Of Care and Destruction

Le’Andra LeSeur (b. 1989 in Bronx, NY) is an artist working primarily with video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. Her work celebrates blackness, contemplates the experience of invisibility, and seeks to dismantle stereotypes surrounding black female identity, among other subject matters.

Awards include Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur recently appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, and SCAD Atlanta, among others.

Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Anacostia Art Center, Washington, DC; SITELAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others. Residences include NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and Mass MoCA. LeSeur is represented by Microscope Gallery.

Zipporah Camille Thompson is a visual artist and sculptor based in Atlanta, Georgia. Thompson explores ritual and alchemical transformations through the unknown and through universals, including death, catastrophe, chaos, and the cosmos. She received her MFA from the University of Georgia and her BFA from the University of North Carolina Charlotte.  Her work has been featured in a number of print and online publications. She has shown at the Zuckerman Museum of Art, Trestle Gallery in Brooklyn, Rogue Space in Chelsea, the Georgia Museum of Art, and Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA, as well as a host of other venues and spaces.  Her work is included in numerous private collections.  Zipporah Camille Thompson is a 2016 Artadia (Atlanta) Finalist, a Hambidge Distinguished Fellow, a former resident of ACRE Projects and Elsewhere Museum, and is a Hambidge Creative Hive Project Artist.  Thompson is most recently a recipient of the Zenobia Scholarship Award for residency at the Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, in Newcastle, ME, a 2018 NCECA Multicultural Fellow, and a 2018 Idea Capital Research & Development Travel grantee.   She is currently a selected artist for The Creatives Program, with studio residency at The Goat Farm.  Thompson is represented by Whitespace Gallery in Atlanta, GA.

Yanique Norman is a multimedia artist whose work primarily deals with privilege and nationalistic ideologies all the while pondering a decolonial future. In an ongoing series that predominately feature collage on paper, video and sculpture, Norman reworks official portraits of Presidential wives so as to allude to a troubled past. Work serves as a reclamation project by reimagining iconic images so as to both reflect and institute a fungible counter narrative regarding blackness. Currently based out of Atlanta, Norman is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (MFA, 2018) and Georgia State University (BFA, 2014). Recent exhibitions include NADA House (New York); Sullivan Galleries (Chicago); Sandler Hudson Gallery (Atlanta); Hudgens Center for the Arts (Duluth); Mast (Atlanta); Illges Gallery at Columbus State University (Columbus); Gallery 72 (Atlanta); Zuckerman Museum of Art (Kennesaw); The Atlanta Contemporary and Museum of Contemporary art of Georgia. Her work is in the public collections of the High Museum; Hammonds House Museum and the Clark Atlanta University Art Museum. In 2018, she was awarded the Susan Antinori Visual Artist Grant. In 2020, Norman will have her first solo museum exhibition at Albany Museum of Art.

Eleanor Neal received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Eleanor lives in Atlanta, GA. Exhibitions include MOCA GA, 2019, Gathered IV. She was also an award winner in the exhibition. Her work was selected for the MOCA GA Works on Paper: 1980-2013 Women from the Permanent Collection Exhibition. Eleanor has exhibited at the Sullivan Gallery at the Art Institute of Chicago. Eleanor was selected by High Museum of Art curator, Michael Rooks for the WonderRoot CSA Program. Eleanor is in the collection at Clark Atlanta University Museum. The Hampton University prestigious Elizabeth Catlett Printmaking Award 2016/2012. Eleanor’s winning artwork was featured in the International Review of African American Art magazine. In 2020 Eleanor was selected as a finalist for the Forward Arts Edge Award. Her artwork will be featured in 2021 at Swan Coach House Gallery. The Sarah Ball Allis Museum in Milwaukee will feature her artwork in 2021. Eleanor has been featured in Anamesa, the journal of New York University’s Graduate School of Arts and Science. The Center of Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, Connecticut selected her artwork for the International Footprint Biennial Exhibition. Eleanor was selected for the Faith Ringgold, fellowship, AnyOne Can Fly Printmaking Award. The award was designed for women printmakers and held at the Experimental Printmaking Institute at Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania under the direction of master printmaker Curlee Holton.
Other exhibitions include Chastain Arts Center, Atlanta, GA.; Swan Coach House, Atlanta, GA; Women’s Caucus for Art of Georgia, The Steffan Thomas Museum, Buckhead, GA; The Saco Museum in Saco, Maine. Eleanor is a graduate mentor for the Low-Res MFA program at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. The College Board and Educational Testing selected Eleanor for the AP Studio Art Program as an AP Reader in Salt Lake City, Utah.

Artists residencies include Hambidge Artists Residency, Rabun Gap, GA; Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont; Haystack School of Crafts, Deer Isle, Maine, and Maine College of Art, Portland, Maine. Eleanor has presented workshops at NAEA, the National Art Educators Association; MOCA GA, SGCI Panel-Printmaking Artists of the African Diaspora, 2017 at Kennesaw College. Eleanor has been featured in Burnaway, 2018.

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.