Christopher Carter was born in Albuquerque, N.M., and raised in Boston. Carter infuses a blend of ethnic and urban influences in all of his artistic work. His bold and decisively organic sculptures strongly reflect his African-American, Native American and European heritage. His assemblages embody power and energy accentuated by the source materials he selects for his creations. Rarely using anything “new,” Carter fashions a chorus of images composed of recycled woods, metals, glass shards, ropes, resins and a variety of discarded objects that, when united seek, to depict traditional concepts in an innovative and creative way.

Clara Toro is a Colombian American photographer and resident artist at The Bakehouse Art Complex. She holds a degree in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography ICP and a degree from PhotoEspaña master's program. She has done work for Univision.com, The 19th.com, FIU and Museum of Art and Design MOAD. Clara does volunteer photography work for nonprofits, has been a photography teacher at Oolite Arts and teacher assistant at ICP. Toro has participated in group exhibitions in Miami at The Bakehouse Art Complex, Coral Gables Museum, MIFA, Mexican consulate, Clandestina Fair, Pinecrest Gardens, Little Haiti Cultural Complex, Green Space and Barry University. She also participated in a group exhibition at Centro de Arte Alcobendas in Madrid, Spain. Clara has had solo exhibits in Miami, at The Bakehouse Art Complex, Tory Burch flagship store, Colombian Consulate and at Roberto Clemente Park in Wynwood. She is a winner of a 2022 Ellies Creator Award for her project “Eight minutes”. In 2024 she received a creative grant from Community Engagement and a Miami Individual Artists Program (MIA) grant from Miami Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs. In March 2024, Clara was invited by Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator DVCAI, to participate in an International Cultural Exchange program in Bermuda. She has worked for the past five years on a project about the Wynwood and Allapattah neighborhoods in Miami, documenting the stories of its residents, through photographs and audio recordings. The Allapattah project was recently published by the Spanish photography magazine Exit.

Cornelius Tulloch is a Miami-based interdisciplinary artist and designer. With work transcending the barriers of photography, fine art, and architecture, Cornelius focuses on how creative mediums can be combined to tell powerful stories.Whether it is through photography or painting, cinematic moments and spatial complexity are depicted in his work. Lighting and color become characters in the art. His unique storytelling through his work has been shown in fairs and museums like the Kennedy Center, Washington D.C.; Pulse Art Fair, Miami, FL; and the Museo Nazionale Delle Arti Del XXI Secolo, Rome, Italy. From being recognized as 2016 Presidential Scholar in the Arts to having his work added to the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem, much of his success has come from the important discussions his work has created; which often are inspired by his cultural background. Being raised in Miami and gaining inspiration from his Jamaican and African American heritage, his work expresses how bodies exist between cultures, borders, and characteristics, to create spatial impact. Cornelius is an emerging talent that is reshaping the boundaries of art and space.

I am not a Painter, I am not a Sculptor, I am not a Sketch Artist nor a Printmaker or Muralist...... I am a Visual Artist.. However, I have always been interested and intrigued by all medias and/or mediums. I'm also content with all past stages of my creative career. Always looking forward, never looking back, as every series and/or completed piece is used to catapult the next. My long life artistic goal has always been to make a universal connection with whom ever observes it. Connecting the work to any aspect of their own culture, creed, religion or spirituality. Like my own life, the work has changed and aged. Every year passing, becoming more rich and precious than the last. For this reason, I have always treated my next piece, as if my last. Also treating every person with the same humanity, in which I treat my own work. While still respecting the world around me, in the same fashion I respect myself, my family and my love ones.

Daveed Baptiste is an interdisciplinary artist whose work incorporates fashion, textiles, and photography. He draws his inspiration from his migration from Port au-Prince, Haiti to Miami, Florida. Through collaborative projects like, Haiti To Hood and Between Lands, Baptiste investigates the notion of race, gender and class within the Haitian community and the larger Caribbean diaspora. He was awarded a year-long apprenticeship with Converse, where he co-designed the Black Joy Collection, and a new colorway/material design for the Energy basketball team. Baptiste earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York. His photographs have been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, and American Vogue. He has participated in exhibitions at New York University and the Aperture Foundation. Baptiste is currently an artist-in residence at the Silver Arts Project in lower Manhattan

David Gumbs is a multimedia artist from the island of Saint-Martin. His research investigates the spectator’s perception and mental landscape. Discovering the Martinican and Cuban flora triggered a vivid passion for mythical forest Gods in island cultures. This was the beginning of an identity quest through the exploration of topics dealing with the offscreen of perception, the cycle of life, the visible and invisible, and rhizome graphical macroscopic universes. His polymorphic art reveals the interbreeding and hybridization process in the collective and individual unconsciousness in Caribbean imagination. David Gumbs’s artistic approach is based on a famous quotation from XVII th century French philosopher and chemist Antoine Lavoisier : « Mass is neither gained nor lost, merely transformed ». Thus, infinite scale, memory, and the Sacred, are themes that emerge from larger topics of interest such as inner/outer landscape of the offscreen. These immersed spaces reveal personal inner projections from the unconscious, and emerge his « Mental Archeology » through others. His research indeed focuses on the different feelings, emotions, and stimulations that build memory.

Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change. Her current practice connects the effects of the hurricane storm surge in relation to coastal erosion, the saltwater inundation of intertidal spaces She imagines these rhizomatic, protective intersectional landscapes and wetlands as sites of resistance. This altered landscape, post surge, though temporary, is an exciting conceptual space regarding the intangeble memory of water as it intersects with the land and the people who live there. Her work was featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago and ICA Boston in Fall 2023. In Fall 2021 a retrospective, Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City. She has exhibited at TENT Rotterdam, the Perez Art Museum of Miami in the 2019-2020 exhibition, The Other Side of Now: Foresight in Contemporary Caribbean Art, and Relational Undercurrents: Contemporary Art of the Caribbean Archipelago, the SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, Portland Art Museum, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work is in the collections of the Pérez Art Museum Miami, MCA Chicago and the Smith College Museum of Art. Deborah received a Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists (2021), Jersey City Individual Artist Grant (2022), a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute and was a Surfpoint Foundation Artist-in-Residence (2023). Deborah Jack received a 2024 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University. ​ Deborah recently presented her new body of work in a solo exhibition entitled, Intertidal Imaginaries: The Resistant Geographies of the Shore in the Aftermath of Saltwater Surges, at the Houston Center for Photography. Concurrently, she is participating in Hurricane Season at the Des Moines Art Center. Her forthcoming exhibitions include Constellations: Racial Myths, Land, and Labour at the Esker Foundation and the Prospect 6 Triennial: the future is present, the harbinger is home.

Deborah Willis, Ph.D. is University Professor and Chair of the Department of Photography and Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and has an affiliated appointment with the College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Social and Cultural Analysis, Africana Studies, where she teaches courses on Photography & Imaging, iconicity, and cultural histories visualizing the black body, women and gender. She is the director of the NYU Institute of African American Affairs and the founder of the Center for Black Visual Culture. Her research examines photography’s multifaceted histories, visual culture, the photographic history of Slavery and Emancipation; contemporary women photographers and beauty. She received the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship. Willis is the author of Posing Beauty: African American Images from the 1890s to the Present; and co-author of The Black Female Body A Photographic History ; Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery ; and Michelle Obama: The First Lady in Photographs (both titles a NAACP Image Award Winner). Professor Willis’s curated exhibitions include: “In Pursuit of Beauty” at Express Newark; “Let Your Motto Be Resistance: African American Portraits” at the International Center of Photography and “Reframing Beauty: Intimate Moments” at Indiana University.

Devora Perez is originally from Nicaragua, and now lives and works in Miami. She received her bachelor’s degree from New World School of the Arts, and is currently an MFA candidate at Florida International University. Perez is interested in the domestic setting and its influence on gender, race and class in society. In her work she challenges domesticity through the use of everyday materials such as caulk, cement, plastic and wood, and uses them in unconventional ways. Through formal and minimal design, Perez emphasizes color, texture and even the industrial material itself. While some pieces may seem fragile and light, others are heavy and dense both visually and physically. These discrepancies in weight between the works and the use of shadows are meant to construct divisions and separate spaces. Her work Man-Made Environment (here, there, everywhere) challenges issues of gentrification in Miami.

Born and raised in France, educated in France and America (l’Université de La Sorbonne, and the Florida State University), Alix Pierre, Ph.D., has taught in France, the Caribbean, and at various institutions in the United States at the undergraduate and graduate levels. A committed scholar, he regular attends professional development events at the national and international level where he presents the result of his research. He is the author of "L’Image de la femme résistante chez quatre romancières noire: vision diasporique de la femme en résistance chez Maryse Condé, Simone Schwarz-Bart, Toni Morrison et Alice Walker" (2014). He has completed an eight hundred-page book on gwoka, the traditional music of the island of Guadeloupe. In a comparative study of over two hundred songs, Pierre discusses the lyrics and practice of gwoka as a repetition in variation of the West African griot art form. He recently served as project manager and scholar-in-residence in Guadeloupe, FWI, for the DVCAI-ARTOCARPE International Cultural Exchange. He taught a seminar on the Pan African/Caribbean griot tradition at the University State of Bahia in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil. He lent his expertise in Francophone studies to the University of Guyana-the Atlanta University Center Collaborative Project serving as co-coordinator, adviser, panelist, moderator, translator and liaison. He was instrumental in bringing to Atlanta the internationally-renown poet and novelist, and Guadeloupe’s Cultural Attaché M. Ernest Pépin as the keynote speaker to the lecture series. As part of his community service effort, Pierre has worked with World Relief, the largest refugee resettlement agency in the U.S., where he designed, implemented and assessed a curriculum geared at assisting refugees who settle in Georgia to adapt to their new environment. For three months, his team met weekly with a family of nine who fled the Democratic Republic of Congo and live now in Clarkston. Pierre currently sits on the board at the Latin American and Caribbean Community Center, and is on the editorial board of Caribbean Vistas: Critique of Caribbean Arts and Culture, and Negritud: review of Afro-Latin American studies. He is an officer of the Caribbean Writers Congress.

Dwayne Ravinsingh Bladon Murillo is an Indo-Belizean, multidisciplinary arts, and dance practitioner and educator, born in Belize City Belize. Murillo attended St John's College Junior College and earned an Associate’s Degree in History. He is best known for his Indian classical dance, dance education, and drumming and his practice includes poetry, fashion design, and illustration. His accomplishments include early recognition as Belizean Youth Artist of the Year in 2014 and his service as acting delegate at CARIFESTA 2019 and Diwali Nagar 2019. He gained certification at the Gurukula Heritage Training Camp Course in 2023, where he studied Arya Samaj, a reformed sect of Hinduism. Murillo is a member of Corozal Organization of East Indian Cultural Heritage (COEICH). He presents his art form annually at the annual East Indian Festival in Corozal and at the Yellow Ginger Festival of Punta Gorda Town in Toldeo, Belize Dwayne Murillo wishes to learn more about Hinduism and create and write books for the Belizean public. He aspires to explore the practice of Sri Guru Rajesh Seenath of Trinidad, expand his teaching practice of Kuchipudi dance style, and work towards forming his dance company.

ELISA TURNER is an award-winning art critic and art journalist. She is a member of the International Association of Art Critics, U.S. Section, and ArtTable, a national organization for women in visual arts professions. Her art writing has appeared in ARTnews, Miami Herald, Artburstmiami, Art+Auction, Arte Al Dia, Art Circuits, Delicious Line, Hamptons Art Hub, ArtSpeak, Miami Rail and other publications. As a blogger she has posted many of her previous Miami Herald articles on http://artcircuitsartcentric.blogspot.com/ and www.elisaturnerartcrit.blogspot.com. In 2009 she began teaching at Miami Dade College; she has guest-lectured at University of Miami and New World School of the Arts. Drawing on her experience and research in Miami Herald archives, she wrote the foreword tracing the history of the Miami art scene from the early 1980s to 2006 for Miami Contemporary Artists by Julie Davidow and Paul Clemence, published by Schiffer Books. It was launched at Art Basel Miami Beach 2007. Her career at the Miami Herald began in 1986 and continued for 21 years. From 1995 to 2007, she was primary art critic for the Miami Herald, with international assignments to Havana Biennial, Haiti, Venice Biennial, and Art Basel in Basel, Switzerland. As Miami correspondent for the award-winning ARTnews print magazine, she has written reviews, news reports, feature stories, and profiles of prominent figures in Miami’s art community. She holds an M.A. in Comparative Literature, focusing on international cultural studies, from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. And she earned a BA in English from DePauw University. Her background reflects wide-ranging experience in writing, teaching, and public speaking. In 2019 she received the Annual Chapter Leadership Award from Florida Chapter of ArtTable. Other awards include President’s Volunteer Service Award from Miami Dade College in 2012 and Society of Professional Journalists Sunshine State Award in 2006.

I create images and facilitate healing spaces that work to inspire reconnection to self, others, and the more than human world. In this lifetime one of my greatest curiosities is understanding the ways humans and other living beings build community and hurt and heal each other inside of it. I find endless pleasure and joy in being a friend, sister, daughter, and granddaughter. Wonder is one of my favorite feelings. Surrender is where I find the most healing. The ocean is my favorite place.

“A sense of homelessness and exile have been profoundly impactful forces in my life. Naturally, they are woven deeply into the fabric of my artistic practice. I’m a second-generation Cuban-American interdisciplinary artist. I am also queer, though my queerness is less a function of my sexuality than it is a question of exile. Exile from the boundaries of the Normal, the Moral, even the Real. I am the child of first-generation Cuban migrants. I am brown. I live with physical and learning disabilities. Though vital, none of these things wholly encapsulate me. I am more than the total sum of my categories. But they’re nevertheless significant, even central, to who I am, and subsequently, to my artistic practice.”

Esperanza Cortés is a Colombian born multidisciplinary artist based in New York City. Cortés’ passion for the mosaic of the Americas, its folk art traditions, rituals, music, dance and their ever evolving changes are at the core of her sculptures, paintings, installations, site-specific projects and interventions. Her artwork examines the extent to which a consciousness—national or personal—defines itself through the opposing force of transcultural experiences. The work is poetically and intricately crafted to encourage the viewer to reconsider social and historical narratives, especially when dealing with Colonialism, and raises critical questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion. As a former Afro-Latin dancer, her work seeks to underscore and use sacred space, the patterns of dance, music and fragments of histories as departure points to investigate and build the structure and space of the installations. Cortés has exhibited in solo and group exhibitions in venues including Smack Mellon Gallery, Bronx Museum of Art, Queens Museum, El Museo del Barrio, MoMA PS1 and Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC. National exhibitions include Albright-Knox Gallery, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Turchin Center for The Visual Arts, Jonathan Ferrara Gallery, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Neuberger Museum of Art, and the Cleveland Art Museum. She has been part of international exhibitions in Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Japan, Mexico, Colombia, Dominican Republic, Spain and Greece. Cortés’ awards include: New York State Council on the Arts Project Grant, Shortlist 2022 Creative Capital, John Simon Guggenheim, Hispanic Society Museum and Library Artist Research Fellowship, BRIC Media Arts Fellowship, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, Puffin Foundation Grant, New York State Biennial, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, New York Foundation for the Arts and the Sustained Achievement in the Visual Arts Award. Cortés’ residencies include: Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture, Ucross, Peter’s Valley School of Craft, Children’s Museum of Manhattan, McColl Center for Arts + Innovation, Museum of Arts and Design, BRIC Workspace, Joan Mitchell Center, Webb School of Knoxville, Sculpture Space, Fountainhead Residency, Bronx Museum - AIM Program, MoMA PS1 Residency, Socrates Sculpture Park, Abrons Art Center, Longwood Art Project, Altos de Chavon, Can Serrat and Bielska BWA Gallery. Cortés’ work has been reviewed by Artforum, Artnews, Artnet, Hyperallergic, ARTFUSE, Cultbytes, New York Times, BELatina, Whitehot, New Art Examiner and Art in America. International reviews include multiple media platforms in Europe, South America and the Caribbean. Cortés has designed programs as a museum educator, artist in residence, and community artist creating legacy projects, murals, sculptures, site-specific installations and Afro-Latin Dance, working with children, teens, elders, homeless and refugee communities, through the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Artist Space, Smack Mellon Gallery, Brooklyn’s Children's Museum, El Museo del Barrio, Wave Hill, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of Art, and the Museum of Art and Design. Cortés’ work is in private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and the American Embassy in Monterey, Mexico.

I am a visual artist focused on conveying nature’s plea for interconnectedness through yarn, thread, and fabric. Using traditional textile methods like knitting, weaving, and embroidery, I mainly work with soft hand-dyed fibers to create unconventional pieces ranging from small two-dimensional tapestries to monumental sculptural forms. In addition to the beauty and fragility of the natural environment, womanhood and motherhood are also recurring concepts of my work. I explore materials, texture and color to connect these ideas and bring them to life with my hands and heart. My practice has roots in my native land of Uruguay, a country where sheep outnumber human inhabitants, and where wool and other natural fibers continue to be an essential tool for people’s livelihood, especially women. The relationship between the fibers I work with and the place where I was born evokes the comfort of belonging, no matter where I am in the world. Over the last several years, my art practice has evolved outside of the studio, allowing me to foster community and create a platform for others to share their textile art journey. Together with two other local artists I created FAMA-Fiber Artists Miami Association- with the mission to educate and advance fiber arts as a contemporary art form.

Francois Piquet, born in Paris suburb in 1967, lives and create in Guadeloupe since 2000. Francois Piquet lives and creates in the “Tout-Monde”, where he chooses to experiment Edouard Glissant’s “creolisation” and the contingencies of a contemporary multiform art, to replace art in its social and utopic functions and create encounters. Sculptures, site-specific installations, street-art, participative video, and social immersion of the artistic gesture : his approach is resolutely contemporary, using humour and constant experimentation of new process, materials and media to provide accessible, non politically correct and challenging points of view on human relations. Industrial ingeener and multimedia designer, he begun his visual arts practice once arrived in Guadeloupe, with a collage street-art collective. He then realized his first monumental sculpture braiding iron strips that were used to hoop rum barrels. It was a revelation. He now continues to produce and experiment caribean contemporary art in numerous solo and collective international exhibitions, in the FWI caribbean, Puerto-Rico, Republica Dominicana, France, Portugal, Denmark, Senegal, United- Kingdom. The International Slavery Museum in Liverpool (UK) just added his work to its permanent collection, joining the Memorial ACTe and other art institutions. In 2019, he presents “Decolonial equation” at Venice Biennale, inside the first Guadeloupe Pavillon.

GeoVanna Gonzalez’s work engages in a multifaceted practice encompassing performance, installation, sculpture, and moving image. Over the course of her artistic journey, she has cultivated an approach centered around the interplay between the live body, spatial dynamics, and sculptural elements. Her artistic endeavors are driven by a desire to forge connections between private and public realms, achieved through interventionist and participatory art that places an emphasis on collaboration and collectivity. A thematic underpinning of Gonzalez’s work revolves around exploring the fluid landscapes of gender and identity, as well as delving into the realms of intimacy and proximity. GeoVanna Gonzalez is a Miami-based artist. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California where she received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design. Her work has been shown at various institutions including The Institute of Contemporary Art, Station Contemporary Arts Museum, NSU Art Museum, The Bass Museum, Untitled Art Fair, Fringe Projects, and The Corcoran School of the Arts and Design. Gonzalez has received awards and residencies from South Arts’ Southern Prize and State Fellowship, WaveMaker Grant, The Ellies Visual Arts Award, The South Florida Cultural Consortium, Santa Fe Art Institute Residency Santa Fe, Franconia Sculpture Park, Bemis Center For Contemporary Arts, and CAMPO. Her work is in permanent collections at Miami-Dade County Art in Public Place and University of Maryland Art Gallery.

Gerard Caliste was born April 27,1978 in New Orleans Louisiana. Gerard decided early on that he would never let his art talent go to waste. In 1994 he became involved in an Art Organization called Young Aspirations Young Artist, YA YA. The organization profoundly changed his life by giving him the support to develop his artistic confidence and skills. In the active years at YAYA Gerard had the opportunity to become a working artist while still in his teens. He worked under established artist such as Willie Birch and Nanette Carter. In December 1994 his designs was chosen as one of seven international artist that was commissioned to create designs that would be turn into a woven fabric by Blumenthal, which was to be replicated as fabric that would be turn into seat covers, that would cover all of the Delegates seats of the United Nations general assembly room, In honor of the United Nations 50th anniversary in 1995. In the fall of 1997 he entered the Savannah College of Art and Design, after being award a presidential scholarship. During his studies in Savannah he was able to find a direction in his work and fine tune his style. While most of the work that he created in YA YA was of painted 3 dimensional furniture pieces such as chairs and coffee tables. Attending college was a chance to explore more traditional aspects of painting as well as artist history. After obtaining his BFA, he moved to Houston Texas to work for the public school system as an Art teacher. Teaching at a very culturally diverse school gave him another source of inspiration, seeing how his student’s art reflected who they are and often where they came from. This experience gave him a refreshed appreciation of his own work in regards to application of media and the constant figurative and narrative nature of their work served as a reminder of the way he naturally painted, and he didn’t want to lose that childlike freedom of his work. Gerard work continued to take on a more narrative theme that is the subject matter that would be reflective of the things that you would see in the urban New Orleans settling. In 2005 Hurricane Katrina ripped through the gulf coast. The effects the storm had on the city of New Orleans push artist to use that emotion to create art. During that time he produced an extensive body of work starting with his debut series Waterlines, followed by a installation Walking on Water 2009. Through the years he produced art for companies such as MTV, Swatch Watch, United Nations and The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. His work is also in the private collections of high profile people like Oprah Winfrey and Brad Pitt. “In the past six years I have consciously developed my approached to expressionism which I call New American Abstract Modern Expressionism. The figurative nature of my work help embodies a presence of a human soul.

Grettel Arrate Hechavaría is a painter, mural painter, illustrator and graphic designer from Santiago de Cuba. She graduated in painting and drawing from the Provincial Academy of Plastic Arts José Joaquín Tejada of Santiago de Cuba. She holds a Bachelor of Art History from the Universidad de Oriente. She is a member of the Union of Writers and Artists of Cuba (UNEAC) and a member of the Association of Publicists of Cuba. Hechavaría has had 14 solo exhibitions in important museums and galleries in Cuba and around the world.

Moisés Aragón is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist from Cuba whose work interprets personal mythology with his reality. Moisés’ interest in the arts started when he was introduced at a young age to the act of “artistic recognition,” having had his self-portrait drawing assignment exhibited in the school’s cafeteria. During his formative years after the “9/11,” incident, he began to questions his relation to the “American empire” as it stood as a beacon of expansion during those initial years of war and occupation in the Middle East. Intrepid curiosity led to the acknowledgement that he had been born in exile and would like to return home.

Halima Taha is an art professional whose curatorial, art advisory, appraisal, strategic planning, and professional speaking services develop corporate, academic, and civic programs and audiences. She is best known for her groundbreaking best seller, Collecting African American Art: Works on Paper and Canvas, the first book to validate collecting fine art, printmaking, and photography by Americans of African descent as viable assets and commodities within the marketplace. It was also used as a choice PBS membership incentive, raising three times its fundraising goal. Since its release, this title provided solid market criteria for publishers to print more artist monographs and African American art history books, independent from museum shows within the first two decades of the 21st century. In addition, her expertise provided the foundation, in conjunction with the National Black Fine Art Show (1997-2009), for cultivating and educating a global audience that enabled Swann Galleries to successfully establish the first international African American auction category in 2008. Her work was also the catalyst for ushering major museums to actively pursue collections of African American Art for exhibition and acquisition, within the first two decades of this century. Halima is a committed arts advocate nurturing the development, documentation and acquisition of Black visual culture as a professional speaker and arts writer. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College and New York University, earning Liberal Arts and Arts Management & Cultural Policy degrees; as well as a Certificate in Appraisal Studies from New York University and the Appraisers Association of America. Halima is also USPAP (Uniform Professional Appraisal Practice) compliant and a member of ArtTable and the College Art Association. She co-authored Thirty Years of American Printmaking: Brandywine Workshop and contributed to several books and magazines about contemporary art, collecting, appraising and arts management. Her commitment to an interdisciplinary approach to critically think about art and how to inspire diverse audiences includes participation as a keynote speaker and panelist for many museum, academic and corporate programs. The breadth of Halima’s experience includes co-owning a Gramercy Park gallery in NYC, former faculty and Director of the Gordon Parks Gallery at the College of New Rochelle in New York and Adjunct Professor and Curator for Scott Kaplan Gallery at Bloomfield College in New Jersey.

I am a compassionate activist who is reclaiming and reframing spaces through Sites Specific dance, film, photography, and installations. I am the daughter of Florence Marie Berg (best known as Flossie) and Henry Lee Williams. I am the namesake of my beautiful, strong Grandmother who was born in Rochelle, Georgia where the cotton fields slow dance behind her house, the small juke joint buzzes with cousins, Bud Light, and one old pool table. My creative practice is the commitment to community and the use of art in a political and socially engaged way that connects community to place physically and strategically. Reconnecting themes related to human conditions and feelings that are inherent and innate to all people is a constant web I try to navigate in; yet social, racial, cultural and economic divides along with institutional racist structures have acted to further remove us from these felt emotions and community connections. This disconnect has paralyzed the humanity muscle in many of us. My philosophy looks at Sites Specific work as a component of my work’s totality. The Mind is the politics and process that takes place in choreographing the interaction. The Body is the site and history of the place along with its current use. The Spirit is the community within the space along with the culture and energetic vibration that has lived in the site and will remain long after the work is resolved. I have an unshakeable contempt for the structures that house the artist’s messages, hopes, imaginations, and experimentations. I try to live within these structures as radically as I can with the hopes of manifesting change.

For two decades, the artist-researcher has been interested in the relationship between art and science, directing his research in two main directions: interactive art and Bio-Art. He holds a thesis whose title is: biological and digital arts in relation with the living in the contemporary artists of the Caribbean and the American continent on these subjects. It exhibits and performs in the Caribbean, South and North America, France, Senegal and China. He represents Guadeloupe and France in 2015 at the 12th Biennial of Havana with Jungle Sphere 3.0. Henri Tauliaut presents Flying Shape Courtship at the National Gallery of Jamaica at the 2016 Digital International Exhibition. In July 2018, he is an artist residency at the prestigious Red Gate Residency in Beijing. In October 2018, he presents the exhibition Empowerment at the Contemporary Art Fund of Guadeloupe. In April 2019, he presented the Bubbles performance at the Wolfsonian-FIU Miami Museum, as part of the All-World Festival organized by the French Institute of Miami. In July 2019, he presents the Bio-Art project for which he designs and builds the mobile laboratory Genetic Experimentation Device. Since 2015, the artist-performer, performs a series of performances with the performance choreographer Annabel Guérédrat. Together, they realize in April 2017 then in November 2019, the 1st then the second edition of the International Festival of Performing Arts of Martinique.