Mural Arts has partnered with American Real Estate Partners to showcase the work of Philadelphia artists in the gallery at 1600 Market.

The upcoming exhibition, No Space Between, features the work of four artists from the Mural Arts Fellowship for Black Artists program. Curated by Nazeer Sabree (Mural Arts Fellowship Recipient, 2020) and Megan Galardi, No Space Between weaves together explorations of intimacy and vulnerability. The four artists within this exhibition make public the nuanced experiences of Blackness through the abstraction of physical representation. Black figures are explored in relation to the spaces they inhabit, the histories they emerge from, and the fractures they create in their resiliency to endure and thrive.

Please join us for the opening reception of No Space Between on December 16, 2022, from 6-8 pm at 1600 Market Street. 

Artist Bios:

Chelsey Luster

Chelsey Luster is a Philadelphia-based curator, visual artist and art educator from Baltimore, Maryland. Luster received their BFA from Temple University’s Tyler School of Art and Architecture and attended a residency at Chautauqua School of Art. As a curator, Luster has organized multiple group exhibitions, was a Katheryn Pannepacker Curatorial Fellow at the Da Vinci Art Alliance, and is currently developing their curatorial practices as a Vox Populi member and Exhibition Manager at Philadelphia’s Magic Gardens.  

Luster’s work centers itself around intimacy, vulnerability, and privacy through depictions of domestic spaces with a focus on the bathroom. The bathroom serves as a setting to explore queer black womanhood with regards to lack of privacy, invasion of the black queer body, power structures, and isolation.

Website: www.chelseyluster.com/
Instagram: @chelseylusterart

Kenyssa Evans 

Kenyssa Evans is an interdisciplinary artist from Washington, DC, and now resides in Philadelphia. She received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts with a minor in Curatorial Studies from Moore College of Art and Design, Philadelphia (‘20). Her work highlights spatial narratives that are both personal and universal through the lens of Black life, aesthetic, and imaginary. With the main use of imagery and materiality that are in constant metaphorical motion to our physical and digital reality, she set forth a visual social study of infinite and finite space through psychology and post-independent visual culture of Blackness.

Website: www.kenyssaevans.com
Instagram: @kensayshi 

Naomieh Jovin 

Naomieh Jovin is a visual artist with a focus in photography. She received her BFA in Photography and Digital Arts from Moore College of Art and Design (‘17). Her work is influenced by the absence of her late mother as well as her experiences growing up as a first generation Haitian-American. In her work, she utilizes appropriated photos from old family albums and incorporates her own photographs to try and recreate similar moments. This process is meant to illustrate resistance and intergenerational trauma and how we carry them through our bodies. The incorporation of appropriated family photos, writings from relatives, and her own personal work allows Jovin to reflect on her family history, while paying homage to generations before her and their generational resistance against erasure.

Naomieh Jovin currently lives and works in Philadelphia, PA.

Instagram: @njovn

Zeinab Diomande (Z the Rat)

Zeinab Diomande, otherwise known as “Z The Rat”, is a Philadelphia based multidisciplinary artist. Diomande was born in 1999 in Virginia. Her family left the country to relocate back to their home in the Ivory Coast where she grew up and spent her entire life. In 2017, she moved to Philadelphia where she is currently attending school majoring in Fine Arts Painting and Drawing at The University of The Arts.

Statement: “My current body of work explores the conversation between the ideas of the black figure in relationship to space. I recently switched my work from small to medium scale to overwhelmingly large-scale paintings to start a conversation surrounding the black body and how people interact with it when it starts taking up space. Exploring my black identity in the realm of painting, I willingly put myself in positions and situations that normally would be kept private as they deal with emotional matter and through the language of self- portraiture, mixed media, high-key colors, dynamic compositions and whimsical sceneries I bring those themes that relate to my experience and the black experience at large. In doing so, I would like to challenge the viewers to think differently of the black figure: vulnerable, sensitive, grounded, present and non-threatening, qualities that never seem to be attributed to them.”

Website: ztherat.com
Instagram: @ztheratt