Facing Race Together
“…and above all we have creativity, the strength that unites us.” –Kanae Goji
This exhibition explores the meaning of inclusion and racial equity in our community through the eyes of local artists who have their own stories to tell. These are stories of struggle and strength, invisibility and triumph, and the beauty of diversity.
The artists selected for this exhibition use a variety of media – oil, acrylic, silkscreen, textiles, wood, mixed-media techniques as well as three-dimensional installation – and display works that emphasize their experiences living in the minority or facing metaphorical and literal barriers living in the South. Though each of them faces a different set of battles in their lives, they use art as a way to process the adversity and find a common thread that pulls us all together.
Roxana Sinex
About the Artist:
Roxana Sinex was drawing before she could talk and grew up hiking and backpacking with her family where she developed a great love for the wilderness. She expresses this in her art, sharing the joy that the forest brings to her along with her life-long passion for portraiture.
Along with her career as an architect, Roxana took classes and workshops in acrylics, oil painting, and pastels. In 2006 she started teaching art and in 2008 opened “Roxy’s Art Studio & Gallery” in Historic Savage Mill in Savage, Maryland.
In 2019, Roxana moved to Greenville, South Carolina and now enjoys her life as a full-time artist in her new studio at the foot of Paris Mountain, bringing her lots of fresh subject matter to her landscapes and meeting new friends to enjoy and to paint.
www.roxanasinexart.com
Charles Eady
About the Artist:
The truth is African Americans have been portrayed to the nation and the world in a pool of political propaganda, causing most people to believe the media’s presentations. In addition, these note-worthy citizens have mostly been excluded from the pages of history books. African Americans are a family-oriented people helping to nurture communities across America.
As an artist I take on these issues with provocative paintings and a book I authored titled, Hidden Freedom. The images I create are deliberately painted to show the daily lives of free blacks who lived in the south that were exempt from history. They are a people who survived in an era of bondage, their contributions to the south are presented with images and documents of their bold existence.
I have spent years searching their records from the colonial times to the Antebellum South and found startling facts. Their images have the potential to ignite the imaginations of all viewers as they view a different narrative of the South.
Sabrina White
About the Artist:
Sabrina White is a South Carolina artist, born and raised in the Lowcountry, currently living in Lexington, SC. She is a K-12 arts educator who has shown her work in galleries in North and South Carolina and attends art residencies, most recently at Azule, A Place for Artists in Hot Springs, NC. She has also published short stories, poetry, and artwork in various publications. Her work deals primarily with issues of race and ancestry, her words and imagery dominated with the faces of the Black man, woman, and child.
Lori Isom
About the Artist:
It is fair to say that Lori has experienced a varied and broad career as an artist and an all-around creative person. Beginning with studying fashion illustration in high school and later at Parsons School of Design, she also dedicated years working as a professional dancer, singer and actress in New York and L.A., and tried her hand at several interesting entrepreneurial pursuits along the way.
A figurative and portrait artist for over 20 years, Lori has been commissioned to do hundreds of individual and family portraits, many of which include military personnel and heads of companies. She has also shared her love and knowledge of art by coaxing the budding artist out of young children, adults and seniors. Lori's work has been featured in the pages of American Art Collector, and she has been interviewed for television and newspaper articles regarding her work.
She has had several solo exhibitions, and has been a featured artist in many group exhibitions. Lori also completed a one-year artist residency for the City of North Charleston, during which she had the privilege to work on several community-focused projects including outdoor murals, art workshops and demonstrations, and outreach programs. At this point in her career, Lori is working to grow in greater artistic expression through deep personal exploration; moving beyond the influence of societal values and mores.
Find Lori on Instagram: ArtintheNow
Amanda Ladymon
About the Artist:
Amanda Ladymon’s work involves creating a circular dialogue, with one part affecting another, creating an endless flow of biomorphic, organic forms and evolving experimentation with materials. Research on the interior workings of the human body and of plants and ocean life on the macro and microscopic level creates the initial cognitive drive for the work. Balancing tension through visual relationships of form and color, her mixed media pieces are the product of a natural, self-organizing principle that operates intuitively. There is an endless interplay between the structured and the amorphous or between evolution and entropy.
Kanae Goji
About the Artist:
Kanae Goji was born in Papantla, Veracruz Mexico. She grew up beside her parents Masaru Goji Inoue (sculptor - plastic artist) and Socorro Jiménez García (nurse), grew up in a cradle of artists beside her. She had a childhood rich in explorations, trips, fascinating adventures that opened a lot to creativity, along with her father she learned many techniques including painting, modeling, sculpture, casting molding. She worked her whole childhood beside her dad as his main assistant in the creations, there were occasions when her development was so advanced that her own father asked for her work to produce them in a large scale and immortalize small creations.
Kanae Goji combined the teaching of kindergarten with the teaching of art at Culture Houses as extracurricular courses that she was invited to participate in and continued to exhibit and sell her easel works, when decided to focus more on muralism, highlighting more as a muralist artist in México. When she met the love of her life, she left everything in México and decided to follow him to this country where it’s been very difficult to find art opportunities. When the young ones began kindergarten, she met Ivan Segura, together with Palmetto and Luna arts, Kanae Goji was very excited about this door open to creativity, where her desire to paint and create is returned to her. She is an art lover, always for everything she invites art with teaching, with culture, with society. Kanae is an artist who combines dreams and techniques ranging from surrealism, expressionism, and abstract figures, she handles colors and nuances always remembering pleasant or dark experiences she has experienced and it’s like, every artist lives and feels through art.
"She is an artist who changes, is not tied to a certain aesthetic, but, according to circumstances, moods, friends, relationships, changes styles."
Now she is living what her foreign father lived in Mexico, that feeling of not belonging, the scarce opportunities for a foreigner. She feels every day more sadness as not being able to find a better job and focus on her ability to teach, she feels devalued and always rejected, discriminated against, and often doomed to failure.
She wants to find a better solvency for her daughters and her family that every day need more, and that, more than love, they also see a mother who can fight and never defeat herself, in the face of adversities. Nowadays Kanae Goji is alive and wanting to do more works wanting to be looked at, her dream is to fly, with her wings of a thousand colors with broken wings wanting to show the world how these butterflies, we are excluded and rejected but look at us here, we are capable, waiting for inclusion.
Keith Tolen
JoAnn Borovicka
About the Artist:
In my mixed media/assemblage art I explore themes of what it is to be human at this time in history. The materials I use include shapes that I carve, mold, sew, paint, or in other ways create myself as well as found items. I love to incorporate into my art objects that have already had a long life, are bursting with personality, and might otherwise be headed for a landfill. I feel that the unique histories of pre-owned materials, with their memory traces of events and personalities, adds layers of mystery to my creations.
For working in a technique described as “assemblage,” I use a surprising number of implements of destruction. I wield saws, drills, wire cutters, hammers, screwdrivers, and knives of all kinds to carve and otherwise shape new materials as well as to modify found objects. Fastening the objects together in an assemblage can be tricky because the diverse materials that may be
involved (wood, metal, glass, ceramic, paper, fabric, plastics) often require different adhesives. Most of my assemblages are enhanced with paints, often highlighted with metallic wax, and—because the variety and layers of texture in my work invite touch—they are always varnished.