Through color, symbols, geometry, and spaces, Jamaal Peterman questions access in relation to young Black males and other bodies. His paintings and installations highlight the separation of classes reinforced by commodities and wealth. Exploring the proximity of Black bodies throughout Western history, he deconstructs and neutralizes the misrepresentation created by stereotype. This is a reference to harmful stigmas placed on the lives that are affected by urban environments. The paintings visually break down the layers of code and conduct governing

For the past three years, I have been working on My Land, a project in which I give myself absolute autonomy to create a world according to my own rules. This long-term project contains drawings and sculptures that represent maps and artifacts of an imagined territory, which exists outside our perception of time and does not correspond to any known culture. The territory has its own systems of logic, language, and measurement that function only within themselves. I consider the project a thought experiment concerning a foreign universe in which the viewer

A painter by training, Benjamin Cabral makes work that is largely autobiographical, creating an honest yet inherently unreliable portrait of the artist. Cabral’s recent paintings are entirely encrusted with beads and rhinestones. These works are conceived digitally, and the pixels are then transferred to the panel through the meditative application of beads. These paintings examine the intersections of trauma and nostalgia, joy and sorrow, and the digital and the analog. Cabral also creates sculptural works intended to be static performers engaging with the viewer.

I make pictures of historical narratives, acknowledging history as a collection of myths that are consistently reevaluated and restructured as they make the story of who we are and who we may become. How does history become? What determines the plot? My paintings are constructions based on two overlapping theories: that history is a set of random and arbitrary collisions of people, places, and things, and that history is created through specific decisions, by specific people, with specific goals.

Letters form words, which constitute our attempts to communicate with one another, to reify our existence. In my work, this attempt often manifests as these basic ingredients of language, similarly to the way an abstract painting manifests as the basic forms of visual perception (another attempt at communication). I wonder about why we, as a species, have the impulse to create. I wonder if it is an attempt to prove our reality to ourselves and others. I use historical imagery and formal elements that allude to moments within the full range of human artistic creation in order

My passion is art and people. My interest is in the people who are in between: between worlds or between genders. My position “in between” has me defined by, trapped in, resisting, and breaking free from the complex cultural debates of sexuality, gender, and subjectivity. My work is a rejection of the mutual exclusiveness of masculinity and femininity in favor of a simultaneous coexistence, focusing on the process through which we come to find our authentic selves, and the struggles that arise as we assert those selves within constraining environments.

I was raised moving from city to city, so my physical environment was always in a state of flux. Growing up in a shape-shifting landscape has tethered my practice to liminality, mystery, and multiplicity. Using cartoons and symbol recognition, and anchoring the rainbow as a place between places, I experiment with how to articulate that which is always changing. Heavily influenced by Understanding Comics and Scott McCloud’s theory of Iconic Art, my figures are drawn with the intention of creating a visual text that shifts the unconscious cultural baseline for the symbol of “human being.”

I use yarn and cotton fabric paired with a contraption called a “tufting gun” to create large-scale soft paintings. The space dividing painters from fiber artists is not as vast as we tend to think. One of the strengths of my work is that it hovers between painting and sculpture, yet it refuses to fit neatly into a category. This new body of work is about unleashing momentum and energy through mark making and color. A formal investigation into how we see and communicate emotion through vision and imagination.

I make paintings about the funny sad sweet condition of being alive. The breakdown and transcendence of illusion is both the subject and, hopefully, result of my work.

My work explores the process of affirming the self: a foreign, nonwhite, nonstraight male subject. Experiencing othering from both China and the US, and often having to conceal certain aspects of myself, I use my work to find the courage, confidence, and honesty to promote social change. In her book All About Love, bell hooks argues for a more community-driven, decentralized, loving environment. This provides an alternative to what I’ve mostly experienced at home and in various institutions.