Phase III "Families Belong Together" by Constanza & Rivera
Maria Constanza is best known for turning acrylic paintings as well as murals into voice pieces that highlight the marginalized. Inspired by her own bicultural and bilingual upbringing as an immigrant in the south Minneapolis Philips community, Maria Constanza began painting murals at the age of 13 and has since been recognized as a statement maker. Her art, a form of community activism, has travelled through Latin America, Europe, and throughout the U.S. In Minnesota, she has brought fellow women artists together internationally and locally through large scale community events to celebrate International Women’s Day and specifically bringing attention to the inequalities women face in all sectors of society including economic, political, workforce, healthcare, and education. Her collaborator Kenneth Rivera adds that our mission is to create artwork that brings dialogue to modern and contemporary issues for the benefit of individuals and communities.
"Come Celebrate With Me." by Helina Metaferia
Helina Metaferia is an interdisciplinary artist working across collage, assemblage, video, performance, and social engagement. Recent solo exhibitions include Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA (2022); New York University's The Gallatin Galleries, New York, NY (2021); Michigan State University's Scene Metrospace Gallery, East Lansing, MI (2019); and Museum of African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2017). She will present her work at the 2023 Sharjah Biennial in the United Arab Emirates. Metaferia's work is in the permanent collection of several institutions, including Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York, NY. Her work has been written about in publications including The New York Times, Financial Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, Artnet News, and Hyperallergic. She received her MFA from Tufts University’s School of the Museum of Fine Arts (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016). Metaferia is an Assistant Professor of Visual Art at Brown University, and lives and works in New York City, where she is currently an artist-in-residence at Silver Art Projects at the World Trade Center (2021-2023).
"What do you Notice?" by Bayeté Ross Smith
Bayeté Ross Smith is an interdisciplinary artist, photographer, filmmaker and education worker, working at the intersection of photography, film & video, visual journalism, 3D objects and new media. He is Columbia Law School’s inaugural Artist-In-Residence, a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a TED Resident, a Creative Capital Awardee, and a CatchLight Fellow.
His work is in the collections of The Smithsonian Institution, the Oakland Museum of California, the Birmingham Museum of Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, and The Brooklyn Museum. He has exhibited internationally in places like Ghana, Belgium, China, Ukraine and Spain. His work has been featured at the Sundance Film Festival, the Sheffield Doc Fest and the L.A. Film Festival.
He has created public art projects with organizations such as the Montgomery Museum of Fine Art, the Jerome Foundation, BRIC Arts Media, The Laundromat Project, the NYC Parks Department, San Francisco District Attorney’s Office and The California Judicial Council. His work has been published in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Geographic Learning, PBS, Facing History & Ourselves, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and Charlotte Observer, in addition to books such as Dis:Integration: The Splintering of Black America (2010) and Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present (2009).
He is a faculty member at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. He also helped launch and work with the Kings Against Violence Initiative, a hospital and school based violence prevention organization in Brooklyn NY.
Phase II "ALL ARE WELCOME?" by Julie Buffalohead
Julie Buffalohead endeavors to create work relating to her experience as a native woman. Historically, stories about American Indian people were written by anthropologists or other non-natives. When American Indians today tell their own stories we can change their perspective. We can reclaim the narrative of ourselves as distinct.
Julie is an artist telling visual stories. Julie's work focuses thematically upon describing Indian cultural experience through personal metaphor. Julie draws from stories across plural American Indian traditions and utilizing motifs within a context of cultural identity. Instead of being illustrative, her intent is to weave a personal story along with the narrative of her culture.
Julie Buffalohead's tribe is originally from northern Nebraska. In 1876 the Ponca were forcibly removed at gunpoint to Oklahoma, and a third of the tribe died on the journey from starvation. Native American cultural knowledge is transmitted through storytelling. In Julie's work characters who are caught within the human condition interact together in a tragic-comedic cultural framework.
Julie's develops her work in response to social concerns and phenomena that exist in America today. This includes the movement to draw attention to missing and murdered Indian women, social justice issues, and recently the Covid pandemic.
"GOSPEL OF GEORGE 9:26" by William Ransom
William Ransom grew up on a dairy farm in Vermont where he had a physical, working relationship with tools and materials on a daily basis. Ransom was directly engaged with the biological processes and natural cycles dependent on the balance of birth and death, growth and decay, loss and regeneration, consumption and excretion that would later inform much of his work. Balance has always played an important role in his life and work; as the son of a bi-racial union, balance between black and white; as a farm kid living in the city, balance between rural and urban, city and soil; as a diabetic, balance between a sweet tooth and insulin injections. Ransom’s work often reflects this sense of balance, suggesting flux, movement, things in a state of becoming or diminishing.
Ransom attended Bennington College and studied Sculpture and Architecture graduating with a BA in 2004 and went on to receive an MFA in Sculpture from Claremont Graduate University in 2008. He has shown extensively across the country in solo and group exhibitions in New York, Chicago, Detroit and Los Angeles and elsewhere. After a decade in Los Angeles he has returned with his family to the hills of Vermont where he now lives and works.
Website: https://williamransom.art/
"MAMA" by Gabriel Villa
Gabriel Villa's work addresses issues related to class and Mexican American culture, however his creative practice is centered around a lifelong fascination with the human condition. Throughout Gabriel's career he has explored ideas connected to family, religion, desire, surveillance, and greed. Symbols of societal constructs merge with idiosyncratic imagery collected from repeated observations of life in his neighborhood of over twenty years. Gabriel enjoys the physicality and process of making, whether it is executing a public mural, alone in my studio, or most recently, working in ceramics.
"Space is the Place" by Heather Hart
"ONE RACE represents that we are all one: one race, one species, not many, divided by color. For example, I have a black father and a white mother (referenced in the art), so what “race” am i, or what "race" is any “biracial/multicultural” person? Race is a fallacy, a social construct created by those in power to keep control and promote oppression. We are human. We are ONE RACE." - Peyton Scott Russell
"ONE RACE" Peyton Scott Russell
"ONE RACE represents that we are all one: one race, one species, not many, divided by color. For example, I have a black father and a white mother (referenced in the art), so what “race” am i, or what "race" is any “biracial/multicultural” person? Race is a fallacy, a social construct created by those in power to keep control and promote oppression. We are human. We are ONE RACE." - Peyton Scott Russell
"Racism Kills" by Luis Fitch
Billboards by Maria Christina "Tina" Tavera, Xavier Tavera, and Patience Zalanga
Billboard by Xavier Tavera
Unified by Xavier Tavera
Shown Left is the new work by Xavier Tavera titled Unified. His original work, Non-Violent Resistance, was graffitied a week after installation. Both Tavera and NE Sculpture have been open to healthy and constructive dialogue with the community. This has been an excellent opportunity to address different points of view, to listen, and to make changes. With this in mind, Xavier Tavera's Unified, pictured left, is now installed at George Floyd Square.
"Non-Violent Resistance" Graffitied
Non-Violent Resistance, original work by Xavier Tavera, was graffitied a week after installation.
Non-Violent Resistance Original
Shown left is the "Non-Violent Resistance" original by Xavier Tavera.
Billboards by Jim Denomie, Seitu Ken Jones, and Xavier Tavera
Phase I Artists: Naima Green, Ivan B. Watkins, and Jessica Wimbley
Billboards installed on Cup Foods at the George Floyd vigil site on 38th and Chicago.
Left: "& Full of Dreams Too" by Naima Green
Right: "To All my Relations (Metakuye Oyasin)" by Ivan B. Watkins
Billboard installed across from Cup Foods at the George Floyd vigil site on 38th and Chicago.
"Masking; Testament" by Jessica Wimbley
Phase I Billboards by Naima Green, Ivan B. Watkins, and Jessica Wimbley
Billboards by William Ransom, Peyton Scott Russell, and Melodee Strong
George Floyd Vigil Site at 38th and Chicago
George Floyd vigil site at 38th and Chicago
Also featuring "Icon of a Revolution I" by Peyton Scott Russell
Billboard "Unified" by Xavier Tavera at the George Floyd vigil site on 38th and Chicago.
Photo Credit: CNN
Thunderstorm at 38th and Chicago vigil site.
Photo Credit: Brandon Bell
Billboards installed on Cup Foods at the George Floyd vigil site on 38th and Chicago.
Left: "La Conneccion" by Maria Christina "Tina" Tavera
Right: "untitled" by Patience Zalanga