They know from whence they came
Featuring Kevin Cole, Ato Ribeiro, Freddie Styles, and Jamele Wright Sr..
29 September – 2 October 2022
Featured Artists:
1. Kevin Cole received his B.S. from the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, an M.A. in art education from the University of Illinois at Urbana, and an M.F.A. from Northern Illinois University. Within the last 32 years, he has received 27 grants and fellowships, 66 awards in art, 51 teaching awards, and over 45 public art commissions. He just received the 2020 Brenda and Larry Thompson from the Georgia Museum in Athens, GA, and the 2019 Nexus Award from the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center in Atlanta.
His artwork has been featured in more than 475 exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Cole’s artwork is included in more than 3600 public, private, and corporate collections throughout the United States and abroad. Public collections include the new National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington DC, The Georgia Museum, Athens, GA, High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA.; William Jefferson Clinton Library, Little Rock, Ark.; Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock, Ark.; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Conn.; The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, La.; The David C Driskell Center University of Maryland at College Park; Dayton Institute of Art, Dayton, Ohio; Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, Philadelphia, Pa.; The Georgia Museum of Contemporary Art, Atlanta, Ga.; Corcoran Museum in Washington, D.C. and the Tampa Museum in Tampa, Fla.
2. Ato Ribeiro (b. 1989) is a multidisciplinary artist working in a variety of media, including sculptural installation, drawing, and printmaking. He works between Accra, Ghana, and Atlanta, Georgia, where he is currently serving as a 2022/2023 MOCA GA Fellow. He was recently a MINT 2021 Leap Year Artist, and the 2017 Mercedes-Benz Financial Services Emerging Artist Award recipient, Artist in Resident at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany, and received fellowships at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT, The Studios at MASS MoCA in North Adams, MA and the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. His work has been exhibited at Lisa Sette Gallery (Phoenix, AZ), Nubuke Foundation (Accra, Ghana), Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI), the N’Namdi Center for Contemporary Art (Detroit, MI), the Rozsa Center (Houghton, MI), and Anastasia Tinari Projects (Chicago, IL) among others.
3. Freddy Styles is an award-winning horticulturist, and his work reflects nature’s forms, textures, patterns and colors, revealing how we are all connected physically and spiritually to the earth. Texture is a dominant element throughout his work. In Styles's words, “I think of all the little textures as secrets. What things would they say to me through touch, colors…the use of natural fibers, and what naturally happens to them when you, for instance, tear, crumple, tuck, or gather it, or when a leaf disintegrates or when bark weathers…my observing texture is like going from the general to the specific.”
Freddy works with the roots of plants to supplement his brush. He is a fluent colorist, fearless of juxtaposing and harmonizing hues in spatial intervals that establish the overall structure of his mystical landscapes. By paying homage to his childhood experiences of communing with the earth, we are graced with an amazing illumination of nature.
4. Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22, Jamele Wright, Sr., moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. While raising a family, Jamele produced art, jazz, and poetry events throughout Atlanta. Realizing that there were many young artists not being represented, he started a gallery called Neo-Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year, Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After a number of solo and group exhibitions, Mr. Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History. He concentrated on African and African American Contemporary Art. Jamele graduated with a Master of Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. He completed a fellowship at Project for Empty Spaces in Newark, New Jersey.