Congratulations to Joey De Jesus, Oasa DuVerney, Adama Delphine Fawundu, Christie Neptune, Jamaal Peterman, and Padma Rajendran, BRIC's ArtFP artists for the 2019-2020 exhibition seasons! Keep an eye on BRIC's upcoming exhibitions as we announce what they'll be presenting at BRIC.

WHAT IS ARTFP?

BRIC ArtFP is an open request for proposals (RFP) from emerging and established local visual artists to explore and expand the possibilities of their work. With this commissioning program led by BRIC’s Contemporary Art program, artists receive honorariums and production fees for exhibition of their work in the Project Room or Hallway spaces. This opportunity includes assistance with development time, installation, marketing, documentation, and more.

GET TO KNOW OUR 2019-2020 ARTFP ARTISTS:

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Joey De Jesus is a queer Nuyorican poet and author of NOCT: The Threshold of Madness (The Atlas Review, 2019) and HOAX (The Operating System, 2020). At the center of his practice lies the role of creative persona in resistance against oppression on his identity. Unconstrained by the guidelines of traditional literature, De Jesus conjures the mystical grasp of performed poetry that brings worlds into being through material qualities of sound, lyricism, and imagery. His projects therefore not only involve text but poem-objects, live sound equipment, and collaboration with performers. 

Through his installation of HOAX in BRIC’s Project Room, De Jesus aims to revive such magical powers that have been oppressed by Eurocentric, rationalistic worldviews by animating the relationship between text and audience. A collection of various extended forms of poetry that relate to cosmology, HOAX consists of eclectic objects such as a book of prayers, celestial maps suspended from the ceiling in position to celestial objects, and an interactive projection of NOCT: The Threshold of Madness, a redaction of a book in black magic, with a MAX/msp environment that will animate its images. 

De Jesus has installed and/or performed poems at Elsewhere, Brooklyn; Artists Space and New Museum, both NY. His poems have appeared in the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-A-Day and Bettering American Poetry, among others. Joey received the NYFA/NYSCA Fellowship in Poetry, a M.A Departmental Fellowship from NYU, and M.F.A from Sarah Lawrence College. He is currently senior staff and poetry co-editor for Apogee Journal and sits on the advisory board of No, Dear Magazine. 

(Photo by Dan Gutt / RAGGA) 

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Oasa DuVerney is an artist and mother who takes a proactive stance on social issues by making visible power structures that produce conditions of oppression. Her ongoing collaboration with Mildred Beltre, Brooklyn Hi-Art Machine, is a community driven art project that takes the form of large scale fence weaving with such poignant phrases as “Do Not Disappear Into Silence,” engaging participants in the process by which ideas and movements spread across a multiplicity of bodies. 

For BRIC’s Project Room, DuVerney will occupy the space with Black Power Wave / Drawing For Protest, an immersive multi-panel drawing of the Black Power Wave. The metaphor of waves draws attention to both the power and vulnerability of mobilizing political movements in which satire and humor play an important role. 

DuVerney held solo exhibitions at Auxiliary Projects and Momenta Art, both Brooklyn, and  participated in group exhibitions at BRIC, Brooklyn Museum, and Smack Mellon, all Brooklyn; and Studio Museum of Harlem and United Nations Plaza, both NY. She has been an artist-in-resident at BRIC, Smack Mellon, Triangle Art, and Brooklyn Children’s Museum, all Brooklyn; and was awarded the Brooklyn Arts Council DCA Grant to Individual Artist. 

(Photo by James Scheuren) 

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Adama Delphine Fawundu is a Brooklyn-born multimedia artist and educator with parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea. Based on extensive travel and research, she examines impacts of the African diaspora following the transatlantic slave trade on intimate aspects of modern life within home and family. Her photographic works thus juxtapose historical and political elements of identity with the personal and affective. 

Fawundu’s project for BRIC’s Hallway, In the Face of History, re-examines the way that we view and interpret history.  It consists of a portrait of the back of her head screen printed on digital prints of historical documents which symbolically places the artist in the past and present. Her short film, the cleanse (2017), also inspired by history will be displayed on flat screens on top of these images. 

Fawundu held solo exhibitions at Crush Curatorial and Wallach Gallery, both NY; and African American Museum in Philadelphia, and was included in group exhibitions at BRIC and Brooklyn Museum, both Brooklyn; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; and Pulse Art Fair and Prism Art Fair, FL, among others. She was artist-in-resident at BRIC and Brooklyn Arts Council, both Brooklyn; and is currently in residence at the Center for Book Arts, NY. Fawundu has been awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant and a grant from the New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA). She is a co-founder and author of the book and journal MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

(Image: self-portrait by the artist) 

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Christie Neptune is a Brooklyn based interdisciplinary artist working across film, photography, mixed media and performance arts. Neptune investigates structural racism as an accumulation of collective attitudes that extend beyond the level of expressed belief to manifest in everyday life through the use of language, media depictions, travel regulations, and so on. Although they may at first originate from particular political situations, these constructs compound and become naturalized in the course of history, preventing marginalized bodies of color from being truly seen or heard. 

In BRIC’s Project Room, Neptune will exhibit Constructs and Context Relativity: Performance I, a multimedia performance series that explores the conceptual impact of abstraction found within the dichotomous relationship of object and space.

Neptune has been included in exhibitions at Smack Mellon and A.I.R. Gallery, both Brooklyn; Rubber Factory, VOLTA, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and Queens Museum, all NY; and CICA Museum, Gimpo, South Korea. She has been artist-in-resident at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn; Bronx Museum of the Arts; and Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. Awards include the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant and NYFA Artist Fellowship. 

(Photo by Balarama Heller) 

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Jamaal Peterman is a Brooklyn-based visual artist who examines the state of black male bodies as they orbit categories of wealth, class, and ethnicity. In previous works, he has featured luxury goods as a point of obsession in parading one’s status and, in the New Fruit series, he juxtaposed dancing black bodies with abstract expressionist backgrounds to capture and explore a moment of diasporic movement across social boundaries. 

Peterman’s Hallway project at BRIC, tbd, includes four paintings and a mural that visualize the migration of African Americans out of the south and away from its segregation laws, travelling across Virginia, Maryland, and Washington DC. His use of abstract geometric forms and symbols question the legacy of black wealth in terms of accessibility by exhuming the objective truth of persisting racial and economic fragmentation. 

Peterman held solo exhibitions at New Gallery and Pratt Steuben Gallery, both Brooklyn; and Artist Proof Gallery, DC. He has participated in group exhibitions at Galerie Richard, NY; and Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, MI; among others. Peterman was awarded Smack Mellon’s 2019 Hot Pick and has been an artist-in-resident at Wassaic Project, NY, and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), North Adams, MA.

(Photo by Federico Savini) 

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Padma Rajendran explores the effects of migration on women’s formation of personal narratives through drawing, printmaking, clay, and fabric. Her process highlights how their voices are often lost or ignored in the traumatic process of moving from one place to another. She is especially interested in the concept of “fruitfulness” that locates a woman’s body within domestic labor. 

Rajendran’s Hallway commission at BRIC, entitled Move me with you, consists of suspended rows of dye drawings whose repetitive layering and fluttering symbolize the movement of stories across generations. Her choice of textiles carries this further, as they have a long history as a portable medium for storytelling as well as a traditionally “feminine” material. 

Rajendran had a solo exhibition at Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn, and was included in group exhibitions at Site:Brooklyn, Brooklyn; Wassaic Project, International Print Center New York, and 20/20, all NY; High Tide, Philadelphia, PA; Index, Los Angeles, CA; and Galleria Benaco Arte, Sirmiane, Italy. She completed residencies at Ortega Y Gasset Projects, Brooklyn; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (Mass MOCA), North Adams, MA; and is currently in residence the Lower East Side Printshop, NY.

(Black & White Headshot by Teddy Wolff / Color headshot by Don Stahl)