterial and the tactile. Rethinking the relationship of margin to center in archival representation, vernacular materials, such as cornmeal and fish traps, become sculptural elements, embedding multiple temporalities and narratives.

His work has been included in the Kingston Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2022–forthcoming); Trinidad & Tobago Film Festival, Trinidad and Tobago (2021) NYU Gallatin at Governors Island, New York (2021), NY; The 92nd St. Y, New York, NY (2020); Brooklyn Public Library, New York, NY (2019); Hunter East Harlem Gallery, New York, NY (2019); the Ghetto Biennial, Port Au Prince, Haiti (2018); Jamaica Biennial, National Gallery of Jamaica, Kingston, Jamaica (2017); Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA (2019); New Local Space, (NLS) Kingston (2016); and Columbia University, New York, NY (2016). Simon will be an Artist-in-Residence at Light Work in 2022, and has participated in residencies at Shandaken Projects and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Artist The Arts Center, both on Governors Island in New York City.

Allana Clarke is a Trinidadian-American artist whose practice is built upon a foundation of uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through video, performance, sculpture, and text, her research-based practice incorporates sociopolitical and art historical texts, to contend with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and the possibility to create non-totalising identifying structures. Clarke’s latest body of work expresses struggle and ritualistic transformation through sculptures made from hair bonding glue, a liquid latex commonly used to adhere hair extensions onto a person’s scalp.

Clarke refers to her first interactions with hair bonding glue as a child as 'rituals indoctrinating me into a world that is anti-Black.' Clarke begins her sculptural process by pouring the hair bonding glue onto flat panels. The bonding glue cures from the top, remaining supple underneath for days or weeks. During that time, Clarke manipulates the material by scraping, pulling, twisting, and pushing into it with her entire body. The performative process manifests in a sculptural relic of the artist literally grappling with her complicated relationship with her medium.

Clarke received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014, and has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo. She is currently a 2020 NXTHVN fellow and an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Wrecked Alphabet, Broodthaers Society of America, Harlem, NY; Indoor Outposts, FRAC des Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France and Spiral/Recoil, Delaware Center for Contemporary Art, Wilmington, DE.

David Gilbert is a discerning scavenger of poignant and beautiful things. He composes ephemeral vignettes from simple materials such as fabric, yarn, and cardboard and then photographs them. The resulting photographs capture moments of true spontaneity and accident paired with a studied airiness and grace. The images, evocatively lit, become a theatrical record of the transitory scenes Gilbert constructs in his studio.

David Gilbert (b. 1982, New York, NY) lives and works in Los Angeles, California. He received his MFA from UC Riverside in 2011 and his BFA from the Department of Photography + Imaging at Tisch School of the Arts, NYU in 2004. His work has been shown internationally in group exhibitions in Los Angeles, Paris, Berlin, and New York, and he has had four solo exhibitions with Klaus von Nichtssagend Gallery in New York. In 2019, he had his first solo show in California at Rebecca Camacho Presents in San Francisco; writing about the work in that show for Art in America, Matt Sussman said Gilbert is "like a drag queen fashioning a gown out of trash, [he] proves glamour is not so much about what you have as what you do with it."

He was the artist-in-residence at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas in 2015 and a resident at Yaddo in the spring of 2019. In 2015, he presented Duets (a performance with Paul Pescador) as part of Performa15 in New York. His work has been written about in The New York Times, The New Yorker, XTRA Magazine, BOMB, and Art Review, and is in the collection of LACMA. In a feature appearing in the February 2019 issue of Artforum, Wayne Koestenbaum wrote Gilbert is “a photographer whose beat is the afterlife as it takes place now, in this studio, this room, among these bedclothes and paint stains and wigs and strings.”

Morteza Khakshoor (b. 1984 Iran) currently lives and works in Southern California. He moved to the US in 2010 to continue his education in Fine Arts. He received his BFA from Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in 2015 and completed his MFA at The Ohio State University in 2018. He has been exhibiting his work nationally and internationally since 2011. Solo exhibitions include ‘Forty-One Drawings and Prints’, University Art Gallery, California State University (2018) and; ‘What Has Become Of Your Strength’, George Mason Atrium Gallery, George Mason University, Fairfax, VA (2016). Group Exhibition include, ‘Humoral Theory’, (3-Person Exhibition), BEERS London, UK (2020); ‘Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair’, London, UK; ‘Art on Paper Fair’, The Tunnel, NY (2019) and; 2018 Edition Artists Book Fair (E/AB), New York, NY.

He is the recipient of many awards, including The Inaugural Emerging Artist Award given at the Editions/Artists’ Book Fair (E/AB) in 2018. His works are in several private and public collections, most notably The Ford Foundation Center for Social Justice in New York City.

Kristen Jensen is an artist living and working in Queens, New York. Her practice is interdisciplinary, often taking quotidian experiences and domestic objects and reinterpreting them in diverse mediums. In the summer of 2019 she was awarded a fellowship through the Jerome Foundation to work at St. John’s pottery in Minnesota as well as a scholarship to attend Watershed residency. Recent shows include a solo exhibition “Lighter, Later” and performance “Some Grace ll” at 17ESSEX in New York City and “Everything Speaks” with Ben Dowell at GEARY. She has also exhibited domestically and internationally at Simone Subal, Wallspace, Nicelle Beauchene, and Bortolami Gallery among others. Jensen was an Abrons AIRspace resident in 2016-2017, an AIR at Shandaken Projects at Storm King in 2016, and led a performative painting and sculpture workshop titled “Enable Uncontrol” as part of the Wanderings & Wonderings series at Storm King Art Center in the fall of 2017.

Caitlin MacBride is an artist currently residing in Hudson, New York she is a lecturer at Rutgers University and a member of the BARD MFA faculty.

Caitlin MacBride’s paintings are not just bonnets, they are living manifestations of the history of America, caps of impairment and shame that the nation herself has metaphorically worn for centuries. Through design they reveal many colorful trappings in detail that civilized society in etiquette and code has required; modesty of both men and women with a repressive consequence, as blinders to control.

Many of us invisibly wear these garments ever still in our own lives, these paintings acknowledge this restriction, but with awareness, they ask in floating beauty, do you still wish to hide?In 2020 she was shown in a traveling exhibition entitled, Lost in America at Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.) curated by artist John Miller. Her panel discussion on Design & Ideology alongside Alexander Alberro (Virginia Bloedel Wright ‘51 Professor for Art History, Barnard College / Columbia University, New York), Dan Graham (artist and writer, New York) and, Cameron Rowland (artist, New York), may be found here.

In this body of work she contemplates the rich history of American regionalism by associating 19th century bonnets seen in the Metroplitan Museum, New York with the four quadrants of the United States. In one piece going as far to mix red clay into the pigment of the painting entitled, SOUTH while on residency at The University of Tennessee in 2020.

MacBride is drawn to the subject of American Material culture, and her works consider both the tradition of hand craft especially with recurring references to the American Shakers and the modernist history of Bauhaus. Her work has been written about in Modern Painters, Art Forum, New York Magazine, The New York Times, Dazed Magazine and Vogue.

Andrea McGinty (32) (b. 1985, Sunrise, FL) in an artist and writer based in New York, NY. McGinty’s work has been exhibited both nationally and internationally, with recent solo and two person exhibitions at East Hampton Shed (East Hampton, NY), Holiday Forever (Jackson, WY), Miami Prácticas Contempoaneas (Bogota, Colombia), High Tide (Philadelphia, PA), and Hotel-Art.us (New York, NY). She is the author of “God, I Don’t Even Know Your Name”, a novella published by Badlands Unlimited (2015), and her work has been featured in publications such as Mousse Magazine, W Magazine, T Magazine and The Paris Review. McGinty received her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts (New York, NY) in 2014.

Rose Nestler is an interdisciplinary artist focusing in sculpture and video. She received her MFA degree from Brooklyn College in 2017 where she was a Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship nominee and a Graduate Teaching Fellow. Her work has been exhibited at a variety of galleries including, Underdonk, Smack Mellon, CRUSH Curatorial, and CUCHIFRITOS Gallery and Project Space. Most recently she exhibited work at L.O.G. (Low Occupancy Gallery) in Chapel Hill, NC and Beverly’s Pop-Up at Good Weather Gallery in Little Rock, AK. In January 2018 she had her first solo show at Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY. Rose has been an artist-in-residence at Chashama Workspace Program, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center and Byrdcliffe Artists Colony. This fall her piece, Gymnasia Hysteria will be presented in the Art in Odd Places: BODY performance festival along 14th Street in Manhattan.