The Complicated Beauty of Truth-Telling: New Haven’s NXTHVN Announces 2022–’23 Fellows and Curators
“Blue chip” artist Titus Kaphar and his brother were on a trip to New York City to see his acclaimed work hanging in his galleries when they were followed, then confronted and searched, by undercover police officers. The officers were looking for stolen art, they said, because they had “been receiving complaints” that “two black men were walking in and out of galleries.”
That should suggest a little of what’s at stake and the kind of barriers and tripwires black and brown artists are likely to face trying to develop careers and get work seen.
“Beauty is complicated because of how we define it,” says Kaphar, who with Jason Price, founded NXTHVN, a 40,000 square-foot incubator for emerging artists and curators of color headquartered in New Haven, CT. It is one of the only programs in the country that unites curators and artists, furnishing them with fundamentals to thrive at pivotal points of their careers.
“Beauty” may sound like an unlikely instrument of social justice here, but not if, like Kaphar, you take Plato or Keats (“beauty is truth, and truth beauty”) at their word. For Kaphar, beauty and truth-telling intertwine at the heart of NXTHVN’s mission. “I believe there is beauty in hearing the voices of people who haven’t been heard,” Kaphar says.
To that end, NXTHVN recently announced its latest group of studio art and curatorial fellows. Coming from as close as New Haven itself and as far away as Nigeria, the nine artists and curators will cultivate their work in a rigorous cross-discipline, community-driven setting running from August 22, 2022 to May 31, 2023. Along the way, each will mentor a New Haven public high-school student aspiring to live a creative life. “I think creativity is essential,” Kaphar says. “It takes creativity to be able to imagine a future that is so different than the one that is before them.”
During the course of the program, the curatorial fellows receive a $45,000 stipend and the studio fellows a $35,000 stipend for the year. They have 24-hour access to dedicated work and/or studio space and subsidized on-site housing. The program culminates in a group exhibition at a prominent gallery, often in New York City, situating fellows squarely in the art world.
The 2022-23 NXTHVN Fellows are Anindita Dutta, Modupeola Fadugba, Donald Guevara, Ashanté Kindle, athena quispe, Edgar Serrano, Capt. James Stovall V, Cornelia Stokes, and Kiara Cristina Ventura.
The Artists
Dutta is an Indian sculptor, installation and performance artist presently residing in New York. Themes including gender conflict and fragility—as well as the impermanence and permanence of existence—permeate her work in clay and repurposed clothing.
Fadugba’s mission at NXTHVN will be twofold. Fadugba, who divides her time between Abuja, Nigeria and Philadelphia, will work to give international reach to The Artist’s Algorithm, a series of exhibitions, essays, talks, games, performances, mentorship programs, murals, and videos which aims to harness the interactive power of play in ways that shed light on problems in education, politics and governance. She will also be furthering her groundbreaking work on the historically fraught relationship between Blackness and swimming by developing a visual memoir of Harlem native Lettice Graham, a 100-year-old swimmer and pageant queen who didn’t learn to swim until she was 60. “I’m open to what might spark my interest and creativity in New Haven,” she says, “as it will be quite a change of scenery from my studio practice in Nigeria.”
Guevara, a multimedia artist, lives and works in Tallahassee, FL. Guevara is of Indigenous Honduran and American German descent and was raised in a first-generation Congolese American family. This early introduction into contradiction, change, cultural differences and amalgamation and the complexities of race and gender drive his current practice and inform the work he will create at NXTHVN.
Kindle is a multimedia artist who lives and works in Hartford, CT. Her work is grounded in the textures and science of Black hair, as she searches for its presence through abstraction and in nature, sound, history and found objects. She plans to “further develop my visual language and the ways I utilize abstraction.”
quispe, a multidisciplinary artist and poet who lives and works in New Haven, creates sculptural paintings and interactive installations that explore themes of spirituality and commodification.
Serrano, a painter who lives and works in New Haven, confronts xenophobia through work that functions as an allegory for screen culture, cultural translation, the flattening of information and limitless borders. During his fellowship year at NXTHVN, he says he plans, “to create a new body of work that explores invisible states of transition by simultaneously merging aesthetic paradigms, countercultural visual languages, and popular iconography.”
Capt. James Stovall V, a self-taught artist, philosopher and visual jazz player, is traveling from his home and studio in Altadena, CA. For him the Fellowship is “the next step in line with the thought of constant elevation,” he says. Stovall names as influences his father, Rembrandt, Hunter S. Thompson, Jay-Z, Roy Lichtenstein, Norman Rockwell, Miles Davis, Jackie Robinson and Kara Walker.
The Curators
Cornelia Stokes lives and works in Syracuse, NY. Her curatorial practice is based in Pan-African practices and kinship, focusing on building community through the arts and philosophies of the Black diaspora. Her work at NXTHVN, a natural fit, will encompass the community at large: “Using the connective force of art,” she says, “I will use what is already important to both the NXTHVN fellows and the residents of New Haven to create innovative projects and inclusive spaces.” She hopes to harness the power of art to connect and build strong positive relationships within the wider community.
Dominican-American writer, independent curator, and owner of the curatorial platform Processa, Kiara Cristina Ventura lives and works in New York City. Her work focuses on highlighting the narratives of artists from marginalized communities, especially artists of color. At NXTHVN, she says, “I plan to develop fruitful relationships with the artists and my fellow curators to connect, have beautiful conversations, and collectively create a stunning, well-researched, and groundbreaking exhibition at the end of the Fellowship—an exhibition that the art world has been waiting for.”
Bringing together these artists and curators puts Kaphar’s hopes for the future on stronger ground. “I believe beauty can open our hearts to difficult conversations,” Kaphar says. And he believes the mentorship program with New Haven’s high schools can bring that hope forward to the future. “What’s encouraging for me is that this practice of mine has given me the opportunity to work with young people in my community,” Kaphar said. “I’m quite certain the answers aren’t in me but if I’m hopeful at all, it’s that they may be in them.”
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