Curator Tour

Kristen V. Cahill is an independent art advisor and curator living in Atlanta. In 2019, she became the curator for The Lola, a women’s club, where she curates rotating exhibitions featuring female-identifying fine artists in the Southeast. As the principal of her design firm, she’s consulted on creative and strategy projects for corporate clients and curated art collections and designed interiors for residential clients throughout the US. Prior to creating her own firm, she worked with Peace Design and Tim Hobby Design on national, high-end residential projects. She also spent ten years in the fashion industry working with Calvin Klein, Barneys New York, Saks Fifth Avenue, KCD and up-and-coming designers. In 2012, she curated and produced the single U.S. showing of Lightscapes, an exhibition of fashion designer Dries Van Noten and photographer James Reeve’s collaboration. She also served on the board of Flux Projects from 2010-2015, where she spearheaded the 2015 Nick Cave original performance piece, Up Right Atlanta. Kristen is a Founding Partner board member of The Lola and a board member of the GA Committee for the National Museum of Women in the Arts.

Daricia Mia DeMarr is from Los Angeles, California. She launched her collegiate career at Clark Atlanta University but received a BA in Art History from Georgia State University and master’s degree in Visual Arts Administration from New York University. DeMarr served as assistant director at the NYU Kimmel Center Galleries, organizing and curating over 100 exhibitions in 6 years. She curated, ‘Respectfully Yours,’ at the Queens Museum, Bulova Center and was a member of the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Art Program public art team. She founded Pi Arts Projects and is co-founder of Black Women in Visual Art. DeMarr is currently gallery manager at Peg Alston Fine Arts in NYC and serves as an independent curator, arts administrator and consultant.

Ann Rowles is currently a studio artist at the B-Complex in Atlanta (GA). She has exhibited widely in the USA as well as in Hungary and New Zealand. Her work is in the collections of The William King Regional Art Center in Abingdon (VA), and the North Carolina Center for the Advancement of Teaching in Cullowhee (NC). Grants and awards include a five-year residency at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, the North Carolina Arts Council Visual Artist Fellowship, a NC Arts Council Scholarship to the conference Public Art Dialogue Southeast, the Triangle Arts Award (Durham, NC) and the Emerging Artist Grant from the Durham Arts Council. Rowles received her MFA in Sculpture from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and has taught at UNC-Chapel Hill, NC Central University, Durham Technical Community College, and Western Carolina University. Active in the Women’s Art Movement since the 1980s, she has been a National Affiliate member of SOHO20 since 1992. Rowles is the co-founder of the Women’s Caucus for Art of Georgia and served on the National WCA Board of Directors 2004-2016.. She previously served in multiple positions on the Board of Directors of Center/Gallery (Carrboro, NC), the Durham Art Guild (NC) and Tri State Sculptors Educational Association, (NC/SC/VA) and was a mentor in the ArtShare program of the Youth Art Connection and the Boys and Girls Clubs of Metro Atlanta.

Cecelia Kane is a nationally exhibiting artist with twenty five + solo shows since earning her MFA from Georgia State University in 1997. She is a painter, fabric artist, performance, video and earth artist whose work delves inside the universe of self and being, aging, death and our connection to nature and community. She has been a curator, visiting artist, guest lecturer, performer, community artistic project director, teacher and graphic producer. She has held numerous residencies and been the recipient of several grants to produce artistic projects. Cecelia is a mother and grandmother who lives and creates in Peacham Vermont, a small rural hill town in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont.

Christina A. West is a sculptor and installation artist who has extensively exhibited her work across the country in venues such as the Mattress Factory (Pittsburgh), The Everson Museum of Art (Syracuse, NY), Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center (Buffalo, NY), the Mütter Museum (Philadelphia), and the Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw, GA). Her work has been supported by a grants and fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Archie Bray Foundation for Ceramic Arts, the National Council on Education in the Ceramic Arts, and the Virginia Groot Foundation. West earned her BFA from Siena Heights University (Adrian, MI) in 2003 and her MFA from Alfred University (Alfred, NY) in 2006. She currently is an Associate Professor of Ceramics in the Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design at Georgia State University.

Working primarily in collage and cut paper, Dayna Thacker investigates thought systems we create in order to make sense of the world and ourselves, with a particular interest in the overlap of contemplative disciplines and scientific theory. A graduate of the University of Tennessee - Knoxville, Thacker worked in Atlanta from 2006 – 2014, and was awarded a studio space at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center for 2008-2013. She now lives and works in Birmingham, Alabama.

Hannah Tarr lives and works in Atlanta, Ga. Tarr received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. While at RISD Tarr was awarded the 2010 Fellowship at Oxbow School of Art and Artist’s Residency and the Florence Leif Award for Painters. Tarr has shown at Camayuhs (Atlanta), FJORD (Philadelphia), Poem 88 (Atlanta), Loyal Gallery (Sweden), Moca GA (Atlanta), Abernathy Arts Center (Atlanta), Swan Coachhouse (Atlanta), and Hartsfield Jackson Terminal E (Atlanta). She was part of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artists program in 2017 and currently works out of her home in Ormewood Park, Atlanta.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, In Kyoung Chun received the Emerging Artist Award 2012-2013 by the City of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs. Chun has participated in exhibitions including High Museum of Art of Atlanta, Athens Institute of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Museum of Contemporary Art Georgia, Poem 88 gallery, Hathaway Contemporary, Mint Gallery, Gallery 72 of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs, Aqua Miami Art Fair, Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Albany Museum of Fine Art of Georgia and 1780 Gallery, Virginia Museum of Fine Art of Richmond.

In the spring of 2020, Chun joined the Atlanta Contemporary Studio program and had her two-person show at Project:ARTspace in New York City. She recently participated in the following exhibitions; She Is Here at Atlanta Contemporary, In Search For Home at Dalton gallery of Agnes Scott College and Light Up Midtown in Columbus, Georgia. In 2021, Chun had her solo show ‘Table and Cloud’ at Blue Heron Nature Preserve of Atlanta and participated in the ArtFields in Lake City, South Carolina.

Chun’s work has been included to its permanent collection of High Museum of Art, the City of Atlanta Mayors Office of Cultural Affairs and Fulton County Public Library of Atlanta.

Jaime Bull builds a cast of sparkly clad forms that embody a strong, sexy, dangerous female presence. She is a collector and uses found, repurposed materials in her work to reference the body with a feminist perspective. Spending her time dumpster diving at the recycling center or scouring Goodwill to amass second-hand tube tops and sequined prom dresses, Bull’s sculptures have the rhinestone aesthetic of a bedazzled jean jacket or a Mardi Gras float. She examines and questions our relationship with the environment by highlighting a preoccupation with hoarding mass quantities of “stuff.”
Bull received her MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of Georgia, Athens in 2013. She is a recipient of the Willson Center for the Arts research grant for her thesis work Lady Beasts: An Investigation of Womanliness. She has exhibited in Atlanta with Whitespace, Camayuhs, Hathaway Gallery and at the Airport in Terminal E. Regionally, she has shown work at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, University of North Georgia, Auburn University, Albany Museum and the COOP Gallery in Nashville. Most recently, her sculptures were featured in a two woman show with artist Melissa Brown (Brooklyn, NY), entitled Fountain, at the Lamar Dodd School of Art. She is a Vermont Studio School Fellow, attended a two-month residency at the Bernheim Arboretum in Louisville, KY and was an Atlanta Contemporary Art Center Studio Artist in Residence from 2016-2019. She was featured in and on the cover of the 219th edition of Ambit Magazine, London.

Jane Foley has created public sound sculptures for the Architecture Triennale in Lisbon, Portugal and La Friche Belle de Mai in Marseille, France with Zurich-based Sound Development City, as well as composed sounds that played in taxicabs throughout the 5th Marrakech Biennale in Morocco. In Atlanta, they have created works for the High Museum, Flux Projects, The Atlanta Contemporary, and the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta Airport, among others. Foley currently teaches art at Georgia State University and Emory University while raising a son who is also an artist and assists on many projects.

Jenene Nagy is a visual artist living and working in the Inland Empire. She received her BFA from the University of Arizona in 1998 and her MFA from the University of Oregon in 2004. Nagy’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at venues including the Portland Art Museum, Weatherspoon Art Museum, Southern Exposure in San Francisco, Takt Kunstprojektraum in Berlin, and Samuel Freeman in Los Angeles, among others. Her work has been recognized with grants and awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Art, the Oregon Arts Commission, Colorado Creative Industries, and the Ford Family Foundation.
Along with a rigorous studio practice, Nagy is one half of the curatorial team TILT Export:, an independent art initiative with no fixed location, working in partnership with a variety of venues to produce exhibitions. From 2011-12 she was the first Curator-in-Residence for Disjecta Contemporary Art Center in Portland, Oregon.

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.

Kelly Taylor Mitchell (b. 1994, USA) is an artist and educator who lives and works in Atlanta, GA where she is currently an Artist-in-Residence with the Studio Artist Program at The Atlanta Contemporary and a Working Artist Project Fellow at MOCA GA. Kelly is an Assistant Professor of Art and Visual Culture and the Art Program Director at Spelman College. Kelly’s multidisciplinary practice centers oral history and ancestral memory woven into the fabric of the Africana Diaspora, in order to present speculative futures, specifically related to concepts of community autonomy, swamp marronage, and inherited/constructed identity. Utilizing printmaking, papermaking, sculpture, and textiles her work manifests as immersive installations, performative objects, and partnered artists books offering a venue for the sensorial –specifically smell- to connect to, convey, and reimagine rituals and rites of autonomous kin, collectives, and individuals of the Africana Diaspora.

Lillian Blades was born in Nassau, Bahamas in 1973 and currently resides in Atlanta, GA. She completed a BFA in Painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design, Savannah Campus and a MFA in Painting at Georgia State University. Lillian works predominately in mixed media assemblage. Her childhood home of Bahamas, ancestral background of West Africa, and her late mother, who was a seamstress, influences her art. These influences appear through use of her color palette and objects that evoke memory and history. In addition, Lillian has studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and Caversham in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa. Her work has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States, as well as The Bahamas, Trinidad, Germany and South Africa. Her public commissions include Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport and Jean Childs Young Middle School. As a public artist she enjoys collaborating with other artists and groups on large-scale assemblages such as The East Atlanta Library. Her artwork is also in the collection of the Birmingham Museum of Art and the National Art Gallery of The Bahamas. A few of Lillian’s favorite things to do are drumming and dancing. 2016 ‘Excellence in Arts’ Awardee - The Bahamas Consulate, Atlanta, GA, 2016 Visual Artist Awardee - National Black Art Festival (NBAF)

MaDora Frey, originally from Georgia, employs a diverse artistic practice to explore her romantic regard for both the natural and built environment and her search for the sublime. Frey’s work takes the form of temporary installations created outdoors, of which only a photograph remains, large-scale public works, and studio works. Her notable commissions include large-scale outdoor public works created for the Katonah Museum of Art, Dashboard US at Woodruff Park, and Perennial Projects. Frey’s recent exhibitions include solo and two-person shows at Massey Klein Gallery, NY, Georgia State University Welch Gallery and Camayuhs Gallery, Atlanta GA. She received her MFA in painting, magna cum laude, from the New York Academy of Art and her BFA, with a concentration in drawing and printmaking, from Auburn University. Additionally, Frey studied at the Florence Academy, Florence, Italy. Her work is held in numerous private collections.

Nikita Gale is an artist living and working in Los Angeles, California and holds a BA in Anthropology with an emphasis in Archaeological Studies from Yale University and earned an MFA in New Genres at UCLA.
Nikita’s work has recently been exhibited at MoMA PS1 (New York); LACE (Los Angeles); Commonwealth and Council (Los Angeles); Matthew Marks Gallery (Los Angeles); The Studio Museum in Harlem (New York); Rodeo Gallery (London); Ceysson & Benetiere (Paris); and in “Made in L.A. 2018” at the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles). Gale’s work has appeared in numerous publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, Art21, AQNB, Frieze, Vogue, and Flash Art. Nikita currently serves on the Board of Directors for GREX, the west coast affiliate of the AK Rice Institute for the Study of Social Systems.

Pam Longobardi’s parents, an ocean lifeguard and the Delaware state diving champion, connected her from an early age to the water. She moved to Atlanta in 1970 and saw her neighborhood pond drained to build the high school she attended. Since then, she lived for varying time periods in Wyoming, Montana, California, and Tennessee, and worked as a firefighter and tree planter, a scientific illustrator and an aerial mapmaker, a waitress and a bartender, a collaborative printer and a color mixer. Her artwork involves painting, photography, and installation to address the psychological relationship of humans to the natural world. After discovering mountains of plastic on remote Hawaiian shores in 2006, she founded the Drifters Project, centralizing the artist as culture worker/activist/researcher. Now a global collaborative entity, Drifters Project has removed tens of thousands of pounds of material from the natural environment and re-situated it in social space. Winner of the prestigious Hudgens Prize and Distinguished Professor at Georgia State University, Longobardi has been featured in National Geographic, SIERRA magazine, the Weather Channel and in exhibitions across the US and in Greece, Italy, Monaco, Germany, Finland, Slovakia, China, Japan, Spain, Belgium, Poland and the UK. The work provides a visual statement about the engine of global consumption and the vast amounts of plastic objects and their impact on the world’s most remote places and its creatures. Longobardi’s work is framed within a conversation about globalism and climate change.

Emerson graduated from the Atlanta College of Art in 1998 and completed her Masters Degree at Goldsmiths College, London in 2000. She has exhibited her work in galleries throughout the United States, Canada, and Europe, including White Columns, NY, Cosmic Gallery, Paris, the MOCA Jacksonville, Fl., and the High Museum in Atlanta, GA. Her work has been published in Noplaceness: Art in a Post Urban Landscape, Stickers Deluxe: From Punk Rock to Contemporary Art, and New American Paintings in 2012, 2007, and 2003. In 2014 Emerson was awarded the 2014/2015 MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant selected by Siri Engberg, Senior Curator at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. Emerson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta.

Shara Hughes (b. 1981, Atlanta, GA) earned a BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Recent solo exhibitions include the Newport Art Museum, Newport, RI; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York, NY; and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA; among many others. In May 2018, Hughes completed Carving Out Fresh Options, a large-scale mural in Boston, MA commissioned by the Rose Kennedy Greenway Conservancy in partnership with the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Hughes has participated in numerous group exhibitions, at venues such as MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA and the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA. The artist was also included in the 2017 Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY. Hughes’ work belongs to many prominent museum collections including the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; the Denver Museum of Art, Denver, CO; the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; the Jorge M. Perez Collection, Miami, FL; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta, GA; the M Woods Museum, Beijing, China; the Phoenix Art Museum, Phoenix, AZ; the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas, TX; the Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis, MO; the Si Shang Art Museum, Beijing, China; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; and the Whitney Museum of Art, New York, NY; among others. Hughes lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Sheila Pree Bright is an International Photographic Artist and author of #1960Now: Photographs of Civil Rights Activists and Black Lives Matter Protests. She portrays large-scale works that combine a broad range of knowledge of contemporary culture and is known for her series #1960Now, Invisible Empire, Suburbia, Young Americans, and Plastic Bodies.

She is the recipient of several nominations, commissions, and awards; Recently, she received the Picturing South commission from the High Museum of Art for her series, Invisible Empire; Nominations, ICP Infinity Awards, NY and Ted Prize, $1 million. Her work is included in numerous private and public collections, to name a few; Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; The Library of Congress, Washington, DC; National Center for Civil and Human Rights, Atlanta, GA; The High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, IL; Harn Museum of Art, Gainesville FL; Birmingham Museum of Art, AL and Microsoft Art Collection, Redmond, WA.

Sonya Yong James (b. Knoxville, Tennessee) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA in Printmaking from Georgia State University where she focused on etching and sculpture. James has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past twenty years and has been the recipient of several grants, awards, and residencies. She has most recently received the Artadia Award in 2019 and the Idea Capital Antinori grant in 2021.

Her work is held in numerous corporate and private collections including Art in Embassies in Mauritania, Africa. James has been exhibited in galleries and museums locally such as MOCA GA, Atlanta Contemporary, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Albany Museum of Art, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art. She was formally a resident at the Studio Artists Program at Atlanta Contemporary and is represented by Whitespace Gallery.

Teresa Bramlette Reeves was born in Athens, Georgia and received a BFA in painting from the University of Georgia, a MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University, and a PhD from the University of Georgia. Prior to teaching at Georgia State University (2001-11), she worked as the Curatorial Assistant at the following New York City institutions: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Guggenheim Museum, and Artists Space. Bramlette Reeves was formerly the Assistant Director of The New York Kunsthalle, the Gallery Director and Curator for the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, and the Director of Curatorial Affairs at the Zuckerman Museum of Art. She completed a Fulbright US Scholar residency in 2016/17, working with the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. She also part of the three-member curatorial collective, Selvage, that organizes exhibitions and events that explore the histories and narratives of a particular place via objects of material culture and contemporary art. Her work is represented in Atlanta by whitespace. She was formerly represented by Althea Viafora Gallery and Information Gallery in NYC, and ID Galerie in Düsseldorf, Germany. In addition to solo shows at these commercial venues, she has also presented solo projects at the Jersey City Museum, P.S. 1 Museum and White Columns as well as being included in numerous group shows in Atlanta, New Orleans, NYC, Cologne and Paris. She was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant, and Fellowship Residencies at the MacDowell Colony, Cite International des Arts (Paris), Hambidge Center, and the P.S. 1 National Studio Program.