Laylah Ali
Laylah Ali (b. 1968, Buffalo, NY) is a visual artist whose main focus over her career has been paintings and drawings, though she has also worked in printmaking, performance and online media. She has described her work as “dealing with the amalgam of race, power, gendering, ambition, human frailty, murky politics, and the other complex combinations that we so often treat as separate entities.” Her drawing retrospective “Is Anything the Matter?” was most recently at the Colby College Museum of Art in Waterville, Maine.
Ali has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; and MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts. Her work and process were highlighted in season 3 of the acclaimed PBS Art21 series. She is based in western Massachusetts and currently the Alexander Falck Class of 1899 Professor of Art at Williams College, Williamstown, MA.
Image: Installation detail from 2026 at Colby Museum of Art for solo drawing exhibit "Is Anything the Matter?" of Studies series (2010-13)
Photo: Kendall DeBoer
Trisha Baga
Trisha Baga (b. 1985, Venice, FL) is a Filipino-American artist working in stereoscopic 3-D video installation, paint, clay, consumer grade electronics, and community performance. Compelled by an interest in what they call “the stuff that makes things stick together,” Baga recombines objects and images into scenarios that address issues related to the evolving frictions between the physical world and the world of images and media technology. For them, working in a variety of media is an optimistic metaphor for the power of translation and connection, as they strive to unearth emotional histories and critically engage with contemporary image culture.
Baga lives and works in Queens, New York, and is represented by Societe Berlin and Gio Marconi Gallery. Baga has had numerous solo institutional exhibitions including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pirelli HangarBicocca (Milan), Fridericianum (Kassel, Germany), and Kunstverein München. Their work is in several permanent collections including those of the Walker Art Center, the Gesellschaft für Moderne Kunst am Museum Ludwig Köln, the Whitney Museum, Kunstpalast (Dusseldorf, Germany), and Moderna Museet (Stockholm).
Image: Scarlett Johansson, 2026. Oil on linen, 66.75" x 45"
nora chipaumire
nora chipaumire (b. 1965, Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe) makes work and creates ideas that straddle multiple imaginaries—African, Black, woman. A life lived through aesthetics informed by refusal, defiance, negotiation, contradictions and more. These refusals take the form of movement, objects, non objects, manifestos, sound and building a pedagogical practice (nhaka) that works the present now with the present past.
Image: DAMBUDZO. Photograph by Marie Staggat, Berlin, 2023. Longtime company perfo Tatenda Chabarwa (foreground) and Soko Jena (background).
Beatriz Cortez
Beatriz Cortez (b. 1970, San Salvador, El Salvador) is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles and Davis, CA. Her work explores simultaneity, multiple temporalities, the untimely, and speculative imaginaries of the future. Her recent solo exhibitions include Storm King Art Center (2023), Williams College Museum of Art (2023), Commonwealth and Council (2026; 2022), and Pitzer College Art Galleries (2022). Her work was included in the 60th International Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, Foreigners Everywhere (2024); 14th Shanghai Biennial, Cosmos Cinema (2023-2024); Museo del Palaciode Bellas Artes (2026) and Museo Anahuacalli (2026), Mexico City; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2025-2026); Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery (2026); and New Museum, New York (2026). One of her commissioned works will be included in the upcoming Boso Triennial in Japan opening in March 2027. Cortez has received the Joan Mitchell Fellowship (2026-2030); Latinx Artist Fellowship (2023); Borderlands Fellowship at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics (2022-2024); Artadia Los Angeles Award (2020); and the inaugural Frieze LIFEWTR Sculpture Prize (2019). She teaches at the University of California, Davis.
Image: Ilopango, the Volcano that Left, 2023. Welded steel, 12 x 19.5 x 10 feet
Photo: Jeffrey Jenkins / Storm King Art Center. Courtesy of the artist.
Ellie Ga
Ellie Ga (b. 1976, New York, NY) is an artist and writer whose practice spans video and performance. Ga creates visual essays that weave the everyday and the poetic in long-term engagement with archives, oral histories, and site-specific research: from the submerged ruins of the ancient Lighthouse of Alexandria (SQUARE OCTAGON CIRCLE) and the mapping of daily life in the icy Arctic Ocean (THE FORTUNETELLERS) to the study of messages in bottles as tools for studying ocean currents and as metaphor for exile (STROPHE, A TURNING; GYRES), to the disorienting effects of light pollution on seabirds in the Azores (ABERRATION OF LIGHT). Her work is in numerous museum collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson; FRAC Sul, Marseille; Fondation Galeries Lafayette, Paris and Moderna Museet, Stockholm. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, her video installations have been commissioned and exhibited at the Whitney Biennial of American Art, New York and Jeu de Paume, Paris. She received a BA from Marymount Manhattan College, a MFA from Hunter College and a certificate in marine archeology from the University of Alexandria, Egypt. Ga has been artist-in-residence at Bryn Mawr College and is a founding member of Ugly Duckling Presse.
Image: Aberration of Light, video still, 2026 (HD video, sound, in progress)
Andrea Geyer
Andrea Geyer (b. 1971, Freiburg im Breisgau) is a German-born artist living and working in New York City. Her cross-disciplinary, research-based practice encompasses photography, printmaking, video, performance, sculpture, and installation. Her work examines socially, culturally, and historically significant individuals, events, and sites. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, Robert Rauschenberg Residency, Creative Time Global Residency, Museum of Modern Art Research Fellowship, Art Matters Grant, and Vera List Center for Arts and Politics Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at MoMA, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Tate Modern, the Serpentine Gallery, Gropius Bau, and documenta 12, among other venues. She is a Professor in the Department of Photography & Imaging at NYU Tisch School of the Arts.
Image: Feeding the Ghosts, 2019, Installation with slide projectors, empty slide frames, books, projector stands, speakers, two tables with lamps, library chairs, Teapot with cup, coffee table, sandbags, voiceover (installation OffScreen, Paris, 2026)
Candace Hill-Montgomery
Candace Hill-Montgomery (b. 1945, New York, NY) is an artist whose work spans painting, photography, installation, assemblage, textiles and writing. Making and exhibiting since the 1970s, Hill-Montgomery developed an experimental approach in relation to her experience of post-war segregation in New York and the revolutionary activism of the time. She writes: “My work is about language. Even if it’s not talking about language within the piece, it’s about language and how we look at things through history. And that is political.” In the 1980s, Hill-Montgomery exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the New Museum, Franklin Furnace and Fashion Moda in New York, and at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. In 1980, her work was included in the infamous Times Square Show, New York, organised by Colab and Issue, Social Strategies by Women Artists at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, curated by Lucy R. Lippard. In 1983, together with Lippard, she organised and exhibited in Working Artists/WorkingWomen/WorkingTogether at Gallery 1199, New York. In 1985, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. At this time, she also made public installationsacross New York City and published artist books of poetry and photography alongside texts in publications including Wedge and Heresies: A Feminist Publication on Art and Politics.
Recent solo exhibitions include A Bare Woman Mutters Nothing…, Hollybush Gardens, London (2026) and Pretty Birds Peer Speak Sow Peculiar, Blank Forms, New York (2024). Selected group exhibitions include Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York; The Campus, 2026 Annual Exhibition, The Campus, Hudson, New York (both 2026); From the Studio: Fifty-Eight Years of Artists in Residence, Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; For Liberation and For Life: The Legacy of Black Dimensions in Art, The Albany Institute of History & Art, New York; Here Is a Gale Warning: Art, Crisis & Survival, Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge (all 2025); and Reluctant Gravities, Hollybush Gardens, London (2024). Her latest publications include Abstractive, Candace Hill and David Grundy (Further Other Books Works, 2026); the collection Muss Sill (Distance No Object, 2020); and Short Leash Kept On (Materials, 2022), a long poem inspired by detective fiction and the writing of Lloyd Addison and Russell Atkins. In 2023, a major essay on her work, Candace Hill-Montgomery, Against Containment by Amy Tobin, was published in Art History, Volume 46.
Image: Some Are Liars, 2024. Ink and acrylic on cotton over laid on pine wood, 123 x 60.9 x 3 cm. Courtesy the artist and Hollybush Gardens, London
Photo: Jo Underhill
Elisabeth Kley
Elisabeth Kley (b. 1956, New York, NY) is known for her ceramic sculptures, vessels, drawings, wall hangings and site-specific paintings featuring geometric and plant motifs borrowed from a wide range of sources, including Modernist theater sets and costumes, Coptic and Islamic textiles, Wiener Werkstätte designs, Egyptian and classical Greek and Roman ornamentation. Recent solo exhibitions include The Invisible Hands of Birds, Modern Institute, Glasgow (2026); Pattern is a Habit, The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY (2025); Cymodocea, Currier Museum (2024); A Seat in the Boat of the Sun, CANADA, New York (2023); and Minutes of Sand, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art (2022) and The Fabric Workshop and Museum (2021). She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant in 1998, and her work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Kley studied at Hunter College and received her BA from Empire State College. She lives in Manhattan and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Image: The Making of Contemporary Artists, Wallach Art Gallery, Columbia University, New York, NY, glazed ceramics, charcoal and flashe on wall, 2026
(Installation view: copyright the Trustees of Columbia University, managed by the Wallach Art Gallery)
Laura Parnes
Laura Parnes (b. 1968, Buffalo, NY) creates critically acclaimed films and installations that fuse comedy with pathos to probe social and political trauma. Informed by traditions and genres in narrative film, video art, and queer theater, her work blurs the lines between conventions of storytelling and experimentation. She has screened and exhibited widely in the US and internationally, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; MoMA PS1,NY; Miami Museum of Contemporary Art, FL; Brooklyn Museum; Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, Athens; The International Film Festival Rotterdam, Rotterdam, Netherlands; and Museo Nacional Centro De Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; and NY and on PBS and Spanish Television. She had solo exhibitions at Pioneer Works, Human Resources, Burchfield Penny Art Center, LA><, Participant Inc., Deitch Projects, Fitzroy Gallery; and solo screenings at the Wexner Center for the Arts, The Museum of Modern Art, and The Kitchen, New York City. Parnes is a 2013 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellow and a 2016 Creative Capital Awardee. Video Data Bank published a box set of her work, and Participant Press published a book of her scripts titled ‘Blood and Guts in Hollywood: Two Screenplays’ by Laura Parnes with an introduction by Chris Kraus.
Image: Photo from Magic Thinking (2026), Archival Digital Print, 40”X60”, Pictured L to R Laine Rettmer and Becca Blackwell
Marsha Pels
Marsha Pels (b. 1950, Brooklyn, NY) has been creating psychologically charged sculptures and installations since the early 1980s addressing war, sexuality and politics. Her most recent solo exhibition is at the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum in Emden, Germany where she has been working on a site-specific Holocaust Memorial for the city. Pels was the recipient of a Prix de Rome in 1984 and a Fulbright Senior Scholar Award in 1997. She also received a New York City Public Art Fund Grant in 1981, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004 and the Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation Individual Support Grant in 2013. Pels’ work is in public and private collections including Grounds for Sculpture, Smith-Gilbert Gardens, The United Jewish Appeal Corporate Headquarters, National Museum of Gabarone, Botswana and The Stiftung Olbricht, Germany. She received her B.F.A. from The Rhode Island School of Design and her M.F.A. from Syracuse University. Pels lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Image: Towards Bethlehem, 2021. 58”h × 28”w × 36”d. Patined cast iron, steel, leather, rubber
Photo credit: Nick Knight
Elaine Reichek
Elaine Reichek (b. 1943, Brooklyn, NY) has been using thread as a core element in her work for the past five decades, and was an early pioneer in rethinking the role of craft in the fine arts and in investigating alternative narratives and histories. Her most recent solo exhibitions include Back Stitch, Hoffman Donahue, New York (2026); “Something Betwixt and Between” – Matisse & Bloomsbury, Seven Sisters, Houston, TX (2025); Frock-Conscious, Shoshana Wayne Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Archival Correspondents, McClain Gallery, Houston, TX (2022); MATERIAL GIRL, Marinaro, New York (2022); Between the Needle and the Book, McClain Gallery, Houston, TX (2020); Sight Unseen, Marinaro, New York (2019); and Now If I Had Been Writing This Story, Vienna Secession (2018). Recent notable group exhibitions include Painted with Silk: The Art of Early American Embroidery, Detroit Institute of Arts (2024); Joan Didion: What She Means, curated by Hilton Als for the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, and Pérez Art Museum, Miami (2022–23); Venedigsche Sterne, Bündner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Switzerland (2022); Women’s Work, Lyndhurst Mansion, Tarrytown, NY (2022); and Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2019–22). Reichek lives and works in New York.
Image: Ovals, 2025. Organdy and thread, on wood stretcher bars, 56.75 x 59.75 in. (144.1 x 151.8 cm)
Photograph by GC Photography
Katherine Sherwood
Katherine Sherwood (b. 1952, New Orleans, LA) is a San Francisco Bay Area painter whose work explores the intersections of disability, feminism, and art history. In her Aggressive Women and Venus paintings, she “crips” images of women, reclaiming the nude as a site of visibility and embodiment for disabled figures. Her work was recently featured in For Dear Life: Art, Medicine, and Disability at MCASD La Jolla (2024–25), and Subvert, Repair, Reclaim at the MFA Boston. Sherwood is Professor Emerita of Painting at UC Berkeley, where she developed the course Art, Medicine, and Disability, and has served on the board of Creative Growth, Oakland. She has received a Guggenheim Fellowship, NEA Grant, Pollock Krasner Grant, Adolph Gottlieb Foundation Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and California Arts Council Legacy Grant. She is represented by Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, and George Adams Gallery in New York.
Image: You Rang?, 2025. Mixed media on panel with found frame, 22.5 x 18.5 inches (framed).
Sara Siestreem
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976, Springfield, OR) is a multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon, working in painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, large-scale installation, and public art. She was recently selected as a National Academician by the National Academy of Design in 2025. She has also been awarded the 2024 Hallie Ford Fellowship, the University of Oregon's 2022-23 CFAR Fellowship, and the 2022 Forge Project Fellowship. She is from a family of professional artists and educators; her training began in the home. Her lifelong mentor is Lillian Pitt (Wasco, Warm Springs, Yakama). Her weaving teachers were Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg A. Robinson (Chinook Nation). Siestreem graduated Phi Kappa Phi with a BS from Portland StateUniversity in 2005. She earned an MFA with distinction from Pratt Art Institute in 2007. She created a self-sustaining weaving program for her tribe, the Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw people. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon and is represented by Elizabeth Leach Gallery and Cristin Tierney Gallery.
Image: fiesta forever (blue nights and rattlesnakes), 2023-2024. Approx: 72 x 8 x 11" each 72 x 92 x 11" overall. Four slip cast ceramic dance caps, acrylic paint, acrylic glazes, Abalone buttons, plastic buttons, Czech White Heart beads, cotton thread, Japanese Indigo (Linnton) dyed and woven industrial cotton, canvas and thread, commercial ribbon
Rea Tajiri
Rea Tajiri (b. 1958, Chicago, IL) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and educator who creates installations, documentaries, and experimental films. Her work embraces poetic, non-traditional storytelling to encourage dialogue and reflection around buried histories. Her recent video assemblage History, Memory, Vertical Stack (2024) was featured in Legacies: Asian American Arts Movements 1969–2001 at 80WSE Gallery at NYU. Her documentary feature Wisdom Gone Wild screened on the PBS series POV and in International Competition at IDFA. In 2023, CAAMFest presented the film as part of a career retrospective. To date, it has won awards including the Audience Award for Best Documentary at Blackstar. Tajiri is currently developing Non-Alien, a hybrid documentary funded by the People’s Media Fund and supported by a 2025 USA Artists Fellowship and a 2025 Guggenheim Fellowship. She is a Professor in the Department of Theater, Film and Media Arts at Temple University, where she teaches documentary production.
Image: Filmmaker Rea Tajiri photographing icebergs at Fogo Island Arts, photographer unknown
Kay WalkingStick
Kay WalkingStick (b. 1935, Syracuse, NY) has explored the American landscape for seven decades, bringing together modernist painting traditions and her Native American heritage to examine the relationship between the physical and spiritual worlds. Moving from early figurative paintings towards geometric abstraction in the 1970s, she developed richly textured, sculptural surfaces evoking geological formations. In the 1980s and ’90s, her celebrated diptychs united abstraction and landscape, while her recent paintings overlay expansive American vistas with patterns drawn from Indigenous cultures, asserting ancestral presence and connections to land. WalkingStick is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, of Cherokee and Anglo heritage. She received her MFA from Pratt Institute in 1975 and lives and works in Pennsylvania. In 2024, WalkingStick participated in the 60th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. Her solo exhibition, Kay WalkingStick / Hudson River School, originated at the New-York Historical Society (2023–24) and continues to tour nationally. Her retrospective, Kay WalkingStick: An American Artist, originated at the National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC, and toured the United States (2015–18). Her work is held in major collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, and Smithsonian Institution.
Image: Salmon River Valley, 2023. Oil on panel in two (2) parts, 101.6x203.2x5.1cm, 40x80x2in. Courtesy the artist