Sherwin Banfield is a Queens, NY based mixed-media artist with recent work attempting to explore journeys of identity and ancestry. Sherwin’s creative practice tends to deconstruct the imaginative and physical journey of identity within his preferred subject matter, the human experience. While exploring the journey of his subject, he would seek to draw a connection between their personal stories and established culture, frequently imposing mythological and imaginative ideas as accessories within his sculptures. His portrait busts and figurative works are expressions of mood meant to draw out the inner identity of his subjects. Accompanying each sculptured identity are accessories of light, sound and/or cultural references that hyper realize this identity to compliment the organic design of their facial, skull and anatomical structure. The goal is to create a projection of attitude, aura and lived experience within his sculpted figures. Recent projects build upon experimental ideas of encompassing various mixed materials with traditional sculpture; lighting, sound and solar power that he refers to as Sustainable Sonic Sculpture. His recent public sculpture “Sky’s the Limit in the County of Kings’ fused the identity of Brooklyn Hip-Hop Legend The Notorious B.I.G., with his musical legacy into a sonic monument. The intention is to reintroduce the multi-dimensional contributions of Hip-Hop Legends, through a multi-sensory experience in Monumentality. Banfield holds a BFA with honors from Parsons School of Design and studied figurative sculpture at The Art Students League of New York. He is a recipient of the Augusta Savage Grant with the National Sculpture Society, the Downtown Brooklyn + Dumbo Art Fund Grant, the NYC Art in the Parks: Alliance for FMCP Grant, the Socrates Annual Emerging Artist Fellowship, the Fantasy Fund Fellowship at Modern Art Foundry and the Art Students League of New York’s Model to Monument Fellowship. In 2023, Banfield is the AnkhLave Public Artist-In-Residence and will be part of the “Branching Out: Trees as Community Hosts” Exhibition at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden (June 17 – October 24, 2023).
Fletcher Benton (American, b.1931), born in Jackson, OH, moved to San Francisco in the 1960s after receiving a BFA from Miami University, Oxford, OH, in 1956. In San Francisco, he taught at California College of Arts and Crafts, San Francisco Art Institute, and California State University. In his own work, he focused on geometric associations that are apparent in his later, large-scale sculptural works. Benton taught himself sign painting as a young man, and, through this process, became enthralled with the inherent geometric forms that comprise the letters he was painting. Benton initially experimented with abstract painting, but the limitations of the medium drove him toward kinetic sculpture.
Throughout his oeuvre, Benton plays with shapes, lines, balance, and movement to create gravity-defying sculptures of all sizes, as well as abstract geometric works on paper. Benton began his celebrated Alphabet series—comprised of 26 large-scale steel sculptures of the letters of the alphabet—in the 1970s, and the kinetic aspect of his sculptures became less important than its form and medium. In his manipulation of a two-dimensional sheet of metal into a three-dimensional painted steel sculpture, Benton brought a particular life to these letters, imbuing these stationary pieces with the kinetic energy found in his earlier work. In 2008, Benton received the International Sculpture Center Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award.
Kraig Blue was born and raised in the Bronx, New York, politicized in Washington, DC, and liberated in Los Angeles, CA. Kraig Blue is a visual artist, educator, musician, surfer, and photographer. He is a multimedia sculptor using found materials as metaphors to explore complex socially constructed ideologies and paradigms. Confronting issues of social justice and globalized racial injustice; he creates multilayered sculptural assemblages as altars to become vehicles for quiet contemplation and dialogue. 1 Using free floating signifiers, he draws inspiration from cultural phrases, history, and science fiction. Materials are carefully selected, adorned, burned, and reimagined within the formal elements of design to rearrange narratives that combine the invisible historical threads of each object. In deconstructing the concept of the altar as a sacred object, Blue simultaneously incorporates the Orisha mythologies from religions of the African diaspora. He considers his sculptures to be a contemporary representation of an innate ancestral history.
Zura Bushurishvili is a world-renowned artist for his exceptional sculptures and paintings. His artwork adorns numerous public spaces across NYC, Atlanta – Georgia, and Connecticut, and has found a place of distinction in the private collection of Victor Niederhoffer, an American hedge fund manager. Originally from the Republic of Georgia, Zura spent 14 years honing his artistic skills before pursuing formal studies at the State Academy of Fine Art in Tbilisi. Presently, he calls Brooklyn his second home, where his creative journey continues to flourish within the confines of his Williamsburg studio. Not only does he passionately create masterful sculptures and paintings, but he also imparts his profound knowledge through sculpting classes. Through it all, Zura remains dedicated to his craft, with an unwavering commitment to “the sake of beauty, love, and harmony.”
Enrique Sebastián Carbajal (1947) is the Mexican representative of the most important contemporary sculpture at the international level. His works also include other artistic expressions such as painting, architecture and design. He is better known throughout the world as Sebastián, a nickname adopted very early in his career by the artist from Ciudad Camargo, in Chihuahua, Mexico.
His specialty has to do with monumental urban sculpture, which in modern art refers to large works. This type of art is characterized by being more intended for the public, since it is usually found in outdoor areas.
His works use principles from other scientific areas, as he relies on the use of disciplines such as mathematics and geometry. In addition, sciences such as crystallography or topology have influenced his work.
Enrique Carbajal’s works are easy to identify thanks to his use of geometric shapes and the presence of materials such as steel and concrete. It has more than 200 works in various cities around the world.
Born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio Carol Diamond received a B.F.A. in Painting from Cornell University and studied at the New York Studio School. She is a tenured adjunct professor at Pratt Pratt Institute and teaches Graphic Design at CUNY’s City College of Technology. Recent show venues include Zürcher Salon, Equity Gallery, Newbury Fine Arts, Boston, Eyes on Main Street in Wilson, North Carolina, Kent State University, and the Painting Center in NYC. Her artwork is included in public and private collections, including the Portland, Oregon Museum of Art. Diamond was awarded a Purchase Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Invitational Exhibition, two grants from the Pratt Institute Professional Development Fund, and the National Academy Museum’s Edwin Palmer Prize. Her work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Too Much Art, the Manhattan Times, Painting Perceptions, and the Pelham Art Center. Her art writing and reviews are published in Art Critical, Painters on Painting, Two Coats of Paint, and Delicious Line.
Carole Eisner was born in 1937 and raised in New York City. After receiving her BFA from Syracuse University in 1958, Eisner worked as a designer for several fashion houses in New York City, where she garnered industry awards including Mademoiselle Magazine’s “Best Young Designer” in 1961. 2 After the first of her five children was born, Eisner began to paint at home. “I didn’t have a studio in our first apartment, so I threw tarps on the sofas and just started to paint,” she says. Shortly after, Eisner began to experiment with scrap metal, welding sculptures that grew in scale as her artistry progressed over the following decades. Eisner’s longevity as an artist is a testament to the natural marriage between her metal sculptures and works on canvas. Over a 50 year career, Eisner has had dozens of solo exhibitions across the United States and several internationally. She has participated in group shows at The Guggenheim Collection and other notable museums. Eisner is represented in private, public, and corporate collections and has been published in The New York Times, New York Magazine, Who’s Who in American Art, and Vogue. Eisner currently resides in Weston, Connecticut with her husband.
Miguel Otero Fuentes is a USA migrant, a university trained architect specializing in facade design, and a self- taught sculptor. The aspirational intersection of these experiences informs art projects that are site-specific, scaled and designed to invite human interaction, and most importantly, aimed to communicate civic minded, utopian leanings. The utilitarian materials used to create the work, such as paint, and steel, echo this egalitarian, anti-elitist impulse. Not only are these materials endemic to my architectural design work; employed in art works, their familiar and humble construction grade pedigree (or rather lack thereof) deconstructs the haughty complexity of fine art – and renders the work accessible to everyone. Lastly, the work exploits simple geometric forms, spheres, hollowed-out rims and cylinders, to further heighten this sense of the familiar. But unbeknownst to the participant, these forms are constructed following ratios that appear in nature; for example, the circumferences of circles will be derived from measurements of the moon’s orbit around the earth; hence these sculpted forms radiate a sense of perfection that intimates the divine order of the universe.
Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1970 iliana emilia García is a painter, printmaker, and installation artist who works in big format drawings on canvas and paper, and escalating installations depicting her most iconic symbol: the chair. Her work often explores concepts of emotional history, collective and ancestral memory, and intimacy. A co-founder of the Dominican York Proyecto GRÁFICA, she holds an AAS from Altos de Chavón School of Design, a BFA from Parsons School of Design | The New School, and a MA Biography and Memoir from The Graduate Center, CUNY. García has been featured in solo and duo exhibitions at the Art Museum of the Americas, Taller Boricua, Hostos Community College, New York and others. She has participated in the IV Caribbean Biennial, Trienal Poli/Gráfica de San Juan, Latin American Biennial in New York, and international fairs. Her work is included in the permanent collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, El Museo del Barrio, The Blanton Museum of Art, Texas, El Museo de Arte Moderno in Santo Domingo, and others.
An edited monograph on her work iliana emilia Garcia: the reason/ the word / the object, was published in 2020 by the Art Museum of the Americas, and edited by Olga U.Herrera, Phd.
Her artist’s papers can be found at the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY.
Chaim Gross (1902-1991) was a modern American sculptor working in New York City from 1921 until his death in 1991. He was born in 1902 to a Jewish family in Austrian Galicia, in the village of Wolowa in the Carpathian Mountains. In 1911, his family moved to Kolomyia. During World War I, Russian forces invaded Austria-Hungary; amidst the turmoil, the Grosses fled Kolomyia. They returned when Austria retook the town in 1915, refugees of the war. When World War I ended, Gross and brother Avrom-Leib went to Budapest, where Gross attended the city’s art academy and studied with painter Béla Uitz, though within a year a new regime under Miklos Horthy took over and attempted to expel all Jews and foreigners from the country. After being deported from Hungary, Gross began art studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule in Vienna shortly before immigrating to New York City in 1921.
In New York City, Gross’s studies continued at the Educational Alliance Art School on the Lower East Side, led by Russian-American etcher Abbo Ostrowsky. Gross first began to exhibit his work as a student at the Alliance in 1922 (in the late 1920s, he joined their faculty). Gross also attended the Beaux-Arts Institute of Design from 1922-25, where he studied sculpture with Elie Nadelman and others, and at the Art Students League in 1926, with sculptor Robert Laurent. In 1926, Gross began to exhibit his sculpture at the Jewish Art Center (then in the Bronx), and in 1927, at the Salons of America exhibitions at the Anderson Galleries at 59th Street and Park Avenue. Beginning in 1928, he exhibited at the Whitney Studio Club at 10 West 8th Street (the precursor to the Whitney Museum of American Art), showing a watercolor “Circus” in their 13th Annual Exhibition of Paintings. In March 1932 Gross had his first solo exhibition of sculpture at Gallery 144 in New York City. Also in 1932, Gross married Renee Nechin (1909-2005), and they had two children, Yehudah and Mimi (Mimi Gross is a New York-based artist, and was married to the artist Red Grooms from 1963-1976).
In 1933, Gross joined the government’s PWAP (Public Works of Art Project), which transitioned into the WPA (Works Progress Administration). Under these programs Gross taught and demonstrated art, made sculptures for schools and public colleges, and created works for Federal buildings including the Federal Trade Commission Building, and for the France Overseas and Finnish Buildings at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. Gross was also recognized during these years with a silver medal at the 1937 Exposition universelle in Paris. Chaim Gross, Sculptor by Josef Vincent Lombardo, the first major book on Gross, came out in 1949 and included a catalogue raisonne of his sculpture.
In the 1950s Gross began to make more bronze sculptures alongside his wood and stone pieces, and in 1957 and 1959 he traveled to Rome to work with famed bronze foundries including the Nicci foundry. In 1959, a survey of Gross’s sculpture in wood, stone, and bronze was featured in the exhibit Four American Expressionists curated by Lloyd Goodrich at the Whitney Museum of American Art, with work by Abraham Rattner, Doris Caesar, and Karl Knaths. In 1963, Gross and his family moved from their longtime residence at 30 W. 105th Street to Greenwich Village, following the purchase of a four-story historic townhouse at 526 LaGuardia Place, which is now the Renee & Chaim Gross Foundation.
Richard Hunt was born in 1935 in Chicago, Illinois, where he continues to live and work. He has exhibited extensively, including recent solo exhibitions at KANEKO, Omaha, Nebraska (2022); Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, California (2022); The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois (2020–21); Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, Athens (2018); Koehnline Museum of Art, Oakton College, Illinois (2018); The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York (2016); Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Illinois (2014–15); Galesburg Civic Art Center, Galesburg, Illinois (2013); Brauer Museum of Art, Valparaiso, Indiana (2012); Peninsula Fine Arts Center, Newport News, Virginia (2011); and David Findlay Jr Gallery, New York (2011). His work is held in over 100 public collections including Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; The Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; The Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio; Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, California; MFA Houston, Texas; MoMA, New York; National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. Hunt is the recipient of numerous awards, among which are the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship (1962–63); the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center (2009); the Fifth Star Award from the City of Chicago (2014); and the Legends and Legacy Award from the Art Institute of Chicago (2022).
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