GALLERY GUIDE

3. Patricia Villalobos Echeverría

LATITUD 12<>LONGITUD-86, VERSION 2, 2021
Video, 1920 x 1080 HD, 
31 min.
Edition of 3, $1000/each

4. liana maneese

the quiet loom, 2018
Archival pigment print
17” x 21”
$120

reflections in Salvador’s water, 2018
21” x 17”
Archival pigment print
$120

5. Tara Fay Coleman

The invisibility of whiteness, 2021
Digital photography
20” x 30”
$350

Ms. Mediocre Lightskin, 2021
Banner with text 
34.25” x 5.25”
$150

6. sarah huny young

LEGACY, 2021
Archival pigment print
34.5” x 25.25”
Price available on request

My artistic practice, as a visual artist, photographer, and documentarian, is defined by using portraits and video to explore identity—primarily Black womanhood and queer personhood—and to challenge a society that remains harsh to the marginalized and the intersectional. I consider the individuals I work with to be my co-curators as well as my muses, and often shoot on-location, around the country, in personal, intimate spaces of their choosing.

I exalt Black women and femmes, including myself—full-bodied, full of dreams, and exploring our own concept of sexuality and identity in a society that demands our labor and assimilation—as beautiful nonconforming works. As the harbingers of social and civil evolution, we hold the stories of the world and deserve the right to tell our own. For those who don't believe their likenesses and experiences are reflected within the most revered exhibition spaces, I contextualize our very existence as its own museum of modern art.

sarah huny young (she/they) is a Black queer femme photographer and visual artist primarily documenting and exalting Black womanhood and queer communities through portraiture and video. Framing her subjects as collaborators, she often shoots on-location across the country in personal, intimate spaces of the subject’s choosing. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, ESPN, Pittsburgh City Paper, New York Magazine, The Verge, and more.

huny received the Advancing Black Arts in Pittsburgh grant in 2016 and again in 2020 to fund AMERICAN WOMAN, an portrait and documentary series about Black American women. She is also a 2020 recipient of a "Best in Pittsburgh" award, via Pittsburgh City Paper, for co-founding the Pittsburgh Artists Emergency Fund.

Currently huny is a 2021 Sibyls Shrine resident artist and a "Marking this Moment: Pittsburgh Artists in 2020" Fellow via Kelly Strayhorn Theater; a member of Diversify Photo, Women Photograph, and Black Women Photographers; and produces and DJs BIPOC queer-centered events via the Mostbeautifullest collective.

7. Melissa Shaginoff

A Savior, 2021
Archival giclee print
22 x 30”
$100

Indigenous Future, 2021
Archival giclee print
22” x 30”
$100

Soft Kinship, 2021
Archival giclee print
22” x 30”

Truth+Telling, 2021
Archival giclee print
22” x 30”
$100 each or $300 for the set of 4 prints

8. Fran Ledonio Flaherty

Global Patterns, 2021
Digital print and acrylic on rice paper
Series of 16 scrolls, 11"x144" each
NFS

Fran Flaherty is a Deaf artist living in Pittsburgh for over 25 years. As a first generation immigrant from the Philippines, her work is centered in issues surrounding migrant family relations and assimilation, maternal feminism, & disability aesthetics that synthesizes traditional media (painting, printmaking, and ceramics) and physical computing (digital inkjet printing and fabrication, 3D printing and modeling). She is also an educational consultant that specializes in building comprehensive digital fabrication labs. She founded Carnegie Mellon’s Digital Arts Studio in 2010 and Western Pennsylvania School for the Deaf’s Cottage in 2014.

My work is inspired by the care paradigm. A premise that human beings cannot survive alone and the progress of human beings, as a species, flows from our identity as social animals, connected to one another through ties of love, kinship, and clanship. It is the prospect of this harmony that inspired me to create Anthropology of Motherhood, artworks of art that engage in the complex visual, material, emotional, corporeal, and lived experiences of motherhood, caregiving, parenting, nurturing, and maternal labor. I consistently apply the culture of care in my work, making space for those who cannot make space for themselves, in particular, am committed to improving the lives of people who are Deaf and/or Disabled by bring disability awareness through my artwork.

Fran lives in the suburbs of Pittsburgh, with her husband Tim, their sons, her Canine Companion hearing dog, Olympia. She recently became a grandmother and is over the moon in love with her grandchild. She is the current artist in residence at AlphaLab Gear, and is a member of the #notwhite Collective.

9. Sarika Goulatia

I am speaking
We are speaking, 2021
Archival print, oil, gouache, pastels, acrylic,
flash on canvas, jumbo clothes pins
60” x 60”
$7500

I am speaking” is a powerful statement made by the Vice President elect Kamala Harris. As a woman and especially as a women of color I resonate deeply with her statement. Even today the traditional social role of women as expected is that of the lady of the house, taking care of the family, being focused on children and their happiness. As women we are often unheard, unseen, unrecognized, discredited, interrupted, and looked over. In the image the hoodie, a symbol of racial profiling and a garment currently at the center of the national debate over race and justice dominates. The faint wallpaper like background motifs are traditional social domestic role women are associated with such as cleaning, cooking, laundry.

I am speaking
We are speaking
do you hear me
do you hear us
or does your male privilege
give you the right to just ignore us
drown our voices
judge us
ignore us
talk over us
question us
suffocate us
society does judge us on our looks
working or not
it is our job to make sure the house is clean,
the laundry neatly folded,
the food cooked and served warm
but guess what
we are rising
we are breaking and shattering glass ceilings and doors
do you hear us
we are speaking
i am speaking

sarika-goulatia.com

10. kelsey robinson

RIVER, 2021

5: 11” x 17"

CLINTON, 2021
3: 4” x 5" rubbings, Charles Caldwell
6: 4” x 5” rubbings, Town Calaboose
6: Revised articles 12” x 20"

CHOCTAW, 2021
3: 11” x 17” rubbings, Natchez Trace

GREETINGS FROM, 2021
12: 4” x 5" rubbings, NAACP v. Port Gibson
5: 4” x 5” rubbings, NAACP v. Claiborne
Hardware
NFS

11. Sara Tang

Heart Testing, 2021
Ancestral gold testing stone from Thailand
over charcoal on wood
7" x 7”
NFS

Heart Dilation, 2021
Thread, wire, mixed media sculpture and
charcoal on wood
15" x 12”
$250

"who I am”, 2021
Evaporated coffee and polish polymers over etching
on reclaimed wood panel
Donation price for femme person of color/#notwhite identifying

Untitled, 2021
Polish polymers on carved seed
over salvaged corroded metal
6" x 2.5”
NFS

Sara Tang is a multidisciplinary artist based out of Pittsburgh. Sara's creative practice (draw me in) is mindful of drawing people in to a deeper empathic encounter with themselves, with their communities, and with what is strange and beautiful about humanity and existence. Sara often uses reclaimed and discarded materials as well as their creative processes to illuminate the mystical and sacred deeply embedded in our lives and surroundings.

I identify as a multicultural woman with Appalachian Pennsylvanian and Maine roots. I am first generation and second generation immigrant. My familial and cultural roots reach to northern Thailand, Guangdong in China, the Tuscan region of Italy, Bavarian German, Scotland, and Wales. Deep faith traditions from both the West and East have been a part of my life. Mountains, stones, the sea, the forests, the land have all formed and continue to form me.

12. Geña

Somos Pájaros, 2021
Digital audio file
7 minutes
NFS

María Eugenia Nieves Escoriaza, better known in artistic circles as Geña, is an interdisciplinary international recording artist residing in Pittsburgh, PA. She’s a singer, percussionist, dancer and teaching artist. Geña hails from Quebradillas, Puerto Rico where she was the lead singer for “Cannabix” and “Doppleganger”. In 1997 she moved to New York City. Through her work at the Theater for the New City, she received a full scholarship to attend a theater arts program at the Lee Strasberg Theater Institute. While in the Big Apple, Geña was honored to sing on the soundtrack for the film “The Believer,” Musical Director Joel Diamond. In 2004 she relocated to Pittsburgh to pursue her music education. She graduated with a Music major and French minor from the University of Pittsburgh in spring 2009.

Geña collaborates in the duo Geña y Peña playing traditional Latin American songs of love and life. This sublime duet is comprised of Geña on vocals and percussion, and Colombian-American Carlos Peña on guitar. Her latest musical projects include Calle Bomba, a music ensemble based on Puerto Rican Bomba; and Rumbón de la Calle, a percussion ensemble that features extraordinary musicians from the African diaspora, Anicet Mundundu, Elie Kihonia, and George Jones interactively performing their native/ancestral traditional songs. She is the lead singer for America’s Latin Orchestra. Geña is a guest artist on Christiane Dolores’ Amor Fati and Pantry of Salt and Sugar; and Phat Man Dee and Liz Berlin’s Social Justice Disco. She was the music director and lead singer of the Puerto Rican rebel roots and riot salsa band Machete Kisumontao. Geña was one of the original members of the group Preach Freedom & Connect. She’s collaborated with Noel Quintana and his Latin Crew; and with Herman "Soy Sos” Pearl on a “latin-techno" project called Ivivi Mori. Her recordings with Tuff Sound Recording Studio and collaborations with DJ Soy Sos in the documentary film “New Muslim Cool” led her to sing along El Mujahideen Team on the film’s soundtrack. In 2012, Geña wrote and recorded on an international collaborative album for the IR26 entitled “This Land is not for Sale‐ Ivere.” Her past projects include collaborations with Preach Freedom, Kenia, Colter Harper, Mathew Tembo, Cha, El Manjar de los Dioses, Dem Brooklyn Bums, and more... Geña is the recipient of the 2015 Fuerza Awards. 1n 2018 she received the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council Artist Opportunity Grant to study at Escuela de Bomba y Plena Doña Caridad Brenes de Cepeda. She was also a recipient of the New Sun Rising and Heinz Endowment Transformative Teaching Artist Award. Geña is the proud mother of Alondra Inarú and currently is a resident teaching artist with the Pittsburgh Center for the Arts. Geña is extremely proud of her collaboration with #notwhite.

I was born in Arecibo and raised in Quebradillas, Puerto Rico. I was the middle child of a family of 6 and was, as most of my family, musically inclined very early on. My father used to take me to the taverns to sing with the town's musicians, and that's where I learned my corta-venas repertoire. The traditional songs of Puerto Rico and the songs of el trio Los Panchos, Sylvia Rexach, Virginia Lopez...were rooted in my mind, heart and soul and to this day, as I sing them, I feel exhilarated. I eventually moved to New York City and then to Pittsburgh and throughout kept learning more and more about my roots and getting closer to my African ancestors through bomba. I've always lived a bohemian lifestyle. This is where I channel my emotions and frustrations, and where I find my place in a different country, with a different language and different customs. With the #nwc I found like-minded individuals that can help me identify, process and navigate my experiences of oppression and my struggles.

13. Alison Zapata

The Deeper Root, 2021
Collage and paint on board
24” x 36”
$1200

Alison Maria Zapata is a visual artist who specializes in painting, murals, and mixed media collage.  She is the owner/ lead artist of Zapata Studios.  She is a member of the #notwhite Collective.  She identifies as Mexican/ Italian/ American.  Having obtained a BA in Fine Art/Art Education at Carlow University, Alison has developed engaging arts programming in classrooms throughout Pittsburgh’s populations over the past twenty-two years. Alison has received art education training through The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Gateway to the Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Penn State, Lincoln Center’s Aesthetic Education, and Wolf Trap Institute.  She is a resident artist in the Artists in Education program through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  She was awarded participation in the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Art and Society: Brazil/U.S. Educational Partnership.  Alison was awarded a teaching artist certificate from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  

www.zapatastudios.com 

14. Maritza Mosquera

Body Image 1, 2021
Charcoal, lead and pastels on hand-pulled black serigraph
38” x 50"

Body Image 2, 2021 
Charcoal, lead and pastels on hand-pulled black serigraph 
38” x 50"
Prices available upon request

16. Maritza Mosquera

Body Image 4, 2021
Charcoal, lead and pastels on hand-pulled black serigraph 
38” x 50"

Body Image 3, 2021
Charcoal, lead and pastels on hand-pulled black serigraph 
38” x 50"
Prices available upon request

For the last 30 years, Mosquera’s major projects live under one umbrella, which she calls The Human Liberation Project.

Her activating, healing and expanding the Universe focused-work is created in her studios at 9Pines and Ice House in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and through teaching and using the listening practice of Co-Escucha, taking part in the Excavation, Exposing and Exorcising of all oppression through the work with the #notwhite collective, of which she is a founding member, and creating art-making possibilities as a Teaching-Artist for people living in challenging spaces such as: detention homes, jails, hospitals and elder care facilities. This work is supported by Pennsylvania Center for the Arts and Media.

Maritza Mosquera is a visual artist, poet, painter, and cook whose creations often accompany dialogues with community. Her visual works are installation “diaries” about relationships and ideas referencing personal and public desires such as the earth’s healing from fracking, intimacy, criminal justice, the story of skin, the end of racism, home recipes, and the power of voice. She was born in Ecuador. Mosquera received her MFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, and her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Massachusetts. Her written and visual work has been presented regionally and nationally, as well as in Costa Rica, Ecuador, Ireland, and Chile. Her work has been funded by the Multi-Cultural Arts Initiative of the Pittsburgh Foundation, Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation, The National Endowment for the Arts, Americans for The Arts, The Buncher Foundation, The Snow Foundation and Arts Midwest.

15. Madame Dolores

BLOSSUMS, 2021
Acrylic paint on 13 cake cardboard rounds
16” diameter each
$1,300 each

Blossums: Global Majority Flower Garden, where each collective member is represented by the shape and symbolism of a flower. The colors subtly hint at each of their self defined and respective countries and the essence of their soul energy. Blossums; the act of producing flowers (verb) and a gathering mass of flowers speaks to the enduring work of becoming human.

artist, storyteller, objectmaker, soundscaper, cultural provocateur
Madame Dolores is a multi-platform cross-disciplinary artist, who employs sound, vision, text, and performance as storytelling tools to create radical, sometimes controversial, cultural engagements. At the heart of her work is a humanistic empathy that questions our inability to coexist and reimagines new mythologies.

Her practice is rooted in responding to compelling questions about cultural definitions, the root of hatred, cognitive dissonance, binary systems, and social conflicts of Us vs Them. She thinks of what she does as social-cultural anthropology, employing the ethnographic technique by culling audio, text and images to create a record of our struggle to be human. Her textual, visual, musical work responds to burgeoning questions about human behavior and inhuman cruelty. How are these confounding, at times, disturbing actions seen through the lens of justice, compassion and understanding?

17. Alison Zapata

The Eternal Bond, 2021
Collage and paint on board
24” x 36”
$1200

Alison Maria Zapata is a visual artist who specializes in painting, murals, and mixed media collage.  She is the owner/ lead artist of Zapata Studios.  She is a member of the #notwhite Collective.  She identifies as Mexican/ Italian/ American.  Having obtained a BA in Fine Art/Art Education at Carlow University, Alison has developed engaging arts programming in classrooms throughout Pittsburgh’s populations over the past twenty-two years. Alison has received art education training through The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust, Gateway to the Arts, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Penn State, Lincoln Center’s Aesthetic Education, and Wolf Trap Institute.  She is a resident artist in the Artists in Education program through the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts.  She was awarded participation in the Fulbright-Hays Group Project Abroad Art and Society: Brazil/U.S. Educational Partnership.  Alison was awarded a teaching artist certificate from The University of the Arts in Philadelphia.  

www.zapatastudios.com 

18. Kitoko Chargois

Hibernation, 2021
Three photographic prints 
36” x 24” 
$750

I am drawn to creating self portraits through photography as a way of embodiment and acknowledgement of the inner world that serves as my sanctum. I love exploring that deeply emotive space between reality and a dream state. Nature serves as a never-ending source of inspiration for me, and flowers, trees, and sunshine inevitably find their way into my work.

Kitoko Chargois is a Pittsburgh-based photographer who is drawn to scenes of emotional authenticity and passionate energy. Much of her work focuses on natural settings or idiosyncratic portraiture that captures life and color at its most vivid and endearing. In her personal work, Kitoko likes to turn the lens on herself. She was born in the Democratic Republic of Congo and immigrated to the U.S. when she was five years old.

19. Jasmine M. Cho

Korean American, 2018
Oil on canvas
24" x 18"
$300

Not your fetish, 2018
Mixed media, oil and collage on canvas
18" x 24”
$250

Capricorn Sister - Anna May Wong, 2020
Cookie with royal icing, edible art paint,
edible luster dust, and food coloring
$150

Redlined - Sammy Lee, 2019
Cookie with royal icing, edible art paint,
food coloring on photograph
$250

9/11 Hero - Betty Ong, 2019
Cookie with royal icing, edible art paint,
edible luster dust, food coloring on photograph
$150

I primarily play with sugar and create portrait cookies to elevate representation for Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders who have been historically excluded from and misrepresented in curriculum and media. I believe cookies are the most disarming and surprising medium possible. They have the power to make people pause and engage with hard-to-digest topics.

I also play with markers, watercolor, oil paints, and mixed media. My artworks contain and reflect the pleasure I find in slowness and high detail, as well as my desire for control over my narrative.

Jasmine M. Cho was born in Los Angeles, California to parents who immigrated from South Korea. Her lived experience as someone who identifies as an Asian American woman has been uniquely shaped by her time living throughout the country from New Mexico to Hawaii before settling in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Identifying as part of The Global Majority is a newer experience for her; it allows her to claim power and expand her identity into a wider context, but it does not necessarily erase the tensions of being treated as a perpetual foreigner, both in her own homeland and the homeland of her parents.

20. Maggie L. Negrete

We See What You're Doing, 2021
Risograph print
8.25” x 14"
$50 per print, edition of 20

21. Patricia Villalobos Echeverría

LATITUDES I, 2020
Lithograph
25 ½ x 36”
$600.00

LATITUDES II, 2020
Lithograph
25 ½ x 36”
$600.00

22. Shani Banerjee

In Between, 2015
Series of three 16mm stills, digital archival prints
8” x 8” each 
$100 each

23. Priscilla Kar Yee Lo

Current Mood, 2019
Glass, Print (digitally enhanced plaster, 3D printed chops)
Photo by Katarina Kaneff 
27x19 inches
NFS  

Evolution: The Theory of “The Asian Mystique, 2019 
Mould blown glass, digitally enhanced plaster
5.5” x 4.5” x 10” each (8 total)
$2300

#yassir, #howlocanyougo, #bowdownbitches

Growing up in a Chinese immigrant family in North America, I was perpetually reminded to be practical about my future. I worked hard throughout my life to live up to my parents’ expectations for me. But after a decade as a health care professional, I felt dissatisfied with the direction of my life and this intensified after working in Saudi Arabia. There, I faced an alarming level of racism and misogyny that I struggled to reconcile with. For the first time in my life, I truly understood what it meant to be a second-class citizen. It became clear to me that intersectionality plays a large role in the complex systemic oppression of individuals who deviate from social norms.

I turned to creative outlets to speak out about this collective adversity that minority women continue to experience. I was drawn to glass not only because of how empowered I felt working with such a temperamental material, but because it is inherently paradoxical, simultaneously existing as a liquid and a solid. The duality of glass, which is constantly in a state of fragility and permanency, mirrors the hegemonic constraints that still linger and influence the world. My work highlights the astute way in which our inherent patriarchal society has affected the Asian female position within its structure and how it maintains control through cultural and social expectations and normalized gender roles. My visual language contains many artifacts of patriarchy from my childhood that have since become pop culture icons. On the surface, these images are devoid of an overt misogynistic agenda, but in reality, these messages continue to affect the way females behave. Much like Jean Baudrillard’s simulacra , the symbolism of these icons became removed from their original medium and their patriarchal foundation, making them easy to manipulate and go undetected. These childhood relics are often dismissed as trivial, but the signs and symbols they reflect, subtly reinforce social norms and binary systems.

The globalization of the iconic Hello Kitty character has internationally spread “cute culture”, which has an undeniable relationship with the creation, maintenance, and propagation of Asian female stereotypes in the West . Hello Kitty is a recurring image in my work because she is a universally recognizable symbol of pop culture that exemplifies the visual language used by society to dictate Asian female identity. This is characterized by cuteness, meekness, submissiveness, and a playfulness that can be interpreted as provocative. Hello Kitty’s cross-generational appeal blurs the line between innocence, vulnerability, infantilization, and sexuality. I believe that “stereotypes are not a false representation, but rather, an arrested representation of a changing reality” . By employing Hello Kitty and other pop culture icons rooted in systemic patriarchy to highlight the intersectionality of being a minority female, I hope to advance this changing reality. I view this as an act of defiance, taking back a symbol of oppression to create a counter narrative that serves to empower Asian females. Ultimately, I view my work as a nostalgic and whimsical, yet mischievous way of documenting where women, particularly immigrant women, are placed within a societally prescribed racial framework. I hope to initiate discourse about the continual existence of an inherent system of patriarchy and how the present continues to propagate the injustices of the past.

Priscilla moved to Canada from Hong Kong when she was eight. Growing up in the West in an immigrant family, Priscilla was always encouraged to be practical about her future. Her Chinese parents defined success as pursuing a steady career, in their eyes, art was a “waste” of time. After university, Priscilla became a Respiratory Therapist specializing in neonatal and cardiac care. Despite living up to her parents’ expectations, she did not feel a sense of fulfillment and decided to move to another country for a changer. Working in Saudi Arabia for four years, she witnessed some terrible injustices and experienced racism on a level that was foreign to her sheltered upbringing. In addition, the sexism she faced daily was both alarming and disheartening. For the first time in Priscilla’s life, she truly felt like a second-class citizen. When she came home from the Middle East, she decided to take various community art class with the hopes of alleviating her angst with a creative outlet. After trying several mediums, glass left a lasting impression that soon turned into a passion. She went back to school to pursue a bachelor’s in Craft and Design from Sheridan College and is now currently at Illinois State University working on her MFA.

24.  Karen Lue

Self-Portrait #1 from 安詳 
(or, when i die i want to die peacefully), 2018
Print on silk
26.5” x 20”
NFS

25. atiya jones

wholly, holey, holy women (one), 2014
Ink on printmaking paper
16" x 20”
$1250

wholly, holey, holy women (two), 2014 
Ink on printmaking paper
16" x 20"
$1250

26. Stacie Lawrence

Uniformity, 2010
Acrylic on canvas
30” x 24”
$1000

27. Dr. Amber Epps

Decolonization Stations, 2021
Audio & Video
Price: Internal Change

I am a powerful, weird situation that just so happens to make art.

Artist.
Lyricist.
Professor.
Advocate.
Curator.
Witch.
Mom.
Woman.
Biracial.
Fruit punch.

28. Veronica Corpuz

Tree of Life: a family constellation, 2021
A series of 11 digital photographs on archival paper
16” x 20” and 20” x 16” 
$250 each

In the Philippines, the coconut tree is called the Tree of Life. This photographic series is an exploratory sketch of the artist’s family tree. Veronica Corpuz is a poet, artist and proud member of #notwhite collective and Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University.

In my mother’s kitchen, there were four watercolor prints on the wall facing the kitchen table. Apple, pear, lemon and orange. Tropes of “American” domesticity. The states of fruit were in varying degrees of being half-peeled. Skinned. The photographs were born from this memory and have evolved into an inquiry, an interrogation of language/image. To call a person a “coconut” is to judge the person as someone who is brown on the outside, white on the inside. As an artist who grew up in the 1980s, raised with the ambitions of “model minority” parents and fed inordinate amounts of pop culture, I think about how the culture of whiteness blended with my parents’ Philippine culture—what my parents celebrated and what they denied. This hybridization has shaped my identity as an artist, mother, partner, daughter. I am grateful to the coconut for teaching me about beauty, resilience, and being.

29. Carolina Loyola-Garcia

Amorous Letters, 2021
Single-channel video installation with writing station and bins
6 min.
NFS

I am lucky enough to have lived part of my life in a time when things were still rather analog. That meant that communicating with loved ones who lived far away required writing letters with all the dedication and uncertainty it entailed: adequate calligraphy to ensure legibility, crafting sentences carefully to convey the full intent of the message, adding in some cases small objects to share a sense of experience: leaves from a tree, petals from a flower, stubs from a concert attended, small little drawings, pictures, spraying perfume on the paper for full effect, etc. That was just the first step, followed by the mailing process before the possibility of tracking packages was available. It was much like sending messages in a bottle. You hoped letters would arrive, and with some luck a few months later you might receive another letter in response. Time felt different back then.

Use this viewing and writing station to write that letter you never sent to someone who is no longer in your life, or to convey something that you’ve been meaning to say to someone who still is. Maybe it’s a letter used just to put your thoughts down without the intention of ever sharing with anyone. Or maybe it’s a letter used to vent and get that thing that’s been bothering you off your chest.

Carolina Loyola-Garcia is a multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker, and educator. She works primarily in media arts, including single-channel video art, video installations, video design for theater, digital printmaking, documentary, and has ventured into performance through theater and dance.

Through her work she has explored topics related to social justice, the dislocated identity that results from colonialism and migration, and questionings around issues related to complex aspects of human existence such as relationships, memory, and the tense interaction between economy and the environment.

Her work has been shown in the United States and abroad, and has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pittsburgh Foundation, the Heinz Endowments, and the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, among others.

She received her MFA from Carnegie Mellon University and is currently Professor of Media Arts at Robert Morris University.

carolinaloyolagarcia.net

30. Latika Sewell

The Big Picture, 2020
Acrylic on canvas
35” x 60”
NFS

The Bigger Picture is a collage of things we (Black people) have gone through as well as a lot of things that are still going on in today's world. The piece itself is a big bill mixed with the USA flag, incorporating images such as organs (their killing us and selling our organs), the underground railroad (as imagined by the artist), a germ, Donald Trump, Latika’s little sister, a KKK member, protestors (#J4A), a burning car (from a Pittsburgh protest), a burning building (R.I.P George Floyd), a police officer, and a few more images.

The world in my eyes is actually a pretty messed up place. It’s like no matter how much good people try to do there are people in power who turn around and do so much bad to the world. I believe money isn’t the root of all evil. I think all evil people with money are the root of all evil. Good people with money do good things for the world. It is only those who are stuck in their racist upbringing that want to see the world in a slave master’s eye-view.

I create because it is what helps keep me sane. There are days when I can’t (or at least that’s what I feel at the moment) create and these are some of the hardest days for me. I realized a few years ago that when I’m not able to create I have a lot of time to actually sit with my thoughts and those are where a lot of my collage pieces come from. Scattered thoughts are what I think all artists deal with. I am normally inspired by things that are super close to home: women, family, nature and a lot of things that happen around the world that affect us as people.

31. Danielle Robinson

"If I Were King", 2020
Graphite pencil, acrylic paint and ink 
16” x 20”
$300

“...black girls NEED to know they are magical...we can have dragons too.”

Danielle has been an artist since the age of five. Drawing, painting and sculpting her way to Rodgers Middle School, CAPA High School (where she added photography to her creative endeavors), Columbus College of Art and Design (1year) and The Art Institute of Pittsburgh (1 year). Danielle has worked with a variety of artists and musicians in the Pittsburgh area, and continues to grow her body of work.

“I hope with my art I can just encourage conversation. I paint black women and animals as I see them, integrated into the fabric of my life, as fantastic goddesses, beasts and super heroes. This is the way I see us. We are more than a shade of brown. The way I express myself on paper is a thoughtless process, I just create. I do love to combine some of my favorite styles of art to create something different and new. I combine graffiti-style, art-deco and African art as starting points in most of my work.”

32. Beautiful Constellations

Beautiful Constellations Mapping, 2021
Interactive installation containing photographs, string, journals, and a couch
Variable
NFS

Why healing? Why now?
What needs to be healed?

Beautiful Constellations gathered to ponder these questions, and from them came the need to reclaim language and words: how we learn from our human, animal and plant kin; and identifying our relational practice. For example: what is a weed? One definition claims that a weed is “a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants”. The behavior of uprooting unwanted life surpasses our relationships towards plants; it is experienced in our relationships with other humans as well.

The scribble of life goes up and across and around, it does zigzags and looptaloops, moving in multiple directions at once beyond an xyz axis. Michelle King talks about the scribble, and how we often tell stories as a rising line from point A to point B. Maybe there are some humps along the way, but we don’t often share how they go backwards or illustrate messiness. What does it look like to heal the spaces within us and that we’re in, through practice?

What you see before you are the vignettes, whisperings, offerings, and aspirations of whole beings living into love and liberation...

Beautiful Constellations is composed of Michelle King, Moses, and Zena Ruiz; three educators in the Pittsburgh area. We are kin. We have some shared experiences and some experiences that we share in story. We listen and learn. We provoke and hold. Between the three of us we hold ancestry in Africa, Europe, Central America, and North America. Beautiful Constellations was born as a thought experiment of the Climate Healing Incubator, which is itself an experimental project of Creatives for Climate.

33. Maria de los Angeles

Family Dress, 2016
$24,000

34. Oreen Cohen

Two Birds of a Feather, 2021
Theatre Lighting gels, laminate, tape
20’ x 20’ 
NFS

Texture, movement, material, and process are key elements of my artwork. I attempt to bring viewers closer to the visceral or essential qualities of material and sites. I extend myself in the mediums of large-scale sculpture, painting, drawing, site-specific installation, public art, intervention, video, and performance.

I labor using my body in sometimes physically demanding processes and performative actions to unlock sensitivities in each new site location. With gumption, I scour resources in dumpsters, city streets, interview residents or stalk historic locations to find fodder for new works. These movements lead me to design possibilities that untangle or combine stories of people and place.

Often I work with the public or in collaborations with artists, makers and musicians in other disciplines to join in the process of magnifying the theatres of action, to engross participants in a spectacle of improvised action building up mythic, often post-industrial narratives.

"Birds of a Feather" is a large sheet of laminated faux stained glass cut into shapes of the movement of bird wings in flight and in landing “patched and quilted” together. In 1948, my Great uncle immigrated to the us from Morocco in 1948. He rose to own a stained glass company in Georgia. My father then immigrated to the US (Rochester, NY) in 1984 and my great uncle would send my dad crates of stained glass to occupy my dad while he was finding foundation here. My father Relied on creativity, relying on the sort of sacred light that stained glass creates to find solace, opportunity and ritual through the chaotic shuffling of our family to the US. stained glass is a medium I am very much drawn to again and again in my artistic practice, infusing it with other mediums to express the freedom, elation and hope that it embraces through lights inherent spirituality.

Oreen Cohen grew up between the Rust Belt of the United States and a Moshav in Northern Israel. She is currently living and working in Pittsburgh, PA. Her interdisciplinary art practice spans the potentiality of material, body and space in sculpture, painting, drawing, public art, intervention and video performance. Brute labored actions, materiality and the scavenging for belonging in a place stems from her growing up within a bi-lingual family that blended the narratives of sephardic/zionist Judaism, North African Moroccan tradition and American culture. Within the process of making art and building identity is a constant question of what creates a place.

35. liana maneese

grounded, 2018
36” x 60” 
A series of three archival pigment prints
NFS; 11” x 17” prints available for sale for $50

Brazilian born, Pittsburgh raised Liana Maneese M.A. Clinical Applied Psychology is an award-winning activist, social practice artist, visionary entrepreneur, doula, liberation psychotherapist, and catalyst for creative engagement. She is the founder of The Good Peoples Group's: The Center on Interracial Relationships. Adopting Identity: Memories and Mirrors.

There is no documentation of my birth. I was obviously born but no one, that I have contact with at least, really knows exactly where or under what circumstances. This, I suppose, is what accounts for the "alien" feeling, that some adoptees report; that I simply arrived here.

This is the story of finding home, identity, as a transracially adopted Afro- Brazilian-American raised in Pittsburgh, PA. I am investigating memory by retracing the steps my mother documented during the process of adopting me from Goiânia, Brasil in 1985.

This installation is made up of images and relics that make a life through memories, which are not always our own. The show features a book of short poems and images as well as photographs from the journey, and relics of identity. Thank you to everyone who has made this possible and to those who continue to nurture my relentless curiosity.

liana identifies as Afro-Brazilian born, Black American, Transracial Adoptee

36. Maria de los Angeles

Opportunity for All Dress, 2019
$24,000

Undocumented Dress, 2018
$24,000