Alexandria Smith is a mixed media visual artist based in London and New York. She earned her BFA in Illustration from Syracuse University; MA in Art Education from New York University; and MFA in Fine Arts from Parsons The New School for Design. She is the recipient of numerous awards including the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship, a Pollock-Krasner Grant, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship, the Virginia A. Myers Fellowship at the University of Iowa and the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship. She has been awarded residencies including MacDowell, Bemis, Yaddo and LMCC Process Space. Smith’s recent exhibitions include her first solo museum exhibit, Monuments to an Effigy at the Queens Museum in NYC and a site-specific commission for the Davis Museum at Wellesley College in 2019. Alexandria currently has a solo exhibit, “Memoirs of a Ghost Girlhood: a Black Girl’s Window on view at the Currier Museum of Art (NH) and recently had a solo exhibit, “Pretend Gravitas and Dream Aborted Givens” at Gagosian Park and 75 (NYC). Alexandria is currently Head of Painting at the Royal College of Art in London.
Elizabeth Colomba was born in France and raised in Épinay-sur-Seine, from parents of Martinican descent. She lives and works in New York City. Elizabeth received a degree in applied art from the Estienne School of Art, Paris and also studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris.
Drawing on Old Master techniques and sensibilities, Colomba’s incredibly detailed and rich paintings reclaim mythological, historical, and allegorical narratives from the long- standing legacy of portraiture. Her love of storytelling from a young age carries over into the paintings she does today, newly placing and lauding the Black figure into a pictorial narrative form from which it had been historically omitted.
“By generating an environment for my subjects to inhabit a space that honors their presence and place in and through culture and time allows me to redefine not only how black people have been conditioned to exist, but also how black people have been conditioned to reflect upon themselves. ”
– Elizabeth Colomba
Through the power of portraiture, Colomba’s work challenges conventions of beauty and significance, placing her figures in prominence and redressing the erasures of women of color across the canon of art history.
Colomba’s paintings have been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Park Avenue Armory, New York; California African American Museum, Los Angeles; the Balthus Grand Chalet, Switzerland; the International Biennial of Contemporary Art (BIAC), Martinique; Volta, New York; the Fondazione Biagiotti Progetto Arte, Florence and the inaugural triennial at Columbia University. Her work is included in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Portland Museum of Art, ME,The Studio Museum in Harlem, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, The Park Avenue Armory, JP Morgan, Yale University and Princeton University Art Museum among others. Her work was featured on the cover of the New Yorker to commemorate Juneteenth 2022 and most recently in the international December 2023 issue of Vogue.
Monique Long is a writer and independent curator based in New York City with experience in curatorial and program development across the United States. Her collaborations include institutions such as the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, the Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, and Guild Hall in East Hampton. Her exhibition, When the Children Come Home, is a solo presentation for David Antonio Cruz, currently on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Long has contributed to arts publications widely, often writing about contemporary art, personal essays, and fashion history. She is also working on a book about Philadelphia and contemporary art.