Curated by Amanda Michele Brown

August 4 - August 27, 2022

Opening Reception: August 4, 6-8 pm

Nia Imani Winslow, *Hair Flip*, 2021
Mixed media paper collage, 20”x16”

440 Gallery is pleased to present Body Politic, an invitational exhibition curated by the gallery's director Amanda Brown. Since antiquity, art has served as a tool to convey a societal "ideal." This show challenges that function by celebrating bodies that do not conform to the current dominant culture's expectations. Ten artists who exist in bodies politicized and marginalized within the U.S. were invited to exhibit figural works that subvert the narratives and assumptions of the cultural hegemony. Featuring an eclectic selection of paintings, works on paper, sculpture, photography, and mixed-media, the ten featured artists are:

James Estrada is an artist and strategist based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Raised in New York City, he draws upon the dreams and imagination of his immigrant childhood, the Colombian-American themes of his transnational family, and religious iconography to describe the world through symbols, rituals, and the everyday sacred.

Amelia Galgon utilizes a variety of techniques when painting with watercolor to express a unification of many disparate parts of their identity. Based in Brooklyn but born in Philadelphia, their work finds peace and acceptance in the discomfort of embodying their own complexity.

Demarcus McGaughey, a Texas native, and New York-based mixed media artist, passionately captures the beauty, strength, and vibrancy of people of color. Behind his art resides a lifelong fascination with human psychology. As a result, in his art, he assumes a narrator role—telling heroic stories of his subject's self-actualization and self-determination.

Dylan Mortimer is an L.A.-based artist. His work fuses anatomical, biological, and medical imagery with spiritual and religious themes, employing shiny, glowing, vibrant materials to evoke a transformation from a deadly disease he was diagnosed with at birth.

Kate Muehlemann-Cataldo is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and hospice nurse. Muehlemann-Cataldo’s practice is influenced by the vulnerability shared in caregiving and queer identity. Her work explores the communication of bodies through their shape and gesture, especially queer bodies in spaces of safety.

Keisha Prioleau-Martin is an artist based in Queens, NY. Her figurative ceramics are whimsical, painterly, and gestural. Characters ⏤ that are unselfconscious, content, and joyous ⏤ dance, play, and dissolve into baths. They go back and forth between figure and clay body as if sprouting out of the very earth.

Originally from Arkansas, Liz Sanders is a freelance photographer based in Brooklyn, New York. Sanders is interested in the push, pull relationship between parent and child and the changing familial relationships as children grow to be peers of their parents.

Buket Savci, an immigrant from Turkey, her paintings convey radical love through explosions of color, light, and a sense of touch to inspired by the need to create community and a sense of belonging in a new place. While emphasizing this celebration of togetherness and trust, Savci's work also explores the definitions of freedom and happiness. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Li Wang, an artist living and working in New York and Beijing, uses different gestures of male bodies to expand the traditional concept of masculinity through his paintings. He creates a world in which the figures, often queer males, feel relaxed and free to be who they are without any predetermined goals or moral imperative.

Nia Imani Winslow, originally from Washington, DC, is a collage artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Nia combines the complexities of different textures, cuttings, and clippings to illuminate figures, moods, and stories. Vibrant hues and tints are used to convey the striking spirit every Black life possesses.

For more information, contact the director, Amanda Brown, at 718-499-3844 or info@440gallery.com.