Ann Lewis (born 1981 Duluth, Minnesota) [1] [2] is a multidisciplinary activist artist often working in public spaces. She focuses her attention on social justice and environmental issues and is best known for her politically charged [3] and sometimes uncommissioned takeovers of public space. [4] She is a 2018 artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute Residency for Equal Justice. [5] She lives and works between Detroit, MI and Brooklyn, NY.
A multidisciplinary activist artist using painting, installation, and participatory performance, Lewis explores the American identity, power structures, and justice. Her work often incorporates repetition through graphic elements and a limited color palette. She is known for producing work that encourages dialogue and drives community participation. Lewis began her public art career as a street artist under the pseudonym GILF! and in early 2014 garnered national media attention when she installed an oversized police tape banner that read “GENTRIFICATION IN PROGRESS” at the former graffiti mecca 5 Pointz in Queens, New York. [6]
Her most recent public art commission, See Her, shines a light on mass incarceration in the context of former female inmates reentering society. [7] The work was created in collaboration with residents at local reentry facility for incarcerated women run by Community Resources for Justice in Boston and Now + There, a Boston-based public art nonprofit, as part of its Year of the Woman series, which was named one of Hyperallergic’s top 20 U.S. exhibitions of 2017. [8]
Her piece White Lies #1, an American flag on which she has reproduced every false statement made by President Trump during his first year in office in white ink, was highlighted in media coverage of Parade Against Patriarchy at Art Basel in Miami Beach, 2017. The group was led by feminist artist Michelle Pred and included Krista Suh, the creator of the Pussyhat Project, who brought a numbered edition of the pink knit hats worn by women during the Women's Marches across the nation the day after Trump's inauguration. [9]
Lewis has collaborated with various brands and organizations over the years, including the fashion house Rebecca Minkoff, where she designed a limited edition series of moto jackets; proceeds from the sale of the jackets were donated to Not on Our Watch, a human rights charity. [10] The Amplifier Foundation, a nonprofit organization that leverages art to drive social change, commissioned her work in 2016. She has worked with Young New Yorkers, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping young people out of prison, since 2014. In 2016, she served as the curator for the organization's benefit auction, which included donated works from more than 80 socially minded artists such as Shepard Fairey, Icy & Sot, Ben Eine, Swoon, Gaia, Dan Witz, Cey Adams, Li-Hill, and ASVP, among others. [11]
Lewis is featured in the upcoming documentary, Street Heroines. [12]
Lewis's work focuses on social justice and political issues such as mass incarceration, women's rights, police brutality, and gentrification. [7]
Lady Pink, born Sandra Fabara (1964), is an Ecuadorian-American graffiti and mural artist.
Inka Essenhigh is an American painter based in New York City. Throughout her career, Essenhigh has had solo exhibitions at galleries such as Deitch Projects, Mary Boone Gallery, 303 Gallery, Stefan Stux Gallery, and Jacob Lewis Gallery in New York, Tomio Koyama Gallery in Tokyo, and Il Capricorno in Venice.
Olive Rush was a painter, illustrator, muralist, and an important pioneer in Native American art education. Her paintings are held in a number of private collections and museums, including: the Brooklyn Museum of New York City, the Haan Mansion Museum of Indiana Art, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.
5 Pointz: The Institute of Higher Burnin' or 5Pointz Aerosol Art Center, Inc., mainly referred to as simply 5 Pointz or 5Pointz, was an American mural space at 45–46 Davis Street in Long Island City, Queens, New York City. When the building opened in 1892, it housed the Neptune Meter factory, which built water meters.
SITE Santa Fe is a nonprofit contemporary arts organization based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Since its founding in 1995, SITE Santa Fe has presented 11 biennials, more than 90 contemporary art exhibitions, and works by more than 800 artists. Following its presentation of the first international biennial of contemporary art in the U.S., SITE expanded its programming to include ongoing exhibitions of notable artists in solo and group shows, often including new commissions and U.S. debuts. While SITE presents artists from all over the world, it has also provided support and career development opportunities for local New Mexico talent. Approximately 20% of the exhibited artists are based in New Mexico.
Akiko Ichikawa is a transdisciplinary artist, editor, and writer-activist based in New York City. She has written on contemporary art and culture for Flash Art,Art in America, Hyperallergic, and zingmagazine. Ichikawa's article on the photography of Dorothea Lange, Toyo Miyatake, and Ansel Adams at Manzanar became popular in fall 2016, following comments by a spokesperson of a Trump-supporting PAC on Fox News.
Elizabeth Ann Sackler is a public historian, arts activist, and the daughter of Arthur M. Sackler; as such, she is a member of the Sackler family. She is the founder of the American Indian Ritual Object Repatriation Foundation and the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum.
Paula Wilson is an African-American "mixed media" artist creating works examining women's identities through a lens of cultural history. She uses sculpture, collage, painting, installation, and printmaking methods such as silkscreen, lithography, and woodblock. In 2007 Wilson moved from Brooklyn, New York, to Carrizozo, New Mexico, where she currently lives and works with her woodworking partner Mike Lagg.
Caroline Speare Rohland was an American artist and muralist who created three post office murals, as part of the art projects for the New Deal's Section of Painting and Sculpture. In addition to the three murals, Rohland has works in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, The Honolulu Academy of Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Cara Romero is a Chemehuevi photographer from the United States. She is known for her dramatic digital photography that examines Indigenous life through a contemporary lens. She lives in both Santa Fe, NM and the Mojave Desert.
Rose B. Simpson is a mixed-media artist who works in ceramic, metal, fashion, painting, music, performance, and installation. She lives and works in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico. Her work has been exhibited at SITE Santa Fe ; the Heard Museum ; the Museum of Contemporary Native Art, Santa Fe (2010); the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian (2008); the Denver Art Museum; Pomona College Museum of Art (2016); Ford Foundation Gallery (2019); The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian (2017); the Minneapolis Institute of Art (2019); the Savannah College of Art and Design (2020); and the Nevada Museum of Art (2021).
Decolonize This Place is a movement based in New York City that organizes around Indigenous rights, black liberation, Palestinian nationalism, de-gentrification, and economic inequality. Their actions often take place at museums and cultural institutions and focus on colonialist tendencies within the art world.
Aisha Tandiwe Bell is an American visual artist known for her work that creates myth and ritual through mixed media including sculpture performance, video, sound, drawing, and installation that addresses themes of fragmentation, shape-shifting, code-switching, hyphenated identities and multiple consciousness, marginalization, and lack of agency people in the African Diaspora struggle with. Through her mixed media, Aisha Tandiwe Bell's art focuses on and looks at the societal constraints of sex, race, and class. She uses each piece of her art to look at the norms that society has created around sex, race, and class and the limitations that people have placed upon themselves when it comes to these ideas. As a Jamaican-American woman in the United States, Bell uses her art to represent the displacement that she feels and the alter egos that black women have to uphold publicly and privately. The sculptures that Bell creates are intentionally cracked, fragmented, and imperfect to reflect her fractured identity.
Maria Gaspar is an American interdisciplinary artist and educator.
TahneeAhtoneharjo-Growingthunder, is a Kiowa beadwork artist, regalia maker, curator, and museum professional of Muscogee and Seminole descent, from Mountain View, Oklahoma.
Nanibah "Nani" Chacon is a Diné and Chicana painter, muralist, and art educator. Her work has been installed at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Navajo Nation Museum in Window Rock, the ISEA International Arts and Technology Symposium, Old Town Lansing, and in the "Que Chola" Exhibition at the National Hispanic Cultural Center in Albuquerque, among other venues.
Samantha "Sam" Kirk is an American artist. She formerly worked in the advertising industry for ten years before pursuing an art career.
Jesse Krimes is an American artist and curator who focuses on criminal injustice and contemporary perceptions of criminality.
Lynnette Haozous a Native American painter, printmaker, jeweler, writer, and actor. She is an enrolled member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe and of Chiricahua Apache, Navajo, and Taos Pueblo ancestry. Haozous works in acrylics, watercolors, spray paint, jewelry, screen-printing, writing, and acting on stage and in film. She is known for her murals and uses a blend of art and advocacy to bring attention to social conditions and injustices.
Raheleh "Minoosh" Zomorodinia is an Iranian-born American interdisciplinary visual artist, curator, and educator. She works in many mediums, including in photography, video, installation, and performance. Her work is informed by the tension between Iran and the United States, as well as explorations of the self, of home, nature, and the environment. She is based in the San Francisco Bay Area.
