“Material With Meaning” Exhibition

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC)

This event has ended.

Bronx River Art Center (BRAC) presents Material With Meaning, featuring four emerging and mid-career New York artists whose international roots include Nigeria, Mexico, El Salvador, and China.

For artists, their choice of materials is singular: the material was necessary to create the work and to communicate its message. Within the wide embrace of multi-media, artists are not reluctant to display their respect for the constituent elements of their work. In doing so, they also proclaim their identity as craftswo/men and bring art-making to street level, where it can be appreciated by the widest possible audience.

Anthony O. Akinbola’s lush Du Rag abstractions reflect his bi-national consciousness. Akinbola’s stunning transformation of the Du Rag into a fine art medium—while honoring its role as a potent signifier in Black male culture—mirrors his own nimble journey within a Nigerian-American identity.

Born in Mexico City and raised in California, Blanka Amezkua is a bicultural artist par excellence. Her work combines a performance sensibility with a deep commitment to Mexican folk/craft traditions and some the materials and/or techniques widely used by some of the folk artists there, such as: papel picado/cut paper, embroidery, bark paper, to name a few.

Mauricio Esquivel was born in El Salvador and has lived in Nicaragua, Cuba, Mexico, Costa Rica, and London before making his home in New York City. For the last decade he has dedicated his art practice to exploring themes of human migration.

Chuxi Guo, installation and video artist, was born in Beijing, China, and is now based in New York. He uses video and video interactive devices as the main medium to expand various interactive boundaries of video art. By considering the viewers’ sensitivity to the space and information of their bodies and identities, and by continuously enhancing or repeating, weakening or revoking the images of different identity groups, he tries to construct the possibilities of image interaction to find human identity, Self-awareness and possible political thinking.