Open Studios

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.

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.

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.

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.

JD Walsh is a multimedia artist. He has exhibited at galleries internationally including Halsey McKay, Cleopatra’s, 106 Green, Brennan & Griffin, and Nicole Klagsbrun in New York, Galerie Steinek in Vienna, and Cooper Cole in Toronto. In 2012 his public art installation “Ensemble for Mixed Use” was commissioned by the City of Toronto for the 2012 Nuit Blanche festival. His work has been written about in Artforum, Flash Art, and Sculpture Magazine, among others. His ongoing music project Shy Layers has garnered critical acclaim and was listed as one of the top 20 electronic albums of 2016 by Pitchfork.

Jaime Keiter is an artist working primarily in the medium of ceramics. She graduated with an art degree from the University of Georgia in 2001 and worked as a photo editor at various fashion and design magazines in New York City for 15 years before returning to Atlanta in 2016. Her ceramic sculptures are collaged from individually handcrafted and glazed porcelain tiles. Her process begins with cutting geometric and organic shapes from porcelain slabs, underglazing patterns and textures, and then finishing each tile with a variety of different mid-fire glazes including copper washes, turquoise, creamy pastels, and bold primaries. These elements are then collaged together to create the sculptures. The works are inspired by the Bauhaus art of 1920’s Pre-War Germany and the Postmodern Memphis design movement of the 1980’s. She is interested in the intersection both of these movements have between fine art and craft that combine to make functional and non-functional design objects. She has exhibited with Daily Operation in Brooklyn, New York as well as Swan Coach House and Poem88 in Atlanta. Her art has been featured in various publications including Sight Unseen, Design Milk, Architectural Digest and Vogue.

Myra Greene uses a diverse photographic practice and fabric manipulations to explore representations of race. Greene is currently working on a new body of work that uses African textiles as a material and pattern as well as color as medium to explore her own relationship to culture. Her work is in the permanent collection of Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, The National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C., the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, the Princeton University Art Museum and the Studio Museum in Harlem. Myra Greene’s work has been featured in nationally exhibitions in galleries and museums including The New York Public Library, Duke Center for Documentary Studies, Williams College Museum of Art, Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Sculpture Center in New York City. Myra Greene was born in New York City and received her B.F.A. from Washington University in St. Louis and her M.F.A. in photography from the University of New Mexico. Myra is a Professor of Photography, and the Chair of the Department of Art & Visual Culture at Spelman College. She is represented by Patron Gallery in Chicago, and Corvi-Mora in London.

Kirstin Mitchell is a multi-media artist living in Atlanta, Georgia. Mitchell creates experiential environments in various mediums including, painting, installation and performance. Her work has been shown throughout the East Coast and Internationally, in Austria and Italy. Mitchell is a recent MOCA GA Working Artist Project Fellow. She has performed with the support of the Franklin Furnace Fund in Manhattan, New York. Mitchell’s work has been featured in publications including Art in America, Art Papers and Flash Art magazines.

Sara Hornbacher is a pioneer of video art and digital imaging. After receiving an undergraduate degree in Fine Art, she completed at Masters Degree at SUNY/Buffalo where she studied video with the Vasulkas at the Center for Media Study. Hornbacher was Guest editor of the first CAA ART JOURNAL issue on Video in 1985. She completed her first residency at the Experimental TV Center in 1976 and annual residencies at ETC continued through 2011. Her annual Signal Culture residencies began in 2014 and continue in 2018 The artist’s single- channel video works and multi-media installations have been exhibited throughout the USA, Europe, Australia, and Japan, including MOMA, PS1, The Whitney Museum Art, The Kitchen, Postmasters and New Math Gallery, The Bronx Museum for the Arts in NY, MOCA/GA, the Fay Gold Gallery, and The Atlanta Contemporary Art Center where she mounted a large-scale interactive installation environment, “A Thousand Plateaus” in 2001. She is currently a Studio Artist at The Contemporary. Hornbacher has received numerous grants and awards including a 1985 Media Production grant from NYSCA and The Mayor’s Fellowship in the Arts from the Atlanta Bureau of Cultural Arts in 2000. ”Transfigured Time”, a 40’ photomural composed of 128 portraits of Atlantans was commissioned for Course E at Hartsfield-Jackson Airport. In 2012, she became a Legacy Artist at The Burch eld Penney Art Center in Buff alo, NY and her video work is being archived at the Rose Goldsen Archive at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY. In 2020, she received a $5000 “Artist’s Relief” Grant.
Hornbacher’s work, “Precession of the Simulacra” a five-monitor installation was shown at MOMA/PS! In J in a year-long exhibition, January 2018. In March 2019, she represented Atlanta with a projection of Numerical Studies III at the Everson Museum’s year-long exhibition, “Video in America”. In 2020, her work, “Precession of the Simulacra” was selected by curator, Laura McGough for Hallwall’s “Signal, Skin, Pixel, Camera”, an online series which ended on July 31 Her installation “Precession: Flag Finale” is currently on exhibit.at OCA’s t Gallery 72, through the Inauguration on January 20, 2021.