Firelei Báez (b. 1981, Santiago de los Caballeros, Dominican Republic) received a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union's School of Art, participated in The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and received an M.F.A. from Hunter College. She has held residencies at The Headlands, The Fine Arts Work Center, The Lower East Side Print Shop, and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace. Her work has been exhibited at the New Museum, The Perez Art Museum of Miami, The Provincetown Association and Art Museum and The Studio Museum in Harlem. She was a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Award as well as the Jacques and Natasha Gelman Award in Painting.

The work of the New York–based painter Firelei Báez (b. 1981) is a captivating nar­rative, presenting familial and diasporic histories that speak to her experience growing up in the United States with Dominican and Haitian parents. Painting with gouache and ink on paper—a reflec­tion of her printmaking background—Báez generates bold images of full-figured women with thick hips who carry more than physical weight on their person: they are adorned, seemingly collaged, with striking patterns, whether multicolored floral (inspired by British colonial gowns) or black-and-white graphic (derived from drapery). They flirt with myth, fable, and fantasy to urge the viewer to question and investigate what story is being told with each image. Báez challenges us to think not only about the way Western societies have been conditioned to understand physical beauty but to consider the aes­thetics of adornment, gesture, and move­ment and the ways texture can give life to a painting. Her work is steeped in his­tory—addressing migration, colonialism, slavery, and the traditional gendering of the Caribbean landscape as female—and aspects of it respond to the late author and philosopher Édouard Glis­sant’s theory of the “poetics of relation,” based in a transformative mode of history that is capable of enunciating and making concrete a French Caribbean reality with a self-defined past and future. For Prospect.3 she has produced 3 new works on paper that speak to the tignon, a type of headscarf, a large piece of material tied or wrapped around the head to form a kind of turban that somewhat resembles the West African gélé. It was worn by Creole women in Louisiana beginning in the Spanish colonial period, and continuing to a lesser extent to the present day.

This headdress was the result of sumptuary laws passed in 1785 under the administration of Governor Esteban Rodriguez Miró. Called the tignon laws, they prescribed and enforced appropriate public dress for female gens de couleur in colonial society. At this time in Louisiana history, women of color vied with white women in beauty, dress and manners. Many of them had become the placées (openly kept mistresses and second families) of white, French, and Spanish Creole men. To maintain class distinctions, Governor Miró decreed that women of color and black women, slave or free, should cover their hair and heads with a knotted headdress and refrain from "excessive attention to dress". But the women who were targets of this decree were inventive and imaginative. They decorated tignons with their jewels and ribbons, and used the finest available materials to wrap their hair.

Douglas Bourgeois (b. 1951, Louisiana) graduated from Louisiana State University in 1974 with a B.F.A. He worked in New Orleans for several years until he returned to live in St. Amant. He has received awards for his work throughout his career including a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship in 1992; a Southeastern Artist Fellowship from the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art and R.J. Reynolds in 1987; and awards in the Visual Arts Fellowship from Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art, Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1981. Bourgeois is represented by Arthur Roger Gallery, New Orleans.

Born and raised in Saint Amant, Loui­siana, where he lives today, Bourgeois went to Catholic school (he once intended to become a priest) at the time when rock and roll and R&B music exploded, and he therefore reveres the two themes, music and religion, equally in his work. In Womack and Del Rey (2014), two Ameri­can singers—one who is young today, one shown in his younger days—perform on what appears to be the surface of the moon, littered with empty vessels and a half-drained hourglass. Bobby Womack grins, guitar in hand, while the ever-melancholy Lana Del Rey turns away from him and from us, serenading Earth. In other works, religion manifests more bla­tantly, as in the series in which saints appear to bystanders, or it remains buried like a clue, as in the detailed image of a Sacred Heart in a light bulb. Bourgeois touches on issues of domestic violence, poverty, and racial injustice.

Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946, California) received his bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University in Arcata, California in 1969. In 1972, he received his master’s in photography from the University of New Mexico. He resides in Glasgow, Scotland, where he founded the Fine Art Photography Department at the Glasgow School of Art in 1982, which he still leads. His work is in numerous institutional collections, such as the Art Institute of Chicago; the Denver Art Museum; The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Tate Gallery, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. In 2009 Cooper received the Guggenheim Fellowship in Photography. He is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh.

For nearly forty-five years, Thomas Joshua Cooper (b. 1946) has been photograph­ing the landscape. His practice is patient. The locations he chooses to document often lie at the very perimeter of the land, requiring months of planning and inten­sive travel. Inspired by the f/64 group active in the 30s and 40s, he uses an 1898 Agfa box camera, carefully capturing the light in long exposures. For Cooper, making pictures is as much about the internal experience of knowing a place as the external experience of seeing it.

Like artists such as Richard Long, and Hamish Fulton, Cooper is a traveller, a nomadic artist whose extraordinary photographs are made in series at significant points around the globe, most often at its extremities. For the series Drowned Trees—A Mississippi River Tree Line (2010/14), the artist traveled the country’s longest north-south waterway to explore the region’s myths, stories, and rituals. These pictures are personal for Cooper. Born in San Francisco to a Cherokee father and an Anglo-American mother, he made the journey to confront the land his family once occupied. A westward-looking view from the start of the Trail of Tears marks the exile of the Native Americans as part of the Indian Removal Act of 1830. Cooper understands the connection between land and identity. As the land meets the water in his photographs, so do the spirits of the region rise to the surface.

Founder of the non-profit Rebuild Foundation, Theaster Gates (b. 1973, Chicago, Illinois) is an artist and innovator in the field of social practice, combining strategies of urban planning, object making and performance. Gates is internationally recognized for his work on the South Side of Chicago, including Dorchester Projects, Black Cinema House, and the upcoming Stony Island Arts Bank and Dorchester Artists Housing Collaborative. Gates’ work both in museums and in communities responds creatively to the challenges of space. In 2013, Gates opened the Arts Incubator in Washington Park. The renovated building is now home to artist residencies, a design apprenticeship program, exhibitions, performances and talks. Gates has exhibited and performed at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Punta della Dogana, Venice; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Santa Barbara Museum of Art; and Documenta 13, Kassel, Germany; among others. He has received awards and grants from Skowhegan, Creative Time, the Vera List Center for Art and Politics, United States Artists, Creative Capital, the Joyce Foundation, Graham Foundation, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and the Artadia New York Residency.

The impetus for collectivity should be rooted in fellowship—amassing bodies, objects, and ideas into a form that begets conversation and criticality in a shared environment. Aggregating information into projects is a cooperative endeavor between Theaster Gates (b. 1973) and those he works with, reimagining the detritus of material culture into environments and spaces of value. The resultant forms vary, from works of art to archives and small businesses. Early experiments in this col­laborative thrust began with a large collection of glass lantern slides, an aban­doned house in the seemingly derelict Grand Crossing neighborhood on Chica­go’s South Side, and a vision. Later ges­tures have included the development of nonprofit arts organizations, libraries, con­ferences, exhibitions, and mixed-income housing. Gates has an affinity for cultural objects, both as potent sites of informa­tion and as carriers of histories. He pos­sesses the ability to transform language and ideas into structures that rearticulate a need for presence and visibility.

Gates is part of a wider trajectory of artists who use the materiality of the built environment—both its physical and its social manifestations—as a platform for critical inquiry, provoking dialogue about archaic notions of equity, inclusion, and land use. This version of institutional critique co-opts the structures that per­petuate the aforementioned antiquated positions to bring awareness to their inherent failures. Situating his practice alongside and within these systems pro­vides an opportunity for Gates and his collaborators to reconfigure the same tools, ideas, people, and objects to a better end.

For Prospect.3, Gates will present works from two of his iconic series, Civil Tapestries, and the Tar paintings”. The “Civil Tapestry” series alludes to the fire hoses traditionally directed by the police at Civil Rights Marches. The artist has created a beautiful painting using colorful strips of decommissioned fire hose, tonally arranged and sewn together. The use of tar in the Tar Painting Series is both political and personal since it is inspired, in part, by Gates’ father who tarred roofs for a living.  In addition, the artist will be working in collaboration with the Ashé Cultural Arts Center with the aim to establish a business venture in New Orleans following his “Dorchester Projects” model.

Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963, Beijing, China) earned his B.F.A. from the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing and his M.F.A. from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville in Fayetteville, Arkansas.  In 2005, Ji was Artist-in-residence at Yale University where he conducted extensive research with the institution’s scholars.  Ji’s work has been presented in solo museum exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum, St. Louis; Rose Museum at Brandeis University, Waltham; Peeler Art Center, DePauw University, Greencastle; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia.  In 2012, Ji’s work was the subject of a solo presentation at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, China. His work has also been included in the 2012 Biennale of Sydney, the 2011 Lyon Biennale, and the 2002 Whitney Biennial.  In 2008, his work was featured in Displacement: the Three Gorges Dam and Contemporary Chinese Art, an exhibition of four Chinese artists, which originated at the Smart Museum of Art, Chicago, Illinois and toured nationally. His work has been featured in publications including The New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker, Modern Painters, and Artforum, and in major public collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn. Ji currently lives and works between New York, NY and Beijing, China. Yun-Fei Ji is represented by James Cohan Gallery.

Using the ancient art form of ink and min­eral pigment on silk and paper, Yun-Fei Ji (b. 1963) addresses social issues using an old revered oriental form of political commentary, the scroll. In 2002 Ji made his first reference to the theme of mass displacement and environmental destruction in his well-known Three Gorges Dam Migration series of woodblock-printed hand scrolls, that depict the flooding and social upheaval caused by the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze River in the central part of China. The work is the beginning of Ji's ongoing study of the human and environmental loss associated with one of the largest civil-engineering feats of recent times, the Three Gorges Dam, which is the world's largest hydropower plant. Meanwhile its immense reservoir has displaced at least 1,200,000 people and has submerged thousands of villages, aesthetically resonant landscapes, and valuable archaeological sites. Over the past decade, the theme has reappeared in Ji’s work, not only related to the construction of large public works throughout the countryside and in general the rapid urban development in China, that forces millions of people to relocate, often against their will, but also the devastation and suffering from natural disasters. In the artist’s latest series of ink-and-watercolor paintings, residents of the vil­lage of Wen are forced by “a sudden wind” to move from their homes into the wilder­ness. “The Last Days of Village Wen” (2011) begins with a chapter written in clear, clerical calligraphy. It tells of the flooding of Wen: ‘There was no rain for eight months,’ the scroll begins, before describing the need for villagers to become itinerant workers. Then, in a way not only creative, but deeply emotive, it narrates a sudden flood that kills enough fish to feed Wen for years. In Ji's work past and present are continuous; the theme of dispossession appears in historical scroll paintings, and Ji's images feature both naturalistic and symbolic images of the "floating weeds"—his term for the displaced, adapted from an ancient Chinese phrase. We also often see phantasmagoric depictions of inauspicious beasts, people dancing "loyalty dances" (Cultural Revolution–era replacements for traditional folk dances) expressing allegiance to the government, officials toppling into high waters.

For Prospect.3, Ji has produced a new scroll with the theme of water, a theme that he addressed already in Water Rising, the work the artist produced as a response to Hurricane Katrina. The scroll will wind around the walls of the oval Emerge Gallery.

Lucia Koch (b. 1966, Porto Alegre, Brazil) currently lives and works in São Paulo, Brazil.  Her work provokes altered states and she is known for using surfaces as filters and creating or transforming atmospheres with unnatural light. From 1992-96, Koch participated in the Arte Construtora collective project, which occupied houses and parks in different Brazilian cities. Her work was featured in the biennials of Sharjah, UAE (2013); Lyon, France (2011); Denver USA and Nagoya, Japan (2010) São Paulo, Brazil (2006); Gothenburg, Sweden (2005); Istanbul, Turkey (2003); Pontevedra, Spain (2000). Most recently she has been included in group shows at international venues such as, the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus; PIER 24, San Francisco; Favela da Maré, Rio de Janeiro; the Yerba Buena Center For the Arts, San Francisco; and the Tokyo Contemporary Art Museum, Japan; and has had solo exhibitions at Capela do Morumbi and SESC Belenzinho, São Paulo; and La Casa Encendida, Madrid.  Her work is included in many public and private collections such as the Musée d'Art Contemporain de Lyon, France; University of Warwick, UK; Fundación ARCO, Spain;  Banco Espirito Santo, Portugal; Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro; Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo; among others.

Moving through space, the brain quickly calibrates light, distance, and texture—registering and mapping spatial relationships on an unconscious level for optimal efficiency and balance of the body. Lucia Koch (b. 1966) relies on this process as she intervenes in the architecture of our surroundings, constructing parameters that enable the body to slow down, observe, process, and experience the structural and ambient elements of the chosen site. Koch installs screens, filters, fabrics, and sculptural elements to heighten the inherent qualities of preexisting architecture and atmosphere and initiate a profound reevaluation of perception.

For Prospect.3, Koch has created Mood Disorder, a site-specific installation for the grand corner window of the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans. Printing directly onto translucent vinyl, acrylic, plexiglass, and glass, the artist employs her signature color gradients and light filters to generate and build a place for new and disordered sensorial experiences. By affecting the transparency of the window and the ambient light within, around, and outside it, Koch deconstructs the familiar barrier between interior and exterior space. To use a term from Koch’s practice, the space is corrected, or elevated to its appropriate potential. The window as divisional border is repositioned as a transitional, in-between, yet autonomous space, a place to locate oneself and not merely pass by or look through between experiences. The work acts as a porous skin that filters light and color out into the urban landscape and allows external elements to permeate the gallery, reminding us of the subjectivity of perception, the performance of our own bodies as we move through spaces, and the localized layers of meaning in the environments we occupy.

Pushpamala N. (b. 1956, Bangalore, India) is a photo, video and installation artist, writer, theorist, and curator. Born in Bangalore, Pushpamala studied sculpture at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University, Baroda. As a sculptor with an interest in narrative figuration, Pushpamala N. transitioned into casting her own body as various characters and personae in the medium of photo-performance while working with a variety of photographers. In the structured compositions of her ‘photo-romances’, studio photographs and experimental short films, the artist seduces the viewers through spectacular and elusive narratives. Collectively, her work deals with post-colonial theory and a feminist historical gaze. Her work has been shown widely in India and internationally in venues such as the Johannesburg Biennale; Asia Society and Newark Museum, USA; Museo Tamayo, Mexico; Tate Modern, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Museum Abteiberg, Germany; Maxxi Museum, Rome; Mori Museum, Tokyo; National Portrait Gallery, Canberra; and the National Gallery of Modern Art and Devi Art Foundation, Delhi. She lives and works in Bangalore, India. 

A feminist artist living in Bangalore, India, Pushpamala N. (b. 1956) has subverted dominant media paradigms throughout her esteemed career as a photographer, video artist, sculpture, writer, curator, and theorist. In the collaborative series Native Women of South India: Manners and Customs (2000–2004), she and the English-born photographer Clare Arni (b. 1962) create performances for the still camera that make visible representational ideals projected by representations of polytheistic deities, documentary photography, and popular culture. In tracing the connections between archetypes, the Native Women series makes visible how the colonial gaze and the patriarchal one have worked in tandem, creating oppressive ideals of femininity that enjoy continued traction in the epoch of globalized neoliberalism. Pushpamala N. casts herself in each role, faithfully re-creating her source material. The act of restaging becomes an act of reclamation.

In Lakshmi, based on an oleograph published by the Ravi Varma Press in the early twentieth century, the figure of the goddess known as the embodiment of beauty, a charm for abundance, emerges in the flesh from a flattened, picturesque background. Another photograph, Toda, is based on a nineteenth-century British anthropometric photograph. Making explicit the quotational nature of the colonial positioning, two hands hold up the checkered backdrop against which a woman stands, consenting to have her body measured and catalogued. Circus uses an iconic Mary Ellen Mark photograph taken in India as its starting point, demonstrating how the construction of the sympathetic female gaze has created a culture of charity that short-circuits opportunities for solidarity among women. In these images—representative of the series as a whole—the symbolic becomes flesh and blood, the background is a figure, and the object claims itself as subject.

Analia Saban (b. 1980, Buenos Aires, Argentina) currently works in Los Angeles and lives in New York. She received a B.F.A. in Visual Arts from Loyola University in New Orleans in 2001, followed by an M.F.A. in New Genres at the University of California in Los Angeles in 2005. Saban’s works are represented in the collections of the Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College; the Hammer Museum at UCLA, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Norton Museum of Art, Florida; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

The Argentinian artist Analia Saban (b. 1980) challenges perceived boundaries between artistic disciplines as well as the conception of painting as a singular work or choreographed set of actions. With subtle and playful irony, she responds to historical tropes such as action painting, the readymade, and the modernist canon by experimenting with history, language, and material. Whether using marble dust or vestiges of paint to smear the canvas or cutting-out canvases to suggest the erosion of painting, the artist insists upon the breaking down of boundaries between disciplines.

Using raw canvas, acrylic, oil, and crayon, Saban often builds up the surface of her canvases, expressing painting in a third dimension. In some works, the canvas becomes a vessel for holding paint, in others the paint acts as membrane or skin; in yet others, it is the departure point for an installation where the paint has been repurposed. It is rarely a place for pure representation or display. Her focus on object making as an accumulative process turns to deconstruction in her “laser-sculpted” works. Using a laser cutter on paper or membranes of acrylic paint, Saban carves away images in negative space. The simultaneous emphasis on erosion and reconstruction runs throughout her practice, as in One-Armed, Three- Legged Chair (with Coil Spring Rubbings) (2014), where she applied a new piece of canvas inscribed with crayon to emphasize the inner workings of a found, deteriorating chair. This oscillation between tearing down and building up is what makes Saban’s work so charmingly uncomfortable yet familiar, and is continued in the series especially created for Prospect.3 during a residency hosted by Loyola University, her alma mater, during the summer of 2014.

Lucien Smith (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) lives and works in New York.  He received his BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York in 2011. He has had solo exhibitions at many venues including the Skarstedt Gallery, New York; Salon 94, New York; Bill Brady / KC, Kansas City;  Suzanne Geiss, Co., New York;  OHWOW, Los Angeles; and Ritter-Zamet, London.  He has been included in group exhibitions at Jonathan Viner, London; Marianne Boesky, New York; Brand New Gallery, Milan; Black Eye, New York; Mark Fletcher, New York; OHWOW, Miami Beach; The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York; The Stillhouse Group, Brooklyn, Art Production Fund Gallery, New York;  ASS Gallery, New York, and Seven Eleven Gallery, New York, NY. Lucien Smith is represented by Salon 94, New York.

Lucien Smith (b. 1989) is more concerned with nature, the forces of life, and the holy and sanctified than with the art world’s fickle exhortations. Two works by Smith are on view as part of Prospect.3. One is a 2013 painting titled Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin, after a Hebrew phrase in the Old Testament book of Daniel that translates, essentially, as “the future is predetermined” and usually implies that a bad event is imminent. The painting depicts a large, woozy seascape based on a 1970s postcard in Smith’s personal collection: a rocky beach turns to rust in the last light of a setting sun. Red, auburn, and brown swirl in a melody of color, interrupted only by the frosted tips of waves crashing along the rocky edge. Smith presents us with an oceanic vista drenched in stained-glass-window light—a nod to Mother Nature’s divinity. The canvas is displayed alongside another painting of his “Ark” Series, History of the Earth, which further explores the intersections of religion, science and nature.

Entang Wiharso (b.1967, Indonesia) recently represented his country at the 2013 Venice Biennale. He is interested in communication between individuals and societies as geographical boundaries become amorphous. He addresses the struggle for tradition to find or maintain a place in the increasingly globalized world. His grand metal sculptures, cast wall reliefs, and oil paintings are imbued with Indonesian pop iconography, contemporary political history, and references to reliefs found on local Hindu temples. The English words seen are coded and invoke thoughts of love, separation, distance and tragedy. He has been the subject of numerous one-person museum shows in Asia, Europe, and the US. His debut solo exhibition at a gallery in the United States was at MARC STRAUS in September 2014.

Entang Wiharso (b. 1967) came of age in Java during President Suharto’s New Order regime, which rose to power some twenty years after Indonesia gained independence from Dutch colonial rule. By the time he graduated from the Institut Seni Indonesia (Indonesian Institute of the Arts) in Yogyakarta in 1987, contemporary Indonesian artists had come to employ a variety of forms and media in addressing their nation’s cultural complexities and the social and political realities of the Suharto years. Wiharso’s early paintings were notable for their turbulent compositions, grotesque figures, and expressions of dark emotional content.

For a period during the mid-1990s, Wiharso lived and worked in the United States, where his observations and experiences led him to examine his sense of identity and to question the relationships between historical processes, contemporary social constructions, and cross-cultural perceptions. The artist began to incorporate superheroes and other figures from American popular culture into his paintings, alongside traditional Indonesian cultural and mythological references. In several works created after his return to Indonesia, where he witnessed key developments in the archipelago’s modern history—the mounting discontent of the late 1990s, the collapse of Suharto’s regime in 1998, and the promises and dashed hopes of the reforms that followed—Wiharso refined his striking visual vocabulary. The introspective and poignantly critical paintings, sculptures, and installations Wiharso has produced since then reflect the psychological confusion, anxiety, and even terror produced by an increasingly globalized and seemingly chaotic world, giving vision to a complex and intensely personal mental landscape. For Prospect.3 he will present his recent large-scale cast- and cut-metal sculptures and reliefs, which interweave personal and historical references. Evocations of Indonesian cultural wealth, and an array of violent, shocking, or distasteful images—knives, tongues, intestines, and the like—are part of his ongoing meditation on the contentious human dramas played out on stages worldwide.