SPOOKY STUDIOS

(Emma)nuelle Chammah is a sculptor and designer based in Atlanta, GA. She earned a Master of Architecture I from Tulane University in 2007. Her early wearable artworks were exhibited and performed in New Orleans, LA and Brooklyn, NY. In 2010, she completed a Digital Sculpture Residency at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and went on to work in New York and California for agencies in architecture, art fabrication, theater and fashion. While building her art practice and working in the cultural arts, she developed expertise in creative placemaking and community art. Currently, Emma continues her radical use of fabric in many forms including wearables, tapestries and sculptures. She completed residencies at The Hambidge Center, GA and the Penland School of Craft in Penland, NC. Her work has been shown at the Oceanside Museum of Art, the Atlanta Contemporary, MINT Atlanta and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia. Forthcoming in 2022, her wearable pieces will be shown at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC for the “Coined in the South” exhibit and she will be preparing new work for a solo exhibition at MINT in Atlanta. She is currently an Artist-in-Residence in the Atlanta Contemporary’s Studio Artist Program.

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.

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.

The drawings and printmaking artworks explore abstraction and its connection to myths and Southern stories, where identity and nature intersect. Inspired by Spanish moss, water, and historical stories of powerful women. Inspiration comes from nature; Spanish moss which lives on the trees along the Georgia Sea Coast. I work with paper and non-traditional printmaking processes. Inspiration for my artwork comes from exploring these places and finding spaces for it in my beeswax monotypes, mark-making India ink drawings and unique printmaking eco plant prints.

The process involves beeswax and using it as a medium in the layering process in the monotypes which create a translucent, transparent effect of color and shape. The India ink drawings connect with movement of body and its connection to Spanish Moss. The recent artworks speak to the Southern landscape of Daufuskie Island where the stories of the women and the spirit of the Gullah culture can carry off, through nature; plants, flowers, trees, to move, change, yet always searching for a place of permanence and empowerment.

Jill Pope is an Atlanta-based painter whose work explores issues of identity and place. Born in the Pacific Northwest, she grew up in midsize cities and small towns in various regions of the United States, relocating cross-country four times in six years as a tween and teen. Pope earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Georgia’s Grady College of Mass Communication and Journalism where she was selected to be a student judge for the prestigious Peabody Awards. Later she went on to earn her MFA in Drawing and Painting from Georgia State University in Atlanta. She has had solo exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Workshop, Chicago and the University of Illinois, Chicago and has shown her work in galleries and museums in Atlanta, Nashville, and Indianapolis. She has received a Helene Wurlitzer residency grant as well as awards from the Decatur Arts Festival and the Northern Indiana Arts Association.

By combining a wide range of maps and mapping symbols, as well as personally charged imagery, her imaginary landscapes investigate ideas of identity, rootlessness and belonging as they relate to place, attempting to answer that persistent and ubiquitous question: “Where are you from?”

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).