The Artists

ARTIST BIOS

Ariana Benson was born in Norfolk, Virginia. Their debut poetry collection, Black Pastoral (2023, UGA Press), was selected by Willie Perdomo as winner of the 2022 Cave Canem Poetry Prize. A 2022 recipient of the Furious Flower Poetry Prize and runner up for the 2023 92Y Discovery Prize, Benson’s poems and essays appear or are forthcoming in POETRY Magazine, Ploughshares, The Yale Review, Copper Nickel, The Kenyon Review, and elsewhere. Through her writing, she strives to fashion vignettes of Blackness that speak to its infinite depth and richness. She is currently completing her MFA at Washington University in St. Louis. Twitter: @literari_ana; Instagram: @extraordin_arie

Bereket Adamu is a multidisciplinary artist from The Southern Peoples Nations of Ethiopia. Adamu’s work concentrates on the complexity of African social, political, symbology, and relationship structures to give abstracted immersive imagery to everyday life and the larger roles we may play. They use their own unique experiences as a displaced migrant to share stories and perspectives that travel through different lands and time. Working in oil on stretched canvas, hand-tufted rugs, moving images, haunting repetitive soundscapes, large-scale murals, printmaking, and digital illustration. Bereket’s work continues to be anti-disciplinary, never limited by genre or medium. Instead it is largely driven and threaded together through color and narrative. 

Bereket is interested and invested in mapping Ethiopian history and familial timelines, both personal and political. She Aims to create striking visuals from stories of displacement, greed, anger, immense terror. Yet, instead of focusing on the evil and greed that propel this damage, she is here to offer a dissectible lens for all that happens in between; the beauty in spite of, the resilience that beauty represents, and even the remarkable joy that can come out of collective pain. Remembering this can spark righteous healing and constantly helps to move forward and dream of better futures that intertwine with our own pasta. When we think about the gaps and holes in ourselves that are in need of mending, Bereket urges us to look back because ;“It is not wrong to go back for that which you have forgotten”.

Brea Wilson is a Black and Filipino, trans non-binary multidisciplinary artist born and raised in occupied Duwamish territory. As a visual artist, Brea primarily works with photography, film, and sculpture. Their artistic practice revolves around exploring the rich intersections of the Black and brown queer experience.

With an unyielding passion for self-expression and a deep desire to challenge societal norms, Brea’s work serves as a powerful catalyst for dialogue and introspection. Through their art, they aim to shed light on the multifaceted dimensions of identity, confronting the complexities and nuances of race, gender, and sexuality. Instagram: @spectrum.of_love

CHARI is a composer, musician, performer, and mixed media artist. Using an evolving mixture of traditional and experimental techniques, Chari is dynamically exploring and illustrating various counterpoints between human experience and society. Chari’s recent works have posed questions about empathy, conflict, emotional intelligence, social justice, healing, listening, and time. Their examinations and integrations have centered around their research into the theories and practices of afro-futurism, deep listening, alternative histories, archives and human centered approaches to technology. Instagram: @chariliveworks

Darryl DeAngelo Terrell (B. 1991), Is a Brooklyn Based, Detroit Born Artist primarily working within lens-based media, performance, and writing; they’re also a Curator, DJ, and Organizer. Darryl received their Bachelor of Fine Art from Wayne State University in 2015 and their Master of Fine Art from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2017. Darryl works under the philosophy of F.U.B.U (This Shit Is For Us*). They’re always thinking about how their work can aid a larger conversation about blackness and its many intersections. Currently, Darryl is working across two bodies of work; one work is currently exploring afro-surrealism, thinking of how to get all black people free from the presence of whiteness, getting black people to “elsewhere” where the black diaspora can have complete freedom. Darryl is also exploring queerness and desire by way of a fat black femme non-binary alter-ego named Dion. Both bodies are flushed out through photography, video, activations, sound, and writing. @blkboyshine

LaNia Sproles lives and works in the segregated city of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where she graduated with a BFA from Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design in 2017. Her body of work spans several disciplines including printmaking, drawing, and collage. The philosophies of self-perception, queer and feminist theories, and inherent racial dogmas are essential to her work. Sproles examines the works of feminist artists and writers such as Octavia Butler, Kara Walker, and Rebecca Morgan. In 2020, she completed her year as a 2019 Mary L. Nohl fellow, continued her teaching as artist-in-residence at the Lynden Sculpture Garden in Milwaukee, and guest curated an exhibition hosted by NADA art fair with Green Gallery. Recently, she created an illustration of Art Preserve artists for the west wall in the Social STUDIO. Instagram: @laniasprolesartist

Le’Ecia Farmer is a queer Black artist currently based in Seattle, WA. She studied fiber art, visual art, and mixed media in Olympia, WA. Le’Ecia also studied traditional and contemporary textile printing in Ghana as well as apparel design in Seattle. Le’Ecia’s diverse skill set comes from technical education, learning from community, and self-teaching. 

Le’Ecia continually draws inspiration from the overt and covert connections between her cultural upbringing and art practice. Le’Ecia is keenly drawn to adornment and self-fashioning beyond surface level connotations and likes to experiment with various materials and the meanings they carry with them.  Instagram: @leeciafarmer

Nahom Ghirmay is an Eritrean-American artist based in Seattle. Through his artworks, he delves into the intricate nuances of identity and delves into the depths of emotional experiences. He’s fascinated by the ways in which we communicate our innermost feelings through our facial expressions and body language. He draws inspiration from the stories, ambitions, and worries of those around him, seeking to capture these narratives through his brushstrokes, charcoal marks, and color palettes. He believes that art has the power to connect people across cultures and backgrounds. Through his work, he hopes to foster empathy and understanding between individuals, and to create a space for meaningful dialogue. Email: Nahomghrmay93@gmail.com, Instagram: @ Nahom_artsy, Website: www.nahomart.org

Shifting between fiction and nonfiction in his narrative paintings, Ronald Hall creates otherworldly spaces in which figures engage in and reflect upon the past, present, and future. “The computer plays an important role in the development process as far as color experimentation, composition, and scale,” Hall has said. His artistic practice directly draws upon his experience as an African American man, and his childhood growing up in the rougher parts of Pittsburgh. He distorts domestic interiors, plantations, and other environmental structures into eerie dreamscapes that invoke historical and contemporary issues involving race and social constructionism. His frequent inclusion of media references—such as Minecraft, photographs from Civil Rights protests, and racist character tropes—captures the intricate web of biases embedded in our everyday lives.⁠⁠ Hall is a native of Pittsburgh where he attended the High School For Creative And Performing Arts, later studied illustration at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, and also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. In 1999 he relocated to Seattle, where he joined Gallery 110 as an artist-member and began exhibiting works at major north western institutions such as The Tacoma Museum, The Seattle Art Museum and The Wing Luke Asian Museum. Hall has been the recipient of many prestigious art awards and grants such as the Gottlieb Foundation Grant, the Pollock-Krasner Grant, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, The Bronx Museum of the Arts AIM Program, the Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant, and the recipient of the 2013 Artist Fellowship Award in Seattle. @ronadhallstudios

SAMAR is a duo of self taught perfumers on a mission to craft immersive unisex perfumes. “The Scentuary” is an homage to timeless beauty, the uncanny, and the surreal. Our sense of smell is often neglected, and most typically observed via a good-bad dichotomy, yet it shares a powerful link with memory making that goes beyond those binary limitations. Scent can return us to moments past, ground us in the present, or wink at an aspirational future. We envision perfumery as an art that inspires attentiveness and wonder for the world around us. Each of our perfumes was inspired by a specific environment we had taken for granted, yet found we missed while sheltering in place. Perfumery renewed our appreciation for simple pleasures and allowed us to move between nostalgic spaces without leaving our home. We hope that you too cultivate curiosity for scent, whether in the various environments you experience throughout your life, or in the bottled art of the scent obsessed. @samarpitcrew