Nir Hod, 100 Years Is Not Enough, Oil paint under and on top of chromed linen

In 100 Years Is Not Enough, Nir Hod explores light on water, something he has never painted before, his underpainting sourced from a trove of images of lakes, ponds, gardens, and blooms. The title of the work is taken from Hod’s naturalistic group of floral landscapes, which use similar elements from his distinct chromed, abstract canvases. Hod’s artistic practice draws upon personal memory and traumatic historical events to elicit subtle tensions between the viewer’s expectations and the material reality of the painting’s surface. The work appropriates and synthesizes Claude Monet’s water lily iconography into dream-like interpretations of flora and various bodies of water. Thick impasto is layered over the chrome, taking on the shimmering effect of sunlight on water.

Roberto Lugo, Run DMC Street Pot, Glazed stoneware

Roberto Lugo lives and works in Philadelphia and is an artist, activist, educator, and spoken word poet known for creating large-scale and ornately decorated ceramics that reimagine historic European and Asian objects of the medium. Lugo complicates the history of these works and the themes they represent – class, privilege, societal values – by creating prized objects that both depict prominent and ordinary figures of color and reference his own Afro-Latino heritage. The permanence of clay complements this mission, as Lugo’s works become lasting monuments to the history and culture of the disenfranchised. In short, Lugo elevates POC culture, community, and history, bringing attention to critical issues of inequality and racial injustice in the art spaces and institutions in which his work is shown.

Lugo holds a BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Penn State. His work is found in the permanent collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The High Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Brooklyn Museum, the Walters Art Museum, and more. He is currently an Assistant Professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia, PA.

Liza Lou, Love for Sale, Glass beads, thread, and nails on gessoed canvas

Row upon row of tiny white beads mounted on canvas are abruptly punctured. Right in the center, a vertical slash cuts through the neat lines, and a jumbled mass of small red beads of differing sizes, erupts from below. If the form and color were not explicit enough in their sexualized reference, the title of Liza Lou’s work says it all. These little beads have formed the bedrock of Lou’s practice throughout her career. What began as an individual endeavor developed into the artist establishing a collective that ran for 15 years in Durban, South Africa, where women produced handstitched beaded cloth that she was able to use in her work. This practical extension of her interest in labor merges with Lou’s sustained challenge to the negative perceptions of craft: all tackled from a gendered perspective.

Liza Lou is an artist who, for the past thirty years, has made sculptures, paintings, drawings and room-size environments that induce states of wonder, beginning with the groundbreaking Kitchen (1991–1996) – a solid beaded room-size environment now in the collection of the Whitney Museum of American Art, and other large scale sculptures, such as Back Yard, (1996–1999), in the collection of Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, which consists of over 250,000 handmade blades of grass made of beads. From 2005 to 2020, the artist lived and worked in Durban, South Africa, where she founded an art studio that included a women’s advocacy program—the first of its kind to combine social practice within an art studio setting.

Haas Brothers, Biggie Balls, Bronze

With Biggie Balls, twin Haas Brothers Nikolai and Simon build upon the Accretion forms they began developing nearly ten years ago. Inspired by processes of layered accumulation found in the natural world—in things like coral and tree fungus—the artists’ Accretions are produced by brushing wet clay onto dry clay in layers, amassing the uniquely textured surface by hand over time.

To produce a similar effect in bronze, the artists have developed an innovative process loosely based on ceramic coil building. To color the cast bronze sculptures, the artists apply a chemical patina to the surface of the works, creating natural variations in rust to achieve the desired colors and effects. This time- and labor-intensive process—typical of the Haas Brothers’s cross-disciplinary approach to their practice—produces unique works, of which the artists can make no more than ten a year. Christening this sculpture with one of the artists’ signature, pun-infused titles—the Haas Brothers artists humor and anthropomorphize the sculpture, the reference to rapper Biggie Smalls offering a point of connection and relatability for the viewer.