My sculptural constructions are fictitious renderings of trees, stumps, and logs. They appear abstracted, altered to pair with other modules to offer the viewer a vision of decay and rebirth on the forest floor. When I make sculptures alluding to a living tree with these waste pieces (relics), it is a form of incantation-a poetic activity. An antidote to the industrial mindset that cares more for removing trees, laying asphalt, and erecting concrete buildings than allowing space for a seed to sprout. Forests are carbon sinks, oxygen producers, soil retainers, and filters for waterways. According to the Dogwood Alliance (research group operating the Southeastern US), it documents and observes Enviva’s deforestation of woodlands of the southeast states of North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Mississippi supposedly using diseased and malformed trees exclusively to make wood pellets; these are exported to European and Japanese electric producers replacing fossil fuel energy (coal and heavy fuel oil). 

George Lorio was born and raised, through his teenage years, in New Orleans. This area of the United States framed his vision of life. It was and continues to be a place of extremes: beauty and decay, religion and ritual, custom and iconoclasm. From that experience, Lorio acquired an excitement for visual matters: colors, forms and even artifacts. Having lived on the border with Mexico for ten years changed his view of contemporary culture and our collective social responsibility. At the time of the “9/11” bombing of the Twin Towers, NYC, his sojourn as a professor at the University of Texas in Brownsville on the Mexican border altered his aesthetic. Viewing the ambient drug wars, the desperation of immigrants, a collapsing Mexican democracy, wealth, inequality, and the environmental decline in his own nation, he changed the insular focus of his art to embrace more topical issues. He taught art at four colleges and universities in various parts of the US for thirty-three years. During that time, he aggressively pursued the development and exhibition of sculptures designed and produced at those venues.

Human figures play a central role in my activation of negative space using simple yet bold, elements of art and design. The line work is my interpretation of vibration that humans radiate. I choose the use of indigo as the hue of my figures. Blue, which is categorized as a cool color, is used with warm tones. Though I paint with oil and some watercolor, my work also includes video installation. Thematically, I juxtapose traditional pre-colonial era Yoruba aesthetic with that of contemporary Black Diasporan aesthetic. I sense this continuous thread that Africans of the diaspora share and are unconsciously tapped into regardless of where they may find themselves. I also choose to address my personal concern with artificial intelligence and its sedation of human connection to the natural world/forces. Maintaining nature's integrity and promoting sustainability is an emerging aspect of my work which I categorize as Afro-futurism.

Oluwatoyin Tella is a creator with a unique affinity towards art and math. She received both her Master of Fine Arts and Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Howard University. Tella was born in Oyo, Nigeria to a Jamaican mother and Yoruba father. By pulling from a rural Nigerian childhood and matriarchal Caribbean home in New York, Tella incorporates a multi-layered perspective. Her diasporic lineage gives her a compelling point of view, which she is passionate about conveying. While Yo-Yo Ma is among her list of collectors, Tella has shown at various galleries and museums, most notably New York’s African American Museum. She is currently in residence at Red Dirt Studios in Mount Rainier, Maryland and is a professor at Bowie State University.

I am curious about the end(s) of the world and the navigational strategies that might be employed upon arrival. My work, underlaid with quantum aesthetics, plays with the unresolved irony of queer (re)generation in the context of late-stage capitalism. I utilize sound, print, generative art, and digital media, merging various representations of the United States war machine with imagery of fetal growth and human desire in order to create an ironic and blasphemic image that challenges the viewer to confront their relationship to hegemony.

Dan Ortiz Leizman is an artist, writer, and educator currently based in the DMV area. They are completing an MFA degree in the University of Maryland’s Department of Art and received their Bachelor’s Degree in Philosophy and Studio Art from Goucher College. Recent awards include the 2023 Clarvit Endowed Faculty and Graduate Student Research Fund and the 2023 ArtsAMP Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Research Grant.