CONTINUUM
August 29th, 2022 through march 26th, 2023
Continuum explores the notion of a propelling energy that gains momentum and builds in magnitude as it moves forward. Through the lens of history and social movements, this group exhibition aims to contextualize individuals’ experiences and progression within the scope of collective consciousness and community upliftment. Continuum presents these contemporary artists as the evolutionary embodiment of their immense history and heritage - an empowered future informed by a dynamic past.
Presented by the Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and Residency Art Gallery in Inglewood, Continuum is rooted in the spirit of community collaboration and sparked by the friendship of co-curators Khalil Kinsey and Residency founder Rick Garzon.
Samuel Levi Jones // Extra, Extra, Fears and Lies
ABOUT THE KINSEY COLLECTION
The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection and Foundation is one of the preeminent institutions dedicated to the research, interpretation, and presentation of the African American experience globally. As a sought-after educational resource with nationwide institutional partnerships - kindergarten through college - the Kinsey Foundation for Art & Education assists academic and cultural institutions with increasing public awareness about African American history and culture. The foundation's work is executed via The Kinsey African American Art & History Collection, a traveling exhibition that has been experienced by over 15 million visitors. The collection is composed of rare primary source historical objects and artifacts dating from 1595 to present day, and fine art created by canonical African Americans artists from 1865 forward.
With education as a goal, The Kinsey African American Art and History Collection has been on national tour since 2006, exhibiting at 38 venues and seen by over 15 million visitors. It is the first privately held collection to show at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (Washington, D.C.), and EPCOT-Walt Disney World (Orlando, FL), where a portion of the collection was on view from 2013-2018. It is also the first exhibition to ever be displayed at SoFi Stadium in Inglewood, California, where it debuted for Super Bowl LVI and was opened to the public thereafter. The collection has been on view at such notable institutions as: the California African American Museum, The National Freedom Center (Cincinnati), The DuSable Museum of African American History (Chicago), The Norton Museum of Art (West Palm Beach) and Tacoma Art Museum (Tacoma, WA) to name a few. In 2017, the exhibition made its international debut at the University of Hong Kong Museum and Gallery in Hong Kong. Celebrities and personalities such as Whoopi Goldberg, Morgan Freeman, Kerry Washington, Katie Couric, Diane Sawyer, Angela Bassett, Zendaya and more have endorsed and lent support in the exposure of the collection. The collection has been cited in 3 national awards, including the President’s National Award for Museum and Library Services.
Installation Images
About the Artists
Alanna Fields
(b. 1990, Upper Marlboro, MD) Alanna Fields is a lens-based mixed media artist and archivist whose work investigates and challenges representations of Black queer identity and history through the lens of photography. Fields' work has been featured in exhibitions including Felix Art Fair, LA, UNTITLED Art Fair, Miami, MoCADA, and Pratt Institute. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar, 2020 Light Work AIR, and Baxter St. CCNY Workspace AIR. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and has given talks at the Aperture Foundation, Stanford University, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parson's New School, Syracuse University, and Rutgers University. Fields lives and works in New York City and is represented by Assembly.
Daniela Garcia-Hamilton
Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work revisits the rituals and traditions she experienced as a child of immigrant parents. Color and pattern is integrated throughout her work as she describes the vibrancy of her cultural traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to shifts in immigration policies, each shift in color for the backgrounds represents the color her family home in Guanajuato was painted, at the time of the policy change. Contemporary American tile patterns are used as the veil through which she remembers these events. As she went through her higher education at CSULB, she began to reflect on her traditions through the American lens. She received her BFA in Drawing and Painting from CSULB in 2018, shortly after she received her Teaching Credential from there as well. She currently works full time as a High School Art teacher in Thousand Oaks. Her work has been exhibited throughout the California Coast, with galleries such as Artbug Gallery, TAG Gallery, Luna Anais Gallery, Artshare LA and the Irvine Fine Arts Center.
Ever Velasquez
Ever's performance /photo series Baños and collage series use the visual language of Yoruba religious culture to explore the legacy of colonialism and its interweaving with the Lucumi religion, which she practices with a personal look into both personal spiritual look of ancestral self- care.
The inspiration for the works were sparked by dreams and spiritual divination. Ever is fully initiated crowned priestess of Obatala and Oshún. She studies so she can preserve and defend this knowledge that has survived colonization while her continued work cultivates traditions for generations to inherent. While resisting the prejudices that continue to battle to this day from colonial religions.
George Evans
George Evans developed his craft from drawing, painting, printmaking and photography. He is fascinated by technology as a creative medium because it opens new ways of visualizing the world around us. Evans currently produces digital prints, in which he combines photography and technology with various drawing techniques. His art has been displayed in museums and galleries, including M. Hanks Gallery, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the California African American Museum, Highways Performance Space, I.G.A. Gallery, and the Watts Towers Art Center. Charles White has been an important, influential figure in Evans' life and work.
Genevieve Gaignard
Genevieve Gaignard (b.1981) is a multidisciplinary artist who uses self-portraiture, collage, sculpture and installation to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race, beauty and cultural identity. Referencing regional and historical events as well as a personal archive as a biracial woman, Gaignard creates environments and performances that teeter between symbolic and autobiographical realms. She cleverly interrogates notions of skin privilege while challenging viewers to look more closely at racial realities. In recent work, Gaignard renders unsettling and violent stories, imagery, and trends of American culture into provocative objects of various mediums, including sound. The ensemble of her work shatters viewers' perceptions of culture and race, compelling them to piece together novel ways of perceiving the world and their place in it.
Since 2019, Gaignard has debuted six solo exhibitions and participated in numerous countrywide group shows. Her most recent solo exhibition, "Strange Fruit," opened with Vielmetter Los Angeles in March 2022 and marks her most ambitious body of work to date, both in scale and subject matter. Gaignard's work has appeared at: The Broad, CA; Stephen Friedman Gallery, UK; The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, TX; The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, DC; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; The Getty Center, CA; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, MA; and Prospect.4, LA. Gaignard received her BFA in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and her MFA in Photography from Yale University. She splits her time between her hometown of Orange, Massachusetts, and Los Angeles.
Glenn Hardy Jr.
Glenn Hardy Jr (b. 1995) is a self-taught artist born in Washington, DC, and raised in Waldorf, Maryland. He is a graduate of Towson University in Baltimore, MD. He is known for alluring, powerful paintings of black life liberated from the burdens of racial stereotypes and conflict. Figures and scenes are idealized, as Hardy depicts a world of black figures existing in comfort, in moments of relaxation, enjoyment, even triumph, free from the realities of existence as a marginalized minority in America. Hardy deliberately darkens the skin tone of his figures, irrespective of the skin tone of the various subjects. Hardy’s works are chronicles of lives lived black - black talents, black “comfort”, and black voice. In a style influenced by Kerry James Marshall and Ernie Barnes, Hardy’s work seeks to subvert, transcend, and ultimately replace stereotypical, negative depictions of American black life. In 2020, Hardy had his Los Angeles solo show debut at the United Talent Agency (UTA) Artist Space in Beverly Hills, CA. Hardy had his first solo show with Charlie James Gallery in early 2022.
Haili Francis
Haili Francis is an artist, scholar, and Harvard-trained cultural producer with specialties in African American and Contemporary Art. As an artist, she explores the beauty and legacy of Black people through portraiture. While pursuing her bachelor of fine arts at the University of Southern California, she completed a Getty Multicultural Internship at the California African American Museum and studied abroad in a fine arts program in Italy. While in Italy in 2007, Haili was trained in Italian Renaissance painting and printmaking techniques and exhibited her self-portrait in a group show at L'Accademia di Cortona.
Haili also received a graduate certificate in Nonprofit Management and Policy from USC and served on the Museum Services Council at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art from 2009-2011. Haili has worked extensively with the Kinsey Foundation for Arts and Education and their award-winning private African American art collection, The Kinsey African American Art and History Collection, which is one of the largest in the world.
As an arts advocate and public servant, Haili was appointed to the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities board in 2016 by Mayor Muriel Bowser of Washington, DC. During her three-year board appointment, she served on the Public Art, Executive, and Arts Education Committees and awarded over $60M in grants to artists and arts organizations throughout Washington, DC. Haili completed her masters in Museum Studies from Harvard University where she was awarded the Derek Bok Public Service Prize at commencement. In 2018, Martha's Table acquired her art into their private "Art That Inspires" collection. Currently, Haili works on fundraising and special projects at the Smithsonian, where she also exhibited her work at the Smithsonian Staff Art Show (2017). Her pieces are also included in private collections at the Washington D.C. Art Bank Collection and she is an ArtTable board member.
Jaimie Milner
TBorn and raised in Southern California, Jaimie Milner discovered photography through a high school elective. After high school, Milner attended the University of Southern California and received her Bachelors in Communication. In her studies at USC, she learned about the portrayal of race, gender and sexuality in the media and the effects it has on our society. It was then she realized she could have a direct influence on how people saw themselves and each other. Milner combined this new found knowledge and her love for the art of photography to capture the essence and stories of a people and their individual characteristics. Milner uses photographic portraiture as her primary medium by which she aspires to capture, empower and inspire the human spirit.
Joseph Sherman
Joseph Sherman (born. 1990) is an African, American artist living and working in Los Angeles. His practice engages photography, mixed media paintings, public + private archives, printed matter, and video. Themes of his work includes Black athleticism, Afro-diasporic imagery, and contemporary culture.
Sherman is a MFA candidate at Otis College of Art and Design (‘23). He holds a decade-long career as a commercial photographer where his work’s mission is to present a passionate panoramic of Black culture.
Lyndon Barrois Sr.
An AMPAS VFX Executive Branch member, Lyndon boasts a long career in art and animation. His film credits include The Matrix Trilogy, Happy Feet, and The Thing, where he directed pivotal character animation sequences in those features and many others (https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0057624/). He currently wins accolades for his unique gum wrapper sculptures and stop-motion animations of historic figures and events, whose portrait and Sportrait films are produced entirely on iPhones. Within the art world, his work has been featured in major institutions from the Pérez Art Museum Miami, to the MOCA Los Angeles, the Massachusetts MOCA, and most recently added to the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art’s permanent collection. Subjects of his work range from gender inclusion in the FIFA World Cup, to America’s Covid-19 crisis, racial uprisings and elections of 2020. A New Orleans native and HBCU graduate of Xavier University of Louisiana, Lyndon serves on the boards of The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, California Institute of the Arts (his MFA Alma mater), and on the new Academy Museum’s Inclusion Advisory Committee, fostering programs and supporting exhibitions.
Mike Reesé
Mike Reesé (pronounced Ree-say) grew up in Mid-City, Los Angeles. He began sharing his art at age 14 while customizing shoes, accessories, and selling his t-shirt designs to his classmates. Soon after, he attended Otis College of Art & Design to study communication arts. Reesé then pursued fine art as a professional practice and expanded his communication arts experience into additional art direction projects. Reesé is also the co-founder of DREAMHAUS LA, an arts non-profit organization that provides creative programming and supplies to schools and the communities of Central Los Angeles.
Reesé’s work challenges the spectrum of dualities such as life/death, refined/raw, gesture/form, art/design, and reality/fantasy. He utilizes unique components that are significant to his life to cultivate universal connectivity; motifs such as floral, taxidermy, clowns and his own alphabet to create proprietary worlds and identities through his art.
Nikkolos Mohammed
Nikkolos Mohammed is a fine artist based out of Los Angeles, California. He received his Bachelor’s of Fine Arts Degree with an emphasis in painting from Otis College of Art and Design in 2013. In 2014, he and fellow artist Mike Reesé founded DREAMHAUS, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization and multifaceted art collective. DREAMHAUS is dedicated to implementing arts as an educational tool and a vehicle toward universal innovation in South Los Angeles.
Nikkolos’ artist practice reclaims hybrid identities through creating hybrid forms. He has exhibited two solo shows in Los Angeles and exhibited in other markets, such as New York and Berlin. Nikkolos also serves as a writer and editor for publications such as Germany-based LeMile Magazine, as well as Hypebeast, an online publication. As a visual maker, he has collaborated with brands such as Coors Light in a global campaign, the National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) for a social justice cause, and has featured works in television and film sets.
Patrick Martinez
Patrick Martinez, (b. 1980 Pasadena, CA) earned his BFA with honors from Art Center College of Design in 2005. His work has been exhibited domestically and internationally in Los Angeles, Mexico City, San Francisco, Minneapolis, Miami, New York, Seoul, and the Netherlands, at venues including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Rollins Museum of Art, the Vincent Price Art Museum, the Museum of Latin American Art, LA Louver, Galerie Lelong & Co., MACLA, the Chinese American Museum and the Euphrat Museum of Art, among others. Patrick’s work resides in the permanent collections The Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles (MOCA), Rubell Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of American History, California African American Museum, The Autry Museum of the American West, Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College, Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Tucson Museum of Art, Pizzuti Collection of the Columbus Museum of Art, University of North Dakota Permanent Collection, JPMorgan Chase Art Collection, Crocker Art Museum, Escalette Permanent Collection of Art at Chapman University, Manetti-Shrem Museum of Art at UC Davis, the Rollins Museum of Art, and the Museum of Latin American Art. Patrick was awarded a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency on Captiva Island, FL. In the fall of 2021 Patrick was the subject of a solo museum exhibition at the Tucson Museum of Art. Patrick lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by Charlie James Gallery, Los Angeles.
Rashaun Rucker
Rashaun Rucker (b. 1978, Winston-Salem, NC) ) is a product of North Carolina Central University and Marygrove College. He makes photographs, prints and drawings and has won more than 40 national and state awards for his work. In 2008 Rucker became the first African American to be named Michigan Press Photographer of the Year. He also won a national Emmy Award in 2008 for documentary photography on the pit bull culture in Detroit. Rucker was a Maynard Fellow at Harvard in 2009 and a Hearst visiting professional in the journalism department at UNC-Chapel Hill in 2013. In 2014 Rucker was awarded an artist residency at the Red Bull House of Art. In 2016 Rucker was honored as a Modern Man by Black Enterprise magazine. In 2017 Rucker created the original artwork for the critically acclaimed Detroit Free Press documentary 12 and Clairmount. His work was recently featured in HBO’s celebrated series Random Acts of Flyness and Native Son. In 2019 Rucker was awarded the Red Bull Arts Detroit micro grant and was named a Kresge Arts Fellow for his drawing practice. In 2020 Rucker was named a sustainable arts foundation awardee. Rucker was a 2021 resident at the international studios and curatorial program (ISCP) in Brooklyn, New York and is currently a Mellon resident at the university of Michigan Institute of Humanities. Rucker’s diverse work is represented in numerous public and private collections.
Rikki Wright
Born in Alabama and based in Los Angeles, photographer and filmmaker Rikkí Wright explores notions of Blackness, femininity, beauty, and community. Her photos are finished with a distinctive warm color grade—a nod to the sepia tones of the colors she admired in her grandmother’s house growing up, and an outward manifestation of the warmth she feels toward her subjects. Rikkí has presented her films and artworks in Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, and London, among other cities. We spoke to Rikki about her ongoing series “Sis,” an exploration of Black sisterhood, and her larger mission to reclaim the narrative of Black femininity.
Samuel Levi Jones
Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, he earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from Taylor University and a B.F.A from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He received his MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012. His work is informed by historical source material and early modes of representation in documentary practice. He explores the framing of power structures and struggles between exclusion and equality by desecrating historical material, then re-imagining new works. Jones investigates issues of manipulation and the rejection of control in a broad sense. He is the recipient of the 2014 Joyce Alexander Wein artist prize awarded to him by the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work is in prominent private and public collections including SF MOMA, The Rubell Family Collection, LACMA, and the Studio Museum in Harlem to name a few.
Sharon Louise Barnes
Sharon Louise Barnes is a Los Angeles-based interdisciplinary artist who creates mixed media paintings, sculptural assemblages, and installations. Her work is known for its exploration of Social Abstraction and a continual experimentation with mediums, materials, and processes. She earned her MFA in Fine Arts from Otis College of Art & Design and a B.A. in Television-Film from CSULA. Barnes has been awarded fellowships and residencies that include the MacDowell Fellowship and Residency, the City of Los Angeles C.O.L.A. Master Artist Individual Fellowship, the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artists’ Residency, and the Spelman College Summer Art Colony at Taller Portobelo, Panama. Her work is held in the permanent collections of the Crocker Art Museum, the California African American Museum, the UCLA Ralph Bunche Center for African American Studies, the City of Inglewood, and the J. Paul Getty Research Institute Photo Archive. She has exhibited in galleries, colleges, universities, and museums including the California African American Museum, the Ontario Museum of Art & History, the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Inglewood City Hall, the Watts Towers Arts Center, UCLA, and California Polytechnic University, Pomona.
SlauCienega
Damien Carter, known to many in the City of LA as SlauCienega (based off the streets where he resides), is an artist from the Westside of Los Angeles. Photography is what he’s mostly known for, but he’ll tell you that he’s more than just a Photographer. From Producing, to Writing, to Directing and Editing, there’s nothing he can’t do.
Right after his High School graduation, A young SlauCi took a position with one of the largest television networks in the world. With a successful career for well over a decade, he never wanted his job (or job title) to define him. He knew that he had a bigger purpose and a gift that the world needed to witness. He would later leave the television world to bet on his art.
SlauCi carved out his own lane and has accomplished many things, but nothing brings him more joy than building within his community, giving back to others and sharing his art that he’s spent years and years perfecting.
Texas Isaiah
Texas Isaiah [He/They] is an award-winning, first-generation visual narrator born in Brooklyn, NY, and currently residing in Los Angeles, CA. In 2020, Texas Isaiah became one of the first Trans photographers to photograph a Vogue edition cover (Janet Mock, Patrisse Cullors, Jesse Williams, and Janaya Future Khan) and a TIME cover (Dwayne Wade and Gabrielle Union-Wade). He is one of the 2018 grant recipients of Art Matters and the 2019 recipient of the Getty Images: Where We Stand Creative Bursary grant. He is currently a 2020-21 artist in residence at The Studio Museum in Harlem.
In 2012, he created "BLACKNESS," a visual project that documented and celebrated the African diaspora's diversity across the spectrums of gender, sexuality, and ethnic heritage. At this time, he began to evaluate the broad visual needs of Black people, specifically Black trans, non-binary and gender-expansive individuals, within the larger photographic canon. As Texas Isaiah found himself photographing individuals who thought they didn't have a place as a sitter within photography, his approach began to prioritize a more thoughtful and compassionate visual world. He not only believes everyone has a right to be photographed if they consent, but he believes photography can be a healing mechanism despite the historical violence it has inflicted on communities. Although he has worked in a studio and various indoor settings, his interest in photographing individuals outdoors comes from personal curiosity and connection with nature.
As an autodidact, Texas Isaiah is interested in paving unconventional paths within the art, editorial, and commercial industries. He hopes to continue his photographic journey and create more affirming and supportive work environments for others because it allows us to self-actualize and meet our highest potential.
Troy Lamarr Chew II
Troy Lamarr Chew II (b. 1992 in Los Angeles, CA, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) explores the legacy of the African Diaspora and its reverberations throughout American culture. His work looks methodically at systems of coded communication and how this is translated and mistranslated both within the Diaspora and the mainstream.
Chew’s rich artistic visual language draws inspiration largely from Black culture and its history. A highly skilled realist, inspired by European painting techniques, Chew uses these art historical traditions to reframe their exclusion of Blackness. In his Out the Mud series, hand dyed and sewn cloths from West Africa are replicated in a trompe l’oeil fashion, their patterns “torn” away to reveal portrayals of contemporary Black culture and resistance. In another series, Slanguage, the artist paints Flemish style vanitas picturing everyday objects, coded in hip-hop lexicon. His most recent Three Crowns series explores the social history of cosmetic dentistry and the use of grills in hip-hop culture. The artist’s lush and luminous oil paintings embody the energy of this infinitely re-mixed yet deeply rooted genre.).
Vic Brown
A Los Angeles native, Vic Brown found his drive for the arts at a young age, inspired by the sights and sounds of the South Central Los Angeles neighborhood in which he was raised. Vic began his creative journey as a visual storyteller by drawing, with his love for Graffiti Art and Hip Hop guiding him.
Vic continued developing this passion when he chose film and television editorial as a career. As an editor, Vic spends his days searching for the best shot to tell the story, this lead him to find his passion for composition and cameras. Vic quickly purchased his first camera and began capturing live music events after work and on the weekends, however, he discovered that he was most fulfilled when he simply walked around his Venice Beach neighborhood recording life in the streets.
Today, Vic continues to feed his passion, spending time in the streets of LA in pursuit of capturing that perfect moment.
Yasmine Nasser Diaz
Yasmine Nasser Diaz is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice weaves between culture, class, gender, religion, and family. She uses mixed media collage, immersive installation, fiber etching, and video to juxtapose disparate cultural references and to explore the connections between personal experience and larger social and political structures. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the rural highlands of southern Yemen, Diaz is interested in complicated narratives of third-culture identity and their precarious invisibility/hyper-visibility. Diaz is a recipient of the Harpo Visual Artists Grant and the California Community Foundation Visual Artist Fellowship and has works included in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, The University of California Los Angeles, and the Arab American National Museum. Her work has been featured in HyperAllergic, Artsy, and Artillery Magazine. She lives and works in Los Angeles.