Kavi Gupta looks forward to the 2022 edition of Felix Art Fair, at The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Suite 1210 in Los Angeles.

As part of our ongoing work of amplifying voices of diverse and underrepresented artists to expand the canon of art history, we will present new and historically important works from established artists, many for the first time in Los Angeles,  such as 2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little; MacArthur Genius Award winner Jeffrey Gibson; Venice Biennale artist and National Academy inductee Deborah Kass; Anonymous Was a Woman grantee Beverly Fishman; John Solomon Guggenheim Fellow and elected member of the American Academy of Arts & Letters Jessica Stockholder; AFRICOBRA founder Wadsworth Jarrell; legendary sculptor Richard Hunt; Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation grantee and Artadia Award winner Clare Rojas; 2021 Smithsonian Futures artist Devan Shimoyama; as well as works from the estate of renowned Los Angeles-based, Korean born abstract painter Young-Il Ahn (1934—2020). We are also proud to present new works from such visionary voices as Kour Pour; SuSu; Esmaa Mohamoud; Suchitra Mattai;  Miya Ando; the digital activist art collective, Rewind Collective aimed at addressing the gender and minority imbalances throughout the art world, and more.

The distinctive, boutique atmosphere of Felix Fair offers us the chance to present and discuss important works of contemporary art in an intimate and conversational environment. By presenting a range of two and three-dimensional works from a variety of established and emerging artists in our program, our curation for Felix, LA 2022 will elucidate key figures on the international vanguard of contemporary abstraction, intertextual figuration and conceptualism.

2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little is one of the most influential contemporary masters of abstract painting. Little is renowned among his contemporaries for his masterful grasp of color relationships, a mastery immediately evident in his luminous, multi-colored, geometric paintings. He takes his knowledge of color to new experiential heights in his Black paintings, inviting the eye into a nuanced and delicate aesthetic exploration of the emotive properties of tone, pattern, and light. In these powerful works, Little turns the ability of the human eye to perceive subtle differences in a single hue into a sumptuous journey into the meaning of perception. Circular elements Little’s White paintings make the series unique within his oeuvre, which has been defined by hard-edge, geometric, abstract compositions grounded in linear color relationships. Textured, painterly brush marks are evident throughout the thickly layered, textural surfaces of the White series. These echoes of the human touch are essential to the underlying humanity of Little’s aesthetic position.

American Dream Denied (Study), by 2022 Whitney Biennial artist James Little, depicts a progressive linear pattern interrupted midway by a pyramid shape. The linear patterns on either side of the pyramid feature luminous hues, while the color fields surrounding the pyramid, as well as the pattern on the far right of the opposition, are grey tones. Little’s works are fundamentally abstract. However, as in the case of this painting, his titles frequently contain relevant information that could inform the viewer about the subject matter the artist was thinking about while working.

This painting offers a luminous glimpse into Little's detailed and time consuming process. The intensity and power of Little’s paintings can be credited to his devotion to experimentation with compositional strategies and color relationships. These vibrant studies on paper are the speculative fields where that spirit of intense experimentation plays out. The artist’s distinctive abstract aesthetic language, which is rooted in geometric shapes and patterns, flat surfaces, and emotive color relationships, is evident in these studies. As is his enduring interest in the complementary forces of simplicity and complexity.

“I’m not cutting edge,” Little says. “I’m just trying to stand up next to the great paintings of the past. It’s like building a building. The things that are going to make it stand are the same as they’ve always been. You have to have a solid foundation. I approach painting the same way.”

Little is a 2009 recipient of the Joan Mitchel Foundation Award for Painting. In addition to being featured prominently in the 2022 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, his work has been exhibited extensively in solo and group exhibitions around the world, including at MoMA P.S.1, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; St. Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; and the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, DC. Upcoming solo exhibitions include Homecoming: Bittersweet, at Dixon Gallery & Gardens: Art Museum, Memphis, TN, with an accompanying catalogue, and at Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, in 2022. In 2022, Little will also participate in a historic collaboration for Duke Ellington's conceptual Sacred Concerts series at the Lincoln Center, New York, NY, with the New York Choral Society at the New School for Social Research and the Schomburg Center in New York, NY. His paintings are represented in the collections of numerous public and private collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond; Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; DeMenil Collection in Houston; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Maatschappij Arti Et Amicitiae, Amsterdam, Holland; Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis; Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse; New Jersey State Museum, Trenton; Tennessee State Museum, Nashville; Arkansas Arts Center, Little Rock; and Newark Museum, Newark.

Devan Shimoyama’s work explores depictions of the Black, queer, male body within the context of personal and social transformation. Shimoyama has stated that he wants the figures in his work are perceived as "both desirable and desirous." He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is both celebratory and complicated. The celebratory aspects of Shimoyama's work come through in his choice of materials. Employing such things as fur, feathers, glitter and costume jewels like rhinestones, and sequins, he brings shine and dimensionality to his surfaces. These materials add to the sense that the figures in the works possess a sort of magical aura, and joyful spirit.

Shimoyama describes his most recent works as an exploration of “radical healing, meditation, and reiki, while also looking towards pseudosciences, astrology, tarot, and various other things that have helped me transform in terms of understanding myself.”

Devan Shimoyama’s Waning Kiss portrays two figures, tenderly face to face, one with bejeweled eyes, the other with eyes closed. Shifting between translucent, softly painted surfaces and highly textured use of jewelry and glitter, the work suggests a layered, ever-transforming realm of mystery and metaphor. Titled Waning Kiss, the painting debuted in Shimoyama’s first European solo museum exhibition All The Rage, which opened in 2021 at Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany. The exhibition grew out of the artist’s examination of masculinity, vulnerability, and the right for people to self-define.

The image is connected to Shimoyama’s ongoing aesthetic exploration of alternative masculinity through adorned, fantastical images of the Black, queer, male body. Through the media of painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation, Shimoyama presents figures that are perceived as both desirable and desirous. He is aware of the politics of queer culture, and the ways in which those politics relate to black American culture. These elements come together in his works in a way that is celebratory and also complicated. The celebratory aspects of Shimoyama's work come through in his choice of materials, which include fur, feathers, glitter and costume jewels. Many of the men in Shimoyama's works also literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a mystified, often vacant expression, interrupting the connection between their inner selves and the viewer, and suggesting a sort of silent suffering. Many are also shedding tears.

“Mixed media allows me to be more direct,” he says. “A lot of the materials I use are ornate, bought at stores where you would buy couture gowns, or where drag queens might buy fabric to construct a fantasy. There’s content in those materials, specific to different memories and experiences and messages. I’m thinking about branding and culture and peacocking – how what you’re wearing reflects some kind of status of yourself. The materials reflect how I think about constructing identity, and possibly code switching from era to era.”

Beverly Fishman’s work explores technological, scientific, and biological systems of perception and representation, instigating constructive conversations about the ways people see their bodies and minds and form their identities. Her most illustrious works engage with the visual language of the medical industrial complex. Her highly polished Pill reliefs utilize pharmaceutical forms as the basis for seemingly abstract compositions that radiate with color.

Fishman’s work poetically kindles the most pressing issues of our time: how humanity sees itself and allows itself to be seen; the extent to which technology alters our perception of ourselves; and the choice between altering our reality and altering our experience of it. Equally important are its formal aspects: its juxtaposition of colors and patterns; its evocative art historical references; and its oscillation between abstraction and representation.

This seemingly pop-inspired image by Beverly Fishman belongs to an ongoing body of phosphorescent, resin wall works Fishman initiated in 2010, in which she blends the branding imagery of Big Pharma with that of the recreational drug industry. In this series, pill forms representing prescription drugs such as Fosamax, Klonopin, and Valium co-mingle with iconography used on popular Ecstasy pills, such as the head of Bart Simpson or President Obama.

Fishman’s mobilization of iconic pharmaceutical forms as the basis for seemingly abstract compositions is a direct critique of how the products of the Pharmaceutical Industrial Industry are positioned in our culture against recreational drugs, despite being utilized by the public in similar ways. As Fishman states, her work proposes that, “like our overmedicated population, art, too, chases a chemical sublime.”

Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work tells visual stories that touch on her Indo-Caribbean lineage. Blending painting, sculpture and installation with methods suggestive of domestic labor which she learned from her grandmother, such as sewing, embroidery and crocheting, the work addresses such topics as the legacy of colonialism, and relationships between culture and gender roles. Mattai frequently uses found materials in her pieces that have their own embedded meanings, such as vintage saris, which relate to post-colonial concerns and contemporary issues surrounding gender, labor, and family. This creates a call and response between the materials, the topics addressed in the work, and processes involved in the work’s creation.

Mattai’s work is in the collections of Crystal Bridges Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Taylor Art Collection, among others, and has been reviewed in publications such as Hyperallergic, the Boston Globe, Widewalls, and Wallpaper Magazine, among others. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, USA; Sharjah Biennial 14, Sharjah, UAE; State of the Art 2020 at Crystal Bridges Museum/the Momentary; MCA Denver, CO, USA; Boise Museum of Art, ID, USA; Center for Visual Arts, Metropolitan State University of Denver, CO, USA and the San Antonio Museum of Art, TX, USA.

A Porous Heart, by Suchitra Mattai, is weaved together from a mixture of materials that relate to the artist’s search to locate herself within the context of her Indo-Caribbean heritage. Ubiquitous contemporary materials such as feather boas, beads and metal chains intermingle with found, vintage saris, which relate to post-colonial concerns surrounding gender, labor, and family, and ghungroo bells, traditional Indian dancing accessories normally tied to an anklet so they sound when the wearer stomps their feet.

Blending painting, sculpture and installation with methods suggestive of domestic labor learned from her grandmother, such as sewing, embroidery and crocheting, the work tells visual stories that touch on the relationship between memory and aspiration, and the formation of her individual identity within her family lineage.

Mattai frequently uses materials in her works that have their own embedded meanings. This creates a call and response between the materials, the topics addressed in the work, and processes involved in the work’s creation.

“I say I’m a storyteller,” says Mattai, “but the story does not only come from history. When you’re thinking about what constitutes memory, it’s part truth and it’s part myth. These sari pieces become a way of connecting women of the South Asian diaspora over time, because they’re of different vintages. Being part of a diaspora community, you want to connect back to this past you no longer occupy, or have tangible evidence of.”

Los Angeles-based artist Kour Pour is a leading voice in the field of intercultural representation. Born in the United Kingdom to an Iranian father and British mother, Pour recalls the most common question he has been asked throughout his life: “Where are you from?” He would always answer with the name of the town where he grew up, but what people were really inquiring about was his bi-cultural heritage. In part an effort to overcome his resentment of this attempt by the majoritarian culture to other him, and in part out of sheer curiosity, Pour began asking the same question about all kinds of things, especially art. If everything is influenced by something else, and culture and information flow freely around the world—today more than ever—how can we declare with certainty where anything is truly from?

Pour’s paintings contain elements that reference both global art history and various interconnected cultural iconographies. Some artists use words like appropriation or re-mix to describe the process of activating existing visual associations from art history and contemporary culture in their work. Pour prefers to use the word foster. “Foster means taking care of something that isn’t necessarily yours. It means nurturing something temporarily in your care.”

Rewind Collective is an ACTIVIST ANONYMOUS collective of creatives aimed at addressing the gender and minority imbalances throughout the art world.  A global collective of photographers, fine artists and digital creatives, they work together to rewind back the patriarchy, misogyny, and segregation, and to address imbalances in representation in the contemporary art field. Through the creation of new digital artworks that respond to existing works from art history, the collective aims to uplift women and other marginalized groups within the field. The mobilizing theory of the collective is that technology can be used effectively as a tool to bring inequities in the art field into focus for viewers, collectors, curators and institutional power brokers. For example, the group’s Remember Us series deploys images of historical artworks and artists in their studios, using AI technology and digitally altering and blending them together to center minority artists who have been overlooked by the traditional Western art historical canon. A statement from the anonymous collective asserts, “Our mission is to rewind back the patriarchy, misogyny, and segregation, and shine a light on those who deserve to be seen and heard.”

Double Exposure - Frida #2 is a unique non-fungible token (NFT) by Rewind Collective. An activist anonymous collective of artists and digital designers, Rewind Collective is interested in subverting the systems of power that result in gender & minority imbalances around the world. Their works frequently depict empowered images of artists and other figures from history who identify as female.

In this work, we see a shifting, digitized double image of the renowned Mexican artist Frida Kahlo. Known for her powerful self portraits, Kahlo set an enduring standard for the liberty of an artist to address social, cultural, and personal issues in their work. Kahlo included content in her paintings relating to Mexican folklore, political history, religious myth, and identity politics. She was very interested in scrutinizing and subverting gender roles and expectations. As a child she suffered from polio, and experienced chronic pain throughout her life. She was not afraid to reference both her suffering and her strength in her work.

This print by Rewind Collective depicts Harriet Tubman, the American abolitionist and political activist. Tubman escaped from slavery and on some 13 missions rescued at least 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. Considered the first African American woman to serve in the military, she was a scout, spy, guerrilla soldier, and nurse for the Union Army during the Civil War.

The print is part of Rewind Collective’s Imprint Series, which comprises physical editions of digital artworks (NFTs) which address gender & minority imbalances throughout the world. 

100% of the proceeds from the sale of this print (minus the NFT minting fees and gas fees) go to the charity ‘Art At A Time Like This.’

Richard Hunt is one of the most accomplished American metal sculptors of the past century. His work has been exhibited 12 times at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, including a solo retrospective in 1971, when the artist was only 35 years old. Titled The Sculpture of Richard Hunt, March 25–July 9, 1971, this was only the third solo exhibition for a black artist in the history of MoMA. The director of that show referred to it as a “mid-career” exhibition, however Hunt is still active in his studio today at age 83.

Hunt’s distinctive visual language is rooted in abstraction, and informed by the behaviors and properties of the natural world. His forms are particularly expressive and evocative of the movement of wind, waves, and light. The subject matter informing his works is frequently rooted in the world of human nature. Many of his beloved large-scale public works are homages to individuals such as Martin Luther King, Jr., or memorials to the many, such as his sculpture recognizing the 50th anniversary of the Special Olympics.

Young-Il Ahn developed a distinctive oeuvre defined by meticulous, abstract paintings that explore his relationship with beauty, nature, and music. Ahn’s most famous body of work, the Water series, has been associated with Dansaekhwa, an aesthetic position specific to Korea characterized by the expression of natural processes through a monochromatic palette. The series grew out of Ahn’s experience of being lost at sea in a heavy fog on a solo fishing trip between Santa Monica and Catalina Island. When the fog finally lifted, the sea around him was completely calm. The sunlight shimmered on the waves.

He wrote about that moment in his autobiography, And still it flows towards me: A Life Lived with Art: “My favorite colors from nature stretched to infinity. The sunlight crashed and reflected against the water every moment, dispersing splendid and sparkling colors in layers.” The experience inspired Ahn to create his Water series, on which he worked for more than 30 years, until his death in 2020.

Jeffrey Gibson (b. 1972, USA) is a member of the Chocktaw and Cherokee nations. His aesthetic position is rooted in the spaces where narratives collide. The work re-contextualizes relationships between popular culture, identity politics, personal experience, memory, and canonized versions of history, inviting viewers to question the myths and assumptions that empower contemporary social structures. One of Gibson’s most recent bodies of works is his limited edition series of small scale sculptures based on a famous image of a hunched over, Indigenous American horse rider. The original, titled The End of the Trail, by James Earle Fraser Gibson, suggests an air of exhaustion or defeat. Gibson deftly re-imagines the work, adding empowering messaging on a flag attached to what in the original work is a spear, along with a melting, multicolored glaze covering the entire figure.

Major exhibitions of Gibson's work include Jeffrey Gibson: When Fire is Applied to a Stone It Cracks, Brooklyn Art Museum, New York, NY, USA; Jeffrey Gibson: CAN YOU FEEL IT, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; She Never Dances Alone, Times Square Arts, New York, NY, USA; Jeffrey Gibson: This Is the Day, Blanton Museum of Art, Austin, TX, USA; Wellin Museum of Art, Clinton, NY, USA; Jeffrey Gibson: The Anthropophagic Effect, The New Museum, New York, NY, USA; Jeffrey Gibson: Like a Hammer, Denver Art Museum, Denver, CO, USA; and Love Song, ICA, Boston, MA, USA. Gibson is a recipient of numerous awards, notably he was honored as the Premier Artist in the 2021 Art Basel Conversation Series; he recieved the MacArthur Foundation Fellowship (2019); Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Award (2015); and Creative Capital Foundation Grant (2005). Gibson’s work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Rose Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Denver Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Eiteljorg Museum, and the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, among others.

Wadsworth Jarrell is one of the founders of AFRICOBRA (African Commune of Bad Relevant Artists), a Black artist collective formed on the South Side of Chicago, which helped define the visual language of the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s.

Jarrell was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1929. Raised on a working farm, he was inspired by the art in the Saturday Evening Post. While serving in the Army he became the company artist for his unit. After the army, Jarrell enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he earned his BA in 1958. After college, Jarrell established his painting practice on Chicago’s south side.

Essential to his work is Jarrell’s belief that the creation of an art object is inherently personal. Though informed by history and governed by material realities, his process always begins and ends with his own experiences. Many of the seminal works he painted at the height of the AFRICOBRA years—like Black Family (1968) and Boss Couple (1970)—directly reference Jarrell’s personal life. Even seemingly less personal works, such as I Am Better Than Those Motherfuckers and They Know It (1969) and Homage to a Giant (1970), examine the broader culture through Jarrell’s distinctly individuated point of view.

Deborah Kass is an American artist whose work explores the intersection of pop culture, art history, and the construction of self. Kass is a fan of popular culture and a rigorous student of art history, and considers all of the existing artistic content as useful material from which to draw. Her appropriation of Andy Warhol’s signature screenprints has served as a platform through which Kass addresses the lack of representation in the art historical canon. Kass uses the Warhol technique to create empowering, feminist images of females from art history and popular culture. Says Kass, “I use history as a readymade. I use the language of painting to talk about value and meaning. How has art history constructed power and meaning? How has it reflected the culture at large? How does art and the history of art describe power?”

Kass’s work has been shown nationally and internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, the Istanbul Biennale, and the Museum Ludwig, Cologne. The Andy Warhol Museum presented Deborah Kass, Before and Happily Ever After, Mid-Career Retrospective in 2012, with a catalogue published by Rizzoli. Work by Kass is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, Solomon Guggenheim Museum, Jewish Museum, Museum of Fine Art, Boston, Cincinnati Museum, New Orleans Museum, National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institute, Fogg/Harvard Museum, and many other museums and private collections. In 2018 Kass was inducted into the National Academy.

African-Canadian artist Esmaa Mohamoud describes her studio practice as an examination of “the monolithic versus the multitude.” Her work is a visually stunning and profound examination of the gap between contemporary culture's oversimplification and diminishment of Black people, compared to the complexity, richness, and diversity of their actual lived experiences.

Mohamoud’s critically acclaimed solo exhibition Esmaa Mohamoud: To Play in the Face of Certain Defeat, which toured the National Galleries of Canada, looks specifically at how the Black body is reduced within the vernacular of athleticism. In other bodies of work, Mohamoud extends her interest in the monolithic versus the multiplicity by examining everyday aspects of Black life, such as financial literacy, Black beauty, and the surveillance of Black bodies. “In certain contexts, my body becomes a visual signifier of some kind of threat,” she says.

Mohamoud’s practice manifests across multiple mediums—including sculpture, photography, textiles, video, and large-scale public installations—and incorporates a broad range of materials and methods, including concrete, textiles, metal, and found objects. She describes her aesthetic as soft industrial. “Part of my practice is hard—metal chains and concrete,” she says. “Then there’s this tenderness to the practice, like fabric and ball gown dresses.”

Clare Rojas is a leader on the vanguard of a type of poetic painterly storytelling that blends elements of abstraction and myth-making. For Rojas, storytelling manifests in many different ways: sometimes visually, as a painting, drawing, or sculpture; other times musically, as a song. Yet one similarity Rojas has noticed between these various forms of expression has to do with reduction. Her songwriting pares down the essence of a story to something that can be conveyed in minutes, just as the essence of form and line in her abstract visual compositions is reduced to an examination of the tension of balance.

Rojas’ highly individualized visual language proliferates from a personal totemic form unrooted to figurative meaning, but evocative of the shape of a drop of water or a mountain. The form has evolved over time, from an abstract shape that Rojas instinctively drew to something concrete she began noticing in her everyday visual environment. Says Rojas, “The more I drew it, and meditated on the shape, the more I saw it everywhere I looked. I found it in the figure, in nature, in water, in land, in animals.”

Jessica Stockholder is an internationally acclaimed visual artist whose works are in the collections of many of the most influential museums, municipalities, and corporations around the world. Stockholder formulates three-dimensional pictures in space, which interact in unpredictable ways with the environments they occupy and explore how perception relates to feelings of chaos and control. The work employs the visual strategies of painting, sculpture, and installation—though it also resists the limitations such terms imply. Stockholder mobilizes consumer products and industrial materials as a way to confront the threat they pose to human existence, and to critique the superficial relationship people have with technology and consumption. By incorporating such concepts and objects into her practice, Stockholder imbues the work with myriad levels of meaning and political resonance.

Chinese-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Su Su creates fantastical, dreamlike paintings that offer a new and unique understanding of intercultural exchange—a jittery, beautiful hybrid of mass media, pop culture, history, and memory with the capacity to shape our understanding of our interconnected world. Her works speak to the complicated and confusing experiences Su Su has had as an immigrant to the United States. They show a distorted, swirling world of liquified pop iconographies and Chinese symbolism. Su Su’s face and body appear in her compositions, reflecting her struggle with the misunderstandings that shape the way China and the United States understand and portray each other’s cultures. Recent exhibitions include Chautauqua Institution of Art, NY (2019); The Andy Warhol Museum 25th anniversary exhibition (2019); The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (2020); The Carnegie Museum of Art (2020); the Muskegon Museum of Art (2021); and the de la Cruz Collection (2021). Works by Su Su are held in the permanent collections of de la Cruz Collection, Miami, FL; The Bennett Prize Art Collection, Muskegon, MI; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and The International Spy Museum, Washington, DC, among others.

Pamela Council is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, printing, installation, and performance. Their work deploys surreal and uncanny forms and an assortment of found and fabricated materials to explore a conceptual framework Council calls “blaxidermy”—a blend of taxidermy and blacksploitation. One recent body of work incorporates squares of silicone into abstract compositions that relate to Council’s experiences working in the sneaker industry. Council assembles the silicon tiles into geometric grids, creating stoic, formalist arrangements next to dynamic gestural patterns emanating from the varied textures, which are themselves sampled from the Reebok texture archives. “I have this word blaxidermy,” Council says. “It addresses Black fungibility, like asking, ‘Why are so many Black people valued after life rather than during our lives?’ I make these works around that question, using adornment materials from my culture.”

Council’s first large-scale work of public art, A Fountain For Survivors, debuted in 2021 in Times Square. It incorporated 400,000 acrylic fingernails. Council is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, Andy Warhol Foundation Grant, MacArthur Travel Grant, and Harpo Foundation Grant for Visual Artists, among others. Council’s work has been exhibited extensively, including at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, OR; New Museum for Contemporary Art, New York, NY; and African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA, among others.

Miya Ando is a multidisciplinary abstract artist whose works reference the ephemerality of nature and the transitory nature of existence. Ando's images and forms reference such fleeting stuff as clouds, moonlight, tides, and the seasons. Her materials—such as steel, glass, and aluminum—convey a sense of durability and strength. Transformed by Ando, materials related to permanence become embodiments of impermanence. Ando presents the titles of her works in Japanese and English. During her time living in Japan, she researched literary and historical texts, compiling poetic Japanese descriptions of natural phenomena. Present in the Japanese descriptions are nuanced layers of thought often lacking in the English translation. These bi-lingual titles convey the sense of duality Ando experiences living between two cultures.

Ando’s recent exhibitions include The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Bronx Museum; The Queens Museum of Art, NY; The Noguchi Museum, New York; and The American University Museum, Washington DC; Ando’s work is included in the public collections of  LACMA; The Nassau County Museum; The Corning Museum of Glass; The Detroit Institute of Arts; The Luft Museum; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; The Santa Barbara Museum of Art; The Museum of Art and History; among others.