Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone

About the Curatorial Fellow:

Courtney Zoa Brown is an experimental visual artist, curator, and cultural facilitator based in Brooklyn, originally from the West Side of Chicago, Illinois. Their practice engages experimental and interdisciplinary forms across di-asporic contexts, with a focus on sculptural, ritual, and spatial languages. Grounded in African-Diasporic sociality, Brown’s practice investigates how communities navigate displacement, archive lived experience, and build forms of resistance through embodied knowledge. Listening functions as both material and methodology in their curatorial approach.

Brown holds a BA in Art History and Africana Studies from Oberlin College. They have curated and programmed with institutions including the Art Institute of Chicago, Brooklyn Arts Council, South London Gallery and John St Gallery. Their notable projects include Through the Loop: Chicago’s Youth Artist Revolution at Jip Gallery (2021), a virtual exhi-bition exploring displacement, activism, and positionality within Chicago’s underground youth artist scene, and Firelei Báez: Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) at South London Gallery, co-curated as part of the inaugural 2023–24 New Curators international fellowship.

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About the artists:

Melika Abikenari is an Iranian-born, Brooklyn-based artist, educator, and organizer whose practice investigates the intergenerational inheritance of memory, matrilineality, ritual, and the body in relation to state violence through material inquiry, performance, and installation. Abikenari holds a BA from UCLA and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has exhibited in galleries and insti-tutions across the US, participated in NYFA’s Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program, and completed residencies at Cerámica Suro, Art Cake, and the Textile Arts Center.

Obadah Aljerfri is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist and designer rooted in long-term inves-tigations into identity and perception across queer, Muslim, and diasporic experience. Their con-ceptual practice integrates painting, sculpture, installation, performance, and illustration with satir-ical, abject, and tender gestures that trouble the violences of the gaze. Holding an MFA in Integrat-ed Practices from Pratt Institute and a BFA in Illustration from the Savannah College of Art and De-sign, they bring over ten years of experience in art production, art direction, illustration, and branding across art, design, fashion, and marketing. Aljefri has worked on major exhibitions with Muhannad Shono, Jenny Polak, and Andrew Woolbright, and has exhibited internationally at Ithra, the Bronx Council on the Arts, 21,39 Jeddah Arts, and Volta Basel.

Ji Eun Cheon (b. 1995) is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of perception and understanding. Through installations that synthesize various media, she examines the coexistence of paradoxes—order and chaos, reason and uncertainty. Her fictional universe, Uncanished Workld, reflects the limits of knowledge and the perpetual tension between structure and instability. She holds BFA and MFA degrees in sculpture from Seoul National University and MFA in fine arts from School of Visual Arts.

Priyanka Dey lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and holds a BFA from Pratt Institute. Originally, Dey is from Mumbai, India. Dey aims to create work that plays with optics of perception by experimenting with and leveraging obscurity. Her process balances a calculative yet intuitive paradigm which re-sists definitive categorization.

Christopher Paul Jordan is a painter and public artist who investigates the afterlife of memory, sim-ulating conditions of removal to reexamine human relationships. Lacing salvaged textiles such as window screens and debris netting with acrylic paint, Jordan separates his images from their origi-nal surfaces while generating new histories from the traces they leave behind. Through parallel practices in performance, installation, and sculpture, his inquiries are persistently situated in pub-lic space. Jordan’s first museum exhibition: In The Interim - Ritual Ground for a Future Black Ar-chive, buries African American predictions of the end of the world on the grounds of the Frye Art Museum until the year 2123. His 20ft bronze, aluminum, and steel sculpture andimgonnamissev-erybody (2021) is the centerpiece for The AIDS Memorial Pathway in Seattle. Jordan has completed residencies at Bemis Center for the Arts, Headlands Center for the Arts, Mahler and LeWitt Studios, Museum of Glass, and NXTHVN. Jordan is a Leslie Lohman Museum Fellow, A Queer|Art Fellow and holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art (2023).

Arom Ju is a multidisciplinary visual artist from South Korea, now based in the U.S. Beginning in digital illustration, she translates the flat precision of screen-based imagery into painting, bridging digital and physical languages. She has recently expanded her practice to include mobile-like mov-ing elements that explore motion and fragility. Ju holds an MFA from Hongik University and has ex-hibited in the United States and Korea, including at the New Museum Los Gatos, A Space Gallery, and Bushwick Gallery in Brooklyn. Her work has also been featured by institutions such as Microsoft and The New York Times.

Colby Lamson-Gordon is a Brooklyn-based artist working across image, video, and sound. Adopted from China to the United States, they explore (dis)placement and imagined memory through pro-cess-driven images and experimental documentary. Their practice draws on the archive and em-bodied knowledge to probe longing and the instability of personal history. Lamson-Gordon’s work has shown at Ridgewood Off-Kilter Film Festival, East Village Film Festival, Residency Unlimited, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Mannes School of Music, and Gallery ZXY. They hold an MFA in Design & Technology from Parsons School of Design and a BA in Economics from Barnard College, where they received the O’Connor Award for best economic thesis. An upcoming resident at NARS Foun-dation and Vermont Studio Center, they live in Brooklyn and teach at Parsons.

Yutong (Leah) Liu is a New York–based artist who received her BFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025. Her practice spans sculpture and sound. Through cast hollow chambers and modular assemblages, she activates absence and deviation, fracturing the coherence of struc-tural systems. Liu’s work has been exhibited in the United States and China, including at Gelman Gallery (Providence), Woods-Gerry Gallery (Providence), and Acentric Space Gallery (Shanghai). She has participated in residencies at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts (Maine), Arts Letters & Num-bers (New York), and Acentric Space (Shanghai), with upcoming residencies at GlogauAIR (Berlin).

Fe Lugo is a Bronx-born, genderqueer artist whose practice spans sculpture, image-making, writing, and digital experimentation. They work with materials such as glass, wood, metal, and photographic imagery to study how identity, power, and desire take form across both intimate and collective histories.

Fe holds a BFA in Art and Art Education from Pratt Institute, where they trained in woodworking, glass, metal fabrication, mold-making, and photographic processes. Lugo has been an educator in New York City arts programs and has held residencies including Stove Works and Wassaic Project. Their work has been presented in community-centered art spaces and interdisciplinary exhibitions, and they continue to expand their practice through research-driven studio work, material experi-mentation, and teaching. Lugo lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Asli Narin is a visual artist based in the United States, originally from Turkey. She holds a BA in Visu-al Arts and Visual Communication Design from Sabanci University and an MA in Image and Commu-nication from Goldsmiths, University of London. Her work has been presented nationally and inter-nationally, including at the 16th Istanbul Biennial (2019, Turkey) and the Ruthin International Arts Festival (2024, UK), with recent exhibitions at the Silver Eye Center for Photography and the Hou-ston Center for Photography. Her work is in collections including Eskenazi Health and the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. She recently received the DeHaan Artist of Distinction Award from the Arts Council of Indianapolis and was an artist-in-residence at Visual Studies Workshop Project Space Res-idency.

Hyunjin Park is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher based in New York and Seoul. She investi-gates the affective presence of non-human beings and how they challenge boundaries between the modern and ancient, life and death, and human and non-human. Her solo exhibitions include Gal-lery OOOJH (Seoul, 2022), Gallery Chamber (Seoul, 2025), with upcoming shows at Open Space Bae (Busan, 2025) and Kumho Museum of Art (Seoul, 2026). She has participated in group exhibitions at Total Museum, Onsugonggan, Hui Gallery (Hong Kong), and OyG project (NYC). Park has attended residencies including Domaine de Boisbuchet, Vermont Studio Center, the Wassaic Project, the Watermill Center, and NARS Foundation. Park was also selected as the AHL Foundation T&W grant recipient.

Sabrina Herbosa Reyes is Filipina-American architect and interdisciplinary artist (sculpture, painting, movement, film, performance) interested in the relationship between spirit and matter as it exists across temporalities and explored through materiality, ritual and craft. Reyes creates environments through large-scale sculpture and installation, as a way to evoke the sublime, inward reflection and daydream. Alluding to nature and “home,” Reyes pulls from her memories of the Philippines and New York to create relationships between environments and bodies. Through movement, the body is seen as a vessel to activate and respond to space, both natural and built. Through this process her work becomes a site that encourages communal gathering and ceremony, as a way to trans-mute spirit in the form of collective healing.

Chanya Vitayakul (they/them, b. 2003) is a multidisciplinary artist from Bangkok, Thailand. Their work has been exhibited in New York, Rhode Island, South Korea, and Thailand, and has appeared in publications including Curatory Magazine, Divide Magazine, New Visionary Magazine, and the Survivor Arts and Writing Collective. Chanya holds a BFA in Graphic Design from the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) and is based in Long Island City, New York.

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