Prospect.5: Yesterday we said tomorrow

Sky Hopinka (b. 1984, Ferndale, Washington) is a multimedia artist whose preferred medium of video installation focuses on the historical narrative of native peoples and uses language as a tool to examine identity, culture, and the influence of colonialism particularly on the native populations of northern Wisconsin, Southern California, and the Pacific Northwest. Hopinka’s installations are organized in such a way that viewers have a sense of moving through locations in Hopinka’s footsteps, emphasizing the significance of land and landscape to history and one’s cultural identity. Hopinka’s work has been featured at the Whitney Biennial, New York (2017), and he has screened films at the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah; New York Film Festival; Crossroads Film Festival, Jackson, Mississippi; and Filmfest DC, Washington, DC. Hopinka earned a BA from Portland State University, Oregon, and an MFA in film, video, animation, and new genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. He currently teaches at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.

Kenyan-born multimedia artist and filmmaker Phoebe Boswell (b. 1982, Nairobi) grew up in the Arabian Gulf and London, where she studied at Central Saint Martins and the Slade School of Fine Art. Boswell’s production includes charcoal and pastel drawings of enormous proportions that recount on a grand scale the griefs, traumas, journeys and triumphs of her subjects in a manner that recalls the allegorical epics of medieval tapestries.

She explores themes of migration and belonging in the visual recounting of her own history and the stories of her subjects, which often take on a mythic quality. Her work is infused with digital media, such as animation, film, interactivity, and audio, elements that she uses to represent feminine and marginalized subjects. Boswell has won several awards and accolades, including the Future Generation Art Prize’s Special Prize in 2017 and the 2020 Paul Hamlyn Award for Artists. EXPO Chicago hosted her solo presentation She Summons an Army, and Sapar Contemporary, New York, hosted Phoebe Boswell: Take Me to the Lighthouse (both 2018). Her work was shown at the 57th Venice Biennale (2017) and the Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (2015). Her collaborative film Dear Mr Shakespeare was selected for the Sundance Film Festival, Park City, Utah, in 2017.

Laura Aguilar (b. 1959, San Gabriel, CA; d. 2018, Los Angeles) spent most of her prolific career examining her identity as a Chicana lesbian artist. After studying photography at East Los Angeles College, her production in her early career was characterized by portraits of diverse communities in the Los Angeles area and self-portraits, which are representations of herself as a complex individual—a Chicana and a lesbian, who struggled with learning disabilities and depression. Later she would incorporate nude self-portraits and nude portraits of other women into her work, challenging contemporary depictions of beauty and highlighting the intimacy between the female form and nature. Her photographs first expose the visibility of these underrepresented and marginalized women, then celebrate them. Aguilar died at age 58, when recognition of her work was gaining momentum. Since her passing, she has joined the ranks of other iconic female photographers.

Kiki Smith (b. 1954, Nuremberg, Germany; lives in New York) is a German-American artist who studied for a time at the Hartford Art School in Connecticut before moving to New York, where she has been based for forty years. Her early work treats such subjects as the AIDS epidemic and gender. More recently, she has turned her attention toward the relationship of the human condition to nature, specifically feminine subjects. Her practice includes the use of tattoo, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, textiles, and photography to create figural representations that explore themes of mortality, sexuality, and the human body and bodily fluids. Smith has been featured three times in the Whitney Biennial, New York, and five times in the Venice Biennale, among other venues nationally and internationally.

Smith has received numerous awards and honors for her work, such as the International Sculpture Center’s Lifetime Achievement Award (2016) and the US Department of State’s Medal of Arts (2012). She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Kevin Beasley (b. 1985, Lynchburg, Virginia; lives in New York) received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies, Detroit (2007), and an MFA from Yale School of Art (2012). Spanning sculpture, photography, sound and performance, the core of Beasley’s practice rests in the synthesis of objects and materials steeped in personal and generational memory. In gathering clothing, objects, sounds, and studio happenings, Beasley generates a material history—one that is altered, molded, cast, and rebuilt. The artist draws from sculptural tradition through a lens of his own physicality, allowing found materials of personal and cultural significance to regenerate, existing simultaneously as they were and as they will become.

His work has been exhibited and collected nationally and internationally from The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York (2018–2019) to A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town, South Africa.

Keni Anwar (b. 1993, New Orleans) is a writer, visual artist, and musician who studied public relations and graphic design at Loyola University, New Orleans. Anwar draws inspiration from the Nile and Mississippi Rivers, the color blue, and ancestral veneration in their exploration of past trauma and the pursuit of individual exploration and freedom. Their Southern Baptist heritage is often the lens through which they explore race, gender, and sexual identity in what are mainly self-portraits in various mediums that incorporate words, imagery, and sound. Anwar’s work invites others to examine their own worlds and origins as a path to self-liberation.

Karon Davis grew up in New York, attended Spelman College, Atlanta, and film school at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. She is the cofounder of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles. Her background in dance, film, and theater informs her approach to representing the human body and physical relationships through figurative sculpture. She sculpts in plaster, a medium that conveys a sense of the temporary, of having captured a fleeting, singular moment in time. Like Egytptian mummies and archeological remains, Davis’s work conveys a historical record through the body. Her sculptures are deeply personal, often an expression of her past traumas and grief.

Wilding Crane Gallery, Los Angeles, has hosted her exhibitions Karon Davis: Muddy Water (2018) and Karon Davis: Pain Management (2016). Her work was also featured in Rock My Soul, Victoria Miro Gallery, London (2019). Her work is held in the collections of The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Rubell Museum, Miami; and Brooklyn Museum, among others.

Houston native Jamal Cyrus received a BFA from the University of Houston (2004) and an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (2008). He also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine, in 2005. As a visual artist, his work is primarily concerned with the political potential of African American popular cultural production and its containment through governmental and corporate forces. Cyrus uses unexpected and evocative artifacts and references in his storytelling. As he discovers the legacy of African Americans through his own work, he regards his pieces as self-educational, a collective making-up-for-lost-time after having endured forms of historical erasure while growing up in the Southern U.S.

Cyrus has won several awards, including the David Driskell Prize, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, and the Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and he was an artist-in-residence at Artpace San Antonio. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2013); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2012); and the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2011).