Nancy Morejón is a Cuban poet, critic, and essayist. She was a recipient of the Struga Poetry Evenings Golden Wreath Award. She has been called "the best known and most widely translated woman poet of post-revolutionary Cuba".
Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary African-American visual artist best known as a painter of complex works using rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Thomas's collage work is inspired from popular art histories and movements, including Impressionism, Cubism, Dada, the Harlem Renaissance, and selected works by the Afro-British painter Chris Ofili. Her work draws from Western art history, pop art, and visual culture to examine ideas around femininity, beauty, race, sexuality, and gender.
Nathalie Handal is a French-American poet, writer and professor, described as a “contemporary Orpheus.” A New Yorker and a quintessential global citizen, she has published 10 prize-winning books, including Life in a Country Album. She is praised for her “diverse, and innovative body of work.”
Minus Space is an art gallery located in Dumbo, Brooklyn, NY. It specializes in abstract art and reductive art.
Cora Cohen was an American artist whose works include paintings, drawings, photographs, and altered x rays. Cohen is most known for her abstract paintings and is often identified as continuing the tradition of American Abstraction. In a 2023 review in Artforum Barry Schwabsky suggested that "Cohen’s determination to evade stylistic consistency has made her one of the most underrated painters in New York." The New York Times' critic Michael Brenson wrote of her 1984 exhibition, Portraits of Women: "The works are dense, brooding and yet elated. The turbulence of the paint not only looks but also feels like freedom." Cohen interviewed many other artists also associated with continuing the tradition of American Abstraction for Bomb Magazine including; Ralph Humphrey, Dona Nelson, Craig Fisher, Carl Ostendarp, and Joan Mitchell. Her work has also been identified with traditions of European abstraction, and specifically German abstraction, including the work of Wols, Sigmar Polke, Gerhard Richter. She began exhibiting in Germany in the early nineties and continued to show at some of its most prestigious institutions.
The Brooklyn Museum Art School was a non-degree-granting professional school that opened at the Brooklyn Museum in Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 1941. The Brooklyn Museum Art School provided instruction for amateur artists as well until January 1985, when it was transferred to the Pratt Institute’s Continuing Education Division.
Swati Khurana is a writer and contemporary artist of Indian-American origin. She was born in New Delhi, India in 1975. She emigrated to New York in 1977, where she lives and works. She graduated from Poughkeepsie Day School in 1993. She holds a B.A. in history from Columbia University, M.A. in Studio Art and Art Criticism from New York University, and an MFA in creative writing at Hunter College.
Anne Pasternak is a curator and museum director. She is the current Shelby White and Leon Levy Director of the Brooklyn Museum.
Erin M. Riley is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work focuses on women and women's issues primarily in hand-woven hand dyed wool tapestries. Riley's work challenges society's comfort level by displaying shocking images including nudity, drugs, violence, self harm, sexuality, and menstruation.
Amanda Browder is an American installation artist known for her large-scale fabric installations on building exteriors and other public sites. Her work incorporates donated materials and local volunteers, creating site-specific art. She is the recipient of grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and Transformation Fellowship from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV).
Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an American writer, educator, and artist from East Palo Alto, California. She is a 2021 Guggenheim Fellow in Fine Arts known for her work in installations, book arts, immersive text-based installations, large-scale public text pieces, publications, collage, and audio recordings. Rasheed's art explores memory, ritual, discursive regimes, historiography, and archival practices through the use of fragments and historical residue. Based in Brooklyn, NY, she is currently the Arts Editor for SPOOK magazine. In 2021 her work was featured in an Art 21 documentary, "The Edge of Legibility."
Melissa Stern is an American artist and journalist. Her drawing and sculpture have been exhibited in museums, galleries, private and corporate collections throughout the world. Her art reviews and cultural commentary have been featured in Hyperallergic, the Brooklyn-based digital arts publication. She serves as Art Editor for Posit, a journal of literature and art.
James Hannaham is a writer, performer, and visual artist. His novel Delicious Foods (2015), which deals with human trafficking, won the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award and was named one of Publishers Weekly's top ten books of the year. The New York Times called it an “ambitious, sweeping novel of American captivity and exploitation.”
Clarity Haynes is a queer feminist American artist and writer. She currently lives and works in New York, NY. Haynes is best known for her unconventional painted portraits of torsos, focusing on queer, trans, cis female and nonbinary bodies. She is a former member of the tART Collective and the Corpus VI Collective.
Sharon Butler is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as metaphor and has said in artist's talks that she is keenly interested in creating paintings as documentation of her life. In a 2014 review in the Washington Post, art critic Michael Sullivan wrote that Butler "creates sketchy, thinly painted washes that hover between representation and abstraction.Though boasting such mechanistic titles as 'Tower Vents' and 'Turbine Study,' Butler’s dreamlike renderings, which use tape to only suggest the roughest outlines of architectural forms, feel like bittersweet homages to urban decay." Critic Thomas Micchelli proposed that Butler's work shares "Rauschenberg’s dissolution of the barriers between painting and sculpture," particularly where the canvases are "stapled almost willy-nilly to the front of the stretcher bars, which are visible along the edges of some of the works."
Shari Mendelson is an American artist and educator, known for her sculptures of animals, fertility figures, and vessels made of recycled plastic materials. She is based in Brooklyn and upstate New York in the Catskills.
Elana Herzog is an American installation artist and sculptor based in New York City. She is most known for abstract, tactile works in which she disassembles, reconfigures and embeds second-hand textiles in walls, modular panels and architectural spaces with industrial-grade metal staples. Herzog has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, Anonymous Was a Woman Award and Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, among others. She has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), Tang Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Sharjah Art Museum, and Reykjavik Art Museum.
Luba Drozd is a Ukrainian-American installation artist.
Stephen Hilger is an American photographer, writer, and educator who lives in Brooklyn, New York.
The Galería Pedro Esquerré, of the Provincial Council of Fine Arts and Cultural Heritage of Matanzas, is a Museum and Art Center, in Matanzas, Cuba.
