Felipe Baeza has a background in printmaking, and his attention to materiality, texture, layering, and surface is evident in his paintings and drawings. His ongoing investigations deal with bodies in flux as they transform, dematerialize, and fuse with the natural world and one another. These bodies are often traveling through interstitial spaces in search of a new landscape where they where they are free from regulation and oppression. Unruly Suspension exemplifies this impulse as a body seems to hang or float in midair, overtaken, or perhaps merging with, an ambiguous purple form. Thread has been patterned across this shape and hangs down the surface of the work, adding to the sensation that the body is defying gravity and reaching beyond itself.

Baeza is a painter and printmaker based in Brooklyn, New York. His recent solo exhibitions include Through the Flesh to Elsewhere at the Mistake Room, Los Angeles; La Emergencia de Hacer Memoria at Fortnight Institute, New York; and Felipe Baeza at Maureen Paley, London. His work has been featured in group exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, San Francisco Art Institute, and The Mexican Cultural Institute, Washington, D.C. His work will be included in the fifth iteration of Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday we said tomorrow, in the fall of 2021. He received a MFA from Yale University and a BFA from The Cooper Union, New York.

*Billboard location: Bushwick – Johnson Ave & Scott Ave

María Berrío is best known for her intricate representational works that imbue scenes, both quotidian and extraordinary, with a labor-intensive, textile-like surface. Collaging together small pieces of colored Japanese and hand-painted paper, the artist creates painterly but iconographic works. Her subject matter ranges, drawing from the folkloric and mythological to the biographical, and the resulting images suggest narrative tableaus of commune, refuge, and harmony between nature and people, as well as quiet scenes of danger drawn from our contemporary context. Her contribution to this project is an image of a citrus tree, its brightly colored leaves and fruits a multifaceted refraction of light. The unpopulated but inviting landscape offers us, the viewer, a lush place in the shade to rest a moment. 

Best known for her intricate collages, Berrío explores themes such as intercultural connectivity, migration and humankind’s relationship to nature. She was born and raised in Bogotá, Colombia, and received her BFA at Parsons School of Design, New York, and her MFA at the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her work has been shown both nationally and internationally, and she has participated in exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio, New York; Nasher Museum of Art, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; Philadelphia Museum of Art, and University Art Museum at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, among others. Berrío was included in the 4th iteration of Prospect New Orleans, The Lotus in Spite of the Swamp, and created a permanent commission for the New York City subway system.

Theresa Chromati’s narrative figurative imagery is obscured and distorted through a lens of abstraction.  Employing dynamic lines, bold patterns and radiating colors her characters weave through amorphous settings on a truth seeking inner journey. The works often hold space for sustained observation to make out the women and objects that populate them as they seem to merge with their surroundings, fragmenting and coalescing across the canvas. Chromati’s new painting features a contorted body at its center with extending limbs and extremities breaking up the surface of the work while reaching for a scrotum flower, the artist’s motif for balance. The figure’s face is an expressive, swirling storm of emotion and blue glitter, seeming to transform before our eyes and, as in much of the artist’s work, suggesting the ever shifting terms of self and identity.

Chromati has garnered critical and institutional attention for figurative paintings that are shaped by fragmented forms of desire and constant motion. Bursts of complex color, sensual protrusions, and texture deploy abstraction to explore various contemporary realities of black woman. These bodies are at once imaginative, bordering on grotesque, and celebratory as they convey a variety of emotional and spiritual states of being. Chromati was born and raised in Baltimore, Maryland, attended the Pratt Institute, and is now based in New York City. Recently, her work was on view at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Pérez Art Museum Miami, and The Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and The Delaware Contemporary. She has been featured in The New York Times, i-D, Interview Magazine, Juxtapoz, Architectural Digest, and Vogue.

*Billboard location: NOHO – 48 Great Jones St/Bowery

This work, a self portrait of the artist, pictures her in a large, open bathroom; it is an image of the self that is both powerful and informal, focusing on the pleasures of domestic ritual. At the fore, she lies across a divan filing her nails and looking directly out at the viewer—her pose is relaxed but her gaze is focused. The background of the image reveals many details, from personal and familiar objects such as underwear strewn about and a lush houseplant to the striking inclusion of a version of one of the artist’s earlier paintings. This staged, frontal scene is punctuated by the discreet presence of a leg stepping into the overfilled and overflowing bathtub behind her, revealing the comfortable intimacies of daily life. 

Dannielle’s work has been exhibited at the California African American Museum, Los Angeles; The Goat Farm Arts Center, Atlanta; Dalton Gallery, Agnes Scott College, Decatur, Georgia; Trio Contemporary Art Gallery, Athens, Georgia; and Pérez Art Museum Miami. She was a MOCA GA Working Artist Project fellow in 2018–19, and her solo exhibition, It Started So Simple, recently opened at MOCA GA.

*Billboard location: Bed-Stuy – Bedford Ave & Atlantic Ave

Chioma Ebinama typically works in watercolor and ink, lending her talismanic images a sometimes ghostly, ephemeral quality. Drawing from her body of work Now I only believe in…love, Ebinama has brought together four works that suggest both familiar life and otherworldliness. Portrait of my beloved as an orchid shows isolated delicately rendered flowers, a kind of stylized botanical study of which the true subject is love. This emphasis on the natural world and the tenderness of our relationships is reflected in the surreal and layered flora that encircle the intertwined lovers of the last image. Their embrace, like the supportive, encompassing grasp of friends, family, or perhaps even strangers that we see in Hugging Party, suggest the necessary magic of the intimacies that sustains us. 

Ebinama has had recent exhibitions at Catinca Tabacaru Gallery, New York; Fortnight Institute, New York; Boys’ Quarters Project Space, Port Harcourt, Nigeria; and The Breeder, Athens, Greece. Her work has been included in group shows at the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, New York; Dak’Art Biennial Off-Site, Dakar, Senegal; 303 Gallery, New York; and La Salita, New York. She is currently illustrating a children’s book written by Kevin Young and preparing for a solo exhibition at Maureen Paley in 2021. Ebinama received her BFA from Boston College and her MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York.  

*Billboard location: Bushwick – 60 Morgan Ave/Harrison Pl (please note: artwork different from that on the billboard)

Marcus Jahmal’s paintings are grounded in the observed and imagined moments of daily life—they feature subjects and details drawn from the familiar and inscribed with an expressive surreality that takes its inspiration from a range of visual lineages. 

The artist’s new work features a shirtless man seated in a gold chair crossing his arms over his chest, his fists tightly closed; it is a protective and powerful gesture, at once drawing himself inward and shielding his body. The quick and open brushstrokes that comprise the background and the man’s jeans are in contrast to the clear, graphic style in which his face and striking red hat are depicted. With his eyes focused outside the frame of the image Jahmal’s subject seems to reside in an interior world beyond us. 

Jahmal’s recent solo exhibitions include Double Down at Almine Rech, New York; GUMBO at CAC Passerelle Brest, France; and Solid Ghosts at Almine Rech, Brussels, as well as shows at Canada Gallery and FiveMyles in New York. He has been included in group exhibitions at the Drawing Center, New York; UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles; and The Journal, New York, among others. 

*Billboard location: Bushwick – Bogart St & Cook St

Christopher Myers works between mediums and forms creating encompassing and boldly iconographic images that often focus on the figure. Exploring the figure as both an embodied self and mythological being, his works suggest the larger narratives of history and the spiritual. My Body is a Burning House is a collage that depicts the image its title describes––a Black man’s torso transformed into a grid of windows engulfed in flames. His lower body is composed of images of wreckage that implies the destruction we are witnessing, but the graceful pose of his hand and seemingly still face suggests that this is not a momentary catastrophe but the kind of acute terror that burdens the everyday.

Christopher Myers’s recent solo exhibitions include Drapetomania at Fort Gansevoort, Los Angeles; The Red Plague Rid You for Learning Me Your Language at Mead Art Museum, Amherst College, Massachusetts; Nobody Is My Name, The Mistake Room, Los Angeles; and Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me at Fort Gansevoort, New York. Alongside his work as a visual artist, Myers is an award-winning children’s book illustrator and heads an imprint at Random House.

*Billboard location: Bushwick – Bogart St & Harrison Pl

Naudline Pierre creates works that explore a mysterious alternate universe populated by characters that often interact with each other in tender ways. She employs imagery from art historical references while building her personal mythology, depicting spiritual tableaus and portraits in an imaginary, fantasy world. Situated at the middle of the painting Too Much, Not Enough is an embodied, mauve-hued woman—seemingly an avatar for the artist herself—surrounded by angelic Black figures whose textured wings and radiating crown-like halos encircle her. The dense purple flesh of the central figure is contrasted against the more loosely rendered seraphic beings, the terrestrial situated among the ethereal. The resulting image is one of divine Black femmehood, conjuring the protective possibilities of the celestial and otherworldly in the day-to-day.

Naudline Pierre’s work has been included in exhibitions at the The Armory Show, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Nicodim Gallery, Bucharest; Perrotin, Seoul; Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles; and Stephen Friedman Gallery, London among others. Pierre’s works are in the permanent collection of Pérez Art Museum Miami; CC Foundation, Shanghai; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Dallas Museum of Art; The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina; and The Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City. Pierre was a 2019–2020 artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, and an exhibition featuring the work of the resident artists, This Longing Vessel, recently opened at MoMA PS1, Queens, New York. In the fall of 2021 her work will be included in the fifth iteration of Prospect New Orleans, Yesterday we said tomorrow, and she will have a solo exhibition at the Dallas Museum of Art. Pierre holds an MFA from the New York Academy of Art and a BFA from Andrews University.

*Billboard location: Chelsea – 115 West 29th St

Ilana Savdie’s work deals with themes around invasion, control, defiance, and the ways in which power is propelled and mediated through bodies. A particular focus is placed on the carnivalesque themes of defiance through the inversion of social norms and the exaggerated body as a form of mockery and protest. I saw and I see is part of a larger series of works that feature aspects of the Marimoda, a fantastical, brightly costumed figure who appears in the Carnaval de Barranquilla—the Colombian city where Savdie was raised—and who emerged as a means to ridicule the elite. These paintings reflect and embellish aspects of this folkloric tradition, exploring both its aesthetic, and more significantly, its political and social histories of subversion. The central figure of Savdie’s painting is surreal and grotesque, but even atop an abstracted ground, it is visceral and familiar—it is an unbound body; a body in flux, pain, revolt, and transformation.

Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She had a solo show with ltd los angeles in 2019, and has an upcoming solo show at Deli Gallery, New York. Her work has been included in group shows at spaces including Jack Barett Gallery, New York; Essex Flowers, New York; Golestani Gallery, Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum aan de Stroom and CASSTL gallery, Antwerp, Belgium; Diane Rosenstein Gallery, Los Angeles, and Fredric Snitzer Gallery, Miami. Savdie received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. She was awarded the 2020 TOYFoundation fellowship and the 2020 NXTHVN studio fellowship where she is currently an artist in residence until May of 2021.

*Billboard location: Greenpoint – 78 Dobbin Street (please note: artwork different from that on the billboard)