Naomieh Jovin is a first-generation Haitian-American photographer. She utilizes appropriated photos from old family albums and incorporates her own photographs to illustrate resistance and intergenerational trauma, and how we carry the experiences of our past and our family’s past in our bodies. Finding her mother’s photo album two years after her death prompted many conversations for Naomieh about her familial history, her mother’s upbringing, and life in Haiti before the family migrated to the US. She saw meaning in connecting her past to her present through her photographs as a form of healing and acceptance. The subconscious similarities between her mother’s photos and her own work highlight an intergenerational connection to familial history and her current self.

Naomieh Jovin received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Moore College of Art & Design in 2017. Her work has been featured in The Nation and Buzzfeed. She has photographed for the New York Times and Vogue Italia. She was selected as a Lens Culture 2021 Critics Choice winner, she was awarded an artist in residence at the Tilt Institute, and she was recently named a 2021 PEW Fellow in the Arts.

Tommy Kha’s theatrical photographs balance precariously between comedy and tragedy, being and performing, and the mundane and the absurd to examine how we construct belonging and otherness. Utilizing photographic techniques of absence and erasure, Kha creates cardboard cut-outs and prosthetic masks of his own face, complicating and fracturing his representation. Kha’s work often maps the connections between his family, their history, and his hometown through staged photographs featuring himself, his mother, and signifiers of the Mississippi Delta Chinese Community. Representing experiences of Asian Diaspora and images of iconic Americana, the artist asks how photography might become a means by which he can be truly seen.

Tommy Kha is a photographer currently working between Brooklyn, New York and Memphis, Tennessee. Kha holds an MFA in Photography from Yale University. His first major publication will be released by Aperture early next year. He is a recipient of the Next Step Award, Foam Talent, Creator Labs Photo’ Fund, and most recently was named an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in Photography Fellow. Kha’s work has appeared in The New York Times, Aperture, and Vanity Fair, among other publications. He has exhibited at LMAK Gallery, Deli Gallery, Foley Gallery, Georgia Scherman Projects, Aperture, Signal Gallery, and ALLGOLD at MoMA PS1 Printshop, New York; Ryerson Artspace, Toronto; Johalla Projects, Chicago; Yongkang Lu Art, Shanghai; and Kunstverein Wolfsburg, Germany.

In Wendy Red Star’s early self-portrait series, Four Seasons (2006), she used herself as a subject capturing the humor and playfulness integral to Crow culture and to her artwork. In the series, Red Star poses within constructed dioramas filled with inflatable animals and artificial materials, a project that pokes fun at the boundaries between conceived authenticity and stereotypical portrayals of Native subjects. The portraits encourage self-reflection, making viewers aware of the deeply ingrained stereotypes of Native Americans in popular culture. Red Star draws on feminine stereotypes constructed and reified through popular culture. She is driven by the complex narrative of her identity as an Apsáalooke woman and by an awareness of the difficulties that Native women encounter navigating the art world. In this sense, her series represents a strategic mode of intervention into the conventions of portraiture and can be understood through its signifiers of race, cultural rootedness, and female agency.

Baahinnaachísh or Baaeétitchish (One Who Is Talented), references the Apsáalooke name Wendy Red Star received while visiting home. It is the original name of her grand-uncle, Clive Francis Dust, Sr., known in the family for his creativity as a cultural keeper. Wendy Red Star holds a BFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, and an MFA in sculpture from University of California, Los Angeles. She has exhibited in the United States and abroad at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York; Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, France; Frost Art Museum, Miami; Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Brooklyn Museum, New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; the Birmingham Museum of Art; and the British Museum, England among others. In 2017, Red Star was awarded the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award and in 2018 she received a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

photo credit - Beatrice Red Star Fletcher

Leonard Suryajaya uses photography to test the boundaries of intimacy, community, and family by placing his subjects in elaborately staged settings full of competing patterns and colors. The results are photographs that are tender and critical, bound up with the struggles of familial authority and self-identity. Many of Leonard’s investigations are rooted in his upbringing as an Indonesian citizen of Chinese descent, as a Buddhist educated in Christian schools in a Muslim-majority country, and as someone who departed from his family and his culture’s definitions of love and family. Leonard explores these tensions in the everyday interaction, in the chance juxtaposition of culturally-coded objects, and in the disruptions stirred by queer relations.

Leonard Suryajaya received his BFA from California State University, Fullerton in 2013 and his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015. He also studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Art Institute Chicago; Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Photography Chicago; Arsenale Nord, Venice; Benaki Museum, Greece; Photoforum Pasquart, Switzerland; National Library, Singapore; Wrightwood 659, Chicago; Aperture Gallery, NY; The Block Museum, Chicago; Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; Frost Art Museum, Miami. His work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Contemporary Photography, The Block Museum, Joan Flasch Artist Book Collection, Chicago; Vontobel Art Collection; Mana Contemporary and Center for Photography at Woodstock. He has received awards for his work from Aaron Siskind Foundation Award, Artadia Awards, Robert Giard Foundation Fellowship, CENTER Excellence in Multimedia Award, New Artist Society Award, James Weinstein Memorial Fellowship, Claire Rosen and Samuel Edes Prize for Emerging Artist, The Santo Foundation Fellowship.