Upcoming Exhibitions
Jude Griebel, Teddy Osei, and Paula Mans February 8– March 2, 2025. The opening reception is Friday, February 7 (“First Friday”), 6 to 8 p.m
Jude Griebel
Revenants
Revenants presents a series of sculptures and drawings that explore our relationship to the animals we consume and how they are perceived within the popular psyche. The work draws on animated foods from popular culture and history to reflect on contemporary consumer culture, erasure of living identity, and interspecies dependence.
Revenants highlights the distance we create as a species when consuming other beings. Through packaging, marketing, processing, and preparation, corporeal transformations are engineered to appease our sympathies and comfort levels, as well as our palates and budgets. In these sculptures, I aim to subvert this sense of transformation inherent in meat preparation to re-empower bodies as fantastic revenants, reinvested with agency and possibility. Standing in their cooked and prepared states, these hybrid bodies demand a sense of reckoning. At once tragic and sympathetic, these sculptures operate within the emotional landscape of consumption that is suppressed by the corporate food industry.
Artist Statement
I create detailed figurative sculptures and drawings that visualize our entanglement with the surrounding world. In my works, landscapes, the species we affect, and the waste we create, coalesce in vivid forms that illustrate the reach of our impact and consumption habits.
Recently, my work has focused on species affected by industrial development and human consumption habits, including plant and insect species that are commonly exterminated, and species living within the confines of laboratories and the factory food system. In my sculptures these species are empowered as fantastic hybrid beings, often magnified in scale and detail, looming above the viewer.
The creation of my sculptures involves myriad materials including carved woods, clays, bio-resins and papier-mâché. The careful hand crafting and painting of each detail heightens the sense of illusion in the work while countering its central themes of hyperactive consumption and development.
About the Artist
Jude Griebel holds a BFA from Emily Carr University of Art and Design and an MFA from Concordia University. He has recently been awarded The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, as well as ongoing support from the Alberta Foundation for the Arts and Canada Council for the Arts. Upcoming residencies in 2025 include the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Brooklyn; Yaddo, Saratoga Springs, NY; and an Arts/Industry Residency at The John Michael Kohler Arts Center, Sheboygan, WI.
Recent institutional exhibitions include Leitrim Sculpture Center, Rochester Center for Contemporary Art, Whyte Museum, International Museum of Surgical Science, El Museo de Los Sures, Holter Museum of Art, Esker Foundation, and Art Gallery of Alberta.
Noteworthy press includes Hyperallergic, Canadian Art Magazine, Art + Design Magazine, and The National Gallery of Canada Magazine. Having grown up on a family farm in rural Alberta, the artist now lives and works in New York City.
Teddy Osei
Duality
Duality presents the work of Ghanaian artist Teddy Osei, which offers a thoughtful examination of the intersection between traditional Ghanaian art forms and Western contemporary practices, including ceramic sculptural forms and found objects. Osei’s work also examines the evolution of his Ghanaian cultural roots, showcasing how it has transformed and found new meaning within contemporary art while preserving its cultural significance.
This exhibition engages with themes of cultural heritage, identity, and the complexities of the diaspora experience. The pieces on display invite viewers to engage with layered narratives that explore the fluid nature of identity and belonging. By drawing on personal and collective histories, Osei creates a dialogue that resonates beyond borders, encouraging a deeper understanding of the cultural connections that shape us. Duality serves as a meeting point for reflection, conversation, and discovery, where the past and present coexist to inspire new perspectives on art and culture.
Artist Statement
My work delves into the quiet yet profound forces that shape identity, belonging, and the stories we craft to navigate our lives. Clay is my starting point. Its responsiveness and memory of every touch resonates deeply with me, carrying history while holding space for reinvention. I pair it with materials like fabrics and found objects, each with its own history, to create ceramic sculptures and installations that embody the tension of identity in flux.
At its core, my work is about belonging, what it means to find it, lose it, and reshape it. I reflect on the boundaries we face, whether they’re drawn by geography, culture, or our own choices, and how they shape who we are. Each piece I create carries a piece of my story, but it’s also an invitation for others to see their own experiences. I want people to feel the pull of memory, the beauty in imperfections, and the richness of life where different cultures and identities come together.
About the Artist
Teddy Osei is an artist and educator whose work explores cultural identity, migration, and the complexities of the diasporic experience. Using his own journey and heritage, he crafts art that reflects the dynamic nature of identity in relation to history and geography. Teddy began his artistic path in Ghana, earning a degree in industrial arts with a ceramics focus from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in 2018. He later pursued further studies in the U.S., earning an MA in Art and an MFA in Visual Studies. Now an Assistant Professor of Ceramics at Lincoln University, Teddy was named one of NCECA’s Emerging Artists in 2024 and received the NCECA Multicultural Fellowship in 2023. His sculptures exhibited globally, are part of collections like the Changchun International Ceramic Museum in China, showcasing his impact on the world of ceramics.
Paula Mans
Cotton Flower
The Cotton Flower series uses portraiture to center Black women in historical discourse surrounding enslaved resistance. In slave societies, power was constructed through the use of race and gender. Enslaved women were exploited not only for their labor but also for their capacity to sustain the workforce through childbirth. The persistent threat of sexualized violence and forced familial separation pushed some women to subvert reproduction by engaging in bold acts of resistance. On cotton plantations, in particular, some enslaved women chose to ingest cotton roots to prevent pregnancy and induce abortions. By asserting their bodily autonomy, these Black women insurgents directly challenged the slave economy. In an effort to reconcile with and transform the profound pain of this history into power, the Cotton Flower series re-envisions cotton plants as symbols of gendered resistance—instruments powerfully wielded by enslaved Black women to circumvent systems of oppression and fight for selfhood.
Artist Statement
I view collage art as emblematic of the interconnectedness of the African diaspora. Just as the dispersed people of the Diaspora are tied together by the thread of ancestry, in collage disjointed pieces are fused to communicate one story. Despite the horrors of the Transatlantic crossing and enslavement, Black people chose to survive—weaving together fragments of their diverse identities to form new cultures in the Americas. I use collage as a tool to mirror these historical processes in her artistic practice. Drawing from imagery of people from across the African Diaspora, I deconstruct and resignify disparate parts to communicate experiences and historical narratives. My works serve as visual records of Black protagonism, using the “Black Gaze” as an instrument to amplify the agency of the Black figure. Rather than subjects to be viewed and consumed, my figures look defiantly out onto the world—engaging, confronting, and challenging the viewer.
About the Artist
Paula Mans is a painter, collagist, and art educator based in Washington, DC. While Paula is a native Washingtonian, she spent many of her formative years living in Tanzania, Mozambique, Eswatini, and Brazil. Her experiences throughout the African Diaspora shaped her identity and informed the development of her artistic voice. Mans’s work has been curated into exhibitions in Washington, DC, Baltimore, New Orleans, Atlanta, New York City, and Kranj, Slovenia. Her work has been featured in the Washington City Paper, Contemporary Collage Magazine, Suboart Magazine, and on Fox 5 DC. Mans is a 2023 Sustainable Arts Foundation grantee, a recipient of the 2024 DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship, and a 2025 Vermont Studio Center Visual Art Fellow. Her work has recently been acquired by the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities Art Bank Collection.
Image Credits
Jude Griebel, Revenant: Prawn, 2023, wood, air-drying clays, bio-resin, adhesives, acrylic, 36 x 28 x 10 inches, photography by Blaine Campbell, work courtesy of Massey Klein Gallery, New York; Teddy Osei, Gatekeepers, 2025, clay, bricks, and found objects, 30 x 80 x30 in.; Paula Mans, Blood Blossom, 2024, mixed media on wood panel, 20 x 32 in