if you're in Miami

Opening Reception:
Thursday, October 11, 7-10pm

Artist Talk:
Saturday, October 13, 2-4pm

Artists: Elizabeth Axtman, Lauren Woods, Mansita Diawara, Nekisha Durrett, Stanley Squirewell, Bayeté Ross Smith, Russell Watson, Heather Hart, and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum

Off Color
October 11-November 20, 2007

Diaspora Vibe Gallery
3938 N Miami Avenue
Miami, FL 33127

www.diasporavibe.net

Miami, FL.- Diaspora Vibe is pleased to present Off Color an exhibition designed to highlight nine international emerging artists (Elizabeth Axtman, Lauren Woods, Mansita Diawara, Nekisha Durrett, Stanley Squirewell, Bayeté Ross Smith, Russell Watson, Heather Hart, and Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum) who create video and photo based work that considers the complexities of the body politic in the contemporary age. These artists each take a very nuanced approach to their practice in which technology, space, time, and abstraction manifest in various conceptual and aesthetic forms. This exhibition is a curatorial project by Hank Willis Thomas and Kalia Brooks. Hank Willis Thomas is an artist that lives and works in San Francisco and New York and a recipient of the New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship Award. Kalia Brooks is a New York based curator and writer and a Helena Rubinstein Fellow in Critical Studies in the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Elizabeth Axtman (b.1980) received her MFA in 2006 from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She creates photo and video based images that attempt to represent the spectrum of emotions within the African American experience. Being of mixed race, she in interested in exploring the accessibility to race privilege. Axtman uses identity as material in the construction of her work. Her work will be featured in Black Is Black Ain't (2008) at the Renaissance Society, Chicago, Illinois. She was recently awarded a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2006.

San Francisco based artist Lauren Woods (b. 1979) hybrid media projects use video and 16-mm film as well as appropriated imagery to reflect on, re-envision, and rewrite the history of a postcolonial and global society. Her work, in the form of single-channel projections and large-scale multichannel video installations, contemplate and question cultural and collective memory and examine sociopolitical discourses. Woods earned her MFA in 2006 from the San Francisco Art Institute. Her work will be featured in the upcoming exhibition, Out The Box, at the California African American Museum in Los Angeles.

Mansita Diawara makes images that are grounded in the literary. She pulls inspiration from scholars such as James Baldwin and Benjamin Buchloh to construct visual portals that inscribe apocalyptic messages. As anartist living and working in New York City she uses her camera to document sites that have become popularized by death, creating photographic eulogies to an absurd end. Diawara received her BFA in 2004 from the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She was awarded a residency with the Whitney Independent Study Program in 2006.

Nekisha Durrett's (b. 1976) large-scale portraits reveal her interest in the ubiquity of popular media. She has arrived at a process that combines drawing and photography to illustrate fictive characters that bear likeness to graphic logos. Durrett earned her BFA at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York. She went on to earn her MFA in photography in 2000 at the University of Michigan as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. Her work was most recently featured in Vote With Your Art at the OK Harris Gallery in New York.

Stanley Squirewell (b. 1978) is dissolving and re-fabricating images that deal with the complex socio-economic issues and control mechanisms of self-perpetual slavery. He works in a combination of found objects, furniture, and old and new visual technology to assemble images that are metaphorically related to the condition of people of African ancestry. Squirewell received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art, Hoffberger School of Painting. His work was featured in a solo exhibition at Warehouse Gallery in Washington, DC 2005). Squirewell lives and works in Baltimore, MD.

Bayeté Ross Smith's (b. 1976) photographic portraits borrow from "official" identification portraiture like passport, driver's license and mug shot photographs. He uses the camera to document the ways in which identity is created, interpreted and expressed in the world. Ross Smith is curious about the individual'ssense of self, rather than the assumptions that are placed upon that individual. He received his MFA from the California College of the Arts in 2004. His workhas been exhibited throughout the United States and internationally including the Goethe Institute in Accra, Ghana, a performance at the Zacheta NationalGallery of Art, in Warsaw Poland, the Leica Gallery in New York and The San Francisco Arts Commission.

Russell Watson (b. 1973) is a multimedia artist that crisscrosses genres of performance, sculpture, photography and video. His practice investigates thepersistence of ancestral memory and its relationship to the performative body. Rooted in the visual culture of the Caribbean his work seeks an idiosyncratic meta narrative that allows for the transcendence of the body as it strives for its full expressive potential. Originally from Barbados, Watson received his MFA inFilm, Video, and New Media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He currently lives and works in New York.

Through her installations, Heather Hart (b. 1975), explores the individual perception of reality and its influence on the acceptance of truth. She is fascinated by the ways humans relate to each other and in turn relate to materials by embellishing utilitarian spaces that merge physical, tactile, and psychological contradictions. Hart is currently a MFA candidate at Rutgers University. Her work was recently featured in an exhibition entitled, United Black Girls, at the Rush Arts Gallery in New York (2007). She was awarded an Emerging Artist Fellowship forSocrates Sculpture Park and a Skowhegan Fellowship at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrum's work alludes to histories that are ancestral and archaeological, while blurring them with stories that, in their urgency and immediacy, conjure current and impending moments. Bodies, as figures, become whispering coconspirators busy at the task of defacing dominant histories while themselves refusing to be obliterated, removed, or otherwise worked over. Sunstrum was born in Mochudi, Botswana and grew up in different parts of southern Africa and southwest Asia. She completed her MFA in May 2007 at the Mount Royal School of Art at Maryland Institute College of Art. Sunstrum was awarded a Skowhegan Fellowship to attend the Skowhegan School ofPainting and Sculpture.

Diaspora Vibe Gallery is located in Miami's Design District at 3938 North Miami Avenue, second level. An opening reception takes place on Thursday, October 11th, 2007 from 7pm - 10pm. An artist talk and slide presentation will take place on Saturday, October 13th, from 2pm - 4pm. The exhibition, reception and artist talk are free and open to the public. For more information, please call 305.573.4046 or log onto www.diasporavibe.net

Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator is supported in part by the National Endowment for the Arts; Artography; Arts in a Changing America; a grant and documentation program of Leveraging Investments in Creativity, funded by the Ford Foundation; Surdna Foundation; Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs Council; Miami-Dade County Mayor and Board of County Commissioners; Funding Arts Network; Dade Community Foundation; Dade Community Foundation's John S. & James L. Knight Foundation Donor-Advised Fund; Carl and Toni Randolph; and Dr. Michael Hill. Founded by its current Director/Curator, Rosie Gordon-Wallace, Diaspora Vibe is currently celebrating its 11th anniversary.