Georgia Gives Day

Chloe Alexander is a printmaker who works in various techniques to create multilayered, one-of-a-kind prints and drawings. Her most recent works, which are mostly based in silkscreen printing, include images of children, birds and various other decorative motifs. Chloe obtained both her BFA and M. Ed. from Georgia State University in Atlanta and has since exhibited work widely, including at Kai Lin Art Gallery in Atlanta, the International Print Center New York, and the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London.

Elizabeth M. Webb is an artist and filmmaker originally from Charlottesville, VA and based in the American South. Her work is invested in issues surrounding race and identity, often using the lens of her own family history of migration and racial passing to explore larger, systemic constructs and the renegotiation of their borders. Her work has screened and been exhibited in the U.S., United Kingdom, Canada, Norway, Japan, Ecuador, Singapore, Switzerland, Mexico, Spain, Austria and Germany. Her film Proximity Study (Sight Lines) won the jury award for Best Experimental Film at New Orleans Film Festival in 2022. Elizabeth holds a dual MFA in Film/Video and Photography/Media from CalArts and is an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program in Studio Art, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. She was Fall 2019 Visiting Faculty in Sculpture and Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Since 2015 she has been the Creative Producer for Arts in a Changing America and in 2020 worked on the launch of the Cultural New Deal for Cultural and Racial Justice. She is currently co-editing an anthology with Roberta Uno and Daniela Alvarez entitled FUTURE/PRESENT: Arts in a Changing America (Duke University Press, 2024).

Dianna Settles is a Vietnamese-American artist in Atlanta, Georgia who received her BFA from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. Her current work explores moments of joyful stillness amidst the cascading series of crises called modern life, accomplished through her synthesis of traditional Vietnamese and classical European painting styles. Recent exhibition highlights include the two person show “The One That Got Away” at Delaplane in San Francisco, CA, her solo show “99 Flowers” at Versa Gallery in Chattanooga, TN, and participation in “Of Origins and Belonging” at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta. As the inaugural artist of Living Walls’ international exchange program, she completed the 180’ long mural To Our Friends / Á Nos Amis in Paris, France in July of 2019, adding to her portfolio of work as a muralist in Atlanta, Oakland, and Pittsburgh. She was a finalist for the 2019 Forward Arts Foundation Edge Award, and was recently accepted into the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist Program. Currently, she is preparing a large portfolio of new paintings for upcoming shows, including an exhibition with Gerald Lovell and Jurell Cayetano at MINT Gallery in Atlanta and a solo show at Institute 193. In addition to her own art practice, Dianna runs Hi-Lo Press, a print studio and art gallery in Midtown Atlanta, which is home to drag figure drawing nights, the Atlanta Paint Club, an 1843 Robert Mayer Parks lithography press, and regular poetry readings, film screenings, dance parties, potlucks, and a variety of other events and workshops.

Ato Ribeiro (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of media including sculptural installation, drawing and printmaking. He was born in Philadelphia, PA and spent his formative years in Accra, Ghana. He is currently serving as a 2022/2023 MOCA GA WAP Fellow, and was recently a 2022 Atlanta Artadia Awardee and a MINT 2021 Leap Year Artist. Ribeiro was the 2017 Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist Award recipient, Artist in Resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, and received Fellowships at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME among others. He earned his B.A. from Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, and his M.F.A. in Print Media from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Sabre Esler is an Atlanta based multi-disciplined artist. She creates works and environments that are fueled by her interest in human behavior. Her latest body of work is inspired by the book “Thinking: Fast and Slow” which compares AI to the capacity of the mind in the lens of behavioral economics. Esler, an Ohio native, graduated from Miami University, Oxford, OH with a BFA in graphic design/illustration and a minor in biology. She continued her art career, first in advertising and design and began a fine art career after leaving the corporate world. She received her MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) in 2015. She taught Foundation Studies at SCAD, (Atlanta Campus) 2018. She will teach at Georgia Perimeter/GSU (Dunwoody Campus) in 2019. She has had solo shows in Boston, Charleston, Knoxville, and Atlanta. Her work has been exhibited at Art Basel the last three years. She is a Hambidge Fellow. To date she has completed four installations in the Atlanta area, taking her sculptures to room size works. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of Ritz Carlton, SunTrust Bank, Oglethorpe Bank, Preferred Office, Georgian Bank, Atlantic Capital Bank, Waycross Bank & Trust, Boardwalk Inn at Wild Dunes, Hilton Hotels, Schell, Bray, Aycock, Abel & Livingston, Crowell & Moring, AdvantEdge Executive Offices, Reaction 35, The Lofts at Capitol Quarters, Hilton Hotels, and Public Collections at The Federal Reserve Bank, Miami University, Tufts University, Fulton County Arts Council, as well as over 500 private collections.

Kate Burke (b. 1994) is an Atlanta-based sculptor. After receiving her BFA in Fabric Design in 2016 with honors from the University of Georgia, she moved to Atlanta in 2017 and shortly thereafter immersed herself within the Atlanta art community. Her solo career has developed steadily since moving to Atlanta, with solo and group showings in Southeast spaces such as Lyndon House Art Center, the Dalton Gallery at Agnes Scott, Tiger Strikes Asteroid Greenville, Free Market Gallery, ATHICA, Harstfield Jackson International Airport, whitespec, Art Fields, Fresh Eye Gallery, Waiting Room Art, and Mint Atlanta. Receiving distinguished awards such as the ArtFields Category Award for textiles in 2019, and with a growing list of fellowships including being chosen as a two-time Hambidge Center fellow and as one of 2021’s Leap Year artists, Kate recently debuted her solo show “Never let me go” in April 2022. Kate will continue her tenure in Atlanta through 2023 - 2025 as one of The Creative Projects Residents.

Namwon Choi is an artist based in Savannah, GA. Choi acquired her BFA and MFA in Traditional Korean Painting from Hongik University in Seoul, Korea in 2002, and her MFA in Drawing and Painting at Georgia State University in Atlanta in 2014. In 2022 she had a solo exhibition at the Moss Art Center at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg, VA and at Laney Contemporary Gallery in Savannah, GA. In fall 2021 her solo exhibition at THE END Project Space in Atlanta, GA was reviewed in the Atlanta Journal Constitution. Choi’s work has been exhibited at the New York City Korean Culture Center, the Los Angeles Korean Culture Center, Aqua Art Miami, at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Georgia in Atlanta and, B20 Wiregrass Biennial at the Wiregrass Museum in Dothan, Alabama. Her work in the “New Connections” exhibition at the Korean Cultural Center in Washington D.C. was reviewed in the Washington Post. In 2020, she was one of three finalists selected for the most recent 1858 Prize Contemporary Southern Art Award at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. She is currently a professor of Foundation Studies at Savannah College of Art and Design.

I am a self-taught, mixed-media artist based in Atlanta, Georgia. I work in wood, resin, cement, dye, and acrylic paint. I began my artistic practice, part-time, in 2016 and have been a full-time artist since 2022.My work is rooted in my experiences as a queer, multiracial person of Enslaved African, Indigenous American, and Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Having never been White enough, Black enough, Native enough, Jewish enough, masculine enough, feminine enough—never enough of whatever was needed to be legible within Western sociopolitical structures—I have learned to see the power inherent in the fact that my identity and very existence disrupt the binaristic logics which dictate the distribution of authority, resources, and safety in America. Aesthetically, I similarly challenge the boundaries of movements, styles, periods, and geographies by freely blending and juxtaposing elements from a diverse set of artistic and cultural traditions, including Naïvism, Neo-Expressionism, Cubism, and traditional African and North American art forms. Thematically, my work explores grief and trauma, both generational and personal. I learned not to cry at the age of four, following the death of my younger sister due to a rare genetic condition, called Tay-Sachs disease, which is common amongst Ashkenazi Jews. Nobody told me I should not cry. But, I knew I needed to be strong for people around me who, at that time, could not be strong for themselves. I never grieved her death. It remains hard for me to grieve. My art, typically depicting weeping figures, is how I materialize these emotions in physical form, so that they are acknowledged, released, and even ritualized, even if not through my own crying. It is my hope that my art can be similarly healing for viewers who, like me, carry the burden of ungrieved trauma and can benefit from grieving vicariously through my works.

Photographer and Georgia native, Tokie Rome-Taylor focuses on the notion that perception of self and belonging begins in childhood. Children are the subjects she centers within her works, with a focus on representing a visual elevation that had been omitted from mainstream “western art history”. Her works have a painterly aesthetic, using both digital and analog image making techniques. She often incorporates multiple mediums, including embroidery, pigments, beading and wax. The resulting works challenge the viewer’s expectation of what a photograph should look like.

Working in tandem with her centering of children, Rome-Taylor explores questions that stem from ethnographic and historical research. These questions probe material, spiritual, and familial culture of descents of southern slaves act as entry points for Tokie Rome-Taylor to build symbolic elements that communicate a visual language. The sitters’ family heirlooms, and recollections of family history, are combined with the historical research about the lives of Africans brought to the Americas.The research centers on their material culture, spiritual practice, and traditions. These have all been used to create a visual language that speaks to our shared history. Children and their family heirlooms, the real or imagined histories of these children’s families and their ancestors all collide to spark conversation around material wealth, familial and cultural traditions of African Americans in the South.

Rome-Taylor’s work is held in multiple private and institutional collections including the MOCA GA, The Fralin Museum at UVA, and the Southeastern Museum of Photography. She has an extensive national and international exhibition record including the Atlanta Contemporary, the Fralin Museum, The Southeastern Museum of Photography, The Griffin Museum of Photography, SP-Foto SP-Arte Fair in São Paulo, Brazil, and the Zuckerman Museum of Art, amongst others.

Rome-Taylor is a native of Atlanta, 20+ year veteran educator and working artist.

Casey McGuire is received her BFA from Alfred University and her MFA in Sculpture from the University of Colorado, Boulder. The daughter of a taxidermist and decoy carver she was subject to object making at a young age. Growing up in Vermont has left a lasting impression and fuels her works based on home and the Anthropocene. Her installations and sculptures contain video, found objects and constructions of roadside detritus that are a conceptualization of the housing crash and the myth of the American Dream. She has exhibited at the Urban Institute of Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids MI; Dairy Center for the Arts, Boulder, CO; Terminal 136, UTSA San Antonio, TX; 621 Gallery, Tallahassee, FL; The Zuckerman Museum, Kennesaw, GA, and Grace Exhibition Space, NY. McGuire was featured in the October 2009 issue of Sculpture Magazine. She has also been a resident at Hambidge Center for the Arts, and the Vermont Studio Center. Most recently McGuire was a resident artist at Artspace in Raleigh, NC where she created Dream Homes, a community project directed at questioning the American Dream and the suburban landscape.

Donna Mintz (born Gainesville, Georgia, 1956) is a visual artist whose painting and installation is a meditation on memory, time, and place. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of such institutions as the High Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the Mobile Museum of Art, where her painting hangs in the ongoing exhibition American Art: 1945 to the Present. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Sewanee Review, Sculpture magazine, and the arts journals Burnaway.org and ArtsATL.org where she is a regular contributor.
Mintz is a past writer-in-residence at Rivendell Writers’ Colony and a fellow at the Hambidge Center for the Creative Arts and Sciences, for which she co-wrote and co-edited The Hambidge Center: 80 Years in the Making (2014), a book celebrating its 80-year history as an artists’ residency. She holds an MFA from Sewanee’s School of Letters at the University of the South and recently completed a book on the life of the writer James Agee.
She is delighted to be a studio artist at Atlanta Contemporary.

Tori Tinsley (b.1980) earned a BFA from The University of Michigan Stamps School of Art & Design, an MAAT from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from the Georgia State University Welch School of Art & Design. Tinsley’s work has been featured in Art Papers, Oxford American,and New American Paintings, among others. She is a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant, a City of Atlanta Emerging Artist Award, and an Idea Capital Grant. Currently, she is a member of the Atlanta Contemporary Studio Artist program and is represented by Laney Contemporary and Co-op Art Atlanta.

Carol John is a painter living and working in Georgia. She received a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, in New York. Carol John is a consummate studio artist, rigorous in her practice and time, she produces a plethora of images and works of all scale. Her work is in the collection of the High Museum of Art, in Atlanta. John exhibits her work in Georgia and New York.