Class of 2020
Originally from Phoenix, Arizona, I moved to Houston, TX in January 2012 to pursue my dream of being an artist. I attended the John Biggers School of Art at Texas Southern University, under the teachings of Dr. Alvia Wardlaw, Robert Pruitt, Leamon Green and others alike. After graduating in 2015, I worked for various small businesses before becoming an independent artist and created my own design company named, Allen Illustrations in 2017. I accredit my independence to allowing me to grow and develop as both an individual and an artist in enormous ways.
I have a hearing disability and am possibly the first deaf student from Taiwan to pursue a MFA in Fine Arts abroad.
I am influenced by the art, culture and attention to detail of street fashion and incomplete style. I like the simplicity and pureness of certain materials that will change in color and status over time, and I use them in my art. I believe elements of traditional Chinese characters, Zhuyin (Mandarin Phonetic Symbols), and personal aesthetic experiences will inspire new works. I hope to take this opportunity to experiment and create better textures and atmospheres.
A play of harmonized contradictions follows Maria Duran's work into stories of familiar disconnection and and vaporous feeling. She has a BFA in Communication Design from the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY with a focus in illustration, however her inclination towards sinuous expression instead of the blunt and glaring has led her to experiment with line-weight, planes and textures. She extends moving stillness throughout her pieces, all rooted in the pursuit to decode man's strangeness and collective nuances of feeling. Mental disorders, magic realism, a curiosity for melancholy, and her own grasp of living fuel the expansion of her psychological and visual language. Meshes of painting, digital crafting, sculpture, projections, and photography become an avid exploration of visual mediums, in the pursuit of decoding the human heart in conflict with itself.
Yawen holds a BFA from the College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, University of Cincinnati. Her work focuses on objects that connect to people’s everyday lives.
Painting and sculpting have became a way for me to deal with new environments. I relieve my solitude by collecting bits of stuff and making collages to ground myself within foreign worlds that I have inhabited, developing a deep kinship with materials along the way. My interest in color and materials began with noticing unfamiliar things everywhere and how they differed from what I had seen and experienced growing up in Korea. Even a simple cookie box, its shape and colors, fascinated me. In retrospect, I can see that my current work - my preoccupation with color, materials, and abstraction - began there.
Kunjin has a BFA in Drawing & Painting (Integrated Art) from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute and was a student curator from 2016 to 2017 in Chongqing. She loves traveling and exploring new things. She likes spending time noticing subtle or sensitive things in life and presenting them in videos or installations.
Jay (Jae Won) Jung is an artist with a Bachelor of Law degree from Yonsei University, Seoul, S.Korea. After receiving her degree, she moved to New York City to begin her art career and to explores the emotional and philosophical tensions of abstract painting, installation and experimental filmmaking. Her years of experience and diverse career background have influenced her deep engagement with time and memories, human psychology, existentialism.
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Sarah has a BFA in Drawing and Painting from OCAD University in Toronto, and has also studied at Ryerson University and McGill. Sarah is a painter whose work often references her mixed Iranian, Canadian and American background. In the summer of 2018 Sarah opened Seven Gardens artist residency in Kerman, Iran, which focuses on Persian food and handicraft.
Jimmy is a multi-disciplinary artist with a BDES majoring in illustration from OCAD in Toronto. He moved to New York City in 2014 and worked as a graphic designer before deciding to pursue an MFA.
Jimmy uses his background in drawing as a foundation for his entire practice. With a wide range of influences, he employs traditional mediums to create observational studies of everyday moments, as well as abstract compositions that are about discovery within the process. He uses these disparate methods to create images and environments that take joy in the act of making.
Some of my works embrace an architectural and a quasi-geometric character to accomplish individual, immaculate composition; others maintain my interest in abstract and relief forms.
Tarah Rhoda received her BFA (2005) from SVA, where she runs the Bio Art Lab, a facility that enables artists working with biotechnology and the natural sciences. She has been featured discussing art and science on CBSNews, CUNY TV, Expresso Futuro and has recently exhibited her work locally in NYC, at the Science Gallery in Detroit, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, Netherlands, Portugal and Berlin.
Through investigations of the body as a miniature world, her work yanks at the scale of self in nature’s reflection. She often harnesses biological synchronicities in order to calibrate the body’s array of landscapes, weather patterns and systems of self maintenance that produce a spectrum of artifacts. Literally ‘mining’ herself as an archeological site, she adapts such extractions into poetic reflections and devices, often utilizing laboratory protocols to set the stage.
Carlos Rosales-Silva was born in El Paso, Texas and has lived throughout Texas. He graduated from the University of Texas at Austin but considers oral histories from Mexican and Indigenous peoples, post-colonial historical texts, and spaces that are safe and inclusive for people of color the foundation and central cosmology of his work. His most recent output reclaims the colors and forms that have long been (ab)used to create oppressive stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous peoples. Draining direct references, symbols, and figures allow him to study the color and form of his identity while withholding easily exploitable imagery. Rosales-Silva’s central intellectual and artistic project is de-centering his white, hetero, Euro-centric western education. He has exhibited throughout Texas, and in Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis, Chicago, Kansas City, and Brooklyn and was most recently an artist in residence at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas and at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY.
I graduated from the Art Academy of Cincinnati with my BFA (major: drawing) in 2016. I am a sculptor and installation artist.
Mengxia has BA in Oil Painting from the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Art and she has explored other media such as video, sculpture, installation, and performance to express her ideas.
Mengxia makes art inspired by her everyday lived experience and concern for social issues, specifically, women's rights in China which have been affected by poor access to education, and sexual and physical abuse. She is also pays close attention to human individuality and the body, both of which are themes in her work.
Wang recieved her BFA from the China Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2016.
