The New Contemporaries Vol. III

SEPTEMBER 23RD through NOVEMBER 19th, 2023

The third installment of The New Contemporaries—Residency’s flagship exhibition series, showcasing new commissions from emerging artists based across the United States—features work by 18 rising talents: Edmund Arevalo, Jonni Cheatwood, Cash Cooper, Maya Fuji, Daniela Garcia Hamilton, Rugiyatou Jallow, Gbenga Komolafe, Spandita Malik, Will Maxen, Nikkolos Mohammed, Kariny Padilla, Ronnie Robinson, Jacob Rochester, LaRissa Rogers, Esperanza Rosas (Runsy), Kristofferson San Pablo, Ashley Teamer, Michael Tran.

The works on view spotlight the various modes through which Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and Asian artists define self-authorship in resistance to fetishization, commodification, and appropriation within the mainstream media landscape. Reflecting upon their lived experiences and positionality, the participating artists have been tasked to represent how their practices embody their expression and movement within our nation’s evolving political landscape, whether through self-care, protection, spirituality, or protest.

Installation Images

Photos by Elon Schoenholz

Opening Day Performance

Autumn Breon

Autumn Breon (b. 1989 Los Angeles, CA) is a multidisciplinary artist that investigates the visual vocabulary of liberation through a queer Black feminist lens. Using performance, sculpture, and public installation, Breon invites audiences to examine intersectional identities and Diasporic memory. 

An exercise in radical spectacle, her 2022 performance (Don’t) Use Me, was the culmination of the artist’s qualitative examination of time through the lens of Black women’s labor. Due to the racial and gender pay gaps, Black women are typically paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to white men. It takes about eight months into the next calendar year for a Black woman to earn what a white man earns in 365 days. To reclaim and further quantify this lost time, Breon invited Black women to respond to the following question: What would you do with eight extra months of paid time? Autumn Breon imagines her work as immersive invitations for the public to join in the reimagining and creation of systems that make current oppressive systems obsolete. Breon has created commissions for Art Production Fund, Frieze Art Fair, and the ACLU of Southern California. Breon’s performance history includes Hauser & Wirth, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and the Water Mill Center. She is an alumna of Stanford University where she studied Aeronautics & Astronautics and researched aeronautical astrobiology applications. Breon is a recipient of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart Fellowship for Abolition & the Advancement of the Creative Economy.

About the Artists

Will Maxen

Will is a visual artist currently based in Houston TX. Born in Waterbury CT, he holds an MFA in Art Studio from University of California, Davis and a BA in Illustration from Central Connecticut State University where he played Division 1 football. Prior to attending UC Davis, he worked as a high school art teacher for three years in Northern Virginia and Connecticut while coaching both track & field and football. Will has exhibited with Museum of Northern California Art and Open Source Artspace New Haven.  In his work, he draws from family photographs, everyday life, and art historical references to explore the complex nuances between people’s interactions within their own levels of consciousness and throughout their surrounding environments. Will uses memory to create pieces that straddle temporalities and paint as a medium whose dexterity helps the subject matter achieve its range of effects and evoke the fluidity of honest, turbulent emotion. Dynamics of intimacy emerge in my work as the painted figures, flowers, and spaces simultaneously induce, interrupt, obstruct, bridge, and erase traditional lines of demarcation between race and color, time and dimension, subject and viewer, moment to moment, and questions of belonging.

Spandita Malik

Spandita Malik is a visual artist from India. Her work is concerned with the current global socio-political state of affairs with an emphasis on women’s rights and gendered violence. Malik specializes in process based work in photography, recently with photographic surface embroideries and collaborations with women in India. Malik’s work in expanded documentary and social-practice consciously emanates from the idea of decolonising the eye and aesthetic surrounding documentary photography of India.

Malik has been awarded Women Photograph Project Grant; The 30: New and Emerging Photographers Award; En Foco Photography Fellowship and Firecracker Photographic Grant. Malik was nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award and was a finalist for the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2021). She was chosen for Charlotte Street Foundation, Silver Arts Projects Residency, NY; The Center for Photography at Woodstock, Woodstock, NY; Bemis Center of Contemporary Arts; Baxter St Workspace Residency and Feminist Incubator Residency. Her work has been displayed at Kemper Museum of Contemporary Arts, Rockefeller Capital Management, Somerset House-Photo London, Jane Lombard Gallery and Sharjah Art Foundation. Malik’s work has been featured in Artsy, Art Spiel, Buzzfeed, Crafts Magazine, Elephant Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, Marie Claire, Musée Magazine, The Times (UK) and Washington Post; she was named ‘Ones to Watch 2020’ by British Journal of Photography. She received her MFA in Photography from Parsons School of Design in 2019.

Jacob Rochester

As a multi-disciplinary artist, Jacob Rochester brings to life the rich and complex history of black Americana through his paintings. Born in Bloomfield, CT, Rochester is deeply passionate about exploring the evolution of culture at the turn of the 21st century. His vivid portraits and still lifes offer a compelling glimpse into the cultural icons and artifacts that define the era of black America's emergence as a global standard for innovation in entertainment, fashion, and pop culture. His work draws from a range of influences and often traditional techniques that drive his distinctive style. 

Ashley Teamer

Ashley Teamer is an artist from New Orleans, LA. Her collages explore the relationships between the body, nature, space, and time. She uses painting, sculpture, photography, and sound to creatively intervene with indoor and outdoor architecture revealing the malleability of our built environment. Through layering images, Teamer's invented landscapes reveal relationships between divergent moments. She has been an Artist-in-Residence at and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and the Joan Mitchell Center (2018). Teamer received a BFA from Boston University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2022.

Cash-Cooper

Cash-Cooper (b. 1990, New York, NY) is an artist devoted to furthering the shared history of humanity, primarily through large-scale paintings. His work, informed by grand narratives of spirituality and anchored in the broad, inclusive practice of “worship”, simultaneously borrows techniques and approaches from Silver Age comics, manga, and Dutch genre paintings . The characters Cash-Cooper introduces en masse, stylized in acrylic, ink and gouache, operate within an immanent, transcendent universe.

Cash - Cooper earned his BFA from Cal-Arts in 2012 and is currently pursuing his MFA at the Roski School of Arts at USC.  Cash Cooper has had various solo shows throughout Los Angeles, China and Singapore. 

Esperanza Rosas (Runsy)

Esperanza Rosas, also known by her creative moniker of Runsy, is a Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist specializing in drawing and design. Her work encompasses the layered intersectionality of her identity as a Mexican-American woman from the Southside of Chicago.

Through the artistic realms of graphite illustration and clean, minimalistic design, Runsy’s art reimagines the intricate nuances of Mexican iconography and Chicago culture. The treasured cultural symbols that appear in Runsy’s work represent the unabashed pride of Mexicanidad in America, and its influence that will continue to persevere through generations to come.

Jonni Cheatwood

Jonni Cheatwood is a Los-Angeles based painter who mixes oil, oil sticks, acrylics and textile in his works. Cheatwood’s practice is a labor-intensive process, sewing canvases with found textiles that reference both interior and exterior spaces. As these canvases are stretched the different fabrics create unexpected textures and shapes, adding a further level of abstraction. As viewers attempt to distinguish between the painted canvas and the printed textile, they are drawn in, finding themselves encompassed by the large-scale canvas and scenes. 

As Cheatwood dives deeper into figuration, his loose brushwork and gestural abstraction subtlety convey the full range of emotion experienced by the subjects in his portraits, as well as the viewers of these scenes. The texture of his brushstrokes combined with the sharp lines of their forms has allowed the artist to create characters that are at once unrecognizable while still universally relatable. 

As a self-taught artist, Cheatwood’s process is one of experimentation and steady evolution over time. It is a dynamic undertaking that spans mediums and aesthetics, creating textured and color-filled pieces that greet the viewer head-on, ready to engage in conversation. Cheatwood’s works evoke a warm, nostalgic sensation like browsing through one’s family book photographs, and although the people depicted in his works aren’t specifically always based on his own relatives or friends, the works are still about people he can relate to. Jonni Cheatwood was born in 1986 in Thousand Oaks, California. He graduated from Arizona State in 2011. He currently lives and works in Los Angeles, California

LaRissa Rogers

LaRissa Rogers (b. 1996) is a Black and Korean antidisciplinary artist raised in Ruckersville, VA. She is currently based between Virginia and Los Angeles. She holds a BFA in Painting and Printmaking and BIS in International Fashion Buying from Virginia Commonwealth University. Rogers has exhibited and performed in institutions such as Frieze Seoul (Korea), Documenta 15 (Germany), Fields Projects (NY), M+B Gallery (CA), 1708 Gallery (VA), Second Street Gallery (VA), Black Ground (Colombia), W Doha (Qatar), The Fronte Arte Cultura (CA), LACE (CA), Grand Central Art Center (CA), and the Museum of Contemporary Art (VA) among others. She received the Visual Arts fellowship at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts (2022) and the Black Artists and Designers Guild Creative Futures Grant (2022). Rogers attended the BEMIS Center of Contemporary Art Residency (2022), Black Spatial Relics Residency (2022), and SOMA (2019), among others. Rogers received her MFA in New Genres at the University of California Los Angeles.

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 (https://www.dreamhausla.org/), 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 l, Chicago 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.

Rugiyatou Jallow

Rugiyatou Ylva Jallow (b.1990 in Stockholm, Sweden), currently residing in Los Angeles, is a Swedish- Gambian visual artist known primarily for her work with acrylic and oil paint.
Her bold self-portraits ensnare emotivity as each layer resonates the artist's internal and outward struggle with feeling distanced from the world around her as she tries to reconcile the dichotomies of bridging multiple cultures as a mixed woman.

Rugiyatou was raised by her Gambian father and step mother who imparted West African values and culture while residing her whole life in Sweden. The artist credits her Swedish mother and grandmother as being early artistic influences in her life, inspiring her to start painting at an early age. Her upbringing became her inspiration to portray black subjectivity and explore her half-Swedish and half-Gambian identity.

Jallow’s use of color to portray black, white, and mixed skin with the thread, is acting as a visual representation of equality and connection across races. The bright colors specifically are a further representation of the artist’s connection to nature and feeling of belonging on this Earth.

Ronnie Robinson

Ronnie Robinson’s energetic, expressive portraits are comfortably ambiguous; collapsing time and space to feel familiar yet unfamiliar. Robinson works from photographs as well as his memory to capture portraits of people who would or could have been, with an emotional intensity that is matched only by the earnestness of his brush work. Often taking a pose from a photograph, Robinson applies his own imagination to the scenario to conjure a character with the familiarity of a family member, sprinkled with a touch of peculiarity.

Robinson’s paintings themselves are immediate, loose, bold and charged. Often working with a ferocious energy, Robinson works and reworks the surfaces of his canvases multiple times before settling on a final composition. Through this subtle and nuanced use of colour, the works end up achieving a sepia warmth reminiscent of vintage photographs, only adding to the feeling that these people once existed and engaged with each other. With a back- ground in the dramatic arts, Robinson approaches paint- ing like a method actor, putting himself in his subject’s shoes to create a narrative and engage with the past, whilst firmly looking towards the future. Working on multi- ple canvases at one time, Robinson takes on different guises to explore different roles and characters within the black community, whilst still keeping the works somewhat autobriographical; an exercise for Robinson to work through and learn from just as much as the viewer.
Ronnie Robinson has previously featured in shows at The Know Contemporary in Los Angeles and also had a solo exhibition at The Cabin LA with Danny

Daniela GarcÍa-Hamilton

Daniela Garcia Hamilton (b.1995) is a first generation Mexican-American painter. Her work explores 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 traditions through portraits of her family members. Settings are fabricated to draw attention to social-political commentary on past and current immigrant experiences. As she completed her B.F.A. at CSULB, she began to reflect on her traditions through the American lens. American tile patterns are used as the veil through which she remembers these events. Her work has been exhibited throughout the US. and abroad, with galleries such as Artbug Gallery, TAG Gallery, Luna Anais Gallery, Artshare LA, Residency Art Gallery and Thinkspace Projects. She is represented by Residency Art Gallery and presented her first solo project with them during EXPO Chicago in 2023. She was published in the New American Painters for the West coast issue in 2023, and was the recipient of the Lakers In The Paint, contributing artist and exhibitor award.

Gbenga Komolafe

Gbenga Komolafe is a Nigerian artist based in Los Angeles exploring the intersections of sculpture, film, and site-specific installation. They draw inspiration from the traditional African ritual practices rooted from their Yoruba ancestors and the innovative craftsmanship of mid-20th-century queer and Black American communities. Through their introspective and research-driven practice, they continue the often unrewarded labor of their queer and diasporic lineage, to envision and actualize radical futures through both embrace of tradition and continual experimentation.

Their practice builds on the Black traditions of batik, quilting, and cult imagery by implementing modern techniques like digital manipulation and assemblage – combining motifs from varying historical canons to construct new narratives for today’s Black queer community. Throughout their sprawling approach to medium is a seamless throughline of textures from nature, abstracted figures, and transcultural symbols. They continue to be intrigued by the stories these tell when considered alongside the shifting and ephemeral narratives surrounding blackness and queerness in the zeitgeist.

Maya Fuji

Born in Japan and raised in the California Bay Area, Maya Fuji is inspired by both her cultural heritage and the exploration of the liminal space she lives in as an issei (first-generation) mixed-race woman in the United States. She is fascinated by traditional Japanese mythology and folklore, as well as Showa and Heisei–era subcultures, and expands on these themes within the context of her personal experiences. A recurring theme in her work is the exploration of what forms our sense of identity, and how that can shift during one’s lifetime on account of generations living abroad. Imbuing the complexity of being multicultural, multinational, and multiracial is central to her works, as her paintings contrast the nostalgia of childhood memories with underlying feelings of being a foreigner simultaneously navigating Japanese and American communities. She illuminates self-discovery through narration and investigation of the otherness she has felt throughout her life, and uses it as a catalyst to reconnect with and reclaim space within her heritage.

Solo exhibitions include SWIM Gallery in San Francisco and YOD Gallery in Osaka. She has shown group exhibitions with New Image Gallery in Los Angeles in addition to Glass Rice and Hashimoto Contemporary in San Francisco. Fuji has been featured in publications such as New American Paintings, Friend Of The Artist, It's Nice That, Immigrantly Podcast, and was the winner of the Innovative Grant and was shortlisted for the Hopper Prize in 2023.

Edmund Arevalo

Edmund Arevalo is a first generation Filipino American artist based in Los Angeles. His paintings, sculptures and installations tell the stories of colonial histories, familial narratives, and the Filipino diaspora. Arevalo combines portraits of family and archival materials to retell and challenge traditional narratives of migration and cultural assimilation. He is the recipient of the Quinn Emmanuel Artist Fellowship (2023), and a Not Real Art Grant (2019). His work has recently been included in South Land Vol.2 (2022) at Charlie James Gallery, Barrio mi Barrio (2022) at South Gate Museum, and Tambayan Vol.2 (2022) at Residency Art Gallery. Arevalo’s work has also been exhibited at public institutions such as the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Vincent Price Art Museum, Torrance Art Museum and Los Angeles City College. Edmund Arevalo received his B.A. in Art from California State University Dominguez Hills (2023).

Kariny Padilla

Kariny Padilla is a visual artist born in the Dominican Republic. Kariny was raised in Queens, NY, where she currently resides. She attended the Fashion Institute of Technology and graduated in 2021 with a BFA. Kariny’s paintings touch on themes of friendship, girlhood, and naïveté.

Kristofferson San Pablo

Kristofferson San Pablo is a Filipino-American artist based in Los Angeles.  San Pablo’s work moves between the autobiographical (portraits of the people & places around him) & observations of the world through his lens as an observer/participant in Pop culture.  In his work, scenes of everyday life evoke ideas about identity, beauty & humor but are met with ideas about authority, classism & piracy.  To San Pablo, those oppositions serve as a way to create a type of light hearted but also serious narrative that illustrate his experience growing up in a California filled with the pros & cons of beauty, sunlight, music, TV & traffic.  San Pablo received his MFA from Art Center College of Design & currently lives & works in Los Angeles.

Michael Tran

Michael Thế Khôi Trần is an interdisciplinary artist who resides in Los Angeles/Orange County. He received his BFA in Drawing and Painting from California State University, Long Beach. Tran’s work explores how the displaced Vietnamese population through community has created a home in Little Saigon, California. He achieves this by referencing local spaces such as supermarkets, temples, and swap meets, and how his community exists within these locations. The Asian community is often reduced to an aesthetic, such as orientalism and being a model minority. Challenging these standards, Tran injects himself into these frequently inhabited spaces wearing a traditional Vietnamese garment, Áo dài. Wearing the Áo dài in these spaces, he has reclaimed his culture and re-appropriated these aesthetic standards placed upon the Asian community.