I have been sculpturally exploring fungal formations since 2019. As part of my creative process, I hike and “photographically forage” for inspiration, visually examining the diverse blooms, colors, and spaces that fungal specimens inhabit.
Neither plant nor animal, fungi have incredible and dynamic characteristics. The function and role of mushrooms across the globe are incomparable. They are an interconnected network and research shows they communicate using electrical impulses through their mycelium, much like neurotransmitters within the human mind. They have the capability to heal the environment and the body and activate dormant areas of the brain. My intention is to use light as a material to bring this energy to sculptural iterations of my mushroom clusters.
Clustered is a series of four cast fiberglass illuminated groupings of mushroom objects that comprise the permanent public art installation at Queens Wedgewood Houston. This multisensory activation is intended to invite viewers to explore and engage with the natural surroundings in the middle of a bustling city environment.
Kevin Chupik has been a professional exhibiting artist for over 25 years. While living throughout the American Southwest, he has cultivated a unique artistic aesthetic. He actively seeks juxtapositions of traditional western imagery elements with those of modernity. Sometimes, like in Setting Sun, his cowboy figures are actors trapped in a surreal narrative about time and place, while engaged in an urbane setting. He holds a Masters in Painting and Drawing from The University of Colorado at Boulder and BFA from Texas Christian University.
Juliana Lupacchino “Julu” is a fine artist, and color is her medium. Her practice focuses on the way colors communicate with each other, and how they effect us—a celebration of beauty, color, movement, and human emotion. Murals and paintings are the primary vehicles in which she explores these themes. Her works are colorful, abstract, organic, and adventurous.
Julu is a native of Savannah, Georgia. She graduated from Savannah College of Art and Design in 2017, with a degree in Fibers. During her time at SCAD, she explored both pattern development and material exploration through large scale installation work. After graduating, she no longer had access to nice equipment and computers, so she started painting with her fingers. She loved working hands on with the medium and believes that there lies a sense of freedom when you leave the brush behind.
Whatever she is creating, Julu’s works are intended to stimulate joyful feelings for the audience. Joy is a key element of all her work which she expresses through color, shape, and scale. She has also lent creative assistance to brands including Howler Brothers.
“My artworks are my way of communicating with the observer about the things of everyday life that we all have in common. Things we do, objects we use, emotions we feel. These actions depicted in my artworks are very simple like the cardboard they are drawn on. My aim is to immerse the observer into the work and make him/her see the world and everyday actions in a different way.”
Golsa Golchini is an Iranian artist based in Milan, Italy. She began her artistic career as a photographer, but later moved on to blend it with painting after graduating from the Fine Arts Academy of Brera with a specialization in the department of Visual Arts. She is widely known for her miniature and realistic paintings on unusual mediums such as her own hands. Golchini uses the unconventionality of her canvas to the idea's advantage. Her art is very colorful and full of detail and many of her quirky compositions come to life in the way that they interact with her body. Often tiny figures in her impasto paintings capture the feeling of being on one's own in a large landscape. Each of these miniature worlds pulse with energy.
Justin’s mixed media art is as rich in color, layers and technique as it is in imagination and meaning. Growing up in Charlotte, creating art was a family affair and Justin knew he wanted to pursue art, so he attended Northwest School of the Arts then Art Institute of Raleigh, Durham. Due to the cost of schooling, Justin began working side jobs related to art to supplement the tuition cost, until the fateful day of June 10, 2019, when riots in Charlotte, NC erupted over questions of equality. That day he was asked to create window installations for The Brooklyn Collective windows ruined during the protests, which he craftily transformed into an art gallery over the next two weeks. With support, guidance and space to create, Justin’s art flourished and he was offered a spot in The Brooklyn Collective as a resident artist.
Justin’s style is ever evolving but has signature elements that make his work stand out. He loves to mix mediums and materials to make unique compositions. These different combinations excite Justin and connect to what he loves most about being a creator: that he can always grow and develop as an artist. The freedom to interchange the styles, mediums and colors he uses makes for endless possibilities and opportunity for improvement.
Dr. Dimeji Onafuwa (Dimeji) is a Nigerian-born artist, designer, and researcher. Tilling passion from his African heart with American soil, he cultivates evocative and emotional scenes of assimilation. Dimeji uses color boldly and simply to create a luminous quality of melancholia, allowing the viewer a powerful sense of human-ness and a presence of the spiritual.
He draws inspiration from Henri Matisse, Fauvism, the 1960s San Francisco Bay Area figurative artists and a lot of African and African-American artists, including Amy Sherard, Sanya Ojikutu, Kolade Oshinowo, Wole Lagunju, & Victor Ehikamenor. He also draws on concepts from the Yoruba art. A few examples are ‘Ona,’ meaning embellishment of form; ‘Ara,’ creativity, ‘Era,’ improvisation, and ‘Pipe,’ equaling completeness.
Dr. Onafuwa has many talents, and painting is among them. He has been invited to speak at conferences, podcasts and to facilitate workshops globally on topics as varied as art, alternative economics, transition design, diversity and inclusion in design, the commons, allyship, and algorithmic bias.
Adding to his native Nigeria and new home, Dimeji has exhibited in several U.S. cities, including Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, Athens West Virginia, Charlotte, and Winston-Salem North Carolina. Dimeji was represented by Sozo Gallery in Charlotte NC.
Mixing bold colors with graphic elements and representational figures, Wisconsin painter Guzzo Pinc, creates dynamic abstract compositions that toe the line between abstraction and figuration. The artist manipulates the surface by sanding painted areas creating translucent effects that invite further study. Large swaths of flat, colorful shapes provide an exciting movement and tension, resulting in a visually striking body of work.
Born in Chicago, Guzzo Pinc earned his MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2020 and currently teaches at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“The main theme of my work is Time ... I seek to convey, through my images, a sense of health, balance, and joie de vivre. The history of art, and other areas of humanity, such as philosophy, deeply inspire me and I am their constant student. It is my hope that each of my paintings enriches the lives of those who see it. My work can both be taken seriously and also lightheartedly -when I am successful. It is only painting after all —but what would the world be without drawing, painting, and the images we create?” – Guzzo Pinc
Mississippi-born artist Patrick Puckett is known for painting portraits of figures with deadpan stares, culled from a life lived in the South. His paintings are recognized for their bold colors and languid figures, executed with confident interaction between paint application, shape, color and texture. The works on paper emit intimacy, with more subtle features and evidence of the artist’s hand through drawn elements. The works on canvas command space, strength and attention through scale, assertive brush strokes and color choice. He paints characters that are woefully out of sync with their surroundings: wedding-goers standing solemnly in a row; a lone man lost in thought amidst a lively crowd; a serious senior citizen holding a bouquet of flowers. Puckett lines up festive occasions such as barbeques, bars and beach scenes, only to call out their less amiable undersides.
Studying under Professor James Meade at the University of Southern Mississippi, Patrick received his bachelor degree in fine arts in 2002. When he’s not painting, he works as a graphic designer, drinks beer, and listens to Elvis. In 2022, Puckett and his family moved back to Jackson, Mississippi where he maintains a studio.
Known for her colorful urban patchwork pieces, Jill Ricci explores the place between “high art” and popular culture, text and image, figuration and abstraction, past and present, and two and three-dimensional space. She describes her work as elegant and gritty, urban and earthy –creating urban, decorative and global motifs and symbols using collage, spray paint, Venetian plaster, wax and leaf. Pulling inspiration from design, architecture, fashion, nature, sacred geometry, and graffiti, she strives to establish an immediate identification between the viewer and the work of art.
Ricci received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago and then nearly two decades later, received a degree from Sheffield School of Interior Design. Ricci resides in Brooklyn, NY. She curates and owns a contemporary art gallery, Parlor Gallery, in Asbury Park, NJ.
“As artists our work has greatly been inspired by our experience traveling the American landscape chasing the elusive truths that a connection to nature holds. This work explores the beauty in a nomadic existence and the mystery’s learned through the struggle of that pursuit. Reflecting on our experience through color, imagery and texture that explores the ever-present lessons that can be learned.”
The Nashville-based dynamic duo of Canned Pineapple Co. specialize in hand-painted signs, murals, and gold leaf work. Buddy Norton has over 10 years of experience in the sign industry and began collaborating with Shelby Lowe in 2017, which became the genesis of Canned Pineapple. Both had a dream of traveling and painting together so they quit their day jobs, refurbished two vans into living spaces and hit the road for seven months of the year. They began painting signs for the likes of mom-and-pop tattoo parlors and even bigger corporate companies like REI.
Traveling as far as Maryland, Alaska and even South Africa, the duo values the relationships they’ve built with the people that have trusted them to turn their vision into reality or design from scratch.
Rachael Van Dyke is a full-time artist creating abstract landscape and figurative work inspired by living off the grid in the Blue Ridge mountains and traveling abroad. Van Dyke’s approach to open vistas is an epic adventure in bright colors, bold strokes and a whimsical, illustrative quality that holds the view captive. Like a bird in flight with a panoramic view from above, her landscapes expand freely, exploring opening.
Van Dyke is an avid artist-in-residence and has participated in national and international residencies. These residencies create new boundaries for her work and encourage an alteration of technique and expression. These boundaries also create stimulation as she is forced to understand and come to terms with her limitations. She chooses to explore the region through hiking or bicycling, visiting museums and historic sites, and trying her hand at engaging with local residents. Each body of work is influenced by place and tells a story of the people and land that she’s encountered.
Prior to her full-time career as an artist, Van Dyke spent twelve years of teaching, art and design and cultivating relationships with galleries. Over the past seven years she has gained representation with six galleries, each with their own personality and clientele. This variety allows her to create a diverse body of work – keeping her excited to paint each day.
New Orleans-based designer, muralist and interior stylist Liz Kamarul brings a keen eye to her artistry, focusing on creating dimension and visual interest with her paintings. She’s been infusing color, pattern, plants, shapes, and envy-inducing secondhand finds into spaces for more than a decade.
Originally from North Idaho and a graduate of the University of Idaho with a major in clothing design and a minor in interior design, she’s traveled the world with her husband, traveled the US in a beautiful Winnebago she designed, and transformed their New Orleans home with never-seen-before ideas. Liz’s artistic talents shine as she uses walls, furniture, bathtubs, and more as her canvas, adorning them with awe-inspiring murals that captivate viewers in the US and beyond.
Herb Williams was born in Montgomery, AL, in 1973. Mr. Williams received a BFA in sculpture from Birmingham- Southern College. Upon graduation the artist immediately went to work at a bronze foundry in West Palm Beach, FL. There he cast hundreds of sculptures with the atelier Popliteo and the last work of art by photo realist Duane Hanson. Herb Williams then moved to Nashville, TN, where he has lived and created art since 1998. Mr. Williams received The Joan Mitchell Foundation Museum Purchase Grant in 2005, the Next Star Artist Award in 2008, and was sponsored by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011. He received his first public art commission in 2017 which was followed by commissions for a large-scale outdoor installation in Lubbock, Texas and six larger-than-life sculptures for the International Concourse at the Atlanta airport.
His artwork was featured at an Inaugural art exhibit in Washington, DC, with Shepard Fairey, and he opened “Plunderland”, a walk-in room installation consisting of almost 500,000 crayons at the art gallery Rare, in Chelsea. A collection of seventy sculptures and paintings were exhibited in Shanghai, China. Mr. Williams’ multi-story graffiti paintings have been featured along with internationally known street artists in the Nashville Walls Project. Herb Williams is currently represented by galleries in Nashville, Laguna Beach and Charlotte.
Tess Davies is a contemporary and street artist from Nashville, TN. She graduated cum laude from Sewanee: The University of the South with a B.F.A under the honors program in 2014. Her studio practices include acrylic and oil painting, with a focus on natural textures, layered spaces and dualities. She takes inspiration from escapism and biological patterns and forms.
My work explores dualities. It restructures familiar, natural objects into a composition of disparate parts. It combines intricate details found in natural textures, fluidity, and chaos. Stillness and movement, color and contrast, human and nature, and structure and looseness are all prevalent dualities in my work.
The purpose of my practice is to address various inevitabilities in life. I am inspired by escapism and utilize this coping mechanism in my work. I use natural symbolism and feminine tropes, seen in the color palette and various natural forms. Each natural component found in my compositions, has a different metaphorical significance, but common themes include decay, disease, growth, genetics, femininity, and repetition. I draw on personal issues and fears that bring people together, while simultaneously causing divides. I address what separates and connects us, and the cyclical nature of life and human tendencies.
I believe the painted, abstract beings represent our tendencies to compartmentalize and reveal personal anxieties in the way the patterns are isolated and contained. They transition in and out of more abstract beings and more nature-based compositions. This movement between the real and the imagined is representational of escapism. Creating these patterns, and repeating them intricately and deliberately, directly correlates to our repeated tendencies. It is also representative of the constant division of cells and growth found in the processes of decay and rebirth. By using natural metaphors, the purpose of this work is to beautify the inevitable.
Stepheny Miller is a talented artist based in Nashville. She specializes in murals and canvas art with focus on floral and the female form. Before settling in Nashville, Miller studied graphic design at Boise State University. She primarily works with acrylic paint.
Victoria Villasana resides in Mexico after living in London for over a decade. Her experience in these different cultures inspires her work. She describes her art as a “symbiosis of cultures.” Her trademark pieces—portraits embellished with yarn and pasted up on London streets—mix indigenous Mexican and Western art and deliver a dose of rebellious femininity. In Nashville, Villasana’s works have also been displayed at the 21c Museum Hotel.
This SAMO portrait is on 300 gsm lamina paper with handmade yarn embroidery intervention. Jean-Michel Basquiat (pseudonym SAMO), a renowned New York City artist, rose to fame in the late 1970s and 1980s for his raw, expressive paintings that often incorporated graffiti, social commentary, and elements of neo-expressionism.
