Sydney Cain was born and raised in San Francisco, CA. Utilizing graphite, powdered metals, printmaking, and chalk as transcendent emblems for myth-making, her work offers reverent narratives that reveal the power of remembrance and spiritual evolution within “unseen” Black afterlives. Cain’s work has been exhibited at Betti Ono, Ashara Ekundayo Gallery, Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco Arts Commission, and the African American Arts and Culture Complex. Forthcoming exhibits include Refutations at the Museum of the African Diaspora and Mothership: Voyage into Afrofuturism at the Oakland Museum of California. Cain is currently represented by Rena Bransten Gallery.
Hung-Lun Chen was born in 1984 in Taipei, Taiwan. He now lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. He received his M.F.A. in sculpture from Yale University and B.S. in biotechnology from California Polytechnic University, Pomona. His practice re-interprets the relationship between tradition and modernity. Chen employs a wide variety of mediums to discern the constant negotiation between folklore belief systems and late-capitalist society. Using a variety of modern and traditional object-making techniques, Chen uses the physicality and materiality of objects as vessels for gestures that are symbolic and functional. In recent years, Chen’s work has been exhibited at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, Taiwan (2017), Newburgh Artist in Vacancy, NY (2018), and Missouri State University, Springfield (2018).
Ricki Dwyer is an artist and educator living in San Francisco, California. Ricki is currently holding a studio fellowship with UC Berkeley and is a 2021 Facebook Artist In Residence. They received their undergraduate degree from Savannah College of Art and Design and an MFA from UC Berkeley. They have exhibited with Anglim Gilbert, Eleanor Harwood, Guerrero Gallery, and the Berkeley Art Museum. They have been artist in residence with Recology San Francisco, Jupiter Woods Gallery London, The Textile Arts Center New York, and The White Page Gallery Minneapolis. They have been recipient of the NEA Grant, Eisner Prize, Murphy and Cadogan Contemporary Art Award, and the Queer Cultural Center’s Emerging Scholar Award.
Charles Lee (b. 1983, Honolulu) is an MFA Candidate in Fine Art at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. Lee holds a BA in Business Management and Marketing from Bowie State University. Lee’s work subverts the narrative that Black culture is a monolith by creating authentic narratives that address issues of reclamation, identity, family, class, authorship, othering and highlights the existence of subcultures within the Black American diaspora. His work seeks to de-mystify the act of being Black by showing the nuance of contemporary Black life. Lee is a recipient of Pabst Blue Ribbon’s Open Door Grant 2021 and has exhibited in San Francisco. His work has also been published by Oxford University Press, KQED, Lenscratch, and in PhotoFilmic JRNL 7.
Gregory Rick was born in 1981 and grew up in South Minneapolis. Rick received his BFA from CCA and is currently pursuing his MFA in art practice at Stanford University. Developing a historical imagination, and a fondness for drawing stories, Rick collapses history while confronting personal trauma. Rick’s works exist as reflections of his personal experience while being in dialogue with the wider world. Rick has received the Combat Infantry Badge, the Yamaguchi printmaking award, the Nathan Oliviera fellowship, and the Jack K. and Gertrude Murphy Award and has shown in museums and galleries in both Minneapolis and California.
Hannah Waiters is a Bay Area-based Black visual researcher and conceptual artist. Her conceptual material art practice interests include museum studies, Black Atlantic philosophy, historical phenomenology in art history, and historical materialism. She earned her MFA in Fine Arts and MA in Visual & Critical Studies at the California College of the Arts. Waiters is currently a collections fellow in Contemporary & American art at the de Young museum, extending her graduate studies research on preserving Black conceptualist erasure in relation to gentrification’s local dynamics. Themes and aesthetics of both Black Atlantic philosophy and museum studies here enlarge how we think about exhibitions and, more broadly, archival/institutional displacements that marginalize local landscapes and perpetuate the erasure of larger local socio-cultural narratives.
Narges Poursadeqi was born and raised in Tehran, Iran. She started photography and video production at the Iranian Youth Cinema Society and continued studying in Fine Art at The University of California Berkeley and California College of the Arts. Her work investigates the intersection of culture, memory, and narrative, and how each affects the other. Poursadeqi’s practice is derived from political events, culture, and religion. She works with archived photos, videos, and texts. Her role as a collector and storyteller allows her to create contemporary work that responds to political events, cultural movements, and contemporary religious discourse. The work exists in the process of finding the perfect casing for each story.
Sam Vernon earned her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University in 2015 and her BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in 2009. Her installations combine xerox collages, photographs, paintings and sculptural components in an exploration of personal narrative, identity and historical memory. Sam teaches in the Printmedia and Graduate Fine Arts program as an Assistant Professor at California College of the Arts (CCA) and Bard College as a Visiting Assistant Professor in Studio Arts.
Zoé Samudzi is an art writer whose work has appeared in Art in America, The New Republic, SSENSE, The New Inquiry, Verso, and other places, and she is a contributing writer for Jewish Currents. She has a PhD in Medical Sociology from the University of California, San Francisco where she researched German imperialism, biomedicine, and the Ovaherero & Nama genocide. Other research interests include visual ethnography and politics of seeing/witnessing, the science of race-making, genocide memory, disposability, and the repatriation of art and human remains.