Open Studios

Erin Jane Nelson (b. 1989, Neenah, WI; lives in Atlanta, GA) received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2011. Her work has recently been exhibited in “Between the Waters” at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and “Photography Today: Public Private Relations” at Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. She has had solo shows at Document Gallery, Chicago (2015, 2017) and Hester, New York (2015) and was included in ATLBNL: The Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center (2016) among numerous group exhibitions at Downs & Ross, New York (2017), Honor Fraser, Los Angeles (2016), Galerie Division, Montreal (2016), and Ellis King, Dublin (2015). She has contributed to publications including BURNAWAY, The Creative Independent, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, and Art Papers, and has curated exhibitions at the High Museum of Art, Atlanta Contemporary, and elsewhere. In 2016-17, while she and her husband, artist Jason Benson, were studio residents at Atlanta Contemporary, they operated the artist-run space Species out of their shared studio. Species continues to occasionally produce exhibitions itinerantly, most recently presenting the work of Rhode Island-based artist Harry Gould Harvey IV at Atlanta Contemporary earlier this year.

Masud Ashley Olufani (MAO) is an Atlanta based actor and mixed media artist whose studio practice is rooted in the discipline of sculpture. He is a graduate of Arts High School in Newark, N.J., Morehouse College and The Savannah College of Art and Design where he earned an M.F.A. in sculpture in 2012. Masud has exhibited his work in group and solo shows in Atlanta, Georgia; New Orleans; Louisiana; Chicago, Illinois; Richmond, Virginia; Lacoste, France; and Hong Kong, China. The artist has completed residencies at The Vermont Studio Center; SCAD Alumni Artist in Residence in Savannah; The Hambidge Center for Arts and Sciences in Rabun, GA.; and Creative Currents in Portobello, Panama. He is a recipient of a 2015 Idea Capital Grant; a Southwest Airlines Art and Social Engagement grant; a recipient of 2015-16’ MOCA GA Working Artist Project Grant, and is a member of the 2014-15’ class of the Walthall Fellows. He has appeared in numerous television shows including Being Mary Jane, Devious Maids, Satisfaction, and, Nashville, and will be a featured actor in the feature film All Eyez on Me: The Tupac Shakur Story.

Kojo Griffin was born in Farmville, VA, in 1971; raised in Boston, MA; and currently resides in Atlanta with his wife and three sons. Griffin has had several solo exhibitions in the US, including two with his former New York gallery Mitchell-Innes & Nash and has shown his work extensively in group shows both domestically and worldwide. He has been a visiting artist at several universities, including The Massachusetts College of Art & Design, University of Illinois at Chicago, SUNY-New Paltz, and, most recently, Hong Kong Baptist University. He was included in the 2000 Whitney Biennial of Art, the 2002 Corcoran Biennial of Art, The Freestyle show at The Studio Museum in Harlem, and the 2006 Seville Biennial in Seville, Spain.

In 1995, he received a BA in psychology from Morehouse College. Griffin recently received his MFA in painting and drawing at Georgia State University.

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.

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.

Jason Benson (born 1987, Baltimore) received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2009 and was the co-director of Important Projects in Oakland from fall 2009 to summer 2014. He has recently exhibited works at Balice Hertling (Paris, France), Ellis King (Dublin, Ireland), Bodega (New York), fused space (San Francisco), Bureau (New York), Springsteen (Baltimore), 321 Gallery (Brooklyn), TG (Nottingham, United Kingdom), Lodos (Mexico CIty, Mexico) and Queer Thoughts (Chicago). He lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia where he is the co-director of Species Gallery. 

While often starting with the camera, Kelly Kristin Jones’ work utilizes various methods and materials to survey new concepts. Primarily interested in our relationship to environment, Jones explores how we are implicated and reflected in something so familiar it has become nearly invisible. Shifting perspective, renegotiating space, and recording sights, Jones studies the utter strangeness of space and movement in urban areas. 

Kelly Kristin Jones earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2012) and currently teaches at Georgia State University. Jones is the recipient of a number of prestigious awards including the Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award (2015), the Southwest Airlines Arts and Social Engagement Prize (2013), the MINT Gallery Leap Year Artist Award (2013), the James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship (2012), The Union League and Civic Arts Foundation Prize (2011, 2012) and the Municipal Art League Fellowship (2012).

Tyler Beard (b. 1982, Olathe, KS) holds an MFA from the University of Colorado at Boulder and a BFA from the University of Kansas. He has had solo shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO; Central Utah Arts Center, UT; Robischon Gallery, CO; and Hathaway Gallery, GA. Additionally, He has been featured in exhibitions at ROCKELMANN&, Berlin; Victori + Mo, NY; Coop Gallery, TN; Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, CO; and the Biennial of the Americas, CO. He has participated in numerous artist residencies including the Montello Foundation, NV; Anderson Ranch Arts Center, CO; Ceramic Center Berlin, GER; Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts, MN; and OffShore, NY. Beard currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

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.

Dana Haugaard received his MFA from the University of Iowa and is a graduate of Emory University. Dana has been a resident in the Atlanta Contemporary’s Studio Artist Program and is a Hambidge Fellow. He has recently been shown at the Zuckerman Museum at Kennesaw State University, the Macon Museum of Arts and Science, and the Urban Institute of Contemporary Art in Grand Rapids Michigan. As an artist working with sound and sensation, Dana investigates how our self-awareness in any given moment functions in relationship to our presence in space, place, and time. He works with sensation and perception to create environments that provoke a heightened sense of awareness of one’s self. Dana uses and manipulates sound, reflective surfaces, and vibrations to construct experiences that draw attention to and call into question our relationship to our surroundings. These situations play with physical, spatial, and temporal reference points to take what is often a minimal presentation and make it an overwhelming experience. Dana currently teaches Visual Art at Emory University as part of the Department of Art History.

Joe Camoosa makes drawings and paintings that focus on complexity, order, and the uncertainty of meaning. Working within abstraction, he searches and strives for what doesn’t exist and hasn’t been seen before: the un-nameable. Mystery and ambiguity loom large; his work contains a number of things that might look familiar yet can’t quite be named—a map, a glimpse under a microscope, a scientific model containing arteries or clusters of organs and bodily shapes, or something in bloom, coming alive. His work is informed by many ingredients: maps, aerial landscapes, music, trains, graffiti, architecture, the sensation of rhythm and movement, the grid of New York City, and the tattered subway map from his childhood.

Camoosa was born in Asbury Park, NJ, and lives and works in Atlanta. He received an MFA in painting and drawing from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia and graduated from Florida State University, where he studied mass communication and anthropology. Camoosa has exhibited throughout the Southeast, and his work is held in numerous corporate and private collections.

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.

Known for incorporating the “glitch” aesthetic into the ceramic vernacular, A-Johnson’s work addresses thoughts of memory, technological integration, mark making, and perceptual consciousness. While his original draw to the ceramic medium was the physical nature in which it is manipulated, during Graduate school at Arizona State University, He found clay to be a relevant medium to explore the relationship of illusion and form, thought and physicality. A-Johnson has continued the exploration of these ideas and processes through multiple relocations, including time spent as a visiting artist at the College of Creative Studies in Detroit, and an Assistant Professor at Buffalo State College. He most recently transitioned from being a full time studio artist in Copenhagen, Denmark to join Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA as an Assistant Professor. A-Johnson’s work has been recognized nationally and internationally through awarded grants, exhibitions, and residencies. In 2012 he was awarded the Emerging Artist Award through NCECA, and most recently received an exhibition grant from the Danish Cultural Ministry to complete a residency and exhibition opportunity through C.R.E.T.A. Rome. For this opportunity he continued to integrate digital processes with traditional forming and surface treatments. This act reflects the current state of human experience, as we navigate between actuality and the illusions presented by our screens.

My process in its essential is collecting and sorting. Collecting of artifacts, colors, textures, and materials. A majority of the materials I work with are reclaimed goods, found objects and papers. My beautiful and filthy City of Atlanta. Her skyline draped delicately with lights to jewel her. I’ll walk the streets and find old sparking wrappers that escape the trash. Sometimes it’s from old chocolate boxes, lotto tickets, or maybe broken car lights. Gifts from the city herself. Reclaimed party supplies, used household items and the discarded miscellaneous are examples of my fascination with the consumed object. There’s an energy given to an item once created, but also life after the production of being produced from materials to commodity. When the user discards that; I like to give it a second life. Permanently salvaging it from its end in the landfill. Creating any object to me is sacred. Glitter to me is a sacred beauty. I truly do not know why I am with it, connected to it, but I do choose to create the art that my soul desires.