Alyssa Newsham (b. 1997) is Creole, New Orleans born and bred is a self taught artist based in Los Angeles, CA. Being born in a family that is full of life and colorful stories, she is steeped in the essence of her Creole culture. Her work is grounded in the importance of family and the acknowledgment of her ancestral traditions. She casts her characters through the movements of her materials, exaggerating hidden archival details that she seeks to accentuate in her work. She aims to illuminate the forgotten, neglected, and lost treasures through her assemblage practice. She predominantly highlights organic materials such as coffee grinds, nut shells, and corn to echo the vulnerability of shifting archival narratives. With her ongoing research inside her familial branches, she traces her steps back into the past to connect evidence with the truths and tales of the present.
Aanii Tate (Diné and white, she/her) works across printmaking, digital media, and fiber arts. Her art challenges settler colonial ways of display and is rooted in themes of land remembrance and sisterhood. She grew up in Portland, Oregon, creating art with her two older sisters. She is a recent graduate of USC, majoring in American Studies and Ethnicity (Dornsife) and minoring in Communication Design (Roski). She is passionate about arts education, community organizing, and arts resource redistribution.
Her work engages hyper-visible photos of Native people and landscapes, popularized by white settler photographers, anthropologists and bureaucrats. Engaging with these images as exploitative and threatening, her current series of works offers these colonially-corrupted images a new life, one rooted in protection with annotations aimed to challenge the viewer’s perspective.