Summer Open - 2020

Melannie Bello is a Colombian-American artist born and raised in Miami, FL. As a multidisciplinary artist, her art practice revolves around painting and layering assemblage. Influenced by concepts of renewal versus removal, she aims to document the present environment by creating a fragile capsule and vessel of movement, light, and feeling through her work. Melannie recently obtained her BFA from New World School of the Arts. 

German Caceres is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on painting and image-making. His most recent paintings center around using the sky as a setting for recontextualizing and abstracting familiar forms and imagery. German is a co-founder of Midnight Thrift, a production team that creates public programming and activations that merge ideas of nightlife, fashion, and conceptual art. 

Beatriz Chachamovits is a Brazilian artist and a marine researcher who lives and works in Miami, FL. She makes drawings, sculptures, and installations that investigate and highlight coral reef destruction and degradation. She has a permanent sculpture piece at the Underwater Museum of Art in Grayton Beach State Park in Santa Rosa Beach, FL, and is currently featured in the exhibition Transitional Nature at the Frost Art Museum in Miami, FL. 

Edny Jean-Joseph is an artist and designer born, raised, and currently residing in Miami, FL. His artwork often deals with historically volatile and traumatic experiences presented as beautiful imagery and he often uses irony as a catalyst for introspection. The materials used by Joseph stems from resources that are available to him at the time, no matter the complexity of the project.

Amanda Linares is a Cuban-born visual artist who currently lives and works in Miami. She first graduated in printmaking from San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba. The experience of leaving her birth country transformed her work’s practice, shifting her interest towards issues of identity, displacement, absence, and reconnection. She recently graduated with a BFA in Graphic Design from New World School of the Arts.

Philip Lique is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice focuses on Western civilization, religion, occult practices, and art history, themes that often become source material for sculpture, installation, printmaking, and independent publications. Philip works with EXILE Books, as well as other organizations, artists, and institutions as a freelancer to produce exhibits, programming, printed matter, and objects. Hailing from New Haven, CT, Lique has lived and worked in Miami since 2016. He holds a BFA in Graphic Design from Paier College of Art and an MFA in Painting from Western Connecticut State University.

Sue Montoya was born in Los Angeles, CA and raised between Tegucigalpa, Honduras and Miami, FL. She received a BFA from New World School of the Arts in Visual Arts in 2014 and her MFA from the University of Florida in 2018. Her practice revolves around architecture, feminism, ecology, and labor (physical and emotional). In 2015, she co-created Feminist Pizza Party, a radical zine-making workshop that has held events at several cultural institutions including YoungArts Foundation, HistoryMiami, Lowe Art Museum, and ICA Miami. 

Mateo Nava is a Miami-based artist working in painting, drawing, collage, and sculpture. In 2017, he earned a BFA from Cooper Union, where his work began to focus on pattern and iconography in relation to Latin American visual traditions. He has completed residencies at Yale University's Norfolk Summer School of Art, YoungArts, and Vermont Studio Center. This year, Mateo was a recipient of the YoungArts Jorge M. Perez Award, his work appeared in New American Paintings, and he recently completed a residency at ProjectArt Miami.

Aryal Novak is a Melbourne-born, Miami-based artist. She has a BFA in Painting from New World School of the Arts. Through oil painting, she captures moments from life, literature, and philosophy, focusing on the subject of landscape and themes of isolation. Her work has been included in several recent exhibitions including Structures and Transformations at New World School of the Arts and The Future Ain’t What It Used To Be at The Kampong, National Tropical Botanical Garden.

Khánh Nguyên H. Vũ (goes by Vũ) was born in Bien Hoa, Viet Nam and currently lives and works in Miami, FL. By applying a poetic and often metaphorical language to their work, Vũ tries to develop forms that are based on subjective associations and formal parallels, which incite the viewer to make their own personal connections. Their work questions the conditions of appearance in the context of contemporary visual culture in which images, representations, and ideas normally function. 

William Osorio is a Miami-based artist born in Cuba. He initiated his studies at the School of Fine Arts in Holguin, later choosing to pursue his dreams by emigrating to the US. His artistic practice consists of a game of concealment and revelation of the subject in an attempt to analyze human behavior. The human figure as a pictorial element becomes an unavoidable reference. William recently completed a residency at Anderson Ranch Arts Center and is represented by LnS Gallery in Miami. 

Almaz Wilson, currently based in Miami, is an artist committed to exploring intimacy, loss and resilience, and identity-in-flux in place-making and shape-making. Almaz holds a BA in Biological Anthropology from the University of Maryland and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the University of Florida where she was a recipient of the Board of Education Fellowship and Graduate Student Fellowship. Almaz has been an Artist-in-Residence at Vermont Studio Center, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at  ProjectArt. In 2020, she received a grant from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts to complete her project, backroads, a collection of new work that explores emotional intimacy as a source of power and a viable route from one unknown landscape to another.

Photos by: Pedro Wazzan, 2020.