Aliya Bonar
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Aliya Bonar makes installations, sculptures, and events that connect people through providing a playful and purposeful place to explore. In the past this has included installing childhood-bedsheet-quilt-forts inside a storage unit; opening a stuffed-animal Arctic Pet Shop; creating an imaginary world inside an un-rented office space, asking visitors to don a citizen badge and stamp their passport by telling personal stories through their journey.

Aliya also makes up-cycled jewelry and clothing, imaginary-landscape quilts, three-legged stuffed animals, and delicious macrobiotic cookies. She is inspired by hardware stores, found objects, maps, trophies and awards, living rooms, animals, crawl-spaces, sleeping bags, hot pink, plush, gold spray paint, glitter.

Bonar graduated from Hampshire College in 2009 with a BA in Socially Engaged Art. She currently works at Creative Time as a Community Organizer.

Elvira Clayton
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Elvira Clayton is a multi-media artist whose work explores notions of identity and its relationship to social and cultural history and our connections to our past. Her compositions are simultaneously art piece, sacred alter, and storybook.

Since relocating to New York in 2006, her work has transitioned towards a community-engaging art practice. Clayton is a two-time recipient of The Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant, which has supported her community collaborative projects. She has studied art at The Glassell School of Art, Houston and The Student Art League of New York.

Clayton has been awarded an Anderson Center Residency Fellowship, a 2011 Blue Mountain Center Fellowship, and she is a 2011 Jerome Foundation Fellow.

Sonia Louise Davis
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Sonia Louise Davis is an artist and photographer from New York City. Her work mines the public and private archive, exploring collective memory and family history through physical traces of the past. Sonia completed artist residencies at the School of Visual Arts in NY, and at _gaiastudio in Jersey City, NJ, as well as a Create Change Professional Development Fellowship at the Laundromat Project. An Honors graduate of Wesleyan University, Sonia holds a BA in African American Studies with a concentration in Music and Visual Art.

Uraline Septembre Hager
[Work Samples]

A trained photographer and a native Harlemite, most of Uraline Septembre Hager’s earlier works were black and white photo documents of her community and the people within. The medium and nature of her work soon changed as she found herself in the midst of a community undergoing vast socio-economic changes and transitions. Finding it difficult to address the flux and transition of Harlem by documenting shifting moments as static moments, Hager began to work with objects and moving images.

Working across various media, concerns of transition, invisibility, and identity have continued to influence Hager’s current work. Extracting issues of social invisibility and obliteration from their normal cultural context, she explores these concerns through the lens of cultural hybridity, shapeshifting, and boundary-crossing. Historical narratives, past and current, personal and universal, are woven throughout her past and current projects to create and question paradigms and relationships. Some of her projects explore the discord between constructed memories and “factual” memories, question “expected norms” in public and private spaces, and tweaks the fine line between the ritualistic and the quotidian.

Hager received her MFA from Hunter College and her BFA from Brooklyn College. Her works have been exhibited in galleries and museums including Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Triple Candie, and Rush Arts Gallery, and The African-American Museum in Philadelphia.

Jessie Henson
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Through collecting objects, accumulating stitches, lines or circles in drawings and sculptures, Jessie Henson creates worlds to exist within. Her works attempt to negotiate the fragility and mystery of the world, while searching out the sublime and the possibility of wonder. Henson has exhibited nationally, including in New York, Los Angeles and Austin, Texas. She received an MFA from Rutgers University and a BFA from the Corcoran School of Art and Design. In 2009 she participated in the AIM program at the Bronx Museum of Art and was an artist in residence at the Vermont Studio Center. In 2010 she was a resident at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska and was commissioned to create a memorial sculpture at the School for Creative and Performing Arts in Cincinnati, Ohio. The artist was born and raised in Cincinnati and currently lives and works in New York City.

Gisela Insuaste
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Gisela Insuaste is a visual artist and educator who received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and a BA in Anthropology & Studio Art from Dartmouth College. Her paintings, sculptures and site-specific installations are based on real and imagined places that explore the intersection of architecture, topography, and memory and tap into the quirky topologies of urban spaces that resonate with personal narratives.

She has participated in various exhibitions and projects nationwide such as the John and June Allcott Gallery, UNC, Chapel Hill, NC; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Satellite Gallery at the University of Texas, San Antonio, TX; Aljira-the Center for Contemporary Art, Newark, NJ; Aicon Gallery, NY; Cuchifritos Gallery, NY; ABC No Rio, NY; Queens Museum of Art, Queens, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (MCA), IL; Chicago Cultural Center, Chicago, IL; Krannert Art Museum-UIUC, Champaign, IL; and Gallery 400-UIC; Bucket Rider Gallery, Thomas McCormick Gallery, Chicago, IL.

Gisela is a recipient of several grants and awards, including The EFA NYC Artist Workers Residency, Smithsonian LMSP Fellowship, Aljira Emerge10 Fellowship, The Richard Driehaus/Artadia Emerging Artist Award (Chicago), Illinois Arts Council Artist Grants, and MacDowell Colony Artist Fellowships. In 2008 she was included in the international art book, The Upset: Young Contemporary Art by Die Gestalten Verlag, a resource of artists working with visual subcultures.

Recent projects include El Museo del Barrio’s Bienal- S-Files @ Lehman College, NY; The Carriage House, Islip, NY; 2nd Floor Gallery, Chicago; Trinity Church Museum, NY; Praxis Art Gallery, Miami/NY. Insuaste works as the Nature and Arts Program Manager at Wave Hill, a cultural center and public garden in the Bronx. She is responsible for the conceptualization and implementation of public programs with an emphasis on environmentally- based art, wellness, and nature studies. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.

Bianca Mońa
[Work Samples]
[Artist Statement]

Bianca Mońa is an artist, arts administrator, curator, educator, and advocate. Bianca's art challenges the standards of beauty through the exploration of mixed media, texture, and text. Her work has been featured in Rebel Diaz Art Collective and Bushwick Open Studios. In addition, she was a consultant for the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (New York City) and the Sauti Yetu Center for African Women (Bronx), and led travel tours about African Diasporic arts to such places as Cuba and Panama. She directed community programs at the Richmond Art Center, where she spearheaded five programs for youth ranging from 2 to 21 years old in her native Bay Area, including an emerging artist teen program. Bianca holds a BA in arts administration from Dillard University (New Orleans), and two Masters Degrees (art education and interdisciplinary studies) from San Jose State University and Teachers College, Columbia University.

Piero Passacantando
[Work Samples]

Piero Passacantando received a BFA in 2001 from the Corcoran College of Art and Design and an MFA in 2009 from the California College of the Arts with a concentration in Social Practice, a field which explores the possible points of contact between the visual arts and the social dimension. Piero was recently the recipient of a Fulbright grant to research Thangka painting in Kathmandu, Nepal. He has participated in numerous national and international exhibitions. He has also been involved in various educational and collaborative situations. He currently lives and works in New York.