Yasmeen Abdallah
Drawing from the personal and the political through elements of memory, trauma, resilience, and persistence, Yasmeen Abdallah (she/her/they/them) unravels ephemera, aftermaths, and the stories told and secrets kept by imprints and objects that speak to our contemporary culture. Referencing her Levantine lineage through magic carpets, intimate weaving, and needle art practices, Abdallah seeks to create safe, mobile spaces to replace the ones being destroyed by occupying forces. These works reveal the gaping holes in bureaucratic systems that cruelly and catastrophically fail humanity. Through a myriad of gestures stemming from underpinnings of an exquisite corpse, she views the threaded needle as a tool of solidarity to rip through borders, unravel fictive allegories, and heal holes in tender hearts of the broken and abandoned. Abdallah believes that through acts of care, a more regenerative, nurturing, and equitable society emerges in which all is/are valued. Abdallah holds Bachelor’s degrees from University of Massachusetts in Anthropology (emphasis in Historical & Collaborative Archaeology, which included field schools with New England indigenous tribal communities); and another in Studio Art with honors, including a Minor in Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies. Abdallah also earned a MFA in Fine Arts with distinction from Pratt Institute. Her work as an artist, curator, writer, and educator has included roles as a visiting artist, lecturer, grant recipient and resident at numerous institutions in and around New York.
Earth Ængel
Earth Ængel (they/them) creates from their own fluid experience, navigating a fantastical queer ecology through the dysphoria of hetero-centric late capitalism. Earth does not attempt to shame and scold these man-made values into submission but instead ingests them. They launder their consumption, laying by its deathbed—grieving, consoling the outcome—its funeral—and then resurrect it into the archive of predetermined aesthetics, bringing it into the queer afterlife. By examining the roots of aesthetics and material use in their empirical value, Earth Ængel uses heat-related practices to melt it all down.
Heat plays a pivotal role in Earth Ængel’s practice, acting as both a literal and symbolic force for transformation. Heat doesn’t just melt materials; it disintegrates rigid structures—whether societal expectations, cultural systems, or personal identity—and creates the possibility for new forms to emerge. Just as materials are softened, restructured, and remade, so too are the binaries of gender, identity, culture, and even economic or political systems reformed into something more fluid, open, and expansive. This process of melting and remaking allows for the regeneration of new possibilities for existence, where identities, systems, and ideas can be seen as dynamic, evolving, and resistant to fixed categories.
The totchkey, surface, or decorative elements, play an essential role in this vision. These often intricate embellishments go beyond ornamentation; they are markers of human complexity, resistance, and identity. The totchkey directly challenges the minimalist, modernist values often celebrated in contemporary design, which tend to erase or simplify identity and experience into a uniform, isolated form. Instead, Earth Ængel embraces decoration as a form of storytelling, a means of reclaiming space for the complexities and nuances of being. This decorative act speaks to a rejection of the exclusionary tendencies found in Modernism and Contemporary Art, and instead celebrates the fullness of human experience in a more Activated Art movement.
Earth Ængel is a recent MFA graduate of Goldsmiths University in London, having completed their undergraduate BFA at Parsons School of Design. They have received awards from The Arts Council of England, Cerf+, Goldsmiths University, and the NYC Parks Department to develop their work. Their pieces have been exhibited in New York, London, Mexico City, Chicago, and Cyprus. Earth Ængel lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, with their partner Rob Rose, where together they form the art duo Ængel-Rose.
Taesha Aurora
Taesha Aurora is an Indian artist and designer born in 1997 in New Delhi. In 2021, she received her Bachelor’s in Architecture from The Cooper Union in New York City. Her thesis explored the intersections of policy, media, and desire, examining their impact on the architectural, material, and cultural landscapes of South Asia.
Aurora has participated in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Chicago Architecture Biennale, the Shankar’s International Doll’s Museum in New Delhi, and The Cooper Union. Currently, she lives and works in New Haven, where she is pursuing a Master of Architecture II at the Yale School of Architecture.
Amir Badawi
Amir Badawi is a visual artist from Houston, Texas that currently lives and works in New York City. His work is sometimes conceptual and sometimes aesthetic. He employs modes and mediums ranging from video to watercolor on paper to stone relief to textiles on steel to instructional manuals, depending on the project. The artist describes himself as not high falutin but medium falutin at worst.
portrait by Asya Yaschenko
Chris Baker
Christopher Baker is an artist living and working in New York City. His ongoing exploration and research of the metropolitan area coastline is the genesis of all his work- conceptual, sculptural and photographic. Every excursion is recorded using GPS and uploaded to Google Earth to create an ever expanding ring around the city’s landmass. Inspired by Dido’s bid for land to build Carthage (also known as the Oxhide Myth), Baker is encircling the city on foot to bring attention to this littoral environment- it’s history, physical changes, environmental condition and how it relates to the present. The treks are documented in photographs and materials for sculpture are gathered at or below the wrack line- the place where floating debris (including the ubiquitous broken reeds for which it is termed) is deposited along the shore by the changing tides.
In the studio, Baker creates pieces built entirely of these found 18th and 19th century objects ranging from broken glass and ceramic shards to lost gold rings and silver medals to rusted canon balls and bullets. These archeological artifacts are assembled into artworks concerning Colonialism, Manifest Destiny and so-called Divine Rights.
James Baker
The Hermetic Museum is the place name of James Baker’s secluded studio in Newport. It is a workspace, archive and creative sanctuary for research. It is also a metaphor for the course of an artist’s life – a mental space in which inspiration, imagination and intuition thrive. The Hermetic Museum is both a physical place and a state of consciousness.
His work is both chronological and cyclical, and represents an ongoing response to the mystical phenomena of nature. His works are metaphors for a state of mind that affirms the spiritual reality in which we all exist. Whether transitory or enduring, these phenomena are signs of a deeper sense of being and of the infinite.
James Baker is a native of Newport, RI. He received his BA from Providence College, and his BFA and MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. He taught first at RISD and later for many years at Providence College, where he is currently Professor Emeritus.
He has exhibited his work in shows throughout New England and was the subject of a 30 Year Retrospective at the Newport Art Museum in 1999. In addition to their display in temporary exhibitions, his works are also featured in many prominent collections including The Museum of Art at the Rhode Island School of Design, The Newport Art Museum, and The Blue Cross/Blue Shield Collection of 20th Century American Art. His research interests range from Art Nouveau tiles to the work of the 20th Century Conceptual Artist Joseph Beuys, works of whose he curated at The Newport Art Museum in 1996.
Sammy Bennett
Sammy Bennett (b. 1990 , Ypsilanti, MI) is an interdisciplinary artist that works across painting, printmaking, textiles, and installation to depict an intimate and idiosyncratic world. Surrounding neighborhoods and apartments become both a backdrop and overarching portrait of the artist, as he employs materials sourced from the city and his own family's history. His rural Michigan, blue collar background and experiences living in Brooklyn manufactures strong dichotomies between analog and digital, country and city, high and low culture, inside and outside, soft and hard. His works often reference quotidian settings such as bedroom interiors with vibrant wood grain flooring, dirty windswept sidewalks and cluttered grassland parks. These seemingly banal spaces pumped full of melodrama give recognition to everyday life as a constant struggle, while his subjects are surrounded by large swaths of pattern, conveying an existential loneliness and dark undertone offset by humor, saturated color and a playful collage-like aesthetic. Littered in these Dutch Vanitas-esque landscapes are an assortment of scavenged mass produced consumer products interwoven with personally worn textiles, which tap into a shared collective memory, and allow his personal identity to become absorbed as another commodity.
Bennett received a BFA from Kendall College of Art and Design in 2012 and an MFA from Michigan State University in 2016. He received the Stanley and Selma Hollander Graduate Fellowship in Studio Art in 2015 along with a Summer Research Development Fellowship from Michigan State in 2014. Bennett attended the Scoula International de Graficia residency in Venice, Italy in both 2012, 2016 and 2025 and ChaNorth Artist Residency in 2022. Recent exhibitions include: All Street (NYC), Strata Gallery (NM), Underdonk (NYC), Ann Marie Sculpture Garden (MD), Local Projects (NYC), and Equity Gallery (NYC), The Eli and Broad Art Museum (MI); Satellite Art Fair (FL), Ortega y Gasset (NYC), He lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Haifa Bint-Kadi
Haifa Bint-Kadi is a first generation daughter of refugees with origins in the Palestinian and Caribbean diaspora born in New Jersey and now residing in Yonkers, NY. She is a multidisciplinary artist, activist and curator working in mosaic whose career spans over 40 years after receiving her M.F.A. from Istituto d'Arte per il mosaico in Ravenna, Italy. Bint-Kadi has been designing and fabricating public art mosaics since 1993. She has completed several public art projects for the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, Suny Oneonta and the City of Yonkers and more. Bint-Kadi curates the gallery spaces for the City of Yonkers and has worked as a teaching artist for several years with CityLore. Her practice is grounded in the belief that art is a form of de-colonization and resistance against systems grounded in oppression as it heals, affirms and establishes self-identity while evoking a sense of wonder and exploration in the world.
In 2010, she completed a sculpture park for the State of New York at Suny Oneonta. The sculptures symbolically represent Pangaea, the seven continents once being connected. The park includes 12 large structures with mosaic skin representing the weaving patterns of indigenous people from around the world and a solar light pathway throughout the Quad area. In 2012 she completed The Eel’s Journey, a large-scale in-ground public art mosaic for the City of Yonkers’s daylighting of the Saw Mill River which serves as a focal point for Yonkers’ new development. In 2014 I received a commission from the Children’s Museum of Manhattan to design and create an installation for their 2014 Muslim Cultures exhibit. Most recently, she completed four sculptures for the new Greenway trail which connects Yonkers to the Bronx
Bint-Kadi is a curator for the City of Yonkers library system and a teaching artist in public schools across the five boroughs and in Westchester County. She has conducted many workshops at venues including the Children’s Museum of Manhattan, the Asia Society, the Hudson River Museum and more. As an adjunct professor at Suny Purchase, she teaches Arts for Social Justice and empowers students to face history and disrupt systems built on oppression. Using historical archives as a reference, she has created over 24 public art mosaic and steel sculptures across the state. With the intent to provide an exciting arts venue in the downtown of Yonkers, she successfully founded the First Thursday Gallery Hop which partners with local galleries and businesses. She maintains a studio practice grounded in family archives which she translate into paintings and mixed media-maps tracing the Afro-Caribbean and Arab roots of her family’s diaspora. She has received numerous awards, grants and recognitions, most recently the “Advancing Equity Award in the Arts from Artswestchester and County Legislators. In her 2022 solo show, I Was a Point: I Was a Circle, at Urban Studio Unbound, she showcased her series of archival paintings documenting destroyed villages and cities in Palestine as well as numerous mosaic portraits of historical figures. Currently, Bint-Kadi is working on a series of mosaic “Dream Palaces,” a sight and sound installation to hold the joy and celebratory moments of Home.
Lauren Bradshaw
Lauren Bradshaw earned her BA in Studio Art at the University of North Georgia in 2019, her MFA in Ceramics at Clemson University in 2021, and is currently a second year Master’s student in the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture at the University of Delaware. She has been included in numerous exhibitions and curatorial projects across the Southeast as well as in California, New York, and Chicago.
Recent exhibitions include Structured Impermanence at Parlour & Ramp in Chicago, Visceral Bonds at Revolve Gallery in Asheville, NC, and Threads of Remembrance at 20*20 Gallery in Lansdowne, PA. Her most recent body of work integrates found objects of cultural significance with materials and processes commonly and historically associated with the labor of women. Thrifted objects such as shoulder pads and bra cups are embroidered and imbued with memories of material contexts and personal narratives. Upcoming exhibitions include Subtle Force in Union Grove Gallery at the University of Alabama Huntsville and Interstitial Agency at Athens Institute for Contemporary Art in Athens, GA.
Aruni Dharmakirthi
Aruni Dharmakirthi is a Sri Lankan-American artist based in New York City. Dharmakirthi’s work explores personal mythology through quilted tapestries and soft sculpture. Content and form are stitched together into works that resemble collage. Their practice utilizes materials such as Memory foam, felt patches, old clothing, and recycled fabrics. Dharmakirthi has participated as an artist in residence at the Bric Workspace Residency (NY), and Centrum Emerging Artist In Residence (WA). Their works have been exhibited nationally and internationally. They are currently participating in the Canopy Program (NY) an artist year-long mentorship.
Photo by Nicole Autumn
Katherine Earle
Katherine Earle pulls the disparate threads of the universe back into some semblance of order, reorienting the chaos that is unsheathed upon us within a social order seemingly intent on disharmony. Invested in time-based processes such as weaving, embroidery and layered dye techniques, she embodies time in her practice in an effort to push back against harmful and extractive notions of efficacy and productivity. Using techniques such as weaving and embroidery, she engages the highly conceptual forms of world creation present in decorative arts and craft traditions. Working with a diversity of materials: glass and plastics, detritus, thread, rusted cotton or silk, pattern and paint, she seeks to upend the hierarchies embedded in her own understanding of our existence. She is especially interested in our blind spots, and what is left out of the stories we tell ourselves about how we interpret our place in the world. In particular, the mythology of progress, a narrative that continues to coerce into a staggeringly precarious present.
Katherine Earle is a fiber artist and multimedia sculptor based in New York. Her work has been shown in two-person and group exhibitions internationally including Copeland Gallery, Sculptors Alliance, Art Aqua Miami, Site:Brooklyn, The KUBE studios and Diagonale. She has participated in residencies in Canada and the United States, including 77Art, the ChaShaMa North Residency, and the Concordia FARR Residency. Katherine has a BFA in Fibres from Concordia University in Montreal, and is a recipient of grants from Joseph Robert Foundation and FST StudioProjects Fund.
Francisco echo Eraso
Francisco echo Eraso is a disabled, trans, Colombian-American interdisciplinary artist, educator and access consultant. Eraso received his BA/BFA from Parsons, The New School in 2018 Visual Studies and Fine Arts. He is this year’s Wynn Newhouse Award recipient and is currently pursuing his MFA in Fine Arts from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
