“100 Small Works of Hope”

Awesum is a Bronx-born, Brooklyn-based artist who conceptualizes in a genre she has coined as Awesurrealism. Her works often display ethereal muses beautifully portrayed to dwell within vivid landscapes that set the tone for a story each painting has to tell.

The artist's unique history reflects in her perspective. Born in 1978 and raised in Colombia, Catalina has lived in NYC since 1998. Entirely self-taught in art, mentored closely, and assisting top NYC Artists, she immersed herself into the arts and their history. Catalina has nurtured and developed a style that blends her love for figurative art and the abstract, art theory, and history with the potency of mythic symbolism. Her current work reflects her heritage and the rich cultural milieu of contemporary New York, passing each through the prismatic lens of her exacting eye and questing spirit Working within a wide range of mediums – painting, portrait painting, and drawing compositions capture the essence of a moment through the use of Impressionists, Expressionists, and post-Modernist techniques. Each line moves with abundant feeling and intention.

A Queer, Non-binary Artist, Musician, Painter, Thinker, Tinkerer, Photo Taker, Hugger, Doer, Dreamer, Director, Lover, Writer, Producer…Person. Known for their broad range of multimedia Work, Lindsay’s music has been featured in shows such as “Castle” “Alias” “Switched at Birth” or SyFy’s “Being human” with Music Videos airing on MTV and Logo; with installations, performance Art, films and Paintings exhibited throughout NYC. Lindsay Katt’s award winning Art film “The Avant-Gardener” (featuring Heather Matarazzo and Celisse Henderson) is set to be released in 2022.

Sabrina Mendoza (b.1996, Lechería, Anzoátegui, Venezuela) is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She dedicates her art practice to raising awareness about Venezuela’s socio-political turmoil by exposing how international and national power structures have affected Venezuelans over time. Portraits of Venezuelan citizens, regions and national symbols are portrayed in her work to celebrate their existence and cultural relevance. She has participated in several exhibitions in Miami, Florida including “Art Sees No Boundaries” in Galleria Gum during Art Basel. In New York, she was featured in “About Red” at The Cooper Union and “Exchanging Visions” at The Hall, Brooklyn. She is a recipient of the Baldwin for the Arts Fellowship and will exhibit and curate at The Clemente Center in 2023.

Grey started apprenticing working artists in 1980 at age 10 and they have continued to incorporate painting into as many aspects of their life as possible. Having worked for many years as a muralist, a scenic artist and fine artist, they are currently the head designer for Play Out Apparel in NYC and design all their fabric prints in acrylic and watercolor.

Mollie Serena is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist working in photography, film, sculpture, lasers, and light art. Within her art practice, she experiments and remixes mediums to synthesize projects steeped in layered visual imagery in the intersection between art, science, technology, and philosophy. Her art practice is informed by her academic pursuits being a graduate of Parsons School of Design with a BFA in Photography, M.A. and Ph.D. from the Philosophy, Art, and Critical Thought division of The European Graduate School.

Judith is an artist known for her abstract imagery and use of unusual materials. She graduated with an MFA from Yale and BFA from PCA. She’s had solo shows at Willard Gallery, Vibeke Levy Fine Art, 718 Gallery, Cirrus Gallery (curated by Richard Armstrong) and Douglas College Art Gallery. She’s was the feature artist at EcoArt blog. Judith has been included in group shows at Willard Gallery, The Hall BK (Exchanging Visions), Baskerville & Watson, H.F. Manes Gallery, Antoinette Torrens Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery, Kavanaugh Gallery, BWAC Gallery and more. She has interviews in Art Reveal and Alkali Art Magazines. Her work has been on the cover of the Paris Review and reviewed in Artforum, Arts Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, GQ, Village Voice, Vast Art and more. She received 2 NEAs, Tiffany Foundation Award, Creative Arts Public Service Award and Ford Foundation Grant. She’s represented in Albright Knox Museum, Vassar College Museum and the Cooper Hewitt and more.

Alex is a third-generation artist working in watercolor and multimedia whose paintings have earned acclaim for their blend of natural, astronomical, and urban elements. Since 2009, Alex's work has been featured in the Mona Niko Gallery in Mission Viejo, CA, The Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition Gallery, the Kunstraum Gallery in NYC, The Clio Art Fair, and was awarded a Merit Award in the Art Room Gallery Open Show 2020. She was awarded a City Artist Corp grant in 2021. She has been featured in Oprah Magazine, Martha Stewart Living, Good Morning America, CNN, USA Today, and more.

Based in Brooklyn, NY, Sarah Rockower makes atmospheric abstract paintings. Since attaining her BFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2005, she has explored a variety of media including textiles, photography, jewelry-making, and most consistently, painting. Drawn to fine art as a tool to capture life's metaphysical moments, she is inspired by details of surface and texture found in nature. She enjoys the challenge of creating a sense of movement on canvas or paper, revealed through watery landscapes. Rockower’s work has been shown in New York, Minnesota, New Mexico, Rio de Janeiro, Rhode Island, online at The American Juried Art Salon and Artsy, and most recently at Fable Jones Studios in Brooklyn, NY.

Fine artist and designer born and bred in Mexico City, former corporate designer for Wall Street, MFA in Communication Design from Pratt Institute; her works on paper explore the interaction of color and its connection to joy and nature as source of resiliency, her hope is to bring courage and peace into a chaotic-disrupted world by questioning our connection to beauty and harmony. Her involvement with fine art includes bookbinding, ceramics and printmaking. Her prints and drawings have been shown in Mexico City, New York and the Hudson Valley and she has been featured in The Daily Beast, Time Out and in feature films.

Kristina Libby (b. 1984, Damariscotta, Maine) is an artist based in NYC. Her work is an ongoing investigation into the profound experience of being human. Through sculpture, design, public art and fine art, she utilizes surprise, whimsy and disconnections to cultivate a sense of curiosity and playfulness. Through an expanding universe of known and imagined experiences, the work draws on science, history, anthropology, biology and technology to create speculative futures and alternative memories. Her work has been discussed and reviewed in the New York Times, Washington Post, NY Post, NY Magazine, NBC, ABC, FOX amongst many others. Notably, her public art series "The Floral Heart Project" was cited as the catalyst for the introduction of COVID-19 memorial legislation in both the US Congress and with the US Congress of Mayors.

Yen Ha is an architect, artist and writer. Born in Saigon, she lives in New York City, where she co-founded the architecture firm, Front Studio. A graduate of Carnegie Mellon and L’École d’Architecture in Paris, she is currently the Smith Visiting Critic at Rice University. Through built forms, the written word and drawn lines, Ha’s work explores the relationships between people and place that can occur over time. She forges connections between people whom she will never meet and who may never know one another. Her short stories appear in Redivider, Waxwing, Crack the Spine and Hypertext, and she has been awarded artist residencies by the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, MASS MoCA and the Arctic Circle. Most recently Ha’s work was featured on a full-size billboard in New York City as part of the Asians Belong Here public art campaign.

Aeric Meredith-Goujon is a photographer, multi-instrumentalist, and filmmaker. Though his work encompasses a range of mediums and subjects, with several ongoing projects that revolve around an exploration of the dynamics of intimacy, strength, vulnerability, eroticism, and bodies in states of extreme activity, Aeric’s primary focus is as a photographer, investigating the charged relationship between the intangible and the material. He is the composer in residence and visual director for the dance company ChristinaNoel and the Creature, co-founded the bands Jelly and sum(titles), and is currently in production on Two Watermelons in a Sack, a podcast exploring contemporary conditions of men. Aeric lives in Brooklyn and holds an MFA from Pratt.

Natale Adgnot is an American/French artist whose graphic compositions blur the line between drawing and sculpture. Alternating between grayscale and colorful palettes, she converts abstract line drawings into wall sculptures made of thermoplastic on panel. She earned a BFA in graphic design in Texas and studied fashion in Paris. Her experience making garments by hand for haute couture runways eventually led her to focus on sculpture. While living in Tokyo, she began using thermoplastic to work three-dimensionally. She has been featured in solo exhibitions at Midori-so Gallery in Tokyo and at Established Gallery in New York. Recent group shows include “Black & White” at BWAC (juried by Jenée-Daria Strand, Curatorial Assistant for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum) where she won an award, as well as TART, curated by Lisa Wirth and Marly Hammer (co-founders of Work in Progress Ventures). She lives and works in New Paltz and Brooklyn.

Crystal Lamb is a photographer and mixed-media artist. The idea for Crystal’s recent work was sparked when she revisited a personally significant cornfield in Vermont on January 1, 2021. Creating an imaginary world out of the seemingly mundane, Crystal desires, as Robert Rauschenberg stated, “to fill the gap between art and life.” Crystal graduated from Pratt Institute. She is currently an art educator in the Bronx.

Based in New York City, Mira Zaki is a globally- traveling photographer and author educated at the world- renowned Brooks Institute of Photography. As an American raised by Egyptian parents, Mira’s career was influenced by her early exposure to travel, world cuisine, and multicultural immersion. She satisfies her fascination of the human condition through the medium of photography and her visual, anthropological perspective of the world. She focuses on creating a positive impact through storytelling in her work, and her strong sense of intuition and empathy shows her unique way of capturing the world and the people in it. Mira uses her talent to capture the visceral, the poignant, and the kinesthetic. Her images transport the viewer to experience her subjects, where the story of individual people, places, and objects inspires, empowers, and challenges the viewers to think past the physical form and into the inner experience.

Nocturnal is a Dominican-American mix media surrealist based out of New York. The pseudonym, Nocturnal, came about when they decided to transition their up-late lifestyle into a creative venture. A fusion of realism and psychedelia, Nocturnals’ art captures a kaleidoscope of hip hop, social issues, taboo, and nature on canvas. Like a phoenix from the ashes, each figure and symbol they paint has overcome adversity—much like their own resiliency. Nocturnals’ artwork is dedicated to questioning our own truths and the impacts of human nature.

Kate Quarfordt is a multifaceted artist whose architectural portraits and luminous abstract landscapes evoke themes of longing, resilience and the inner multitudes of women’s lives. Quarfordt is a frequent collaborator with singers, performers, writers, and activists, creating multidisciplinary works that invoke stories of resistance and create spaces for connection, action, and reflection. Her 2020 solo show with Chashama presented work from her Tiny Portals series accompanied by creative rituals with ten different artists. In addition to her artistic practice, Kate is a co-founder of City School of the Arts, an arts-based middle school in Manhattan where she teaches and directs theater productions, and a proud member of The Resistance Revival Chorus.

Rashida is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist who explores themes of liberation and constraint through painting, craft and textile work. Rashida has been painting and making art from a very young age, and maintains a professional career in social and government reform focused on marginalized New Yorkers. Her artistic practice is informed by her community work and rooted in her experience as a first-generation Muslim woman. Rashida is a Queens-native and a proud graduate of NYC public schools. She holds an honors degree in studio arts and political theory from Wesleyan University, and a master of science in comparative politics from the London School of Economics. She began her formal study of art at LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and continues to study at the Art Students League of New York. She lives in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn and serves on the board of the South Asian Women's Creative Collective.

Mona Pinky Balgobin is a self-taught Guyanese-American artist, born and raised in The Bronx, NY. She works in molding paste, gold leaf and acrylic paint to create dynamic, textured abstract pieces. Her art journey began as a self taught nail artist in middle school, using her creativity to raise funds for the NCCS (National Children’s Cancer Society). Many years later she continues to develop her art to be shared with others by painting on stretched canvas, wooden panels, furniture, outdoor restaurant seating and many more! She hopes to bring a sense of peace, wonder, and freedom through her art.

After being laid off due to the COVID pandemic, Michele Bonds left her multi-decade corporate career to pursue her long standing dream of being an artist. She grew up in the urban centers of California before landing in New York City. Throughout her life, Michele has always been fascinated with complex human interactions and the fluctuations of connections that make up the global social fiber. The vibrant flora of California initiated her interest in plant fibers. She learned to sew by hand as a child from her mother, who would make the clothes for her and her brothers when they were children which inspired her interest in textiles.

While working during the day, Michele would take crafting classes at night and on weekends learning knitting, soapmaking, color theory, and textile science for fun, but she didn’t start making fine art until early 2021. Mark Bradford’s work became an early inspiration which led to Michele developing her art style. In complex, layered topographies, Michele explores the meeting point of order and chaos and the impact of these forces on the individual and the social and historical fabrics. She weaves abstract and representational imagery to create nuanced Rorschach-esque structures. Michele works and studies at The Art Students League with Bruce Dorfman and Deborah Winiarski in New York City and lives in Astoria, Queens.

Amanda Ocasio also known as the artist and tarot reader Sona (b. 1993, Brooklyn, NY) is a queer femme Puerto Rican interdisciplinary artist and bruja based in NYC. Although she’s always considered herself a portrait and figure artist, over the last ten years she has found herself to be much more dynamic. As a mother of three small children, there were years she felt she lost herself as an artist. Now reclaiming her time and her identity both as a creative professional and as a mom her artwork explores themes like culture, spirituality, dreams, and intuition. Amanda studied at FIT, The Art Institute, and SUNY Purchase. She currently works for the Department of Education in a role supporting family engagement at a local public school. She is active as an artist doing design, public art and fine art for commission, for herself, for local businesses, and community based organizations. This is her first time being featured in a group exhibition in NYC.

Anna Jast is an architect by education and a photographer by passion. She grew up in Vienna, Austria where she graduated in Architecture from Vienna University of Technology. Since her college time in Europe, she started exploring black and white photography and participated in many National Geographic competitions. During an exchange year in Marseille, Anna got inspired by the magical light in the South of France and spent hours in the darkroom developing my black and white photos. In 2009 she moved to Zurich, Switzerland where she discovered her talent for organizing shows and worked four years at Baselworld Watch and Jewelry Show. Anna has ten years of international experience in event management on various interior design and exhibition projects. In 2014 she moved to New York City, where she attended photography classes at the International Center of Photography to deepen my knowledge and experiment with photography. Anna strongly supports the New Yorker cultural and artistic scene, while volunteering for various art shows and cultural institutions. Due to her multicultural background, Anna is fluent in four languages and her big passion besides photography is cycling.

Camila Villa Zertuche (b. Mexico City, 1996) is a multimedia artist working in NYC. She mixes media representations and personal experiences to create mythical works that explore the conditions of women and nature as subjects of colonization, capitalism, and patriarchy. Working in painting, drawing, and three-dimensional design, Camila represents flora, fauna, and femme identities that are half imagined and half experienced. Camila muddies the seemingly naive in her hyper stylized representations through layers of paint, washes, and blurring marks. As women, their bodies, and the natural world have been historically domesticated and increasingly commodified, Camila shows a hybrid reality influenced by an overly saturated digital world and ancient stories of divine beings and goddesses. She also uses Spanglish titles to contextualize her work and highlight opportunities for understanding outside of traditional language. Camila graduated from the Cooper Union in 2020. Her work has been exhibited at JuniorHigh in Los Angeles, The Cooper Union, HolyRad Studio, and La MaMa Galleria in in New York, Locust Projects in Miami, Ejecta Projects in Carlisle,PA, and virtually through Lucien Smith’s online platform: Serving The People.

Anne Kornfeld is a photographer whose work espouses the complexities, off-beat and underlying realities of the psychic states of people and environments. Her solo show, Navigating Uncertainty: An Artist’s Pandemic Journal , was held at Aurelia Gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker and in the upcoming addition to a medical book The Autonomic Nervous System in the chapter on the impact of COVID-19. Her work has garnered honorable mentions in the Pollex Awards and Julia Margaret Cameron Award for women photographers. Recently she has been featured in the Pasadena Photography Arts Review for street photography, the Griffin Museum of Photography: Projections at the Griffin and The Griffin’s show: Once Upon a Time at Boston Crossing. Currently, her work is readying to be included in The Magic of Light, at a Photo Place Gallery, Middlebury, Vermont and The Still Life at the Praxis Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota in March. Known as a leader in arts education in the New York City public schools, Anne has worked with immigrant youth at Newcomers High School in Queens, where she founded an award-winning art program.

Kimberly Braisin-Winsor is an artist born in Brooklyn and based in New York City. She creates artwork through many different mediums including oil paint, acrylic paint and marker and pen on paper. Her process is a form of meditation where she uses color, texture and metallics to make her paintings and drawings. Kimberly is a three-time Emmy Award winning professional makeup artist with a fine arts degree from University of Maryland.

Cyndie Lou Boehm is a Brooklyn and Riverhead, NY based artist who uses her personal experiences as a conduit for her work. Whether it is through her journey as a makeup artist, a Kundalini yoga & meditation teacher and practitioner or as a drummer, she draws on moments throughout her life to intuitively guide her paintings. Cyndie Lou received her BA in graphic design from the University of North Florida and currently is the Makeup Department Head at The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.

Katrina Majkut, a feminist artist, curator, and writer, investigates how social traditions impact civil and social rights. Majkut has exhibited in over thirty college gallery shows, where she lectures on women’s issues, art activism, and textile arts. Recent exhibits include Bronx Museum Biennial, Spring/Break, Dorsky Museum, Museum of Craft and Design, Every Women Biennial, Dinner Gallery, and Smack Mellon. Residencies includes Wassaic Projects, Emmanuel College, MASS MoCA, Jentel, Trestle Projects. Fellowships include Forge NYC and Bronx Museum AIM Program. She wrote her first non-fiction book, The Adventures and Discoveries of a Feminist Bride: What No One Tells You Before You Say ‘I Do’ in 2018.