Exhibiting at Felix LA for the first time, Fridman Gallery will present the work of several artists whose innovative uses of mixed media advance their storytelling: Dindga McCannon, Nate Lewis and Lauren Luloff. For most of them, presentation marks their West Coast debuts.

 

Dindga McCannon (b. 1941, New York City)

Raised in Harlem and the Bronx, Dindga came of age as an artist and young mother during the rise of feminist art in New York City and the civil rights movement across the nation. Dindga began her career studying with Harlem Renaissance artists – Jacob Lawrence, Charles Alston, Richard Mayhew, and Al Loving – at the Art Students League of New York and at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. She went on to become a pillar of the influential African-American art collective Weusi, and later co-founded (with Faith Ringgold and Kaye Brown) Where We At Black Women Artists, which picketed and petitioned museums to become more inclusive. 

 

Dindga’s use of oil painting, printmaking, and sewing made her an early influencer of textile assemblage, found-object quilting, and wearable art, all of which expand upon the legacy of African and African-American culture and historical memory. Her works often focus on the history and stories of women — iconic public figures, unknown heroines, family, and friends who shape her vibrant universe. Throughout her career, Dindga has created space for artistic exploration and a support network for generations of Black artists to follow.

 

Dindga’s work is in the public collections of the National Gallery of Art, The Whitney, the Brooklyn Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. She participated in in major traveling museum exhibitions, including Afro-Atlantic Histories at the National Gallery of Art, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965-1985 at the Brooklyn Museum; and Black Power at the National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, Tennessee.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Nate Lewis (b. 1985, Beaver Falls, PA)

Nate Lewis is recognized for his intricate works on paper, which combine elements of photography, printmaking, sculpture and drawing. The figurative works feature dancers caught in motion with limbs intertwined against backgrounds of embossed textures, fabric rubs, colored inks and curvilinear shapes, which not only envelop but also respond to the movement, appearing as sound waves and currents. Nate Lewis bachelor’s Degree in Nursing from Virginia Commonwealth University, and practiced critical-care nursing for nine years. Lewis’s work has been exhibited at The California African American Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Yale Center for British Art, and in Men of Change: Power, Triumph, Truth, touring with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Services. Past residencies include Pioneer Works, Dieu Donne, Fountainhead, and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Lewis’s work is in the collections of the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Art, the Brooklyn Museum, The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Wellin Museum of Art, the Blanton Museum of Art, Grinnell College Museum of Art, Kadist Foundation, and other institutions. He lectured at Yale University as part of Claudia Rankine’s Racial Imaginary Institute.

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alina Grasmann (b. 1989, Munich, Germany) 

Alina Grasmann’s site-specific paintings blur fact and fiction. Her works are inspired by her travels, American architecture, film, and literature. Grasmann researches places and then visits them in real life, recording her experiences and the atmosphere. Drawn to the narratives of each place, she compares the reality and sensation of the place with the way she imagined it would be, then makes interventions by changing or adding objects, or erasing parts. Rather than illustrating existing myths about a place, she aims to create space for association so new stories emerge.

 

Grasmann studied at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts in the class of Karin Kneffel, and at the Vienna University of Applied Arts in the class of Gabriele Rothemann. She participated in the NARS Foundation Artist-in-Residence program in New York City, Rocking S Art Ranch Residency in Phoenix, Arizona, and at Fridman Gallery’s residency in Beacon, New York. The artist lives and works in Munich, Germany.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

​

Sahana Ramakrishnan (b. Mumbai, India)

Sahana Ramakrishnan’s paintings explore the concept of non-duality, central to Hinduism and Buddhism. By contrast, the Western-European tradition––with its emphasis on the distinction between the subject and the object, between the rational mind and the examined world––has led, inevitably, to the fracturing of the social fabric and the wealth gap that accompanies unchecked individualism. Non-duality posits that there is no distinction between an individual consciousness and the totality of being, that the observed reflects the observer and that, therefore, any resentment towards the other is illusory. From this standpoint, Ramakrishnan uses her paintings to contemplate death, identity, and the consumption and killing of "other" sentient beings. 

 

Ramakrishnan was born in Mumbai, India and raised in Singapore. She moved to the United States to complete her BFA in Painting at RISD, has participated in residencies and fellowships at Yaddo, Gateway Project Spaces, the Robert Blackburn Workshop, the Yale/Norfolk Summer program, and received the Florence Leif grant from RISD. 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

​

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Lauren Luloff (b. 1980, Dover, New Hampshire)

Lauren Luloff’s time-based process of mark-making – brush-painting dyes onto stretched silk then unstretching and steaming the fabric to let the dyes seep in – recalls symbiosis and growth found in the natural environment. Her signature organic, flowing forms play with the dichotomy of order and chaos, the dissonant and the harmonious, the unsettling and the soothing. Each pattern can be seen as a wavelength, a molecule, a neuron in a complex network of communications. The paintings also can be read as landscapes, an homage to Luloff’s home in Northern Maine, the changing seasons, the passage of time, the shifting colors, the rituals of morning light, of budding trees, of ripened fruit, of holidays and harvest. 

 

 

Lauren Luloff, born in 1980 in Dover, New Hampshire, received her MFA from The Milton Avery College of Art, Bard College and her BFA from Pennsylvania State University. Her work has been featured and reviewed in The New York Times, Vogue, T Magazine, Art in America, and the Huffington Post. She has been awarded residencies by The Bau Institute in Cassis, France, The Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY, DNA Residency in Provincetown, MA, and Interlude Residency in Hudson, NY. 

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

​

​

​

​

​

​

 

 

 

 

 

VLM (Virginia L. Montgomery)

VLM is a multimedia artist working across video, performance, sound design, and sculpture. She is known for her unique, synthesia-esque, surrealist works that unite elements from mysticism, science, global 21st c. innovation culture, and her own lived experience as an intuitive, neurodivergent individual. Her artwork is surreal, sensorial, and symbolic. It shifts in subject matter from stones to moths and machines, as VLM deploys an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary of repeating gestures and recursive symbols like circles, holes, and spheres. Her artistic efforts are characterized by material experimentation, somatic sensitivity, and her unusual studio practice of hand-raising the moths and butterflies appearing in her videos. VLM’s diverse artistic movements interrogate the complex relationship between physical and psychic structures via gestures of agency, intimacy, and empathy. VLM also holds a parallel career; she works as a visual ideation scribe, a Graphic Facilitator, a unique profession for which she travels the world to diagram the development of ideas at group meetings like TED talks, DEI events, and innovation conferences. In her work as a fine artist, VLM turns this professional skill-set, which she describes as “mind map scribing,” inwards, to render the contours of her own subconscious and the symbolics of storytelling. Collectively, VLM's symbols, forms, subjects, and gestures rupture material surfaces, opening up portals into the hope of atomic consciousness.

 

Montgomery has had solo presentations with New Museum (NY), Times Square Arts (NY), Museum Folkwang (Germany), Wright Lab at Yale University (CT), The Lawndale Art Center (TX), False Flag (NY), and Hesse Flatow (NY). She has also exhibited in group exhibitions at institutions including SculptureCenter (NY), La Panacée-MoCo (France), The Hessel Museum at Bard College (NY), The Banff Centre (Canada), Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), The Menil Collection (TX), and Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Denmark), among others.

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​

​