Join us for a conversation at Smack Mellon between Erica N. Cardwell and artists Miatta Kawinzi and Madjeen Isaac on the occasion of their solo exhibitions. The conversation will explore the overlapping themes of home, diaspora, and inheritance excavated within each artists’ respective practices and exhibitions.
Erica N. Cardwell is a writer, critic, and educator based in Toronto. She is the recipient of a 2021 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant. Her writing has appeared in ARTS.BLACK, Art in America, Frieze, BOMB, The Brooklyn Rail, C Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and other publications. Earlier this year, Wrong is Not My Name: Notes on (Black) Art was published by The Feminist Press. She has written exhibition and catalog essays for artists such as Crystal Z. Campbell, Rico Gatson, Samantha Box, Chitra Ganesh, and Sandra Brewster. Erica is assistant professor of creative writing at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
Madjeen Isaac is a first generation Haitian-American artist whose practice is rooted in home, communality and belonging. Isaac reimagines and hybridizes landscapes to center boundless Black and Caribbean existences depicting joy, leisure, and liberation. Ultimately she challenges ideas around liminal spaces and the constraints of reality. By reimagining and suggesting ideal worlds of access and autonomy, she inspires viewers to internalize and claim their right to a better reality.
Isaac received a BFA in Fine Art from the Fashion Institute of Technology and an MA in Art + Edu & Community Practice from New York University. Residencies/fellowships include Smack Mellon’s Artist Studio Program, BRIClab: Contemporary Artist Residency Program, the Laundromat Project Fellowship and Lakou NOU Artist Residency Program at Haiti Cultural Exchange. She has exhibited at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Swivel Gallery, Jenkins Johnson Projects Gallery, The Frost Art Museum, The Art and Design Gallery at FIT among others. In 2023, Isaac collaborated with KITH to create an Artist Series Capsule Collection in Honor of Black History Month. She is the recipient of the 2024 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship for Painting and the 2022 Women of Distinction Award for Arts and Entertainment from NY Assemblymember Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn.
Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, writer, and educator. Her work explores practices of re-imagining the self, identity, place, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Of Liberian and Kenyan heritage, Kawinzi was raised in Tennessee and Kentucky and has been based in NYC since 2010. Her work engages interior and exterior landscapes to illuminate themes of inter-connectivity, hybridity, diaspora, and queered temporalities.
Recent exhibitions include “Mami Wata Afrofuturism: 500 Years Back to the [Afro][F]uture” at the Houston Museum of African American Culture, TX (2024), “States of Becoming” touring with Independent Curators International 2022-27 and presented at Des Moines Art Center, IA (2024) and the Africa Center, NY (2022-23), “in pieces…” at PS122 Gallery, NY (2023), and “Soft is Strong,” solo exhibition at CUE Art Foundation, NY (2021). Kawinzi’s work has screened at the Pan African Film Festival with LACMA, CA (2023), Ann Arbor Film Festival, MI where she received the No. 1 African Film Award (2022), and New Orleans Film Festival, LA (2021).
Recent residencies include Residency Unlimited (NY), Smack Mellon (NY), and MacDowell (NH). She is a recipient of the 2024 Creative Capital Award, 2023 Harpo Foundation Grant, 2021-23 Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, and 2021 NY Artadia Award. She received a BA in Interdisciplinary Art and Cultural Theory from Hampshire College and an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College.