STRAIGHTLICK - Key Persons
Straight Lick is proud to present its first exhibition with Abigail Albano-Payton: Me, Myself… You Albano-Payton uses her art as a tool for discussion of those that are often dismissed. Taking Nina Simone's quote, "An artist's duty is to reflect the times" as a call to action, she seeks to depict the contemporary moment in a truthful and distinctly candid way.
From a young age, she realized the importance that representation, or lack thereof, has in society and how those depictions can affect generations. Her work explores depictions of People of Color, with a focus on the Black community, and seeks to dismantle and repair our preconceived notions of them.
Her visual language consists of intimate moments of love and self-exploration as both she and the subjects consider themes of race, gender, and the intrinsic value of the human experience. In "Barbershop," a trip to the barber issues a challenge to the viewer to revisit their assumptions and perceptions of Black hair and the natural hair movement while imbuing the scene with an unmistakable love and appreciation for her community. She articulates both the meticulous thought of the barber as he focuses on the job at hand and the genuine care and sense of camaraderie so commonly found in Black barber shops.
With portraiture, Albano-Payton deftly combines figuration with backgrounds that extends into the realm of the abstract. In "Kaelon," she captures a young man in a moment of flux as he grapples with not only his natural hair journey, but also how he perceives and expresses his own sexuality. He gazes directly at the viewer with a vulnerability and a fearlessness only youth can have. The background lies unfinished; Albano-Payton affords Kaelon to finish his own story, something society rarely gives a young Black man the chance to do.
The culmination of the show is "Path to Resilience," a masterwork that deals with themes of traditions, family and, of course, hair. Portraying a pair of sisters combing out their hair in front of the television, this small moment of Black love perfectly summarizes how she wants to recharacterize depictions of Black people in art - two humans, sharing the human experience, passing on traditions and history in the form of a braid. The quiet contentment of Albano-Payton's scene is reminiscent of Vermeer's work, calling to mind the beloved scenes of the everyday that solidified their places in art history.
Alayna N. Pernell was born in 1996 in rural Alabama. Pernell received her BA in Studio Art and African American Studies in 2019, and is currently an MFA Photography candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Pernell's interdisciplinary practice considers the gravity of the mental wellbeing of Black people in relation to the physical and metaphorical spaces they inhabit. Visually, she creates space for healthy dialogue to occur. For her, difficult conversations are vital for promoting understanding, love and empathy between people.
Angelique Scott has been working with clay for over a decade. She received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University both in Art Education with a K-12 teaching license and Craft & Material Studies with a concentration in ceramics and fibers. She has participated in several national and international residencies including Vermont Studio Center, The Hambidge Center, and Skopelos Foundation for the Arts in Greece. Scott creates work about blackness as a social and cultural identity using clay and other mixed media such as fabric, wire, beads, and hair. She creates specific forms that communicate her cultural experience and invite the audience to engage in a vital dialogue about contemporary issues regarding race and culture.
Darciana rey is a photographer, poet, and curator. She is also the founder of an all Black Women art collective ‘Lemonade in the Garden'. She uses both photography and poetry to capture her life and the world around her. She believes that it is our duty as humans to understand what has shaped us into the people we have become by diving into our past memories and into new ones. She graduated with a BFA in photography from the school of visual arts and is currently working between Delaware and New York City
Ashleigh Smith was born in 1997 in St. Louis, Missouri. Ashleigh is an independent curator and the founder of The Curator's Pick: a collective for young curators of color. Ashleigh received her BA in Art History and Museum Studies from Duke University in 2020 and will be attending the Williams College graduate program in Art History in the fall of 2021. Smith finds both beauty and complexity in figurative works and believes Black feminism can be a powerful framework for understanding subjectivity, and ways of being, in both fine art and visual culture.
Bakari Akinyele (he/him) is a multimedia artist based in Washington, DC and currently working in Southeast Asia. His art practice incorporates natural dyeing, painting, and drawing. Akinyele studied political science, philosophy, and bioethics while attending Howard University where--drawing on the support of his peers and mentors--he developed an artistic education rooted in cultivating community. Utilizing concepts and principles of Bioethics and eco-consciousness, Bakari Akinyele imagines a future through the lenses of public and environmental health. Akinyele uses his art practice to reveal methods of creation that he believes can be carried over into the post climate crisis future--primarily expressed through materiality, story telling, imagination, and daily living practices.
Jenée-Daria Strand (she/her) is the Curatorial Assistant for the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum. There, she supports in the research and organization of numerous exhibitions, including Carrie Mae Weems' "Resist COVID: Take 6" and, most recently, "Lorraine O'Grady: Both/And." Independently, she has curated exhibitions for Showfields (NYC) and Gloria Gail Gallery (Brooklyn, NYC). Jenée-Daria aims to expand her knowledge of art history, and integrate her interests in performance practices, to examine Black subjectivity within the museum setting. She holds a BFA in Dance from Florida State University, and is pursuing an MA at New York University (NYU).
Black Art Sessions is pleased to present Luke Francis Austin, the first virtual presentation of work by the artist. This show features two works across painting and web-based digital collage that explore Black, queer, male fetishization and hyper-objectification as re-presented through pornographic imagery. Both works featured were made during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Doll 1 explores the Black, male body as an object on stage. The figure is painted as a collage of disparate parts including found images and an inflatable sex doll. The variance of skin tone suggests the subject may not represent any individual, but rather serve as a confrontation of a collective experience of distortion and commodification. The subject's legs appear flattened reflecting both the projected inhumanity of the figure, as well as the flattening of identity through objectification in both Western art history and contemporary visual culture. The painting's frozen-odalisque begs whether or not the subject is a willing participant in the performance and who, exactly, comprises the audience.
Black Art Sessions is pleased to present its first exhibition, Straight Lick, featuring photographer, Marley Trigg Stewart (b. 1993). Originally from Pasadena, California, Trigg Stewart's work, This Side of Paradise, tells the story of his queer identity in connection to his lineage. Right before the pandemic hit, Trigg Stewart flew back to California and spent the next 3 months stuck with his mother and brother, not making any art. Unexpectedly, he received a call from his distant father, where he officially reunited with him and eventually, with his art. This Side of Paradise, was inspired by his father's recollections of his late brother, Trigg Stewart's uncle, Greg, a queer Black man whose life was taken due to the AIDS pandemic of the 1980s-90s.
Brittany Clottey (she/her; b.1999) is a curator and scholar from South Jersey. Currently based between Boston and New York City, she is a senior at Northeastern University studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics with a concentration in political philosophy and critical theory. Brittany has held past curating roles in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Northeastern's College of Arts and Media, and has done freelance work in creative directing. She is currently curating an exhibition titled, "Marginal Bodies; Women of Color, Representation, and the Struggle for Citizenship & Belonging." Her interests lie between the intersections of critical theory and aesthetics, exploring the ways that Black people grasp the reality of their situations, criticize current socio political structures and reimagine their pasts and futures.
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Curator
David Jones is a curator and current graduate student studying art history at York University in Toronto. David's curatorial practice is rooted in exploring possibilities that redefine the process of how art is shared publicly.
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Curator
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
Kailyn Bryant (b. Birmingham, AL) creates dynamic, richly colored multimedia artworks that articulate the ways in which identity, whether individual or collective, shape personal and political manifestations of grief. The tactility of identity markers, such as gender presentation or the styling of one's hair, serve as a starting point for these considerations. In the video works two similar perspectives are exposed though unified symmetrically by animations, symbolizing the universal nature of loss that lies beneath the grieving process. By individualizing her subjects with varied colors, form, and textures, Bryant reconstructs the dynamic individual to highlight the scope of the fragments that synthesize into a community.
Karinne Smith Karinne Smith is an artist born and raised in Los Angeles, California. She earned her B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (2013) and her M.F.A. in Sculpture from Yale University (2020). Karinne is a recipient of the Fannie B. Pardee Scholarship for excellence in sculpture (2019), and an alumnus of the Artist Collective Summer School at the Institute for Contemporary Arts in London (2019). She has exhibited in Berkeley, New Haven, and London, Ontario and recently participated in The Wrong Biennale (2019-2020) with her interactive website Seekingchocolate.com.
Job Titles:
- Member of the EVENT PROGRAMMING TEAM
- Curator
Job Titles:
- Member of the EVENT PROGRAMMING TEAM
Luke Francis Austin (b. Los Angeles, CA, 1998, lives and works in New York) received their BFA from California Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo. Through the construction and deconstruction of images, Austin challenges covertly racist imagery embedded in visual culture. By collaging together found images and self-portraiture, they create amalgamations that reflect how the artist and people who look like them are perceived. With an understanding of the lineage of western image making, gaze theory, and psychology, Austin's work serves to ask questions about re-presentation and the exploitation of Black, queer people for pleasure.
Trigg Stewart's work looks to the past in the form of archives, as a way of revealing patterns, locating shared histories, and finding answers. The reunion with his father led him to start ‘looking with intent', as the spontaneity of the event revealed so much about his lineage. Trigg Stewart sees the archives as a tool to resist the ‘act of missing out,' because knowing about Greg's existence could've somehow altered his life, making his reality as a gay Black man so much easier to grapple with.
Trigg Stewart says, "Left curious about tenderness, family, death, desire, pain, and the grey spaces in between, photographing provides a method to acknowledge these ideas and explore the incestuous nature of their relationship." Trigg Stewart draws his attention to how the archives "inform familial legacies," and finds that they "provide a framework through which unspoken conversations across decades are possible." As a result, the portraits he's cultivated through his community in NYC and the snapshots of his parents and their circle of friends during their youth all add to those unspoken conversations.
Trigg Stewart's occupancy within this current COVID-19 pandemic provides a striking parallel with the AIDS pandemic that took the life of his uncle. Sharing a queer identity, growing up in the same town as his uncle, and being born the subsequent year of his death made this experience feel fated. Between the archives, the memories and the interrelations, Trigg Stewart's work is truly an embodiment of alignment.
Marley Trigg Stewart (he/him, they/them; b. 1993) is an artist from Pasadena, California, whose practice is concerned with exploring authorship of queer identity through photography. In framing his work, Trigg Stewart explores the notion of legacy by connecting archival images and fine art references to portraiture of subjects with whom he is constructing relationships in real time. He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Job Titles:
- Member of the EVENT PROGRAMMING TEAM
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Curator
Naomi Soquar is a writer whose work spans across digital archiving, experimental film, and critical cultural studies research to explore innovation and preserve memory work of the Black African diaspora. Specifically, she is interested in understanding the multiple ways new media imagines deterritorialized spaces for Black embodiment. She is a graduating senior from George Washington University. Her desire to synthesize and bridge significant scholarship in media studies, cultural studies, and innovation led her to design a major in Global New Media Studies. This interdisciplinary subject critically examines changing industries, cultures, and social trends from a diverse, intermedial perspective.
Niara Jordan is a visual artist from Mount Vernon, NY. She is a self taught painter who has presented in Single Fare 4, (2017, New York) and curated the virtual exhibition Simmer Down (online, September 2020). Besides making 2D work Niara develops local programming within the Zennia Experience duo and hopes to make accessible art an everyday happening in her town and beyond.
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Member of the EVENT PROGRAMMING TEAM
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Artist
Shelton Boyd-Griffith is an art consultant & independent curator based in St.Louis, MO. His discipline is Interior design and through that, he focuses on the relationship between spatial interiors and art. Through his curatorial practice, he explores concepts such as the Black interior, the Black queer body and the connection between fashioning the Black body and Black figuration.
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
- Curator
Job Titles:
- Member of the CATALOGUE TEAM
is a Ghanaian-British curator, writer, and community educator. The emancipatory potential of play is central to their practice, as is dreamwork.Currently based between London and Accra, Yaa is a culture staff writer at AMAKA and manages a digital studio, A-kra, which offers an online art history platform (There Are New Suns, formerly Decolonize The Art World) and virtual residency program(The Imaginarium).