Group Show
Crossing the Line: Contemporary Drawing and Artistic Process
Curated by: Larry Ossei-Mensah, Dexter Wimberly
Mixed Greens Gallery
531 W.26th St.
New York, NY
July 11th - August 16th, 2013
Opening: July 11th 06:00 PM - 08:00 PM
Mixed Greens is proud to present Crossing the Line:
Contemporary Drawing and Artistic Process, a group exhibition co-curated by
Dexter Wimberly and Larry Ossei-Mensah. The curators initiate an expansive visual
discourse that brings the act of drawing front and center, showing its importance
as the foundation of art making.
Crossing the Line features new works by a group of emerging female artists
hailing from Nigeria, the Dominican Republic/Haiti, South Korea, Trinidad, Iran,
and the United States. All are exploring drawing within the context of their
dynamic artistic practices and re-defining how drawing fits into the broader global
contemporary art conversation. The exhibition presents distinct approaches to
representational and abstract drawing, as well as experimental, site-specific mixed
media and video installations that are equally influenced by drawing.
Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze is a Brooklyn-based artist of Nigerian birth and British
upbringing who has found empowerment in the authenticity of the hybrid.
Amanze was recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to create a new body of
work in her native Nigeria to fully piece together the gaps in her identity. She has
been greatly influenced by memories of architecture and space, the politics of
home, nomadic stories, and urban landscapes. Drawing from her background in
textiles and printmaking, Amanze's drawings reflect a fragmented and layered
material sensibility that is highly intuitive to process. She received a BFA from
Tyler School of Art in 2004 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy in 2006.
Residencies have included Cooper Union in NYC and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ.
Firelei Báez is a Haitian-Dominican artist who makes large-scale, intricate works on
paper indebted to a convergence of interests in anthropology, science fiction, black
female subjectivity, and "women's work." Her art explores the humor and fantasy
involved in self-making within diasporic societies. Such societies often utilize
cultural ambiguities to build psychological and even metaphysical defenses
against cultural invasions. She received a BFA from The Cooper Union's School of
Art in 2004, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in
2008, and received an MFA from Hunter College in 2010. Her residencies include
The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace and The Lower East Side Print
Shop. Báez's work has been written about in The New York Times, The LA Times,
and Art in America, among others. She was a recipient of the prestigious Joan
Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award as well as the Jaque and Natasha Gelman
Award in Painting.
Born in Queens NY, Oasa Sun DuVerney's works on paper and video
performances use consumerist culture as a means to unmask our society's
collective aggression. DuVerney received her MFA from Hunter College and is the
2011 recipient of the Tony Smith Award. She exhibits her work nationally and has
been featured in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, and the Gotham
Gazette. She also won awards from the Brooklyn Arts Council and the Citizens
Committee for "The Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine," a public project which brings
together a small Brooklyn neighborhood every summer to confront gentrification
through art making. In 2012, DuVerney's work was exhibited in the three-person
exhibition, Through a glass, darkly, at Postmasters Gallery in NYC and the group
exhibition, Me Love You Long Time, at Aljira Art Center in Newark, NJ. She is
currently an LMCC Workspace Artist-in-Residence. DuVerney lives in Brooklyn.
Sanam Enayati was born in the United States and raised in Tehran, Iran. Her
newest body of work investigates the physicality of basic human emotions. By
identifying one emotion and letting it transform and overlap with another, Enayati
seeks to create a new, non-familiar space/reality through a series of "feminine"
and "domestic" processes, repetitive movements, and obsessive behaviors. The
emotions inspire a series of compulsive movements within the non-familiar
space/reality, transmuting an orderly, obsessively made space into complete
chaos. After making marks as memories of that space, Enayati then abandons the
space and enters into the nostalgic episodes by making drawings and paintings.
Enayati holds a BFA from the Illinois Institute of Art in Chicago, IL, an MFA from the
School of Visual Arts in NYC, and a Masters of Fashion Design focused on
sociology and psychology from Istituto Marangoni in Milan, Italy.
Music by:
Chill Carrier - A New Day
