Fall 2025 Exhibition Opening

Jiha Moon (b. 1973) was born in DaeGu, South Korea, and currently lives and works in Tallahassee, Florida. Her gestural paintings, ceramic sculptures, and installations explore fluid identities and the global movement of people and culture. “I am a cartographer of cultures and an icon maker in my lucid worlds,” she says.

Moon draws from a wide range of influences, including Eastern and Western art histories, Korean temple paintings and folk traditions, popular culture, internet emojis and icons, and product packaging from around the world. She often transforms and distorts these visual languages, making them both unrecognizable and strangely familiar at the same time.

Her work is included in the collections of The Asia Society, The High Museum of Art, The Mint Museum, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Renwick Gallery, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, among others.

She is a 2023 Guggenheim Fellow and a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation's Painters & Sculptors Grant. Her mid-career survey exhibition, Double Welcome: Most Everyone’s Mad Here, organized by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art and the Taubman Museum, toured more than 15 museums across the U.S.

Moon joined the Department of Art at Florida State University as a faculty member in Fall 2023.

Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, Sonya Yong James lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. She received a BFA from Georgia State University, focusing on printmaking and sculpture. James has exhibited nationally and internationally for the past twenty years and has been the recipient of several prestigious grants, including the Artadia grant in 2019. She was also a nominee for the 2023 United States Artists Fellowship award.

Her work is held in numerous collections, including Art in Embassies, and has been exhibited at MOCA GA, The Minnesota Museum of American Art, UAB's Abroms-Engels Institute for the Visual Arts, and the Ogden Museum of Art in New Orleans. In addition to her residency at Atlanta Contemporary, James has received grants for residencies at Mass MOCA and has upcoming residencies planned in Mexico City for 2024.

Youmi Efurd, curator of the Richardson Family Art Museum, oversees Wofford College’s Fine Arts Collection and organizes its exhibitions and programming. Originally from South Korea, she holds a PhD in the history of art from the University of Kansas. Her training in Asian languages and societies enriches her research and deepens her interpretive approach to culturally significant objects. In addition to her curatorial work, she periodically teaches Museum Studies. Her recent initiatives focus on developing educational programs that enhance visitor engagement and foster more meaningful museum experiences.

Ernesto Rivera (b. 1983, Santo Domingo) is a Brooklyn-based artist working primarily in drawing and installation. Alongside his practice, he works as an archivist and registrar for a private collection in NY and writes cultural criticism that resonates with younger Dominican thinkers. He holds a BFA in Fine Arts from Parsons, The New School, and an MA in Design Theory from the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México.

Gabriella Moreno (b. New York, USA) is a queer, latine artist whose practice uses the erotic as a lens to probe entanglements of gender, power, and desire. Moreno holds a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts, where she was awarded the Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship, and received an MFA in Studio Art from The Ohio State University, where she was awarded the Dean’s Enrichment Fellowship.

Jenny Jaramillo (b. Quito, Ecuador) is a visual artist and educator working mostly in performance, video-performance and installation. Jaramillo holds a Bachelor's degree from the Facultad de Artes de la Universidad Central del Ecuador and a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the La Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales (FLACSO).

Natalia Mejía Murillo (b. Bogotá, Colombia) is a visual artist whose work explores the notions of territory, repetition, trace and time through correspondences between astronomy, cartography and archaeology. She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, an MA in History and Theory of Art and a BFA from the National University of Colombia.

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.