Loriel Beltrán (b. 1985, Caracas, Venezuela; lives and works in Miami, FL) creates sculptural accumulations of paint and color that defy traditional notions of artistic media. Poetically merging painting and sculpture, the artist states that his works “resist becoming images” and instead materialize color in its full complexity. Situating his work between the legacy of Latin American modernism and postwar painting in the United States, Beltrán dissolves distinctions between image and object, surface and substance, plane and structure. While the artist considers perceptual effects, he remains equally invested in issues of materiality, process, and industry, foregrounding artistic labor and the residue it leaves behind.

Many of Beltrán’s works consider the interplay between particular combinations of colors, often indicated by technical abbreviations in his works’ titles. Beltrán has described the resulting works as “panels of code,” and rather than depicting a single image, they suggest a distinct visual language, replete with numerous possibilities for imagery. The artist’s surfaces are composed of layers of paint that have dried to create vibrating optical effects. To create his works, Beltrán produces custom molds and pours paint into them, allowing the paint to harden and dry over time. The artist sometimes integrates objects into his molds–such as leftover materials or detritus from his studio–to introduce “interruptions” into his compositions. He repeats this process for months or even years, as layers of paint coagulate and accumulate. The artist then removes the mold and slices the resulting object–a hardened block with swirls and layers of color–into strips using a custom-built machine. The strips are arranged into bold, planar compositions, which he adheres to a wooden substrate.

Over the course of his decades-long career, Lari Pittman (b. 1952, Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) has developed a unique visual aesthetic that has established him as one of the most significant painters of his generation. Pittman’s signature, densely-layered painting style includes a lexicon of signs and symbols (such as bells, eggs, animals, and ropes), a compilation of varied painting techniques, and a clear homage to the handmade, craft, and the decorative. Pittman creates complex compositions that mediate the tension between color, text, and imagery; landscape and decoration; and chaos and order with remarkable dexterity and often on a large scale, and the artist has an innate ability to create compositions in which each element within a painting is given equal space and significance.

In the mid-1970s, Pittman attended California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California, completing a B.F.A. and an M.F.A. The Institute’s strong feminist arts program challenged the devaluation of art forms traditionally associated with women, and it was partially as a result of his engagement with this program that Pittman developed an interest in undermining aesthetic hierarchies and embracing the decorative arts. Pittman’s strong affinity for the decorative can be seen throughout his numerous bodies of work, and it has contributed to his singular visual style. While Pittman’s early works were informed by the socio-political struggle resulting from the peak of the AIDS epidemic, racial discord, and LGBTQ+ civil rights struggles that defined the last two decades of the 20th century, his later paintings evince a shift in focus towards interior spaces, including domestic and psychological subjects.

Todd Gray (b. 1954, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Akwidaa, Ghana) is a photo-based artist whose work aims to destabilize assumptions about the veracity of photography and provoke reconsiderations of long-accepted norms and beliefs surrounding the medium, including the role of the viewer in constructing meaning. His lush photo assemblages are composed of images ranging from imperial European gardens, West African landscapes, and architecture, to rock icons and portraits of the artist himself, all carefully arranged to create critical juxtapositions that examine ideas of African diaspora, colonialism, societal power structures, and dominant cultural beliefs. With an eye informed by his four decades as a professional music photographer as well as his B.F.A. and M.F.A. from California Institute of the Arts, Gray’s photo sculptures are infused with a certain subversive beauty, reflecting his strong sense of visual aesthetics.

Gray’s distinctive photo collages range in size from the domestic to the monumental, with his largest to date spanning over 30 feet. The artist utilizes layered frames in his work—from simple wood to ornate, rococo pieces—which are either artist-made or sourced from flea markets and estate sales. Gray stacks these frames on top of one another, deliberately obscuring certain elements of his photographs and striking a delicate balance between revealing and concealing his subject matter. Images are rotated, cropped, and subtly abstracted, even as they remain firmly representational. All of the photographs (with the exception of those from the Hubble telescope) are sourced directly from Gray’s own catalog in a process the artist refers to as “appropriating his own archive.” As the creator of now iconic imagery of cultural figures such as Michael Jackson, Iggy Pop, and the Rolling Stones, the artist navigates an area between the appropriation of the Pictures Generation and Pop Art’s acknowledgement of popular imagery and commerce as drivers of so-called high culture. Across his collages, Gray weaves historical imagery into pictures of the present, reminding us that the realities of our world today are shaped by those of our collective past.

Alex Prager (b. 1979, Los Angeles, CA; lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is an American artist, director and screenwriter based in Los Angeles. Prager is known for her uncanny images and films that blur the line between artifice and reality to explore the human condition. Prager has spent over two decades honing her signature style, which draws on traditional movie making techniques from golden-era period styles (like film noir and Technicolor), classical mythology, and the allegorical works of Dutch Renaissance painters Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brugel. Over time, large-scale productions have become synonymous with her work.

Working simultaneously across film, photography, and sculpture, Prager constructs highly emotional moments that feel like a fabricated memory or dream. Her distinctive use of archetypes, everyday objects, humor, and allegory—along with her signature technicolor facades—allow her to explore dark and complex topics. Existential concerns are central to her practice, including collective and individual identities and the impact of technology on society. Like the psychological works of artists including Alfred Hitchcock, Edward Hopper, Pipilotti Rist, August Sanders, and Bill Viola, Prager’s work invites the viewer to contemplate the human experience by revealing that the extraordinary lurks within the ordinary.

Catherine Opie (b. 1961, Sandusky, OH; lives in Los Angeles, CA) is known for her powerfully dynamic photography that examines the ideals and norms surrounding the culturally constructed American dream and American identity. She first gained recognition in the 1990s for her series of studio portraits, photographing gay, lesbian, and transgender individuals drawn from her circle of friends and artists. Opie has traveled extensively across the country exploring the diversity of America’s communities and landscapes, documenting quintessential American subjects—high school football players and the 2008 presidential inauguration—while also continuing to display America’s subcultures through formal portraits. Using dramatic staging, Opie presents queer and trans bodies in intimate photographs that evoke traditional Renaissance portraiture—images of power and respect. In her portraits and landscapes, Opie establishes a level of ambiguity of both identity and place by exaggerating masculine or feminine characteristics, or by exaggerating distance, cropping, or blurring her landscapes.

Opie received a B.F.A. from San Francisco Art Institute in 1985, and an M.F.A. from CalArts in 1988. Solo exhibitions of her work have been organized at Museum of Art São Paulo (MASP), São Paulo, Brazil (2024); Heide Museum, Melbourne Australia (2023); The Current Now, Stowe, VT (2022); Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art, Winnipeg, Canada (2020); Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Cleveland, OH (2019); Marciano Foundation, Los Angeles, CA (2019); Princeton University School of Architecture, Princeton, NJ (2018); Centro Internazionale di Fotographia, Palermo, Italy (2018); Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art, Pacific Design Center, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA (2016); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, OH (2015); Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA (2012); Socrates Sculpture Park, New York, NY (2012); Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, MA (2011); Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR (2010); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2006); Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2002); and the Saint Louis Art Museum, Saint Louis, MO (2000).

Billie Zangewa (b. 1973, Blantyre, Malawi; lives and works in Johannesburg, South Africa) creates intricate collages composed of hand-stitched fragments of raw silk. These figurative compositions explore contemporary intersectional identity in an attempt to challenge the historical stereotype, objectification, and exploitation of the black female form. Beginning her career in the fashion and advertising industries, Zangewa employs her understanding of textiles to portray personal and universal experiences through domestic interiors, urban landscapes, and portraiture. Her earliest works were embroideries on found fabrics depicting remembered botanical scenes and animals from Botswana, where the artist was raised, but she soon transitioned to creating cityscapes, focusing on her experience as a woman in the city of Johannesburg and her personal relationships. These works explored her experience of the male gaze, leading her to begin to think more critically about how women view themselves and what the visualization of the female gaze, through self-portraiture, could look like.

After the birth of her son, Zangewa began making her well-known domestic interiors to explore the shift in focus from self-examination and femininity to motherhood and the home. Often referencing scenes or experiences from everyday life, Zangewa has stated that she is interested in depicting the work done by women that keeps society running smoothly, but which is often overlooked, undervalued, or ignored. Zangewa refers to this as “daily feminism,” which can be considered a contemporary version of “the personal is political.” Through the method of their making and their narrative content, Zangewa’s silk paintings illustrate gendered labor in a socio-political context, where the domestic sphere becomes a pretext for a deeper understanding of the construction of identity, questions around gender stereotypes, and racial prejudice.

Calida Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, DE) is known for paintings that merge hyper-realism with poetic abstraction. Situating Black subjects in dynamic, fluid spaces, Rawles employs water as a vital, multifaceted material and historically charged space through which questions of identity, memory, healing, and belonging come into focus.

At times buoyant and ebullient, at others submerged and mysterious, her subjects float within exquisitely rendered landscapes of bubbles, ripples, and refracted light. For Rawles, water holds a profound duality: it can signify physical and spiritual healing while evoking histories of trauma, racial exclusion, and displacement. Drawing from history, mythology, philosophy, and politics, she uses this complexity to reimagine Black subjects beyond racialized tropes and envisions new possibilities for healing. At times referencing specific geographic locations, Rawles uses place to bring attention to the histories and specific events embedded within them, while water’s ability to alter perception acts as the central force of her practice. A ripple may obscure a face while revealing something less immediately visible.

Kim Yun Shin (b. 1935, Wonsan, North Korea; lives and works in Seoul, South Korea) is a multidisciplinary artist known for her dynamic sculpture and painting, which often unfold through a series of interactions with nature. Growing up amidst the backdrop of Korea’s tumultuous history in the 20th century, Kim has established herself as a pioneering figure in the post-war South Korean art scene, overcoming societal norms to carve out a space for herself as a first-generation woman sculptor. Despite facing challenges in a male-dominated field, she ventured to Paris to pursue her artistic aspirations, taught at various universities, and co-founded the Korean Sculptress Association in 1974 to support emerging artists. Partly influenced by her nomadic early life, her work reflects a fearless exploration of diasporic cultures—from France, Mexico, and Brazil, to her adoptive home of Argentina, where she established Museo Kim Yun Shin, the first Korean immigrant art museum. Her journey from turbulent beginnings during the Japanese colonial period and Korean War to becoming a trailblazer in Korean contemporary art reflects the artist’s personal resilience and commitment to artistic innovation.

Across six decades, Kim has developed an aesthetic that engages with the fundamental qualities of materials and nature, navigating themes of confrontation, introspection, and coexistence. Central to her artistic expression is the use of solid wood, a primary medium through which Kim envisions the structural and spiritual elements of antiquity and the primordial world. In doing so, she visualizes the intersection between nature, time, and history, reconsidering the very essence of human existence. Her early sculptures from the 1970s are deeply rooted in traditional Korean hanok architecture, which uses a distinctive technique that joins wooden blocks without nails. In her Stacking Wishes series, the artist also explores traditions of vertical stacking in Korean and Latin American totemism. This notion of organic connection and her interest in East Asian philosophy merge in her iconic Add Two Add One, Divide Two Divide One series, which she began in the late 1970s. The terms “add” and “divide” originate from the philosophical concept of yin (division and fragmentation) and yang (addition and integration). Through a meticulous yet intuitive process—in which Kim “adds” her soul into the solid wood and “divides” the space between the bark and inner wood to create a complete whole—the artist delves into raw materiality and uncovers a newfound vitality.

McArthur Binion (b. 1946, Macon, MS; lives and works in Chicago, IL) combines collage, drawing, and painting to create autobiographical abstractions of painted minimalist patterns over an “under surface” of personal documents and photographs. From photocopies of his birth certificate and pages from his address book, to pictures from his childhood and found photographs of lynchings, the poignant and charged images that constitute the tiled base of his work are concealed and abstracted by grids of oil stick. The complexly layered works, from a distance, appear to be monochromatic minimalist abstractions that have led many to compare his work to that of Jasper Johns, Robert Ryman, or Brice Marden. However, while his contemporaries focused more on materiality, abstraction, and in some cases the social and political climate of the time, Binion’s works are intensely personal and deeply dedicated to the rigorous process of making a painting. Upon closer inspection, these monochromatic abstractions come into focus: the perfect grid becomes a series of imperfect laboriously hand-drawn lines, behind which emerge intimate details of Binion’s identity and personal history. Binion’s gridded compositions impose rational order to the layers of personal history, allowing only fragments of information from his birth certificate to be read, or details of his mother’s face to be identified—but never enough to be immediately legible. Having begun his career as a writer, Binion is highly influenced by language and music, as can be seen in his titles and the ways in which he layers information to be “read” rather than simply seen. The tension that exists between the grid and the artist’s visible gestures is not unlike that of jazz music, which merges improvisation with the order of a musical composition.

Binion received his B.F.A. from Wayne State University, Detroit, MI in 1971 and his M.F.A. from the Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, MI in 1973. Select recent solo exhibitions of his work have been organized at the de la Cruz Gallery at Georgetown University (2025); Museo Novecento, Florence, Italy (2020); the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MI (2018); Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX (2012); and the University of Maryland University College Gallery, Adelphi, MD (2010).

Dominic Chambers (b. 1993 St. Louis, MO; lives and works in New Haven, CT) creates vibrant paintings that simultaneously engage art historical models, such as color-field painting and gestural abstraction, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. Interested in how art can function as a mode for understanding, recontextualizing, or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, the artist sees painting as a critical and intellectual endeavor, as much as an aesthetic one. A writer himself, Chambers draws inspiration from literature, especially Magical Realism and the writing of W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk, and one of its central themes―the veil. A product of racial injustice that is a metaphorical lens through which Black bodies are observed and experienced, references to the veil appear throughout the artist’s work, whether in large swaths of color that obscure his figures or in the recurring use of a raindrop motif as both an active and passive element in his canvasses.

Chambers sees color as a protagonist in his paintings that is as important to unlocking their meaning as his subjects, and his deft manipulation of the tension and interplay between contrasting colors gives his work a subtle electric charge. In his most recent series, Leave Room for the Wind, Chambers situates his subjects in vivid landscapes that evoke shifting, monochromatic dreamscapes, and reference the mutability of our environment. The richly-hued paintings in this body of work depict open fields saturated in primary hues of red, yellow, and blue. Many of these scenes are populated by figures flying kites―a profoundly domestic activity pursued solely for its own sake, unconnected with external recognition or reward. In these works and throughout his oeuvre, Chambers proposes that enjoyment, stillness, or wonder can act as a gateway to private life and reminds us that leisure and recreation are critical to replenishing our own interiority.