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For the 2023 Armory Fair in New York, Kavi Gupta is proud to present a selection of new and historically important works by some of the most influential artists working today, internationally acclaimed, Pittsburgh-based painter Devan Shimoyama; abstract painter and critically beloved standout of the 2022 Whitney Biennial James Little; Japanese-American painter and sculptor Tomokazu Matsuyama; multidisciplinary abstract artist Miya Ando; conceptual artist Willie Cole; interdisciplinary Seneca artist Marie Watt; painter and sculpture artist Alfred Conteh; along with new works by several emerging artists on the contemporary vanguard, including; Michi Meko; Nikko Washington; and Armani Howard.
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Devan Shimoyama’s visually scintillating artworks stop people in their tracks. Clad in such finery as fur, feathers, glitter, rhinestones, and sequins, his paintings and sculptures emit a magical and joyous aura. Viewers easily enchanted by beautiful things might get lost in the shimmering artistry of Shimoyama’s expertly crafted cosmetic veils. Those whose eyes and minds are willing to travel beyond the surface subterfuge of glitter, flowers, and jewels gain precious entry into a complex world of mystery, introspection, rhapsody, and desire.Shimoyama’s painting practice is rooted in explorations of his personal identity and experiences. Mobilizing mythology, spiritual traditions, and the compositional strategies of classical painters such as Francisco Goya and Caravaggio, he crafts heroic and sanguine depictions of the Black, queer, male body. Many of the men in Shimoyama's paintings literally have jewels in their eyes, endowing them with a tearful, mystified expression suggesting internal suffering. -
Booth Spotlight
Devan Shimoyama: The Barbershop Project -
Celebrating four years since its inception in Washington, DC, Devan Shimoyama’s Barbershop Project returns as part of Kavi Gupta’s 2023 Armory presentation. In its original manifestation, Shimoyama created a fully-functioning barbershop inside a blue shipping container. The space was filled with custom furniture adorned with an assortment of flowers and rhinestones, and featured paintings by Shimoyama on the walls. The paintings showed an array of different types of people getting haircuts, suggesting a welcoming environment where all types of people could feel at ease to express themselves honestly.The project is intended as a reflection upon notions of masculinity and femininity, spotlighting cultural traditions and expectations within Black barber shops that cause non-binary, LGBTQ+ and/or gender non-conforming individuals not to feel safe or welcomed. Shimoyama’s Barbershop is an inclusive space for everybody.Shimoyama’s new barbershop paintings reflect the changes he witnessed recently when revisiting the barbershop he used to go to when he started the series.
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Devan Shimoyama's innovative and engaging Barbershop Project, which opened on May 4th, 2019 in Washington, DC. It portrays an assortment of patrons getting haircut styles that might be available at a typical barbershop serving a Black clientele. Shimoyama constructed a fully-functioning barbershop inside a blue shipping container. The space was filled with custom furniture adorned with an assortment of flowers and rhinestones, and featured paintings by Shimoyama on the walls. The paintings showed an array of different types of people getting haircuts, suggesting a welcoming environment where all types of people could feel at ease to express themselves honestly. The project is intended to reflect upon notions of masculinity and femininity, spotlighting cultural traditions and expectations within Black barber shops that cause non-binary, LGBTQ+ and/or gender non-conforming individuals not to feel safe or welcomed. Shimoyama’s Barbershop is an inclusive space for everybody. -
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“They’ve done a whole renovation, and there are women working there. It feels like a more inclusive environment,” he said. “It’s been nice to see how things have grown and expanded.”
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Devan Shimoyama
Stay Still , 2023Oil, color pencil, Flashe, rhinestones, acrylic, fabric, collage, jewelry and glitter on canvas stretched over panel
84 x 68 in.
213.4 x 172.7 cm -
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Other major current and recent exhibitions include Devan Shimoyama in The Regional, Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; When We See Us, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, Cape Town, South Africa; Oh, Gods of Dust and Rainbows, at FRONT International Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art, Cleveland, OH, USA; All the Rage, at Kunstpalais, Erlangen, Germany, Shimoyama’s debut European solo museum exhibition; A Counterfeit Gift Wrapped in Fire, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Untitled (For Tamir), a single work exhibition in the Spotlight Gallery at The Rockwell Museum, Corning, NY, USA; Black Gentleman and Midnight Rumination, a major multi-museum exhibition at The Regional, co-organized by the Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, OH, USA and the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO, USA; Garmenting: Costume as Contemporary Art, Museum of Arts and Design, New York, NY, USA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; Tell Me Your Story, Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands; Getting to Know You, Cleveland Institute of Art, OH, USA; We Named Her Gladys, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; The Barbershop Project, CulturalDC, Washington, DC, USA; Fictions, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY, USA; and Translating Valence: Redefining Black Male Identity, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI, USA. Shimoyama was awarded the Al Held Fellowship at the Yale School of Art in 2013.
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James Little is a master in the field of contemporary American abstract painting. In an age that frequently trades durability and patience for ephemerality and instant gratification, Little might be seen as an outlier. A careful, precise, disciplined perfectionist who emphasizes personal improvement over outside recognition, Little offers an alternative definition of influencer to a culture obsessed with quick returns and fame for fame's sake.Little’s distinctive visual position is based on a rigorous, life long academic study of color theory, pictorial design, and painting techniques. Rooted in simplicity, his work centers geometric shapes, patterns and emotive color relationships.
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“The White Paintings are more or less experiments in color. The thing you see first is the last layer of paint, which is white. But if you look beyond the surface, within the squares and circles there’s a whole universe of activity.”
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When asked what he most hopes people take home with them after an encounter with his paintings, Little answers with his trademark combination of sincerity and wit: “Emotion. It’s about getting as much feeling out of the work as you can. There’s not a lot of verbiage surrounding what I do. You’re not gonna get a syllabi on my Black identity, or anything like that. The art world is overloaded with rhetoric and jargon. Just stop and put it on the wall and let’s see what happens. If it performs, it performs. If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. To have to explain it is what creates the deficit for me. Those things get in the way of having an experience with the art.”
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Kennedy Yanko
Jump Start, 2016Raw pigment on canvas
33 1/4 x 41 1/2 x 1 1/2 in
84.5 x 105.4 x 3.8 cm -
Little holds a BFA from the Memphis Academy of Art and an MFA from Syracuse University. He 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. His work has been included in The Dirty South: Contemporary Art, Material Culture, and the Sonic Impulse at Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA, curated by Valerie Cassel Oliver and traveling to Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR, with forthcoming catalogue. 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. 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.
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A first-generation Japanese American who lives and works in New York City, Tomokazu Matsuyama has developed a singular aesthetic grounded in an elegant expression of what he refers to as “the struggle of reckoning the familiar local with the familiar global.” As a bi-cultural visual artist, he is keenly aware of the nomadic diaspora, a community of wandering people who seek to understand their place in a world full of contrasting visual and cultural dialects.Though he manages a dynamic, wide ranging, and truly global practice that includes painting, sculpture, and large-scale public works, Matsuyama notably remains dedicated to furthering the most personal and intimate aspects of his aesthetic evolution. Each painting that leaves his studio is the fulfillment of hundreds of hours of work, as intensive research into source imagery converges with the application of innumerable layers of custom blended paint.
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Tomokazu Matsuyama
Duvel Nostalgia, 2023Acrylic and mixed media on canvas
54 x 54 x 2 in.
137.2 x 137.2 x 5.1 cm -
Matsuyama received his MFA in Communications Design from the Pratt Institute, New York. Recent exhibitions include Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Accountable Nature, Long Museum West Bund, Shanghai, China; Tomokazu Matsuyama: No Place Like Home, Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Oh Magic Night, Hong Kong Contemporary Art (HOCA) Foundation, Repulse Bay, Hong Kong; Edo Pop: The Graphic Impact of Japanese Prints, Japan Society, New York, NY, USA; Tomokazu Matsuyama: Palimpsest, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Thousand Regards, Katzen Arts Center at American University Museum, Washington, DC, USA; and Made in 17 hours, Museum of Contemporary Art Museum, Sydney, Australia, among others.
Public displays of Matsuyama's work include a monumental, permanent sculptural installation, activating Shinjuku Station East Square, Tokyo, Japan, one of the busiest urban train stations in the world, as well as acclaimed, large-scale public commissions in Beverly Hills, CA, and in the Bowery neighborhood of Manhattan, mobilizing Matsuyama's signature examinations of bi-cultralism and pop culture.
Matsuyama’s works are in the permanent collections of the Long Museum, Shanghai, China; Powerlong Art Museum, Shanghai, China; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, CA, USA; Asian Art Museum, San Francisco, CA, USA; the Royal Family of Dubai; Dean Collection (Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys), USA; the institutional collections of Microsoft, Toyota Automobile, Bank of Sharjah, NIKE Japan, and Levi’sStrauss and Co. Japan; the Asian Art Museum of San Francisco, CA, USA; Pt. Leo Estate Sculpture Park, Melbourne, Australia; the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Xiao Museum, Suzhou, China; among others.
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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.
"Making art is a function of thinking,” Ando says. “I endeavor to stay on a focused train of thought from one piece to the next, each completed work begets the next work. It’s a continuum of thought and the works are a residue of that thinking process."
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Miya Ando
Unkai (Sea Of Clouds) November 27, 2021 4:58 PM Santa Cruz, 2021Ink on aluminum composite
41.25 diameter x 1 in
104.8 diameter x 2.5 cm -
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Miya Ando
Kumo (Cloud) Diptych January 8 2023 NYC, 2023Ink on aluminum composite
60 1/2 x 73 x 2 in.
153.7 x 185.4 x 5.1 cm -
Artist Spotlight
Miya Ando: Flower Atlas -
Complementing her indigo paintings in the Kavi Gupta booth at the Armory Show, Miya Ando’s monumental public installation Flower Atlas will continue to be on view in the Winter Garden of Brookfield Place throughout Armory week, until September 14, 2023. Consisting of 72 cloth banners suspended in the building’s glass atrium, Flower Atlas tracks flowers in bloom around the world, as described by the 72 seasons in the Japanese Kō calendar.Ando’s work is rooted in an examination of natural processes. She is half Japanese and half American, and her works are often titled in both Japanese and English. Her ideas revolve around her experience of living between two cultures: one that is profoundly based on a spiritual and societal connection to the natural world, and one that is remarkably less so. Flower Atlas is illustrative of this concept, juxtaposing the four seasons recognized in the United States with a cultural viewpoint in which there are a minimum of 72 distinct and observable seasons."Making art is a function of thinking,” Ando says. “I endeavor to stay on a focused train of thought from one piece to the next, each completed work begets the next work. It’s a continuum of thought and the works are a residue of that thinking process.”
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Ando’s work has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at The Asia Society Museum, Houston; The Noguchi Museum, New York; Savannah College Of Art and Design Museum, Savannah; The Nassau County Museum, Roslyn Harbor; and The American University Museum, Washington DC. Her work has also been included in recent group exhibitions at The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville; The Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Haus Der Kunst, Munich; The Bronx Museum; and The Queens Museum of Art, NY. 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 other public institutions as well as in numerous private collections. Ando has been the recipient of several grants and awards including the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant Award, and has produced numerous public commissions, most notably a thirty-foot-tall sculpture built from World Trade Center steel installed in Olympic Park in London to mark the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, for which she was nominated for a DARC Award in Best Light Art Installation. Ando was also commissioned to create artwork for the historic Philip Johnson Glass House, New Canaan, CT. The artist holds a bachelor’s degree in East Asian Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, studied East Asian Studies at Yale University and Stanford University, and apprenticed with a Master Metalsmith in Japan.
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Willie Cole is a contemporary American sculptor, printer, and conceptual artist. His work combines references to everyday consumer objects and appropriation from African and African American imagery.Cole is well known for his Dada and Surrealist readymades, which assemble and transform ordinary domestic and used objects such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, hair dryers, bicycle parts, wooden matches, lawn jockeys, and other discarded appliances and hardware. His long-running Mother and Child series of assemblages uses high-heeled shoes to convey the thematic figures. The forms created by the well-worn shoes recall traditional African sculpture.
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Kennedy Yanko
Untitled, 2020High heel shoes and wire
17 x 18 x 18 in
43.2 x 45.7 x 45.7 cm -
Recent exhibitions of Cole's work include To Reclaim, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA; New Concepts in Printmaking 2: Willie Cole, MoMA, New York, NY, USA; Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY, USA; Chicago, Surrealism: The Conjured Life, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL, USA; and Afro: Black Identity in America and Brazil, Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, USA. Cole’s work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; MoMA, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Wake Forest University Student Union Collection of Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, NC; and many others.
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Marie Watt is a Seneca artist whose bold, multi-sensory visual language celebrates and fosters community connections. Inviting people to explore and expand the boundaries of mutual relationships is an essential part of Watt’s aesthetic vocabulary. As a citizen of the Seneca Nation and a woman with German-Scot ancestry, her perspective has been shaped by values of connectivity and sharing.Drawing from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings, Watt mobilizes her art practice as a form of visual and experiential storytelling. She frequently invites collaborators into her creative process, either as literal participants in the art making process or as contributors of materials or narratives that are then integrated into the work. Watt embraces and centers the stories embedded within those materials and narratives. Examples include her use of donated and vintage blankets, which frequently bear the scars of their histories in the form of flaws such as rips, repairs, or faded colors. Such markings connect Watt to the people who once used them, and to the moments of their lives that read like visual echoes stored within the objects. -
Marie Watt
Skywalker Greets Sunrise, VIII, 2021Steel I-beam, cold rolled steel cap
96 x 24 x 24 in
243.8 x 61 x 61 cm
127 lbs -
Watt earned her MFA from Yale and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts with a focus on museum studies and studio arts. Her work has recently been featured in solo exhibitions at the Denver Art Museum in Colorado and Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, among many others, and group exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Seattle Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA, among many others. Watt’s work is included in the permanent collections of more than 80 museums and public institutions, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario, CA; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, Buffalo, NY; and Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD. -
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Alfred Conteh is a leader on the vanguard of American portraiture. He uses his studio practice to explore his identity and personal history from a number of different perspectives. Born in Fort Valley, GA, and based in Atlanta, his mother is African American and his father is from Sierra Leone, West Africa. Conteh’s work concerns the ways African Americans are dealing with disparities that have been affecting their communities for generations, especially in the Southern United States.Conteh’s paintings utilize materiality to elucidate the ways in which America subjugates its Black citizens by neglecting the infrastructure of Black neighborhoods and systematically denying Black citizens access to all the rights and privileges afforded to the majoritarian culture. -
“If there were opportunities for them to work, I doubt they would stand here trying to sell a two dollar bottle of warm water.”
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Alfred Conteh
Stanton Road Water Boys, 2022Acrylic and urethane plastic on canvas
84 x 84 in
213.4 x 213.4 cm -
Recent major exhibitions of Conteh's work include Alfred Conteh: The Sweet Spot, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA; Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth., Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service; Visions of a Cultural Commentator, curated by Madeline Beck, Cobb Marietta Museum of Art, Marietta, GA; Alfred Conteh, Selected Works, Harriet Tubman Museum, Macon, GA; and 5 Perspectives, Steffan Thomas Museum of Art, Madison, GA. Conteh's work is included in several major collections, including that of the The Legacy Museum, Montgomery, AL; the Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, MS; Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta, GA; and several others.
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Michi Meko is a multidisciplinary artist whose rigorous studio practice is grounded in a material, metaphorical, and philosophical examination of what he calls “the African American experience of navigating public spaces, particularly in the American South, while remaining buoyant within them.”Incorporating romanticized found objects as well as the visual language of mapping, flags, and wayfinding into his work, Meko constructs transcendent aesthetic spaces into which the viewer’s psyche is free to wander.
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Meko is the recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant and the Atlanta Artadia Award, and was a finalist for the 2019 Hudgens Prize. Recent exhibitions of Meko's work include Dark was the Night, Cold was the Ground, Kavi Gupta. Chicago, IL; The Dirty South, Virginia Museum of Fine Art, Richmond, VA; Realms of Refuge, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL; Michi Meko: Black and Blur, Clark Atlanta University Art Museum, Atlanta GA; Michi Meko: It Doesn’t Prepare You for Arrival, Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia (MOCA GA), Atlanta, GA; Michi Meko: Before We Blast off: The Journey of Divine Forces, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA and Abstraction Today, MOCA GA, Atlanta, GA. His work is held in the collections of the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; King & Spalding, Atlanta, GA; Scion (Toyota Motor Corporation), Los Angeles, CA; MetroPark USA Inc., Atlanta, GA; and CW Network, Atlanta, GA, among others.
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Nikko Washington is a multimedia artist from the Hyde Park neighborhood of Chicago. His work is rooted in portraiture, and frequently centers the artists, activists, and influencers who have made an impact on his community. A believer in the idea that if people don’t learn from their history they’ll repeat it, Washington makes work that archives and contextualizes the present moment through the lens of mythology and storytelling.Washington’s visual language conveys a sense of heroism in his figures. His style marries Mannerist-inspired figuration with highly emotive abstract markings, w with brightly colored, gestural brush strokes expressing movement and constant evolution. Stars appear frequently in his work, suggesting a range of symbolic meanings from the celestial to the celebrity to the political. -
Washington earned his BFA at the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design and the School of The Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions include, School Of The Art Institute of Chicago BFA Exhibition, Sullivan Gallery, Chicago, IL; Solo Exhibition, The Bad Sleep Well, Chicago, IL; Y:ou Gallery, Solo Exhibition, Chicago, IL; 53 Till Infinity, Logan Center Cafe, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL; Artist and Residency, Soho House Chicago, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, A Legacy On Our Own Terms Heaven Gallery, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, Something About Us, Anthony Gallery, Chicago, IL; Group Exhibition, Neighborhood Gallery, Innersect, Shanghai, CN; and Group Exhibitions, Skin and Masks, I-III, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL.
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Armani Howard is a multi-disciplinary, African American-Thai artist whose work cross-examines the roles of memory, nostalgia, and folkloric narratives in the creation and preservation of identity.
Thinking about what that dynamic means to a family over generations, Howard draws heavily upon family folklore in his work. His nebulous, conceptually layered compositions depict an intersectional space between objective reality and the more speculative mental, emotional, and spiritual aspects of life.
Raised as a Buddhist, the practice of meditation has informed Howard’s understanding of how physical bodies are, and sometimes are not, boxed in by seemingly concrete circumstances. This understanding manifests in the work as the figures in Howard’s paintings are often blurred or hidden, or depicted with allegorical or symbolic features. The physical environments they inhabit are heavily abstracted and obscured, suggesting a realm outside of time in which dream life, memory, and imagination coexist with materiality.
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Howard earned his BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent exhibitions includes, SKIN + MASKS, Kavi Gupta, Chicago, IL, USA ; Juxtapoz X Adidas: The Showcase, The Times, Chicago, IL, USA; Black Creativity: Artists, Aesthetics, And Movements, Indiana University Northwest, Gallery for Contemporary Art, Gary, IN, USA; Save Money Save Life Fundraiser, Lincoln Hall, Chicago, Illinois; Howard’s work is included in the collection of School Of The Art Institute Of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA, among others.
Kavi Gupta, The Armory Show 2023: The Javits Center | Booth 217
Past viewing_room
