Working predominantly as a painter, I tell short stories of justice and social improvement. Using portraiture and protest paintings that represent the African American experience, I examine the ways in which past issues affect the present. I experiment with various formalist approaches; family relationships are the framework that connects disparate bodies of work and show how joy and trauma are intrinsically connected. Through my work, I invite viewers to see the world through my eyes, fostering an intimate experience between audience member and subject.

 Jillian Van Volkenburgh is a multidisciplinary artist. Moving from painting to photography to sculpture, the subject matter dictates the medium. Her work is rooted in her experiences in the industrial corridor southeast of Chicago. She is currently focused on work based on personal transition, with themes of home, work, legacy, and death. These themes are translated into variations of both symbolic and literal imagery, ultimately creating a broad self-portrait.

 Having survived the 2010 earthquake that displaced him to Chicago from his native Haiti, Olivier Souffrant reshapes experiences of duress and endurance by channeling them into beauty through disruption. The foundation of his practice lies within challenging the illusions and allures of life that we as a society have attached ourselves to. By mixing digital collage, painting, and appropriation, his unconventional methods raise questions about accessibility and creativity within the contemporary art world.

 Sorrells has been surrounded by Western culture and ideologies for most of his life. He makes work that is meant to establish spaces for Black narratives in fine art institutions. Using oil paint and drawing in his extensive studies of American history, he creates work with a loving touch that is enriching and intricate. Sorrells is absorbed by the idea of spreading African American culture through his art, focusing on dramatic yet intimate and vulnerable scenes.

 I take books from Western classic literature and American textbooks and use them as a framework for portraits inspired by family photographs. The resulting palimpsests become new narratives that invite viewers to reexamine the stories they might already know well—now through a different lens.

 My work is an ongoing investigation of Latin America and Latin American culture. Half-Panamanian and half–North American, my identity wrestles with two cultures and two languages. As a young man, I spoke English and often dreamed in Spanish. Travels to Latin America provide the basis for my art by informing dreams and exploring subject matter that is both foreign and familiar.

 Influenced by Baroque art, photographs, film stills, and her father’s work with mosaics, Anisa Rakaj creates intimate portraits that adulate the female form and embrace embellishment. Rakaj methodically arranges her compositions, intentionally suspending her figures in an alluring stillness. Utilizing theatrical lighting, body positioning, and ornamentation, Rakaj imbues her work with a sense of drama. Each subject, conscious of the viewer, hangs upon the precipice of action, reveling in the chance of voyeurism.

 The selected works are an invitation into a psychological space, an expression of the embodiment of the Sevens of the Tarot using a labyrinth of allusions, ideas, and images. The pieces touch on grand yet subtle ways of communicating—gesture, body language, and theatricality; intimacy and alienation in bars; and finding the queer erotic in the quotidian.

 I make paintings that read like a single sentence. Solitary. Distilled. I’m interested in an image that is mutually assertive and poetic—that has been pared down to an essence, without ever becoming austere or, worse, inaccessible.

 I strive to dissolve the association of Black bodies with brutality by highlighting Black individuality and interconnectedness. I explore the intimacy of understanding oneself and others through painting several nude figures that are connected, intertwined, or physical reflections of each other. I do the same when depicting human beings’ relationship with the environment, creating subjects that appear to be at the intersection of human beings and flowers or trees.