Big Happy: A Momentary Utopia | Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz

Wanda Raimundi-Ortiz is an interdisciplinary visual artist whose work pulls from 17th and 18th-century European portraiture, comic books, sketch comedy, folkloric dance, and installation to address race, bias, trauma, and healing. Her work has been exhibited in numerous venues such as the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Museum of Arts and Design, Garage Museum Moscow, Orlando Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Gyeongnam Art Museum, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico; and at the Manifesta biennial, and the Performa biennial. Her work has been covered by numerous media outlets, including Art in America ArtNews, PBS, NPR, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. She earned her MFA from Rutgers University Mason Gross School of Art and also attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She currently serves as board member for the College Art Association, where she’s committed to addressing invisible workloads on faculty of color.

Ayana Evans’s guerilla-style performances have been staged at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Queens Museum, and a variety of free public locations. Her performances have been reviewed in The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, Hyperallergic and New York Magazine’s The Cut. She was a 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance, 2018 New York Foundation of the Arts (NYFA) Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts, 2021-2022 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, 2021-22 Professor of the Practice at Brown University, and 2022 Chamberlain Award winner at Headlands Art Center. Her past residencies include Yaddo, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, and Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Evans’ most recent projects included a performance in Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat at the Venice Biennale and the development of a career fair and outdoor projection series that welcomed over 150 formerly incarcerated individuals and transformed the job hunting space into a fun environment. Evans is currently a professor at Brooklyn College and NYU.

Tsedaye Makonnen is an artist-curator, mother, birthworker of East African descent. Her studio practice primarily focuses on intersectional feminism, reproductive health and migration. In 2019 Tsedaye was a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow and staged two interventions at the Venice Biennale. In 2021 her light sculptures were acquired by the Smithsonian for their permanent collection and she published a book titled Black Women as/and the Living Archive. Tsedaye is the recipient of a permanent large-scale public art commission for Providence, R.I. In Fall 2022 she performed at the Venice Biennale for Simone Leigh’s Loophole of Retreat, was Clark Art Institute’s Futures Fellow and received a Franklin Furnace Fund award. This 2023, Tsedaye will be exhibiting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bard Graduate Center and The Walters Art Museum. Her work has been featured in Artsy, New York Times, Vogue, Bomb Magazine, Hyperallergic, and more. She is currently represented by Addis Fine Art. She lives between DC and London with her partner and children.