Heidi Howard employs portraiture to create a new painted spaces. Often painted en plein-air, Howard’s portraits are a record of time spent with the person, of heat, of sound, and of ideas. They offer a more flexible way of documenting, perceiving, and existing collaboratively. A figure is traditionally depicted in a landscape or a room and the space in the image is created by the illusion of light falling on the figure and their space. Because Howard’s marks do not aggregate to form an illusion, they are more evident. They reveal the process by which they came to compose a painting, which in turn reveals the passage of time. Heidi Howard has painted many artists including Liz Collins, Chitra Ganesh, Judy Pfaff, Baseera Khan, Michelle Handelman, Curtis Roads, Sondra Perry, Paula Wilson, Aliza Nisenbaum, Susanna Coffey and Doron Langberg. In 2018 Howard created their first collaborative portrait and largest painting to date, a 40-foot by 100-foot wall-painting in the lobby of the Queens Museum of the artist’s mother mother, Liz Philips, entitled “Relative Fields in a Garden.”
Howard was born and raised in New York City. They have participated in artist residencies, including the Terra Foundation (2021), the Rauschenberg Residency (2020), Carrizozo AIR (2019), Palazzo Monti (2018), and Byrdcliffe (2014). Howard directed their first performance through an individual artist grant from the Queens Council on the Arts in 2019. Howard has presented their work at many venues including the Queens Museum (New York, 2018-2020), W139 (Amsterdam, 2018), Et-al Gallery (San Francisco, 2018), and Gaa Gallery (2018, 2017, 2016).
Howard was artist-in-residence with Esteban Cabeza de Baca at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville in the Fall of 2020. They have taught at many prestigious institutions including Columbia University, Hunter College, RISD and Lehman College. They are passionate about teaching as a way to share and create. This includes many possibilities of painting and printmaking on canvas, walls, ceramics and clothing, and discussions of the collaborative and cultural possibilities of this work across the fields of science, history art history, gardening, music, dance, architecture, etc..
Esteban Cabeza de Baca (b. 1985, San Ysidro, CA) is an artist whose observational paintings are dream-like impressions of his own lived experience and are often shaped toward capturing and reimagining lost cultural histories. In his work, Cabeza de Baca employs a broad range of painterly techniques, entwining layers of graffiti, landscape, and pre-Columbian pictographs in ways that confound Cartesian single-point perspective. His influences range from petroglyphs, from which many of his motifs derive, to Jackson Pollock, who, the artist notes, was in turn influenced by Navajo sand painting. He often begins his works en plein air, recasting the practice of landscape painting, which was once the preferred surveying tool of colonizers.
Cabeza de Baca has received numerous grants and awards including, a Robert Gamblin Painting Grant (2013); a Stern Fellowship, Columbia University (2013); a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Award (2014); a Stokroos Foundation Grant (2017); and a Henk en Victoria de Heus Fellowship (2018). His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions, such as: Bluer Than a Sky Weeping Bones, Gaa Gallery, (2016, Provincetown, MA); Unlearn, Fons Welters Gallery, (2018, Amsterdam); Verano, with Heidi Howard, Gaa Gallery, (2018, Wellfleet, MA); Esteban Cabeza de Baca, Gaa Projects (2019, Cologne); Worlds without Borders, Boers-Li Gallery (2019, New York); and Esteban Cabeza de Baca – Life is one drop in limitless oceans … , Kunstfort Vijfhuizen, (2019, Amsterdam). He has participated in over 15 group exhibitions at venues such as the Leroy Neiman Art Center (2014, 2015, New York), the Yale University School of Sacred Music (2017, New Haven, CT), the Dutch Royal Palace (2018, Amsterdam, Netherlands), and the Drawing Center (2019, New York), among others. He has a BFA The Cooper Union and an MFA from Columbia University. Esteban is represented by Garth Greenan Gallery.
Esteban has taught at Columbia University, SUNY Purchase and University of Tennessee Knoxville. He has been a visiting artist as Boston University, MICA, Cooper Union, Hunter College and many more. Community teaching projects that would be of interest in future are murals with local youth, planting urban gardens, drawing and painting meditation exercises. Community is integral to Esteban’s work especially through landscape painting and our connection to nature.
Ivan Forde is a contemporary artist based in Manhattan who works in photography, printmaking, collage, sound performance, and installation. The artist performs for the camera often outdoors or in the studio, playfully framing himself as protagonist, antagonist, and chimerical human/animal hybrids navigating the antique structures of epic poetry to redefine notions of migration(s), memory, homeland(s) and identity(ies). Forde’s non-linear analysis of classic poetry about the origin of nature, the ocean, human culture, life and death, opens the possibility of reformed archetypes, alternative endings, and new beginnings. By crafting new visual epics, often depicted in shades of blue cyanotype, Forde intertwines the personal and the global to offer a transformative view of prevailing narratives that unite us across cultures, geographies and time.
Forde maintains his teaching practice alongside his studio projects through workshops, performance seminars, and artist talks. Forde hopes to learn from Yonkers community members about experiences within their neighborhood through cyanotype workshops that use ordinary materials such as plants, discarded and translucent objects to heighten awareness of locality and derive meaning from aspects of the lived environment.
Sonia Louise Davis’ sculptural objects, installations, performances and experimental texts are grounded in Black studies and informed by her training as a jazz vocalist. Her sensibilities as an improviser impact her choice of materials, movement across mediums and the ways she interacts with the varying techniques she employs: from weavings and tuftings, works on paper, fabric and found objects, to durational live events that feature voice, breath, and gesture. Davis situates her practice within a lineage of Black feminist abstraction. She is deeply inspired by thinkers who speak urgently of emergence, deep listening, waywardness, adaptation, world-making and collaborative survival. Davis writes: “Holding on to its vernacular meaning, improvising is a way of making do with what we’ve got, pulling from the resources of our past experiences to generate something fresh and unforeseen in the present moment. It’s about trust in self. It’s my methodology, guiding the way I listen in the studio as well as my active engagement with the outside world. We are always, already improvising. Beyond art-making, I believe improvisation can be harnessed for the radical collective action needed to create a more just society.”
Born and raised in New York City, Sonia Louise Davis is a visual artist, writer and performer. She has presented her work at the Whitney Museum (NY), ACRE (Chicago), Sadie Halie Projects (Minneapolis), Visitor Welcome Center (LA), Ortega y Gasset (Brooklyn) and Rubber Factory (NY), among other venues. Residencies and fellowships include the Laundromat Project’s Create Change Fellowship (NY), Civitella Ranieri (Italy), New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (Brooklyn), Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice (NY), Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace Artist in Residence Program (NY), and the Studio Immersion Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (NY). An honors graduate of Wesleyan University (BA, African American Studies) and alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Sonia lives and works in Harlem.
Rafael Domenech is an interdisciplinary artist living between New York and Miami. He explores and employs notions of architecture, urban design, and contemporary material productions to develop and produce different typologies of objects and spaces, such as experimental publications, pavilions, installations, and public programs. Domenech's spatial interventions intersect publishing methodologies such as cutting, redacting, revising, and circulation as research tactics to amplify his interest in the exhibition model as an active machine for production rather than a repository space. He is currently preparing for a collaborative exhibition at the Bass Museum. His work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter; Socrates Sculpture Park, Long Island City; The Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; The Bass Museum, Miami Beach; Phillip and Patricia Frost Art Museum, Miami; Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; Artium Museum, Vitoria, Spain; Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami; and Hua International Gallery, Berlin, and Beijing. He was the recipient of an award from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and the Cintas Fellowship. He holds an MFA from Columbia University.
Predrag Dimitrijevic art education started in Serbia where he was born. After arriving in US in 1984 he studied art at The Cleveland Institute of Art and The Yale University School of Art. He is primarily painter but also makes prints and sculpture. He works at Metropolitan Museum of Art in the department of photographs. Since 1992 Predrag has lived and workd in New York City.
Justin Cloud (b. 1987 Houston, TX) is a visual artist from a family of farmers, mechanics, and engineers. Derived from his experiences as a Ford automotive technician, Cloud’s work often references machinery and automation by way of its contemporary relation with nature. In 2015, He moved from Wyoming to NYC, receiving his MFA from CUNY Hunter College in 2018. While sheltering at his home in Brooklyn during the 2020 outbreak of Covid-19, Cloud refocused his creative energy through cultivating a garden, growing vegetables and plants, and giving away food to his local community. The garden became a sanctuary for introspection and a laboratory for community activism. His work has been shown nationally and has been included in recent exhibitions with LTD LA, Frederic Snitzer Gallery, and Thierry Goldberg. He has been featured in ArtMaze Mag, Brooklyn Rail, Art News, and Daily Lazy among other publications. Justin Cloud currently lives and works in NYC.
Justin Cloud’s work represents the projection of self as it relates to nature and technology. He wants people to be able to identify some part of who they are with the various characters in his work. It's less about narrative and more about what drives one to empathize with the world around one’s self. Cloud is interested in the specific limbic spark that triggers you to identify with a plant, animal, or machine.
It is a great privilege to be able to share artistic crafts with the Yonkers community. With this in mind, Justin Cloud plans to take part in workshops that utilize methods of sculpture and craft. This could include drawing, printing, pattern making, and creating patinas for sculptures using ink or paint. Assisting with the YCAP food pantry is also incredibly meaningful, and Justin looks forward to future engagements with the community.
Born in Skopje, Macedonia, 1967. Lives and works in New York City, USA. After graduating from the Fine Arts Academy in Skopje, he received MFA at the Fulbright School of Arts and Science at the UA. His work has been shown in numerous one man and group shows in the USA and Europe. His sculptures are part of permanent institutional and private collections in the USA, Australia, Europe, Japan, China, South Korea and his native Macedonia.
Recent note note-wordy large scale white marble monumental sculpture was installed at the Commercial Bank in Skopje and, limestone sculpture at the Forma Viva Sculpture Symposium. Gorazd Poposki is the founder and director of Gallery MC, a non-profit multicultural interdisciplinary art gallery committed to the research, production, presentation and interpretation of contemporary art. The gallery supports established and emerging artists and explores ideas at the junction of arts, performance, and architecture.