Alia Ali (Arabic: علي عاليه) is a Yemeni-Bosnian-US multi-media artist. Her work explores cultural binaries, challenges culturally sanctioned oppression, and confronts the dualistic barriers of conflicted notions of gender, politics, media, and citizenship. Through her practice, Ali critiques linguistics and inherited political structures and narratives, while simultaneously attempting to counter the polarization and miscommunication that imperils communities across the world, encouraging viewers to confront their own prejudices.

Working between language, photography, video, textile, and installation, Ali’s work addresses the politicization of the body, histories of colonization, imperialism, sexism, and racism through projects that take pattern and textile as their primary motif. Textile, in particular, has been a constant in Ali’s practice. Her strong belief that textile is significant to all of us, reminds us that we are born into it, we sleep in it, we eat on it, we define ourselves by it, we shield ourselves with it, and eventually, we die in it. While it unites us, it also divides us physically and symbolically. Her work broadens into immersive installations utilizing light, pattern, and textile to move past language and offer an expansive, experiential understanding of self, culture, and nation.

Ali has exhibited in numerous solo exhibitions and art fairs across the globe. Her work is in collections at the British Museum, Princeton University, New Orleans Museum of Art, Tucson Museum of Art, Museum of Photography in Chicago, Benton Museum of Art, and a myriad of international private collections. Ali is the recipient of the ARTSY Vanguard Prize 2021-22 and is a NIKON Global Ambassador.

Ali is a graduate of Wellesley College and the California Institute of the Arts (CALARTS). She lives in New Orleans and travels between her studios in Paris, Jaipur and Marrakech.’

Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian-born interdisciplinary artist, creating sculpture, painting, installation, public sculpture, and video. Cortés’ work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Smack Mellon, Wave Hill, Bronx Museum, Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, MoMA PS1, Socrates Sculpture Park, Albright-Knox Gallery, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Rowan University Museum, Turchin Center, Corcoran Gallery of Art, and Neuberger Museum of Art. Cortés’ international exhibitions include Europe, Latin America and Asia.

Cortés’ awards include: Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Fellowship, NYSCA Grant, Hispanic Society Museum Fellowship, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, LMCC Grant, Puffin Foundation, New York State Biennial, Bronx Museum AIM Fellowship, Robert Rauchenberg Change Grant and NYFA Grant. Her residencies include: Yaddo, Ucross, McColl Center, Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC Workspace, Joan Mitchell Center, Sculpture Space, Fountainhead, Caldera, Socrates Sculpture Park, Brooklyn’s Children’s Museum, & MoMA PS1. Cortés’ reviews include: Artforum, ARTnews, Artnet, Hyperallergic, ArtFuse, Cultbytes, Ante Mag, The New York Times, The Art Newspaper, Los Angeles Times, Whitehot, ArtNexus, Art in America, and PBS.

Cortés has designed and implemented projects as a museum educator, artist in residence, and community artist, creating legacy & visual arts projects. Working with vulnerable communities especially homeless and refugee children and teens, through Artist Space, Smack Mellon, Museo del Barrio, LMCC, MoMA, Whitney Museum, and Museum of Arts & Design.

Cortés’ work is in private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the American Embassy in Monterey, Mexico.

John Ebbert has lived in many places, held strange jobs, and had odd experiences. When he lived in Virginia, he would race 39 miles each morning on the Capital Beltway to make technical drawings for the government in a small office above a 7-Eleven in Beltsville, Maryland, with the blinds drawn in case Russian spy cameras were outside. He was a landscape painter in Oregon, where he once jumped off a bridge, and a group of friends jumped after him. He used to get paid to stay up all night, building towering sculptures in the largest toy stores in Manhattan, and would then rollerblade home to his warehouse space in Brooklyn, crossing the Brooklyn Bridge as the sun came up. He walked on glass roofs, spraying whitewash to keep flowers from blooming too early. He served lunch at the world’s largest golf club outside of Dallas, Texas. He played electric guitar in a heavy metal band that practiced in a tiny storage unit lined with Styrofoam, where the drummer would spike sheared-off sticks into the ceiling, while reaching for new ones to keep playing.

Since getting an MFA from Pratt Institute, though, John’s settled down. Now, he lives in a log cabin in the woods, writes stories in little black books, and draws distorted pictures of himself. John is an active member of the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators, Eastern New York, and the Hudson Valley Writers Workshop.

Patty Horing is a figurative painter based in New York City. Her work focuses on psychological portraiture. Horing is represented by Anna Zorina Gallery in New York City, where she has had multiple solo exhibitions including Ordinary Lives in 2017, followed by Underdressed in 2019, A Few Good Men in 2023, and, most recently, Insiders, October, 2025. Additionally, she and artist Deborah Brown co-curated a large group show, Sit Still: Self-Portraits in the Age of Distraction, at Anna Zorina in June 2020. Just Between Us at PERG Gallery in Ludwigsburg, Germany was her first international solo show (May – July, 2024), and she co-curated Survival Tips for Unfriendly Times, a show of 12 American artists at PERG in October, 2025.

Recent group shows include Friends & Lovers at the FLAG Art Foundation, and Home Sweet Home at The Girls’ Club Collection in Ft. Lauderdale, both 2024. At the start of Horing’s career, her work was selected to appear in the 2010 Outwin Boochever Award show at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. Her work is in the permanent collection of the Parrish Art Museum and in notable private collections including Fundacion AMMA, The Min Art Museum, and the Girls’ Club Collection.

In the press, Horing’s work has been featured in New American Paintings, Artnet News, Canvas Rebel, The OG Magazine, Quiet Lunch, Create! Magazine, Studio Visit and W Magazine. She received her MFA at the New York Academy of Art in 2015, after a decade of developing a self-taught painting practice. Before becoming an artist, Horing received an MA in English Literature from NYU and her BA from Brown University.

Jordin Isip is a Filipino American artist from Queens, NY, and has a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. He has exhibited in galleries throughout the United States and in Berlin, Hong Kong, London, Manila, Paris, Kilkenny, and Rome. Jordin has also curated over two dozen group shows including Mystery Meat at Future Prospects (Philippines), Scab On My Brain at Space 1026 (Philadelphia), Panorama Project 3 at Jonathan LeVine Gallery (NYC), and Pure Source at Blanc Gallery (Philippines). Jordin is based in Brooklyn, and teaches at Parsons School of Design, where he also serves as the Director of the BFA Illustration Program.

G. Brian Karas was born in September 1957 in Milford, CT. In 1979 he graduated from Paier School of Art in Hamden, CT. From 1979 to 1982 he worked at Hallmark Cards as a greeting card artist in the Humorous Department. He has been a freelance artist since 1982 and has written and illustrated many books which have won numerous awards. Karas’ books include Atlantic, an American Library Association (ALA) Notable Book, Saving Sweetness by Diane Stanley, and the Boston Globe/Horn Book Honor title, Home on the Bayou. The New York Times describes his work as “…depicted in a childlike style that belies the sophistication of the drawings. Exquisite and moving in its subtlety.” He lives in the Hudson Valley of New York.

JaFang Lu is a Taiwanese-born painter known for her nuanced approach to the figure and her deep sensitivity to color, form, and surface. She received her BA from the City College of New York University and continued her training at the Art Students League and the New York Academy of Figurative Art. Her artistic development was shaped by several influential teachers, most notably Nelson Shanks, founder of Studio Incamminati. Now based outside of Philadelphia, JaFang teaches painting and drawing locally and leads workshops across the United States. Her work bridges realism and abstraction, exploring the dynamic tension between observation and design. Her paintings have been exhibited at the Avery, Stanek Gallery, and the Salmagundi Club, and are held in private collections throughout the U.S. She is a recipient of the Leeway Foundation’s Art and Change Grant and continues to evolve her practice with a focus on color relationships, material exploration, and painterly invention.

A notable presence in American contemporary art, Beverly McIver has charted new directions as a Black female artist. With breathtaking honesty and virtuoso painting, her works tackle difficult themes about the human condition such as depression, racism, poverty, disability, and death. She has received numerous awards and honors and has been the subject of eleven museum exhibitions.  

Born and raised in Greensboro, North Carolina, McIver earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from North Carolina Central University and a Master of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Drawing from Pennsylvania State University. Her artistic journey serves as a testament to her perseverance and the complexities that shape her identity such as stereotyping, self-acceptance, family, otherness, illness, death and, ultimately, freedom to express one’s individuality.

In 2022, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, Arizona, showcased a survey exhibition of McIver’s work titled Full Circle, curated by Kim Boganey, which subsequently traveled to the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, and the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, South Carolina. The exhibit was accompanied by a 132-page hardcover catalogue published by the University of California Press with essays by Michele Wallace, leading black feminist scholar and daughter of Beverly’s graduate school mentor, Faith Ringgold, and distinguished scholar of American art history at Duke University, Richard J. Powell.

McIver’s recent honors include a yearlong residency at the American Academy in Rome, where she was featured in a documentary titled Beverly McIver e il colore nero for Italian television. In 2017, she was honored with the lifetime achievement award from the Anyone Can Fly Foundation in a ceremony hosted by Faith Ringgold. Additionally, she was named one of the “Top Ten in Painting” by Art in America in 2011.

McIver’s work can be found in numerous esteemed collections including the High Museum of Art, Atlanta, Georgia, the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, the Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland, and the Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina, among others.

Michael Pribich is a visual artist living in New York City and Jalisco, México. He was born and raised in Northern California. He is interested in the artist’s role in advancing ideas that lead to continual growth and change. His work uses labor to address themes of displacement and migration in both rural and urban settings.

Pribich has participated in exhibitions and artist residencies throughout the world including: Project Row Houses, Ucross, Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture, Nars Residency, Jentel, and 360 Xochi Quetzal. He has completed video and sculpture projects in Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and India.

Dylan Rose Rheingold (b.1997, New York) is a painter based in New York, NY. Rheingold received her MFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2022, and her BFA from Syracuse University in 2019. Her paintings have been featured in exhibitions at M+B, Los Angeles, California; V1Gallery, Copenhagen, Denmark; T293, Rome, Italy; The Historic Hampton House Museum of Art & Culture, Miami, Florida;Rusha & Co., Los Angeles, California; Sow & Tailor, Los Angeles, California; Latitude Gallery, New York, New York; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, New York; China Academy of Art, Hangzhou, China; Backhaus Projects, Berlin, Germany; London Paint Club, London, United Kingdom; amongst others. Rheingold lives and works in New York.

Nadine Robbins’ art has been showcased in renowned galleries such as the Louis K. Meisel Gallery and Anthony Brunelli Fine Arts for hyperrealist art, and are housed in private collections and museums such as the Howard A. & Judith Tullman Collection in Chicago, the Count-Ibex Collection in Germany, The Knoll Collection, the Meam in Barcelona, and The Arnot Museum in Elmira, NY. Robbins studied at the Sollies-Pont Lycée in France and returned to the US to earn a BFA in graphic design from SUNY New Paltz.

In 2008, Robbins began photographing and painting clients and friends. She refined her voice for the next two years, culminating in a solo show of eight 6’x4’ portraits of couples exhibited at the Brill Gallery in North Adams, MA. Two of these paintings were accepted into the Royal Portrait Society’s annual exhibition at the Mall Galleries in London in 2010 and 2011.

In 2019, Robbins participated in the prestigious Painting Today to celebrate International Women’s Day at the European Museum of Modern Art (MEAM) in Barcelona, Spain. Her works have been showcased at The Rockwell Museum in Corning, New York (a Smithsonian affiliate) and the Wausau Museum of Art in Wisconsin. Notably, in 2021, The Arnot Museum in Elmira, NY, invited Robbins to exhibit her entire body of current artwork in their tri-annual exhibit titled 3 Americans: Contemporary Masters of Realism. In 2023, paintings featured in the contemporary art magazine GOSS183 were included in the Lunar Codex Peregrine and Nova missions as part of NASA’s Artemis plan to land humans back on the Moon in 2026. Most recently, Robbins initiated a long-term project to paint portraits of influential figures who have inspired her throughout her career. The first portrait is of the matriarch of photorealism, Audrey Flack, which was exhibited and sold at Art Miami in 2023.

Oliver Wasow is a collector of American photographic portraiture. He is the author of Artist Unknown (Art and Culture Center of Hollywood, 2011) and Friends, Enemies and Strangers (Saint Lucy Books, 2017). Vintage photo booth portraits from his collection were the subject of the exhibition Black Photobooth: From the Collections of Näkki Goranin and Oliver Wasow at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Kingston, NY in 2023.

Wasow is also a fine art photographer currently living and working in Rhinebeck, NY. He received his BA from Hunter College and his Master’s Degree from the Transart Institute, In Austria. His work is currently represented by Theodore:Art Gallery in NYC. He has had a number of one person exhibitions, including shows at the Josh Baer Gallery, Janet Borden Gallery, The Hilliard University Art Museum in Lafayette, LA, The South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art in North Carolina, and Galerie De Poche in Paris, France. His work has also been included in numerous national and international group shows, including such benchmark exhibitions as Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Image World, at the Whitney Museum of Art in NYC, and The Photography of Invention, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.

Wasow’s photographs are included in a number of private collections and are also represented in various prominent public collections, including The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Whitney Museum of Art, The Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and The Milwaukee Art Museum. Reviews of his work have been featured in most major art publications, including, among others, Art Forum, ArtNews and The New York Times. He has been the recipient of various grants and awards including a Louis Comfort Tiffany Grant in 1999 and, in 2000, his second New York State Council on the Arts Grant.