Stella Jones
Exhibitions
Current
We Carry Generations
Start Date: October 7, 2023 End Date: January 28, 2024
(Group Exhibition)
Artists include legacy, emerging, mid-level and established artists. CHARLY PALMER offers drawings of heroines created for his current book, “The New Brownies’ Book: A Love Letter to Black Families.” CHRIS MALONE uses clay, beads and other media to create a sculpture inspired by dancers Pearl Primus, Misty Copeland and Michaela DePrince. AYO SCOTT brings the story of the “Me Too” movement to life with a portrait of its founder, Tarana Burke. CARL JOE WILLIAMS introduces us to women who made a difference in his personal life with a tryptic of his mother, aunt and grandmother. FRANK FRAZIER’s latest work from his Civil Rights Shoe Polish Series is an Afrocentric depiction of protests for social justice.
Among the legacy artists whose work continues to set the bar and to influence those who follow, ELIZABETH CATLETT’s Mother and Son lithograph, SAMELLA LEWIS’ original sketches and GWEN KNIGHT’s serigraph, The Girl, offer differing views of what it means to be a woman and Black in America.
Past Exhibitions
Jerry Lynn
Start Date: July 1, 2023 End Date: September 28, 2023
Opening: August 5; White Linen Night
Artists in Attendance
JERRY LYNN is one half of the Lynn brothers, who received early success collaborating under the name “Twin.” Their work can be found in many celebrity collections including Kanye West; Black Enterprise founder Earl Graves; Ralph White of Earth Wind and Fire; Singer/songwriter Kem; Alonzo and Tracey Mourning; BET Founder Bob Johnson and former NBA player Ulysses ‘Junior’ Bridgeman. The “Twin” duo has been featured in multiple magazines and publications and were the official artists of the Essence Music Awards; The Tom Joyner Foundation Cruise; The Kentucky Derby Grand Gala; Black Enterprise Golf and Tennis Challenge and many more. Now working solo, LYNN feels a sense of freedom and often merges historical and current events in his paintings.
Past Exhibitions
Patrick Waldemar
Start Date: July 1, 2023 End Date: September 28, 2023
Opening: August 5; White Linen Night
Artists in Attendance
PATRICK WALDEMAR, a graduate of the American Academy of Art in Chicago is one of the Caribbean’s leading watercolorists. He began exploring the complexity of race in America – specifically the South when he made New Orleans his home. These new works are lush and rich with racial tension. WALDEMAR divides his time between New Orleans and Kingston, Jamaica. His work has been exhibited throughout Jamaica and the United States. He has been published in the American Artist Magazine and International Artist Magazine. His work is in private collections in the U.S.A., United Kingdom, Canada and Jamaica.
Past Exhibitions
CEAUX
Opening: August 5; White Linen Night
Artists in Attendance
Start Date: July 1, 2023 End Date: September 28, 2023
CEAUX is multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in New Orleans, LA. His vivid paintings offer a view of the culture and life of everyday Black folk. CEAUX has exhibited in local venues including the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. He works in a variety of mediums including tattooing, custom cars and musical production.
Past Exhibitions
Reflections: Black life through different lenses
Start Date: April 1, 2023- End Date: June 26, 2023
In JOHN LISTER III’s second exhibition at STELLA JONES GALLERY he is showcased with an exciting emerging artist, ZSUDAYKA NZINGA. Several themes are repeated in their work as they offer disparate views of America including race, class, religion, heroes and heroines.
Lister’s work provides social commentary on the struggles and lifestyles of Black Americans with an approach that is both lyrical and methodical. He utilizes the visual language of stylized figures, icons, text, symbols and bold colors, along with imagery from popular culture.
Lister received a BFA from Bowie State University and attended Morgan State University. He has a myriad of influences on his work but considers Pablo Picasso, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Cy Twombly, Gustav Klimt, Robert Rauschenberg, Henri Matisse and Roy Lichenstein to be his greatest inspirations. His work is found in many private collections as well as the permanent collection of the New Orleans Museum of Art.
Nzinga is a multi-disciplinary artist, curator and arts educator living and working in Washington, DC. The artist considers her work cultural anthropology and focuses on mixed media portraiture that reflects American culture, more specifically the Black woman in America. Her work contains symbolism and many patterns inspired by textile fabrics, Ankara and cultural fabric patterns as well as stained glass.
Her work has been exhibited in public spaces around DC and can be found in many private collections.
Past Exhibitions
More Brown Limbed Girls
Start Date: January 1, 2023- End Date: June 27, 2023
Candace Hunter (chlee), a Chicago based artist, has created a new series of collages that are whimsical and tell stories. Through the use of repurposed materials from magazines, vintage maps, cloth, various re-used materials, she offers this new landscape of materials back to the viewer.
During the beginning of the Coronavirus pandemic, she began to create what she now calls her “Brown Limbed Girls” – a growing series of whimsical brown girls enjoying their lives. She is extremely happy to share the girls with a new audience.
A highly respected artist through the Midwest, chlee has most recently received the Tim and Helen Meier Family Foundation Award, the 3 Arts Award and honored by the Diasporal Rhythms Collective. She is in many private and public collections.
Past Exhibitions
Pride and Beauty
Start Date: January 1, 2023- End Date: June 27, 2023
Bari Jenks is a self-taught artist whose work is African inspired using mixed media to create portraits of Black women. A graduate of Rhode Island school of design, she balanced a career as an interior designer, artist and decorative painter in New Orleans Louisiana until hurricane Katrina.
Past Exhibitions
When Lives Matter
Start Date: April 1, 2022 - End Date: May 31, 2022
I create a visible, interactive surface – like visual icons that are accessible to everyone. My paintings invite viewers to dialogue with them, to take them into their memory.
WOSENE WORKE KOSROF has been a part of the Stella Jones Gallery family since 1999, including an exhibition The Color of Words on exhibit during hurricane Katrina in 2005. He has been a contemporary voice on the international stage and an important component in solidifying our niche as an important venue for fine art of the African Diaspora.
Kosrof has created an internationally recognized artistic signature in his work by being the first contemporary Ethiopian-born artist to use the script forms – fiedel – of his native Amharic as a core element in his paintings. He paints from a place between accident and intention, curiosity and discovery, mastery and uncertainty – and so the viewer too can approach his work to discover meanings that emerge through their interaction.
While attending Howard University, he was surprised that his art history professor was lecturing about his paintings as examples of the new contemporary art coming out of Africa. As a student in 1972 at the School of Fine Arts, Addis Ababa, he had begun showing his paintings in Ethiopia, as well as in the USA, and was pleased that he was already becoming recognized as an artist so early on in his career.
Kosrof is represented in many prominent international and private collections, as well as in the permanent collections of many significant museums.
Past Exhibitions
A Celebration of Black Identity
Start Date: June 2, 2022- End Date: July 28, 2022
We are pleased to present a group exhibition of iconic, contemporary and emerging artists whose work mirrors the social, political and cultural times in which they live(ed) and work(ed.) Their individual explorations of identity and often transformation, offers a chance to bring awareness to the diversity within Black art and to celebrate Black Identity.
From fiber, prints, paintings and sculpture, the artists utilize a variety of media and experimentation while exploring their Southern roots, African heritage, musical icons, everyday life events, rituals and traditions and more.
Artists include RON BECHET, ANTONIO CARRENO, ELIZABETH CATLETT, GENEVIEVE DEMARCO, GEORGE HUNT, CANDACE HUNTER, BARI JENKS, EPAUL JULIEN, SAMELLA LEWIS, JOHN LISTER, JOSEPH LOFTON, JERRY LYNN, LEONARD MAIDEN, DELITA MARTIN, CHARLY PALMER, STEVE PRINCE, ELLAMARIE RAY and PATRICK WALDEMAR.
Past Exhibitions
Kevin Sipp “Pantheon: Black Noise Navigators”
Start Date: January 7, 2023- End Date: March 28, 2023
Pantheon: Black Noise Navigators
In this exhibition I seek to celebrate the fusion of communal and personal mythologies in the history of African descendant music. Each portrait and ritualized artifact speaks to the profound impact our musical griots have had on our bodies and souls. When I speak of the musicians I love, I often speak of ancestors, saints, orishas and avatars, of the divine being embodied in their music and songs.
I wanted to use aesthetic symbols and colors to create a coded language that paid homage to African Diaspora legacies and the tradition of Japanese tattoo body suits as well. The mythic and historically referential worlds created by the words and sounds of our master musicians coupled with the memories and artistic influences that impacted me as a child growing up came to the forefront.
The template used for these works on paper I intend to use again across various media.
KEVIN SIPP 2022
Past Exhibitions
DELITA MARTIN
Start Date: October 1, 2022- End Date: December 28, 2022
“Even though my work depicts Black women, it’s very universal…”
DELITA MARTIN returns to STELLA JONES GALLERY for her third solo exhibition. She tells the stories of women that have often been marginalized and offers a different perspective of the lives of Black women. MARTIN incorporates portraiture, symbols, patterns and color to reconstruct the identity of Black women. “I repurpose objects in my mixed media art, because objects carry memory. When we touch things and live in spaces, we leave our fingerprints on those spaces.”
MARTIN uses a variety of mediums, including various printmaking techniques, painting, drawing, collage, hand-stitching, and has repurposed vintage jewelry into some of her past work. Her process of layering allows her to create portraits that fuse the real and the fantastic.
MARTIN received her BFA in drawing from Texas Southern University and MFA in printmaking from Purdue University. Formally a member of the fine arts faculty at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, Martin currently works as a full-time artist.
Permanent Collections (selected): Bradbury Art Museum, C.N. Gorman Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, David Driskell Center, Library of Congress, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Minnesota Museum of American Art, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Petrucci Family Foundation, Thrivent Financial, William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum, and the U.S. Embassy, Nouakchott, Mauritania.
ARTIST TALK: FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 18
Past Exhibitions
You Inspire Me
Start Date: August 1, 2022- End Date: September 28, 2022
We are pleased to present a pairing of two dynamic contemporary artists. Both focus on the social, political and cultural times in which they live. Charly Palmer often uses portraiture in his mixed media paintings, while Cey Adams uses iconography to highlight his collages. Both artists have found inspiration in the other’s work and have come together to collaborate on two works along with all new individual works.
ARTIST TALK: THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 15th – 5:30pm – 7pm
CHARLY PALMER has exhibited at STELLA JONES GALLERY for over fifteen years and has illustrated nearly a dozen children’s books. Palmer’s career has skyrocketed in the last five years after creating the album cover for John Legend’s most recent album and gracing the cover of Time Magazine’s “America Must Change” issue on race, amidst the uprising after the death of George Floyd. The artist was recently chosen to design the cover of NBA 2K22, the forthcoming 75th anniversary edition of the popular NBA 2K videogame series, designed two Olympic posters and painted portraits for the Green Bay Packers football stadium.
Palmer’s work can be found in private and public collections, including Atlanta Life Insurance, McDonald’s Corporation, Miller Brewing Company, Coca Cola Company and Vanderbilt University. One of Palmers painting’s was auctioned in 2015 as part of “THE ART COLLECTION OF MAYA ANGELOU” by Swann Auction Galleries.
CEY ADAMS, a New York native, emerged from the downtown graffiti movement to exhibit alongside fellow artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring. He appeared in the historic 1982 PBS documentary Style Wars, which tracks subway graffiti in New York. Adams served as Creative Director for Hip-Hop mogul Russell Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings, where he co-founded the Drawing Board, the label’s in-house visual design firm, creating visual identities, album covers, logos, and advertising campaigns for Run DMC, Beastie Boys, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, Notorious B.I.G., Maroon 5, and Jay-Z. He exhibits, lectures and teaches art workshops at institutions including: The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, where his Black Flag mural greets visitors.
Adams work can also be found in the collections of MoMA, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of the City of New York, New York University, Temple University, Walker Art Center, MoCA Los Angeles, Pratt Institute, Stanford University, Howard University, Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, High Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, among others. He co-authored “DEFinition: The Art and Design of Hip-Hop,” published by Harper-Collins; and designed “Def Jam Recordings: The First 25 Years of the Last Great Record Label,” published by Rizzoli. He recently collaborated with IDEO, Apple, Levi’s, Foot Locker, Converse, Pabst Blue Ribbon, YouTube and Google.