The Shape of Water

Various Artists
November 13, 2024 – January 12, 2025

The Shape of Water

November 13, 2024 – January 12, 2025

The Visual Arts Center of Richmond and Crafting the Future present “The Shape of Water,” a group exhibition featuring artists who explore the embodiment of the human form, connection to land, and the act of leaving impressions—both conceptual and tangible. Through dynamic installations, two-dimensional work, and functional objects, each artist transforms materials such as textile, glass, and clay, infusing their work with notions of storytelling, memory, and modernity. The exhibition title draws inspiration from the idea that water retains information. Much like personal memories, water has the ability to hold onto impressions and experiences, aligning with the exhibition’s examination of the imprints we make and those we leave behind.

Curated by Jaynelle Hazard and Terrick Gutierrez.

Exhibiting artists include April Bey, Sam Christian, Gabrielle Ione Hickmon, Hong Hong, Kandy G. Lopez, Aryana Minai, Cedric Mitchell, Jomo Tariku, and Felandus Thames.

Crafting the Future is a nonprofit, 501c(3) tax-exempt institution that works to increase access to creative enrichment by connecting BIPOC artists with opportunities that will help them thrive. Read more about them here.

 

Exhibiting artists

April Bey

April Bey (b. 1987)  grew up in the Bahamas (New Providence) and now resides and works in Los Angeles as a visual artist and art educator. She is currently a tenured professor at Glendale College.

Bey’s interdisciplinary artwork is an introspective and social critique of American and Bahamian culture, feminism, generational theory, social media, post-colonialism Speculative futurism/surrealism and Blerd culture.

Bey’s two-dimensional mixed media works and installations are from her ongoing Atlantica series. Bey incorporates fur, glitter, vinyl and woven textiles—materials rich in queerness—to craft icons around the images of real-life figures from her community.

Her work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at The Nevada Museum of Art, Reno NV; The Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; The California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA, among others. It has been included in group exhibitions at The Modern Fort Worth, Fort Worth, TX; The Southwestern Center for Contemporary Art, NC; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Portland State University, Portland, OR; The Getty Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, AZ; Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Virginia Beach, VA; The National Art Gallery of The Bahamas, Nassau, Bahamas; New Orleans African American Museum, New Orleans, LA, among others. Her work is in the public collections of California African American Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Center for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT; Escalette Collection, Chapman University, Orange, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, Nassau, The Bahamas; Museum of Art and History, Lancaster, CA; Fullerton College Art Gallery, Fullerton, CA, among others. She is represented by Tern Gallery in Nassau, Bahamas and Vielmetter Los Angeles.

Sam Christian

Sam Christian (they/them) is a Richmond native finding every way to celebrate and preserve the inherent strength found at the intersection of black and queer identity. Christian uses multiple forms of media including Fiber (Quilting), Digital Drawing and Printmaking to convey the chaos of queer childhood, the utility of black art and the need to preserve ones self in the face of adversity. Christian asks every viewer to question their ideas of liberation and community Care. Christian is included in the Pamela and William Royall Collection (2020) and is one of the Annual Residents for the Visual Arts Center of Richmond (2023 – 2024).

 

Gabrielle Ione Hickmon

Gabrielle Ione Hickmon (b. 1994) is a Black woman from a middle place—Ypsilanti, MI. Her lab is a place where clay, words, and herbs meet. She is interested in body memory, waiting rooms, placekeeping, circles, the African American Midwest, ecomemory, jazz, and ocular proof.

Gabrielle’s work includes essays, qualitative research, and hand-built ceramics. She won Bronze in the Leisure, Games, & Sport category of the 2022 Information is Beautiful Awards and First Honorable Mention in the 2022 NYU American Journalism Online Awards for her ethnographic research project, How You Play Spades is How You Play Life: Spades in the African American Community. Her writing has appeared in Vox, Condé Nast Traveler, The Baffler, The Pudding, Literary Hub, and elsewhere. She attended Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. Gabrielle will begin her doctoral studies in History with a focus on the African American family in the Great Lakes Region from the 1800s to the present at the University of Michigan in the fall of 2024.

Gabrielle is currently at work on The Boyne City Project, a multi-media family history project that explores multiple periods and contexts of African American history in Michigan prior to, through, and after the Great Migration, a memoir about her experience with breast cancer, and WORKING PROCESS, a series of conversations with other Black women ceramic artists about their work and process.
Gabrielle has been in residence at Pocoapoco, Mas Palou, Mudhouse, and John Bauer Ceramics. She will soon be in residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond and The Writer’s Colony at Dairy Hollow. In 2023, Gabrielle was awarded a fellowship to Haystack Mountain’s 5th Summer Session in Ceramics to study smoke-firing under Madoda Fani. Gabrielle works out of a studio in Ypsilanti, MI.

 

Hong Hong

Each summer and fall, Hong Hong (b. 1989, Hefei, Anhui, China) travels to faraway and distinct locations to make paper under the sky. The environmental, site-specific investigations map interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. During the winter and spring, she forms paintings directly on the floor of her studio. These schematics combine story-telling, text, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity.

Hong is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024 – 2026), The Margie E. West Prize at University of Georgia (2024), a United States Artists Fellowship in Craft (2023), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2023), a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. And Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018 – 2019). She also participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2022), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 – 2021), Yaddo (2019), and I-Park (2018). Hong has presented her work in exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), San Francisco Center for Book Arts (San Francisco, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Rule Gallery (Denver, CO), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Texas Asia Society (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others. Her practice has received press in publications such as Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Boston Art Review, Hyperallergic, American Craft Magazine, Public Parking, Two Coats of Paint, and Glasstire.

 

Kandy G. Lopez

Kandy G. Lopez was born in New Jersey and moved with her family to Florida. She received her BFA and BS from the University of South Florida, concentrating in Painting and in Marketing and Management. She received her MFA with a concentration in Painting from Florida Atlantic University in 2014. She has taught at Florida Atlantic University, Daytona State College, and is now teaching as an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication, Media and Arts at the Halmos College of Art & Sciences at NOVA Southeastern University.

As an Afro-Caribbean visual artist, Lopez is eager to be challenged materialistically and metaphorically when representing marginalized individuals that inspire and move her. Her works are created out of the necessity to learn something new about her people and culture. Lopez is interested in developing a nostalgic dialogue between the artwork and the viewer. If she’s not learning from her materials and how it affects the message, it’s not worth creating.

 

Aryana Minai

Aryana Minai, an Iranian-American artist based in Los Angeles, draws upon the personal experience of living between two distinct cultures in order to explore broader issues surrounding histories of architecture, migration, labor, and the body. Referring formally to both the walled gardens of Iran and the pick-up truck beds of Los Angeles day laborers, Minai’s large-scale works on paper call into question the presumed permanence of architecture, the world-building potential of nostalgia, the inclination to find remnants of the familiar often under unexpected conditions. The process of creating pulped paper from found materials becomes analogical to the process of remembering and reconsidering through personal memory, a transformation of one form into another. Traces of the artist’s hand appear alongside imprints of bricks and stones culled from demolished buildings, vintage woodblocks used in textile design, wallpaper stencils, vestiges of places and aesthetic vernaculars that no longer exist, objects that can only be accessed partially, through memory. As contemporary art increasingly concerns itself with the global, Minai’s works transcend abstract concepts like “cultural hybridity” to suggest how social forces and historical circumstances actually manifest in both memory and material form.

Aryana Minai (b. 1994 in Tehran, US) received a BFA from Art Center College of Design in 2016, an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2020, and currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA. Selected solo exhibitions include: “Unveiling the Ground”, Tara Downs, New York, US (2024), “Soft Waters Heard Here,” Shulamit Nazarian, Los Angeles, US (2023); “Roses in a Garden of a Ruined House,” James Fuentes, New York, US (2023); “Does it Have a Heart, Does it Sing, Does it Sting?,” Ochi Projects, Los Angeles, US (2022); “The Dirt That Binds Me,” Steve Turner, Los Angeles, US (2020). Her group exhibitions include: “Tracing The Edge,” Benton Museum of Art, Claremont, US (2023); “Incognito,” Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, US (2022); “Many,” Craft Contemporary Museum, Los Angeles, US (2022); “Generations: Abstract Los Angeles: Four Generations,” Brand Library, Glendale, US (2022). Minai was the recipient of The Hopper Prize Shortlist in 2023, and has held residencies at The Macedonia Institute, Chatham, NY; The Print Shop LA, Los Angeles; and Maple St. Construct, Omaha, NE.

 

Cedric Mitchell

Cedric Mitchell’s studio art glass practice is deeply influenced by 18th-century imperial Chinese glass and the innovative spirit of PostModernism. Through vibrant colors and intricate arrangements, Mitchell creates visually captivating sculptures and objects that embody both beauty and meaning. Drawing inspiration from street art and cherished childhood memories, his work transcends boundaries to offer a profound representation of the human experience.

Mitchell’s artistic journey requires discipline, dedication, and a strong sense of community. Collaborating with youth arts organizations and marginalized communities over the past decade has allowed the artist to refine his techniques while nurturing a robust social practice. Mitchell strives to make art accessible to all and support emerging artists to reach their full potential.

The Modern funk design he employs stands out for its vibrant colors, whimsical patterns, unconventional shapes, and the fusion of modernism and postmodernism. It rejects strict aesthetic rules, embracing individuality and self-expression. Drawing from retro pop culture aesthetics, it celebrates uniqueness and eccentricity, creating a playful and captivating atmosphere.

Ultimately, Mitchell’s goal is to create art that resonates with viewers, combining beauty with profound concepts. He believes in the transformative power of art and aim to contribute to a world where everyone has access to it.

 

Jomo Tariku

Jomo Tariku, an Ethiopian American artist and industrial designer, has made significant contributions across various creative disciplines. Born in Nairobi, Kenya, he later moved to Addis Ababa before immigrating to the United States in 1987 to pursue higher education. His unique brand of modern African furniture design emerged during his undergraduate years at the School of Art and Design at the University of Kansas in 1992-93. Jomo’s early work and presentation earned him permanent residency in the US through the National Interest Waiver visa in 1997. His furniture designs draw inspiration from Africa’s rich cultural heritage, historical structures, traditional furniture, craft, colors, artifacts, landscapes, wildlife, and even hairstyles.

As a co-founder of the Black Artists + Designers Guild, Jomo actively advocates for Black designers on a global scale. His research on licensed Black furniture designers has been featured in prominent publications such as the New York Times and Business of Home (BOH). Jomo’s work has graced more than 40 publications, movie sets and even the home of the Vice President of US, Kamala Harris at the Naval Observatory.

His designs are part of the permanent collections in 11 major museums like the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Jomo has been recognized by Wallpaper Magazine, Oprah, and Susanne Graner of Vitra Design Museum for his impactful contributions. Beyond furniture design, he applies his skills to showcase African stories through compelling data visualizations and has diversified into other creative spaces, including public art sculptures and wallpaper design. Jomo is represented by Wexler Gallery in the US and Foreign Agent Gallery in Switzerland. Jomo resides in Springfield, Virginia, with his wife and two sons.

Felandus Thames

Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) lives and works in Connecticut. He graduated from Jackson State University with a BA, where he received many honors, including the Mississippi Arts Commission’s prestigious “Individual Artist Fellowship” for visual arts. Thames received a MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2010, and the following year mounted his first New York solo exhibition at Tilton Gallery. He has served as a Visiting Critic to Rhode Island School of Design, and his work appears in many notable collections, including Mississippi Museum of Art and The Studio Museum of Harlem.

Recent group exhibitions include “Unmasking Masculinity for the 21st Century” at the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts and “Resistance in Black and White” at the Cleveland Museum of Art. His work was curated in the 2022 Venice Biennial exhibition “The Afro-Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined” for the European Cultural Counsel. His work was recently curated in the Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s critically acclaimed traveling exhibition “The Dirty South” which appeared at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), and Denver Museum of Contemporary Art. His work received critical attention with favorable mentions in Art In America, Artforum, and Hyperallergic. Thames is a 2022 Harpo Foundation individual artist fellow and was recently selected by the US State Department for the “Art in Embassies Program” in Dakar, Senegal.

CURATORS