2019 Atlanta Biennial: Women’s Panel Discussion

Joy Drury Cox (b. 1978, Atlanta, Georgia) is an artist and educator living in Durham, North Carolina. She graduated with a B.A. in English from Emory University and earned her M.F.A. from the School of Art and Art History at the University of Florida. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since 2003 and is the author of three artist books: Stranger, Old Man and the Sea, and Or, Some of the Whale. Most recently she co-authored a photography book with her partner, Ben Alper titled Compound Fractures featuring photographs of caves taken in the Southeastern United States. Her works are included in various private and public collections, including the New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Today she works in a variety of media including drawing, collage, textiles, and photography. Cox is currently a Teaching Assistant Professor in the Art and Art History Department at UNC Chapel Hill.

Jiha Moon (b. 1973) is from DaeGu, Korea and lives and works in Atlanta, GA. She received her MFA from the University of Iowa, Iowa City. Her works have been acquired by Asia Society, New York, NY, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA, The Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, Smithsonian Institute, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC and The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA. She has had solo exhibitions at Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, GA, Taubman Museum, Roanoke, VA, the Mint Museum of Art, Charlotte, NC, The Cheekwood Museum of Art, Nashville, TN and Rhodes College, Clough-Hanson Gallery, Memphis, TN and James Gallery of CUNY Graduate Center, New York, NY. She has been included in group shows at Kemper Museum, Kansas City, MI, the Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia, PA, the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA, Asia Society, New York, NY, The Drawing Center, New York, NY, White Columns, New York, NY, Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, MA, and the Weatherspoon Museum of Art, Greensboro, NC. She is recipient of Joan Mitchell foundation’s painter and sculptor’s award for 2011, MOCA GA Working Artist project fellow 2012-13, Artadia award 2016. Her mid-career survey exhibition, “Double Welcome: Most everyone’s mad here” organized by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and Taubman Museum has toured more than 10 museum venues around the country until 2018.
Moon gestural paintings, mixed media, ceramic sculpture, and installation explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and their cultures. She says, “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds.” She is taking cues from wide ranges of history of Eastern and Western art, colors and designs from popular culture, Korean temple paintings and folk art, internet emoticons and icons, fruit stickers and labels of products from all over the place. She often teases and changes these lexicons so that they are hard to identify yet stay in a familiar zone.

Jill Frank received a BA in photography at Bard College, and MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia. Jill is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Georgia State University in the Welch School of Art and Design. Reviews of her work have appeared in Art Forum, Art in America, Bad at Sports and The Paris Review.

Dr. Jordan Amirkhani is a Professorial Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art at American University in Washington, DC. She received her PhD in the History and Philosophy of Art at the University of Kent in the United Kingdom in 2015 and has published scholarship on the Franco-Cuban painter and polemicist Francis Picabia, the British conceptual art collective Art & Language, and the photographic work of Crow artist Wendy Red Star. Recent curatorial projects include Identity Measures, an exhibition of 23 New Orleans-based artists for the Contemporary Art Center of New Orleans’ 2019 Open Call exhibition, and DIALOGUES, an inaugural exhibition of 32 artists for STABLE—a subsidized studio, gallery, and educational space in northeast Washington, DC. In addition to her academic scholarship, Jordan also writes art criticism for a number of contemporary art publications including Artforum, Art Practical, Baltimore Arts, and Burnaway.org. Her emphasis on contextualizing contemporary art and artists working in the American Southeast garnered her a prestigious Creative Capital/Andy Warhol Foundation “Short-Form” Writing Grant in 2017 and three nominations for The Rabkin Prize in Arts Journalism in 2017, 2018, and 2019.