Pandora’s BoxX Project: Celebrating Womxn Artists & Visionaries

Pandora’s BoxX Project is a photographic portrait series that documents and celebrates the impact of womxn creators and art workers (including trans, non-binary, gender queer, and female) who reshape how we experience art and culture. 

Join us as we celebrate 5 years of Pandora’s BoxX Project, with a focus on Brooklyn’s art ecosystem and the multigenerational womxn artists and cultural producers enlivening it.  Artists Deborah Kass, Helen Evans Ramsaran, Aya Rodriguez-Izumi and Emily Mae Smith will engage in a lively conversation on their work and the art world as they see it, with Ivy N. Jones moderating.

This program is co-organized with artist Grace Roselli, creator and photographer of the Pandora’s BoxX Project.

About the Panel

Ivy N. Jones is a cultural leader and founder of Welancora gallery in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Cultured Magazine has hailed: the gallery “advances the work of the African Diaspora” with “longevity and agency” for over 20 years. She is a graduate of Hampton University.

 

Deborah Kass is an artist whose work is notable for her pointed feminist critique. Through her use of appropriation, she often mimics the work and styles of male artists to rewrite the patriarchal narrative of art history. Born in San Antonio, TX in 1952, her honors include a mid-career retrospective at The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, inclusion in multiple Venice Biennales, and the position of senior critic at the Yale University painting program.

Helen Evans Ramsaran is an artist whose work explores traditional African architecture and sculptural traditions, spirituality, communal living, extended family, community, rites of passage and, more recently, global warming. Her work has been exhibited internationally in many landmark exhibitions and is held in several permanent collections including the New Museum, The Sheldon Museum, The Mead Museum, the Harlem School of the Arts, and John Jay College among others. She is represented by Welancora Gallery.

Aya Rodriguez-Izumi is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work blends installation, performance, community engagement, documentation and beyond to explore aspects of ritual retention, cross-cultural identity and histories that risk erasure. She was born in Okinawa, Japan, and grew up between that island and East Harlem, NY, where she currently lives and holds a studio; she is also on faculty at SVA’s MFA Fine Arts and a current member at AIR Gallery.

Emily Mae Smith paints lively compositions that often nod to distinct historical painting movements with feminist commentary on gender, class, and violence.  She is represented by Petzel gallery, Perrotin, Rodolphe Janssen, and Contemporary Fine Arts.

All images: Courtesy Grace Roselli, Pandora’s BoxX Project