肉肉传媒

Matthew Kirk (Queens, NY)

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A self-taught artist, Kirk has worked for over twelve years in New York City as a professional art handler鈥� a trade that has often influenced his artistic practice in terms of utilizing readily available materials to make his art. His gestural paintings and abstract assemblages are steeped in symbolism and iconography that relate to the visual language of the Navajo, while his use of the grid as compositional armature takes structural inspiration from traditional Navajo weavings and rugs, as well as topographical maps and urban landscapes. Kirk states, 鈥淛ust as family, work, current events, and city life are reflected in the work, my Indian heritage plays an important, but nuanced role.鈥�

Mind the Heart! Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan (Israel)

Mind the Heart! (est. 2009) is a worldwide art project by Israeli artists Maya Gelfman & Roie Avidan. In the past decade, the project has reached more than 100 cities across 5 continents: from New York to Bangkok, Delhi to London, from the Israel National Museum and the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. to orphanages in Kenya and Uganda. 

The project works at the intersection of art and social awareness. It engages the public domain with the aim of getting both the artists and the audiences to be fully present, to 鈥榖e here now鈥�. This is achieved through tangible street-art but expands on that across mediums and disciplines, to temporary installations in the wild, performances, poetry and public actions. The works are made with soft materials that clash with the concrete jungle. They deal with the power of choice, the cyclical nature of things, acknowledging wounds in order to heal, and interconnectedness. 

_{Image courtesy of the artists.} 

Dont茅 K. Hayes (Atlanta, GA and Cliffwood, NJ)

Dont茅 K. Hayes has been selected as the Fall 2022 Windgate Foundation Artist-in-Resident.

Hayes graduated summa cum laude from 肉肉传媒 at 肉肉传媒, Georgia with a BFA in Ceramics and Printmaking with an art history minor. Hayes received his MA and MFA with honors from the University of Iowa and is the 2017 recipient of the University of Iowa Arts Fellowship.

Recent art exhibitions include groups shows at the Museum of Science + Industry, Chicago, Illinois, the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, Wisconsin, and the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary in Georgia. Dont茅鈥檚 artwork has been presented at the 1-54 art fair, London, England, Design Miami, Florida, and a solo presentation at the 2021 Armory Art fair in New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, and the Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey, amongst others.

Hayes is a 2019 Ceramics Monthly Magazine Emerging Artists and Artaxis Fellow. Dont茅 is the 2019 winner of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern art from the Gibbes Museum of Art. Dont茅 K. Hayes is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Florida.

IMPACT STATEMENT

Amy Pleasant (Birmingham, AL)

Amy Pleasant鈥檚 work includes painting, drawing, and ceramic sculpture, all exploring the body and language through repetition. Pleasant explores the fragmented figure as sign or symbol. With a limited palette and an economy of line, she draws images like writing a letter, documenting essential, universal motions and human behaviors. This repetitive and calligraphic drawing process creates a visual language over time, like an alphabet. In her clay work, she uses a similar process, cutting figurative forms out of hand rolled slabs, maintaining a sense of directness and intuitiveness that is similar to her drawing and painting practice.

She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).

She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University鈥檚 School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others.

 

She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018) and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015).

Impact Report