Exhibition Artists

Rawles (b. 1976, Wilmington, Delaware; lives in Los Angeles) received a B.A. from Spelman College, Atlanta, Georgia, and an M.A. from New York University. She has had solo exhibitions at Lehmann Maupin, New York; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles; and Standard Vision, Los Angeles. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions, including the 12th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, Berlin; Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA); Walter Maciel Gallery, Los Angeles; LACMA9 Art + Film Lab, Inglewood, California; Rush Arts Gallery, New York, among others. Rawles created the cover art for Ta-Nehisi Coates’s novel, The Water Dancer, and her work is in numerous public and private collections, including the Dallas Museum of Art; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Pérez Art Museum Miami; and Studio Museum in Harlem, New York.

Yu-Wen Wu is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Taipei, Taiwan and is based in Boston, MA. She received her B.sc from Brown University in Providence, RI, and an MFA from the School of Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Wu has received numerous awards including the 2023 James and Audrey Foster Prize at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art. Her work is in several private and public collections, and she has exhibited nationally and internationally at institutions including the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens College, NY; the Smithsonian National Museum of American History, Washington, D.C.: Tufts University Art Galleries, Medford, MA; Acropolis Museum, Athens, Greece; Xippas Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland;and more.

David Uzochukwu is a Berlin-based artist, photographer, and filmmaker whose work explores identity, cultural memory, and history. His images have appeared in the British Journal of Photography, i-D, Dazed, and have been exhibited at Saatchi Gallery (London), Fotografiska (New York and Shanghai), and Museo de Arte Moderno (Mexico City), among other institutions. His photographs are held in public collections including Collection Pictet (Switzerland), Musée de la Photographie de Saint-Louis (Senegal), and The Wedge Collection (Canada). A 2025 Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree, Uzochukwu has directed films such as Götterdämmerung (2020) and Civil Dusk (2021), and episodes of Black Fruit, which premiered in 2024 at the Tribeca Film Festival. Bodies of Water is his debut solo museum exhibition.

Khara Woods is a multidisciplinary artist and graphic designer based in Memphis, TN. Finding joy in grids and geometric abstraction, her colorful practice includes painting, sculpture, and public art projects that can be seen throughout Memphis. Woods’s work has been exhibited at the Hilliard Art Museum, Lafayette, Louisiana; Red 225 Art Gallery, Nashville, Tennessee; and throughout Memphis including the Beverly + Sam Ross Gallery at Christian Brothers University, Crosstown Arts, and Sheet Cake Gallery. She was awarded the New Public Artists Fellowship in 2021 by the UrbanArt Commission.

Thomas Jackson was born in Philadelphia, PA, and grew up in Providence, RI. After earning a B.A. in History from the College of Wooster, he spent his early career in New York City working first in book publishing, then as an editor and writer at Forbes Life magazine. An interest in photography books eventually led him to pick up a camera, shooting street scenes, then landscapes, and finally the installation work he does today.Mostly self-taught as an artist, Jackson’s practice merges landscape photography, sculpture, and kinetic art. His work has been exhibited widely, including at The Photography Show (AIPAD) in New York and the Bolinas Museum in Bolinas, CA, and published in The New Yorker, Harper’s, Wired, the San Francisco Chronicle, and elsewhere. Jackson was named one of the Critical Mass Top 50 in 2012, won the “installation/still-life” category of PDN’s The Curator award in 2013 and earned second place in CENTER's Curator's Choice Award in 2014.

Andrea Morales (b. 1984) (she/her/ella) is a queer, Latiné documentary photographer and photojournalist whose work focuses on social movements, community, and everyday magic in Memphis and the wider American South. Born in Lima, Peru, Morales grew up in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood and is currently based in Memphis. She received a BS in Journalism and a certificate in Latin American Studies at the University of Florida, an MA in Visual Communication at Ohio University, and an MFA in Documentary Expression from the University of Mississippi. She has worked in newsrooms across the United States, and her photos have been featured in outlets including The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, NBC News, ProPublica, Washington Post, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, and The New York Times. She currently serves as the Visuals Director at MLK50: Justice Through Journalism, a nonprofit newsroom in Memphis reporting on the intersections of poverty, power, and public policy. Her work has been exhibited across the country and is held in public and private collections including The Do Good Fund, Memphis International Airport, and the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art. (Photo Credit: Lucy Garrett)

His studies with Hans Hofmann in Provincetown and subsequent immersion in the New York art scene blended with his southern background to produce a vibrant art that celebrates bustling city life; the city provided his subjects: people riding buses and subways, stores, street scenes, parades, and the urban landscape. Although the Tennessee works are quieter and more bucolic, they too teem with telling details—interesting characters, hand painted signs, and animals. Like a correspondent, he makes note of people and situations, capturing the salient details that bring a scene to life.

Samilia Pelshak is a Nigerian-American fashion designer, educator, and pattern designer whose multidisciplinary practice bridges fashion, environmental design, and visual storytelling. She is based in Memphis, Tennessee, where she is the CEO of her sustainable fashion brand, SAMILIA, LLC. Pelshak received her Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Memphis College of Art, with further studies in environmental and graphic design at the Rhode Island School of Design.

Suchitra Mattai is a multi-disciplinary American artist of Indo-Caribbean descent who creates mixed-media paintings, sculptures, and installations that shed light on untold histories. She often combines processes and materials once associated with the domestic sphere, such as embroidery, sewing, weaving, and found clothing, in order to honor the labor of women. Past projects include group exhibitions at MCA Chicago, ICA Boston, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Sharjah Biennial 14, MCA San Diego, Art Gallery of Ontario, MCA Denver, and solo exhibitions at ICA San Francisco, Tampa Museum of Art, and Socrates Sculpture Park. This fall, she will also open a solo exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC. Her works are represented in public and private collections, which include the Crocker Museum of Art, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Joslyn Museum of Art, MCA San Diego, Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Portland Museum of Art, Tampa Museum of Art, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art.  Mattai received an MFA in painting and drawing and an MA in South Asian art from the University of Pennsylvania and is a 2023 recipient of an Anonymous Was a Woman Award.

Greely Myatt is a Mississippi-born artist active in Memphis who creates playful sculptural works from recycled materials he has collected, found, and received. He received his BFA from Delta State University and an MFA from the University of Mississippi. Myatt is now Professor Emeritus of Sculpture at the University of Memphis, where he taught for 31 years.  His whimsical works and monumental sculptures have been exhibited across the United States, Europe, and Japan and can be found in public and private collections, including the City of Memphis;  Hadley Martin Fisher Collection;  Huntsville Museum of Art;  Masure Museum of Art;  Memphis Brooks Museum of Art;  Metal Museum; Minneapolis Institute of Art; Mississippi Museum of Art; and Urban Art Commission.

Comprised of two artists from Memphis, Tennessee, Banana Plastik aims to bring color and vibrancy to walls everywhere. Paige Ellens (she/her) and Ivy-Jade Edwards (she/her) majored in Studio Art at the University of Memphis, graduating in 2020 and 2019, respectively. With Edwards' striking illustrative style and Ellens' attention to color and patterning, the two painters joined forces to collaborate on murals and other public artworks. Both artists are inspired by murals, contemporary art, and pop culture, including anime, film/TV, and music. They’ve exhibited separately and together across the state, and their creative flair in murals can be seen across Memphis.