Colene Brown 2020 Exhibition
This virtual exhibition is presented to honor the 2020 recipients of the Colene Brown Art Prize, an unrestricted grant that has been awarded in amounts of $10,000 each to ten New York-based visual artists. This year’s recipients are:
Caitlin Cherry, Zachary Fabri, Scherezade Garcia, Nate Lewis, Joiri Minaya, Kambui Olujimi, Erwin Redl, Christophe Roberts, Naomi Safran-Hon, and Michelle Segre.
This award aligns with a central element of BRIC’s mission, to provide opportunities for visual artists, supporting them while they create exceptional and necessary work. Open to artists at any stage of their career, the award is given to New York-based artists with no restrictions.
As this exhibition reveals, the artists chosen are highly diverse, and includes painters, sculptors, video artists, and those working with installation. While each artist was selected based on their individual merits, the assembled work in BRIC’s gallery offers an intriguing overview into the kinds of visual and thematic concerns driving contemporary art practice.
GALLERY
As you explore the virtual gallery, click on the artists' name to get a closer look at the work, and to learn more about the artists' practice.
Southfacing Gallery View
Northeastern Gallery View
Caitlin Cherry, L to R: Sunhead Emergent Leviathan, 2019; Kiosk, 2019; Phase Shift, 2019
Southfacing Gallery View
Southeast Corner View
Background L to R: Naomi Safran-Hon, Mirror Ceiling: A Room with a Mattress and a Chair, 2017; Kambui Olujimi, Hands to Hand from the North Star series, 2020; Kambui Olujimi, High Road from the North Star series, 2020;
Foreground: Kambui Olujimi, Fathom, 2017
Southwestern Gallery View
L to R: Joiri Minaya, Scherezade Garcia, Nate Lewis
Northwestern Gallery View & Wall Text
Christophe Roberts, Saint and the Warrior
PROJECT ROOM
L to R: Zachary Fabri, Mourning Stutter, 2020; Erwin Redl, Reflections v2, 2019
Erwin Redl, Reflections v2, 2019
Renderings by Erik Witkin and Keyshot Farms.
VIEW BY ARTIST
Caitlin Cherry
"For me, making art is a form of escapism to celebrate Black women in the moments where they're glamorous, have money, and are proud."
Zachary Fabri
"Often, I use my body in photographs and video, as a politicized agent in the work, as a vehicle for communicating ideas for a larger conversation."
Scherezade Garcia
"My work is always embedded in history. The moment you tackle history, it gets complicated because you can take many thoughts."
Nate Lewis
"Repetition, patterns, and textures comprise the poetry that threads the language of my work throughout the various mediums."
Joiri Minaya
"The foundation of my art practice is a daily process of finding intimacy in all things large and small."
Kambui Olujimi
"I am interested in the seamless process of synthesizing invisible constructs into what commonly function as 'inevitabilities.'"
Erwin Redl
"In this body of work, space is experienced as a second skin, our social skin, which is transformed through my artistic intervention."
Christophe Roberts
"I started researching the many hundreds of techniques out there, like basket weaving. Because naturally I was doing this from a child, like cutting up paper plates and making sculptures. I've been digging into my roots. Where I come from."
Naomi Safran-Hon
"The paintings I create depict neglected architectural spaces with traces of both their former human inhabitants and the external forces that brought about their desolation."
Michelle Segre
“In positioning the work frontally to the viewer, I emphasize the idea of the art object as a kind of transmitter or receiver of information, the information itself being a source of energy that gets exchanged with the viewer."
This year’s recipients were selected from a pool of 50 nominations provided by Gina Beavers, Artist; Rashida Bumbray, Director of Culture and Art, the Open Society Foundations; Andrianna Campbell-LaFleur, Curator and Art Historian; Chitra Ganesh, Artist; Marcela Guerrero, Assistant Curator, Whitney Museum of American Art; Miguel Luciano, Artist; Brooke Kamin Rapaport, Deputy Director and Martin Friedman Chief Curator at Madison Square Park Conservancy; Seph Rodney, Critic; Yvonne Force Villareal, Art Production Fund, Co-Founder and Culture Corps, Founding Partner; and Nicholas Weist, Founding Director, Shandaken Project.