Juror’s Selections

Jul 08, 2021 33 minutes

The following section is presented in alphabetical order. Biographical information has been edited.

Prices for available work may be found on p178.

Beverly Acha

Austin, TX

studio@beverlyacha.com / www.beverlyacha.com / @beverlyacha

b. 1987 Miami, FL

Education

2018 Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Madison, ME

2012 MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT

2009 BA, Williams College, Williamstown, MA

Residencies

2019 MacDowell, Peterborough, NH

2017 The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY

2016-17 Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program, Roswell, NM

Solo Exhibitions

2018 Warm Form, Underdonk, Brooklyn, NY

2016 Mutualities, Roswell Museum and Art Center, Roswell, NM

Two-Person Exhibition

2019 See Also, with Kristi Cavataro, The Lighthouse Works, Fishers Island, NY

Group Exhibitions

2020 Fanfare, Ildiko Butler Gallery, Fordham University, New York, NY

2019 Three, DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY

Award

2018 Aon-CUE Artist Empowerment Award, CUE Art Foundation, New York, NY

Collections

Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College, Oberlin, OH

Anderson Museum of Contemporary Art, Roswell, NM

Observation and ways of seeing are the starting point for my paintings. Color references atmosphere, time of day, and light in space. Shapes reference landscape, architecture/structures, and embodied experiences.

Abstraction lives in moments of perceptual slippage and in the space between binaries, between knowing and seeing, between experience and memory, and between the real and the imagined. I locate these unstable in-betweens, which resist stasis and being named, in sites of repetition, such as mimesis, echoes, reflections, time, and technology.

My paintings develop intuitively in response to parameters I set. The initial ordering rules allow for chance outcomes and for an improvisational way of painting. It is through these subtle shifts in the structures and systems of repetition that I make a game of looking that reflects the game of its making.

Andrew Alba

Salt Lake City, UT

andrewalba.art@gmail.com / @andrew.alba

b. 1986 Salt Lake City, UT

Residencies

2020 Modern West Fine Art, Salt Lake City, UT

2018-19 Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT

Solo Exhibitions

2020 Everyone Sucios, Finch Lane Gallery, Salt Lake City, UT

2019 Gas Station Honey Dew, Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Salt Lake City, UT

2018 Spring and All, Chapman Library, Salt Lake City, UT

2017 Rainbow Variance with Mestizo, Institute of Culture and Arts, Salt Lake City, UT

Group Exhibitions

2019 Looking for America: Salt Lake City, The City Library, Salt Lake City, UT

2017 Utah Ties, Central Utah Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT

2013 Acclimatized, Center on Contemporary Art, Seattle, WA

Divining Meaning: Meditations on Gender and Religion, Lewis & Clark College, Portland, OR

Awards

2020 Visual Arts Fellowship, Utah Division of Arts and Museums, Salt Lake City, UT

2017 Honorarium, Central Utah Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT

2013 Honorarium, Center on Contemporary Arts, Seattle, WA

Represented by

Honorarium, Center on Contemporary Arts, Seattle, WA

My work communicates plainly and depicts the experience of being brown in white spaces, while emphasizing how people live their heritage. Borrowing techniques of abstraction from neoexpressionists, my work aims to evoke an emotional response while commenting on our wildly complex sociopolitical present. As a self-taught artist, I create work without the theoretical constraints and critical expectations of the academy. I sculpt using everyday materials from my day job in construction. I like to juxtapose the clean white walls of the gallery against the rough-hewn, everyday materials of the worker. While drop cloths, drywall mud, concrete, and lumber aren’t of archival quality, I am interested in how these materials will enact the inescapable slow decay of blue-collar bodies. My work is for tired working people.

Barber

Omaha, NE

ltb_11@hotmail.com / www.barberpaintspeople.com / @uniteusone

b. 1982 Detroit, MI

Education

2016 MFA, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

Residencies

2021 Sam Fox Island Press, Washington University, St. Louis, MO

2018 The Union for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE

Awards

2020 Grant, USArtists International, Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation

2019 Grant, MAP Fund (for artist collective Propelled Animals)

Grace Lee Boggs, an American revolutionary, defined true wealth as the ability to relate to other human beings. In the pursuit of such wealth in 2004, I reframed my figurative paintings in a matrix of nonidentity to address the fluidity of personhood and the oneness of humanity.

I assign to David W. Carbado’s belief, in his essay concerning male and heterosexual privilege, that “we cannot change the macro effect of discrimination without ameliorating the power effects of our identities.” By allowing viewers to personify the figure and thereby erect a personal narrative, I am hoping to reform the scope of perception. My two-dimensional work is my contribution toward cultural shifts that move individuals beyond the constraints of race and gender into a society that is free from the consequences of social categorizing.