Allen Hung-Lun Chen is a Taiwanese-born, Los Angeles-based artist whose sculptural practice explores the intersections of cultural memory, ritual, and the shifting meanings of tradition in contemporary society. Working across materials and scales, Chen engages with themes of migration, belief systems, superstition, and modernity—often through assemblage and pastiche that reflect a layered historical consciousness. Chen holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale University. His work has been exhibited at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum (Taiwan), Slash Art Foundation (San Francisco), and SculptureCenter (New York). Central to his practice is a sustained inquiry into how antiquity and ancestral knowledge are reinterpreted and transformed across cultural and geographic boundaries.
allenhunglunchen.com
Jules Gårder is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and curator. Their work is indebted to cycles the of collapse and reconstruction born of grief. While primarily working in sculptural ceramics, Gårder also engages performance, video, and collaborative forms. Currently an MFA candidate at Rutgers University, they were born in Sweden, raised in Maine, and further shaped between New York and Los Angeles. They hold a BA in Art from UCLA. Gårder’s practice is grounded in the belief that grief—when not shunned—can sharpen. It becomes a generative force for personal, political, and planetary action. Grief is a technology of knowledge—an ‘inefficiency’ threatening to power for its clarifying effects. Gårder maintains a long-term posthumous collaboration with their late mother, artist Eva Chimes (d.2000), using her drawings as source material. Their recent work investigates grotesques, gargoyles, and other pre-Christian creatures as historical and speculative forms—protectors, monsters, and outcasts—reimagined through contemporary lenses of surveillance, adornment, and trauma. They challenge dominant narratives of the necessity of closure around both sexual violence and loss, embracing the unresolved, the abject, and the absurd. They allow for humor and camp, subverting the expected aesthetic affect towards topics like death and harm. Their work has been exhibited nationally, including at Human Resources, Murmurs, Coaxial, Last Projects, and The Pit in Los Angeles; The Range in Colorado; and The Re Institute in New York.
julesgarder.com
Julia Haft-Candell remixes ancient techniques to write new narratives, which in turn change structures that seem set in stone. Each arm of her practice–artwork, teaching, and writing–offers alternatives to traditional models of categorization, communication, language, and education. In 2019 Haft-Candell founded The Infinite School, a new framework for ceramic education, which she runs out of her studio in Los Angeles. Haft-Candell has received grants and residencies from Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY; Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME; Yaddo Corporation, Saratoga Springs, NY; and California Community Foundation, Los Angeles, CA, along with other national and international organizations. Her work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts among other institutions. She has exhibited at the Miller Institute of Contemporary Art in Pittsburgh, the de Saisset Museum in Santa Clara, Inman Gallery, Houston, The Craft Contemporary, Los Angeles, and Candice Madey, New York. Haft-Candell’s work has been written about in numerous publications including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Artforum, and Art in America.
juliahaftcandell.com, theinfiniteschool.com
Kyoko Hamaguchi, born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, is a conceptual mixed-media artist who lives and works in New York City. Hamaguchi uses objects and materials in unintended ways to explore the underlying and hidden meanings within daily experience and systems in society. She holds an MFA from Hunter College, New York (2020) and a BFA from Tokyo University of the Arts (2015). She has done artist residencies at Light Work and The Watermill Center. She has had solo exhibitions at ATM Gallery, New York; KOKI ARTS, Tokyo; and F2T Gallery, Milan. She has shown in numerous group exhibitions including at Off Paradise, Dinner Gallery, and Neue House, New York; The Florence Trust, London; ACC, South Korea; Art Intelligence Global, Hong Kong; Museum of Modern Art and Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum, Japan.
kyokohamaguchi.com/
Utsa Hazarika is a research-based artist and writer. Her practice ranges across video, installation, and sculpture, and explores how an interdisciplinary dialogue between art and social research can push us to think about power, memory, and resistance. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum (US), and group shows at Socrates Sculpture Park (US), Hessel Museum of Art (US), and Museum of the City of New York (US). She has been awarded residencies and fellowships in Asia and the United States, including Pioneer Works (US), MASS MoCA (US), and Khoj International Artists’ Association (India). She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from The New School, where she was awarded the President’s Scholarship, and an MPhil in Social Anthropology from the University of Cambridge, where she was awarded Christ College’s Levy-Plumb Award for the Humanities. Her art and academic research has been published in Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology (UK), Trans Asia Photography Review (US) and The Caravan (India). She was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program; has visited as a lecturer and critic at Columbia University, Georgetown University, NYU Steinhardt, and The Cooper Union; and participated in several interdisciplinary seminars, including at the Asia Art Archive in America.
utsahazarika.com
Hai-Hsin Huang was born in Taipei in 1984 and received her BA degree from National Taipei University of Education in 2007. In 2009 she received a MFA from The School of Visual Arts in New York. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn and Taipei. Huang composes works that explore the space between humor, tragedy, and horror. Her works delve into the threat of violence and fear in society and the contradictions ones encounters in daily life. While often executed in a colorful and lighthearted palette, at their heart, her whimsical narratives express a dark and unique sense of humor. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at Taipei Fine Arts Museum, the National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts in Taichung, The Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig, Taipei Cultural Center in New York, and Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art in Israel, Centre Pompidou-Metz, and Le Lieu Unique in Nantes, France, Das Weiss Haus in Vienna. Her paintings are in the permanent collections of the Taipei Fine Arts Museum, White Rabbit Gallery in Sydney, Artbank in Taiwan, UBS Art Collection and Art Gallery of Western Australia and AMMA Foundation in Mexico City. Huang was recently selected as one of the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellows. Huang has also participated in several artist residency programs, including Das Weiss Haus (Vienna 2025), 3331 Arts Chiyoda (Tokyo, Japan, 2018), PILOTENKUECHE (Leipzig, Germany, 2017), Arteles Creative Residency Program (Finland, 2016), New York ISCP (NY, USA, 2013), and Vermont Studio Center (VT, USA, 2013).
haihsinhuang.com
Emily Janowick (b. Murray, KY) builds monumental sculptures and architecturally curious sound installations that shift physical and emotional perception through playful intervention. Janowick received a BFA from the University of Tennessee (Knoxville, TN) and MFA from Hunter College (New York, NY), and attended Yale Norfolk in 2012. She has held solo exhibitions at Foyer Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022), International Waters, Brooklyn, NY (2024), and Parent Company, New York, NY (2024). Janowick’s work has been written about in The New York Times, ARTNews, Two Coats of Paint, and The Electric Pencil, and deemed a “must see” by SeeSaw, Artforum, Artnet News, and Hyperallergic. Group exhibitions in New York include Kate Werble Gallery, Foreign and Domestic Gallery, International Objects, Ortega y Gasset Projects, A.I.R. Gallery, and Hesse Flatow East, among others. Her writing has been published in Peer Review, Funny Looking Dog Quarterly, Stone Highway Review, and Harpur Palate. She was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist award in 2022 and will be the distinguished Windgate Artist in Residence at Purchase College in 2026. Janowick lives, works, and goes to Mets games in Queens, New York.
emilyjanowick.com
Ali Kaeini, an Iranian artist, explores themes of displacement and historical identity through his art. His work delves into memories, forgetfulness, war, power, and solitude. Drawing inspiration from Iranian history, cinema, and architecture, Ali creates intricate geometric structures intertwined with organic, spiral forms, departing from traditional techniques in a rebellious manner. Ali earned his MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023. In 2024, he received the MacDowell Fellowship and the VMFA Professional Award. He has attended residencies at Lighthouse Works, VCCA, NARS Foundation, and Wassaic Project, and was a 2019 participant at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He was also a 2023 recipient of the Hamiltonian Fellowship. His work has been exhibited in solo and group shows across the U.S. and the Middle East, including at DDDD in New York, Delgosha Gallery in Tehran, and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art (VMOCA). He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
alikaeini.com
Simone Kearney is a Dublin-born, Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and writer. She is interested in tracking the daily embodied experience of emotional and intellectual life, which she traces through repetition and variation, metaphor and materiality. Her practice is an inquiry—as much visual as it is psychological—into how experience is a cobbled, fragile thing, shapeshifting, being configured and then reconfigured, subject to time, funneled and infused in through our bodies. In recent projects, she has been working with hand-carved stone sculpture, clay, and text, to reflect states of self and collective consciousness. Some solo exhibitions include “Runes,” Putty’s Coronation, Brooklyn, NY, 2024; “Criers,” Undercurrent Gallery, Brooklyn New York, 2022; “Amok,” Artshack Gallery, Brooklyn, NY, 2022; and “Piehole,” Annex Gallery, Lighthouse Works, Fisher’s Island, NY, 2017. Select group exhibitions include: “Various Flowers,” Hirschl & Adler Modern, New York, NY, 2023; “Dreaming: Correspondence in Word and Image,” Olympia Gallery, New York, NY, 2023; “Formless Bodies,” Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto, CA, 2022; “As Humor Has It,” Olympia Gallery, New York, NY, 2022; “Shandaken Anniversary Exhibition,” Klaus Von Nichtssagend Gallery, New York, NY, 2022. She has given interdisciplinary performances and/or readings at the Queens Museum, NADA, St. Anne’s Warehouse, SVA, the Poetry Project, Rachel Uffner Gallery, the Judd Foundation, This Red Door, P.S. 122, and Thierry Goldberg Gallery. Residencies include Uillinn: West Corks Arts Center, Shandaken: Paint School, Shandaken: Governor’s Island, Lighthouse Works, the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, and the Edward F. Albee Foundation. She is a NYFA grant recipient and is the author of Dim, Dahlia, Violet, Stone, (ITI Press, 2024), DAYS, (Belladonna Press, 2021), and My Ida (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2017). She teaches at Parsons School for Design and Rutgers University.
yeejae kim is an interdisciplinary artist whose work investigates invisible systems of competition and control embedded in everyday life. Through kinetic installations and performance, she explores how care becomes labor in the pursuit of unattainable ideals, drawing from spaces like spas, gyms, and cafés where bodies are silently ranked through posture, consumption, and routine. Using mechanized motion and repetitive gestures, her work mirrors the relentless drive for self-optimization, turning rituals of maintenance into sites of critique. Her projects have been exhibited at The Jewish Museum, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, theBLANC Gallery, and Wallach Gallery, among others. Kim holds a BA from the University of California, Davis, a Post-Baccalaureate from Brandeis University, and an MFA from Columbia University. She lives and works in Queens, NY.
yeejaekim.com
Mev Luna is a research-based artist whose practice spans performance, film, new media, and text. Through an autoethnographic/anti-ethnographic methodology, their work reappraises history to identify fictions governing contemporary life and considers issues of institutional access, incarceration, and how images of marginalized groups are circulated and controlled. Recent exhibitions include the international solo “Warped Terrain” at laNao Galería, Mexico City, and “Empathy Fatigue” at Andrew Rafacz Gallery, Chicago. Luna’s time-based works have premiered at SFMOMA and Artists' Television Access, San Francisco, The Gene Siskel Film Center, Chicago, and Kino Moviemento in Berlin. They've given talks at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, Bard College, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. Luna was a 2023-24 Faculty Fellow, Mellon Initiative for Inclusive Faculty Excellence at The New School; 2020-2021 Queer | Art NYC Film Fellow; 2018 Art Matters Foundation grant recipient; 2018-2019 BOLT resident at the Chicago Artist Coalition; and a 2017 SOMA Summer participant in Mexico City. Luna was a Visiting Critic in the MFA Painting Department at Yale School of Art in the fall of 2024, and are currently Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art Practice and Theory at Parsons School of Design, The New School. Luna is currently working on an experimental documentary titled, Confined Terrain, which examines the Texas prison system’s complex relationship with Mexican labor and the US agricultural industry through the lens of one individual: their late father. Weaving together oral history, dashcam footage, and archival materials from the Texas Department of Corrections with 3D simulations, medical imaging, and ASMR slime, the film attempts to both visualize and reckon with the enigmatic phenomenon of intergenerational trauma and incarceration’s impact on multiple generations.
mevluna.studio
Dogwood Messer (b. 1995) grew up in Mississippi along the vanished Gulf Coast of a community flooded by Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, their family documented all damages with a disposable camera. Their art practice began by drawing from those records not to catalog damages, but to form their own record of what potential might be salvaged from climate disaster. As their art practice developed, they continued to imagine possibilities beyond what was available in their world. Growing up in Southern Mississippi, there were acres of soybeans but not enough space for them to be queer. Photography provided them a means to supplement this lack with images of queerness from across history and the tool to picture a better possible future. Queer photographers served as their artistic guides. Learning from them, they have worked to create images that show possibilities for life and love on queer subjects’ own terms. The challenge of defining those terms often acts as both a central tension in their work and a motivation to keep making, defining and redefining new forms queer bodies might take.
dogwoodmesser.com
Dominique Muñoz is a Guatemalan American visual artist whose interdisciplinary practice spans photography, printmaking, performance, and installation. Rooted in personal and familial history, Muñoz explores the entanglements of assimilation, queerness, and cultural survival. Drawing from his own childhood homes and inherited objects, he examines how memory, care, and migration shape identity and how notions of home are continually remade. Through a maximalist approach that embraces the excess of color, pattern, and texture, Muñoz constructs visual languages that honor both origin and transformation. His installations often blend found objects with photographic interventions. Photography functions not just as an archive, but as a site of power, one Muñoz actively reclaims by queering its colonial and heteronormative legacies. Muñoz received his MFA in Studio Art from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his BFA in Photo & Film from VCUarts. He was awarded the 2025 Denis Roussel Fellowship at the Center for Fine Art Photography and was a 2024 LeRoy Neiman summer fellow at Ox-Bow School of Art. His work has been exhibited in galleries including Candela Books & Gallery (Richmond, VA), the Greenville Museum of Art (Greenville, NC), The National Building Museum (Washington, DC), Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), and Soft Times Gallery (San Francisco, CA).
dominiquemunoz.com
Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American writer, performer, and artist based in New York. Their work considers the ways that death and visioning—as understood through West African folkloric systems of belief—are contextualized in relation to Western medical understandings of the (black) body. Omojola is the author of If I Gather Here and Shout (2024), winner of the Nightboat Poetry Prize, and their writing has appeared in The Offing, The Baffler, American Poets, Boston Review, Ghost Proposal, and elsewhere. Omojola has received fellowships from MacDowell, Cave Canem Foundation, Millay Arts, The Poetry Project, and has presented work at Gladstone Gallery, NY; A.I.R. Gallery, NY; Silver Eye Center for Photography, PA; and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY, among others. They hold an MFA from the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.
funtofuntofunto.com
Yumiko Ono completed her first MA at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague (Czech Republic) and her second MA with honor at Stieglitz St. Petersburg State Academy of Arts and Design (Russia), supported by government scholarships from Japan, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Israel, and Russia. She has participated in numerous international residency programs, including LMCC, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, John Michael Kohler Arts Center, MASS MoCA, and ISCP (USA); Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada); Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop (UK); Taipei Artist Village (Taiwan); Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park (Japan); Gyeonggi Creation Center (South Korea); CCI Fabrika (Russia); RSJ (Brazil); Meet Factory (Czech Republic); and At Home Gallery (Slovakia). She received the Franconia Sculpture Park Fellowship and grants from the Japan Foundation, Yoshino Gypsum Art Foundation, and Asahi Shimbun Foundation. She was also a finalist for the CAF Award and received a commission from the Rainha Dona Leonor Museum (Portugal). Her work has been exhibited internationally in both private and public institutions. Selected solo exhibitions include “Cascade” at Rainha Dona Leonor Museum (Portugal), “Epitomes” at MoCA Taipei (Taiwan), “Organic Matter” at Diem Phung Thi Museum (Vietnam), “Composition IV” at Summerhall (UK), “Peripeteia” at Triumph Gallery (Russia), and “Utopia” at Slag Gallery (New York). Her group exhibitions include “Domani” at The National Art Center (Tokyo, Japan) and “Breathing Particles” at Tokyo Arts and Space (Japan). She has also participated in international festivals and symposiums such as BIWAKO Biennale (Japan), The Nature of Cities Festival (Germany), Taehwa River Eco Art Festival (South Korea), and Kyoto Sento Art Festival (Japan). Her work is held in both public and private collections including Kohler Co (USA), Rainha Dona Leonor Museum (Portugal), Yelabuga State Historical Architectural and Art Museum, and the Imperial Porcelain Factory (Russia).
yumikoono.com
Alex Schmidt (b. Chicago, IL) works across performance, painting, text, social-engagement, and set design. Schmidt is a Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Elaine G. Weitzen Studio Fellow (2024-2025). They have held solo presentations at Leslie-Lohman Museum (NY, NY), 21st Street Projects for Critical Practices Inc (NY, NY), ENTRANCE Gallery (Marfa, TX), and Olympia (NY, NY), among others. They have performed at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Swiss Institute, MoMA PS1, the Kitchen, BOFFO, Blade Study, Galerie Timonier, Duplex NYC, OLYMPIA, Essex Flowers, Abrons Art Center, and PERFORMA, among others. Schmidt is the audio narrator for Dykette by Jenny Fran Davis (Macmillan Audio, 2023) and has been featured on Poetry Off the Shelf (Poetry Foundation) with CA Conrad. Schmidt was a SU-CASA Artist-in-Residence in 2018 + 2019, a Ruth Stanton Scholar from 2020-2023, and the recipient of a grant from the Mayer Foundation. Schmidt’s work has been reviewed by the New Yorker, Vogue, Dazed Magazine, Office Magazine, Paper, New York Magazine, The Guardian, and Art 21. Schmidt has written for The Whitney Review, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and The Public Review.
bodyconfidence.org
M Slater is an interdisciplinary artist who lives and works in Philadelphia, PA. They have exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the TILT Institute for the Contemporary Image, Vox Populi Gallery, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, The Woodmere Art Museum, Fjord Gallery, and Little Berlin (Philadelphia, PA); G51 Gallery (North Adams, MA); and Bedroom Gallery, (Hong Kong). Their work has also been published in Title Magazine and Facility. Alongside (and in communication with) their studio practice, M works in graphic design under the alter-ego ‘Belsh’ (belsh.net) where they collaborate with other artists and cultural institutions on exhibition design, art direction, and long-term art projects. They are also currently leading a project to photograph and catalog the permanent art collection at the William Way LGBT Center Archives for eventual online public access.
mslater.info
Chiffon Thomas (b. 1991, Chicago) is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice spans sculpture, collage, drawing, performance, and installation. He creates immersive, site-specific environments that explore the adaptability of identity while interrogating systems of power. Drawing from his lived experience, Thomas examines the complexities of embodiment and social positioning through contorted figures, fractured compositions, and historical references. Merging abstraction and representation, Thomas’s powerful figurative assemblages feature anatomical fragments—crafted through a combination of hand-building and life casting—alongside reclaimed architectural materials such as iron, glass, concrete, silicone, fiber, and salvaged structural elements. These materials establish a dialogue between the body and the built environments that both shape and reflect it. His work portrays identities in flux, navigating intersections of race, gender, queerness, and spirituality. Thomas is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Fellowship and was an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. His recent exhibitions include “Staircase to the Rose Window”, P·P·O·W, New York, NY (2022); “Made in L.A. 2023: Acts of Living”, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2023); “Progeny”, Michael Kohn Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2024); “Ribbon Sharp”, Perrotin, Paris (2024); and his first solo museum exhibition, “Chiffon Thomas: The Cavernous”, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT (2023). His work is held in the permanent collections of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, NY; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, FL; Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; Norton Museum of Art, West Palm Beach, FL; Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY; Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH; X Museum, Beijing, China; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, among others.
www.chiffonthomas.com