Zeal Harris

" Marriage is a Lottery" mixed media on archival paper

2019

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer...

Zeal Harris is known for creating seductive, caricaturesque, political, urban-vernacular, story paintings, with a blunt mix of high-brow/low-brow elements. Her micro-narratives offer socio-political commentary about a range of larger issues that often have to do with the layered experiences of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Almost always, the work is based on contemporary real life stories or events in daily life. She is a Los Angeles based visual artist who graduated from UCLA School of Film & Television and later with a MFA in Studio Art from Otis College of Art & Design. She has been in recent exhibitions at the Port Au Prince Haiti Ghetto Biennale, the California African-American Museum, and the Caribbean Cultural Center of the African Diaspora in New York. "Knight stealth" dye sublimation...

LISA KOKIN Mineola, New York, b. 1954 Lisa Kokin creates her art with recycled and reclaimed materials she has found at flea markets, thrift stores, and recycling centers. In the pas...

This depicts civil rights icon MLK, the Statue of Liberty, Iwo Jima, an assemblage of mixed media photographic images and painted collaged elements. A powerful, moving work, an ode to the black civil rights movement. John M. Mitchell is originally from North Carolina, and as an art student at North Carolina Central University, he was involved with the Civil Rights movement including participating and getting arrested at a sit-in protest in Durham in 1963. After graduating, he was one of the first art teachers to take a position at the newly integrated schools in his home state. Mitchell continued his education in the 1990s and earned an MFA in painting from the Savannah College of Art and Design in 1993. He later served as a professor there from 1998-2006. Of his inspiration to create, Mitchell says: "A lot of my work is based on my experiences during the Civil Rights movement," he says. "I see art making as a 'record' of experiences. My bittersweet past, growing up in the segregated South, inspires the content, focus and narrative of my work." Savannah-based artist John Mitchell believes that a home is more than a simple edifice. Rather, he argues that the sociological, psychological, architectural, and historical associations embedded in the structure “tell us about our culture, our lives. It tells us about where we come from.” Mitchell's signature shotgun house constructions, crafted from found materials and scraps of newspaper headlines, reference his childhood in North Carolina, where such modest architectural structures were once commonplace. In "ALA 1963," he uses the shotgun shape to create a heartfelt memorial to a group of African-American girls killed in a racially motivated church bombing in Alabama nearly 50 years ago. He also incorporates the shotgun symbol in "Victims," a powerful reflection upon crime in Savannah in the early 1990s, which reveals how little has changed over the past two decades. Mitchell's mixed media constructions operate, in many ways, like memory itself. Scraps, fragments and pieces loosely cohere around a central idea, making symbolic and metaphorical connections. In these richly narrative and boldly stream-of-conscious assemblages, the whole truly is greater than the sum of its parts. Mitchell's jazz collages...