Claverack, NY — NXTHVN is pleased to present Double Down, the culminating exhibition for its Cohort 05 Fellowship. Continuing a tradition of collaborating with New York-area galleries on a concluding exhibition for Fellows, James Cohan and The Campus are partnering with NXTHVN’s Cohort 05 to present the cohort's annual exhibition. Double Down features the work of Studio Fellows Adrian Armstrong, Alexandria Couch, Eric Hart Jr., Fidelis Joseph, Jamaal Peterman, Eugene Macki and Alex Puz and is organized by Curatorial Fellows Marquita Flowers and Clare Patrick.

Double Down, NXTHVN’s Cohort 05 closing exhibition, joins presentations from Bortolami, James Cohan, kaufmann repetto, Anton Kern, Andrew Kreps and kurimanzutto for the inaugural exhibition at the galleries’ new shared upstate space, The Campus. The inaugural exhibition connects new and historical works by over 80 artists, including the seven participating in Double Down. Embracing a collaborative model, the galleries have turned an abandoned former school building into a platform for dynamic cultural exchange. The Campus is pleased to donate ten percent of sales proceeds from Double Down to NXTHVN in support of their ongoing initiatives.

Vacant since the '90s, the 78,000-square-foot building of the Ockawamick School, built in 1951 and largely unrenovated, has been ripe for reanimation. Colorfully painted classrooms, mid-century architectural details, and generous natural lighting create a compelling context for artists to engage with the space, the original purpose of the structure, and one another. 

“We’re thrilled that our Fellows will be part of the inaugural exhibition at The Campus. At NXTHVN, we strive to provide our Fellows with education, access and programming opportunities that nurture and advance artist careers. Exhibiting alongside established artists at an extraordinary new art space, Double Down is a fitting closing show for our Fellows,” said Dr. Kalia Brooks, NXTHVN’s interim executive director.

Set among six other gallery programs, Double Down enlivens blank rooms with works that burst forth color and intent. Eyes bounce around the room, tracing this deeply saturated exhibition that stretches the boundaries of material uses and physical convention. Two rooms are filled with paintings, photographs and mixed media installations that call to aesthetic maximalism and continued dialogic exchange. Large-scale pieces overload the space—charged with the sighs and cackles of late-night communing and studio hopping. The works reflect the osmosis that occurs when a cohort of artists find kinship. 

Saturation remains a central proposition: as a commonality of form, but also as a verb, describing a shared approach to making. Bridging the aesthetic and conceptual, the artists have become immersed in their own practice, pushing ideas and materials as far as they know how. Adrian Armstrong, Jamaal Peterman and Alexandria Couch build worlds in mixed media installations and densely painted colors, inspired by personal archives. Eugene Macki’s sculptures challenge the utility and value of material while Fidelis Joseph’s paintings explore instinct and the subconscious through formless abstraction. Alex Puz transfixes color theory as a tool through paint, as Eric Hart Jr. activates color in photography, speculating on other possibilities.

In Double Down, color and content drench the exhibition. Composite ideas penetrate individual practices, borne from and manifested in community. Set up in dialogue with each other, the exhibition leans into the visual weight of the room. The busyness of the exhibition intends to halt the viewer, challenging them to find time to arrive at nuance. By pushing into the saturation of color and material investigation, viewers can catch glimpses of the conversations shared. 

Founded by Titus Kaphar and Jason Price, NXTHVN’s annual fellowship works to cultivate creative connections. Since 2019, NXTHVN’s Fellowship program has served as a springboard for artist careers. Notable individuals who have completed the NXTHVN Fellowship include Felipe Baeza, Layo Bright, Kenturah Davis, Alexandria Smith, Vaughn Spann, Patrick Quarm, and many more.

ABOUT NXTHVN

NXTHVN is a new national arts model that empowers artists and curators through education and access to a vibrant ecosystem. Supported by intergenerational mentorship, cross-sector collaboration and local engagement, NXTHVN accelerates the careers of the next generation and fosters retention of professional art talent while helping catalyze New Haven into a world-class, sustainable arts community.

CURATORIAL FELLOWS

Clare Patrick

Clare Patrick is a curator, writer, and educator focusing on installation art and museum practices. Born and raised in Cape Town, South Africa, she is guided by collaboration and the potentialities of spatial intervention as a methodology for decolonial curating. She seeks to create exhibitions that prompt rearticulation, often through multisensory projects that challenge existing modes of engagement. 

Patrick was a 2023/24 Curatorial Fellow at NXTHVN. She previously held roles at Norval Foundation in Cape Town, mother’s tankstation, and The Lightbox in the UK, and as a lecturer at the Paris College of Art. She maintains an advisory role with Atelier 11, Paris, supporting curatorial programming and is Art Director for No! Wahala Magazine, a publication focused on celebrating contemporary African photography. She graduated from the University of Sussex with an MA in Art History, and a BA in Fine Art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, University of Cape Town. Her practice has unfolded through exhibitions and workshops across South Africa, in the UK, France, Ireland, the US, and Morocco.

Marquita Flowers

Marquita Flowers is a curator, educator, and creative consultant. Born and raised in the Bronx, she learned the gift of collective thinking, organizing, and art making from Black artists. Building within supportive Black ecosystems was the most crucial component to their work and is the guiding value system Flowers aims to uphold within her curatorial practice. 

Flowers is currently working to develop a framework for radical creative equity which is an antidotal offering to the often individualized, capitalist, and patriarchal culture that permeates our collective capacities. Radical creative equity interrogates market ideology and asks critical questions about the creative labor of Black people under capitalism. It is a project of communal invention and reinvention with aims to produce new possibilities for Black visual culture. 

Flowers has several accolades from academic institutions but nothing has contributed to her growth more than becoming a mother. Being in community, on the dance floor, and in ephemeral spaces of Black imagination is where she thrives.

STUDIO FELLOWS

Adrian Armstrong

Adrian Armstrong’s (b. 1990, Omaha, Nebraska) multidisciplinary practice, which encompasses drawing, painting, printmaking, installation, sound, and other mixed media elements, documents contemporary Black experiences in the United States. He is deeply interested in questions of how Black experiences intersect with the history of photography, portraiture, and collage. 

Using friends, family members, and acquaintances as subjects, Armstrong’s single and multi-figural works probe the influence of place and popular culture on the formation of self-image, community, connection, tenderness, and love. More specifically, he is interested in the complex ways race informs how we assign value to and interact in the spaces we occupy.

Armstrong has shown work both nationally and internationally including New York, California, Texas, London, Paris, and Madrid. His works have been acquired by the permanent collections of Texas Tech University, the University of Texas Black Studies Department, and the Library of Congress.

Alexandria Couch

Alexandria Couch is a visual artist whose work explores the intersection between dissociative dreamscapes and an expansive personal archive both historic and mythical. Textiles,  recycled materials, text, paint, and furniture are used to hold, mend, disrupt, and document a vast interior world in which contradictions are inevitable. Using shapeshifting as a mode of operation, Couch interrogates the space between the dimensions of her reality and indeterminate universes. 

Couch is a native of Akron, Ohio, where she received her BFA in Printmaking and Painting at the University of Akron’s Myers School of Art in 2020. She recently completed her Printmaking and Painting MFA at Yale University in 2023. Couch has shown in multiple exhibitions including the 2019 and 2020 AXA Art Prize, the Ross-Sutton Gallery’s Presentation for 1-54 Art Fair in New York, Heaven at New Image Art, Comfort/(Dis)Comfort at the Center for Contemporary Printmaking, the 2022 Front Triennial, and A Signal Urgent But Breaking at Perrotin in New York.

Eric Hart Jr.

Georgia native and NYU graduate, Eric Hart Jr. (b. 1999), is an image maker and writer crafting works inspired by Black and/or queer experiences. Hart’s stylized portraiture and overall visual language is heavily influenced by the notion of rejecting control. Through themes of power, freedom, performance, and religion, Hart strives to foster consciousness for audiences as he displays people like himself in all of their power and beauty.

Hart’s photo work has been in publications such as i-D Magazine, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Rolling Stone magazine, as well as being praised by artists such as Beyoncé and Spike Lee. Hart is a two-time Gordon Parks Foundation scholar, 2022 Forbes 30 under 30 Art & Style honoree, 2022 Doritos SOLID BLACK Changemaker, and a Google Image Equity Fellow. In 2023 Damiani published his first monograph titled When I Think About Power.

Fidelis Joseph

Fidelis Joseph is a visual artist from Adamawa state in the northeastern part of Nigeria. Joseph began his formal education in art in 2009, at the Federal College of Education, Yola. He started his artistic career in Lagos after graduating with a BA in Fine Arts from the prestigious Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria, Kaduna state, Nigeria. At the end of his undergraduate studies in 2017, he won the Artist of the Year Award. Before coming to New Haven, he was granted the Cranbrook Art Museum Purchase Award, upon the completion of his MFA in the painting department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2023.

Eugene Macki

Eugene Macki was a 2023/24 NXTHVN Studio Fellow and the 2023 Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York Solo Exhibition recipient. He attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds a Master’s degree in Fine Art from Chelsea College of Arts in London. Macki is a member of the Royal Society of Sculptors (Est. 1905, UK) and founder of the Peut Guard (A project that consists of an artist award, research retreat, curatorial program, and exhibition). He has exhibited his work at the National Liberty Museum, Pennsylvania; The Salisbury Museum, UK; the Royal Academy of Arts, UK; GroundWork Gallery, UK; Aspex Gallery, UK; and performed at Socrates Sculpture Park in New York among other venues. Macki has two solo exhibitions in 2024, the first being held at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in New York in July and the second at the Mattress Factory in Pittsburgh in November.

Jamaal Peterman

Jamaal Peterman (b. 1990, Fort Lauderdale, FL) lives and works in New York, received his MFA at Pratt Institute in 2019 and a BFA from the University of Maryland Eastern Shore in 2014. He has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Art (MoCADA); Columbus Museum of Art; Phoenix Art Museum; Baltimore Museum of Art; Public Art Fund; Brooklyn Museum; University of Chicago; University of Louisville; Kavi Gupta, Chicago; James Fuentes, New York; and Vigo Gallery, London. 

Peterman has been awarded the Peter S. Reed Foundation grant, commissioned by MoMA PS1, and has undertaken residencies at NXTHVN, Pioneer Works, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, MASS MoCA, and Fountainhead. Peterman has developed a highly encoded language of abstraction that ricochets inside of, between, and beyond the frame of the image. Geometric abstraction illuminates colors and forms to communicate hierarchies of space and movement as well as class and race.

Alex Puz

Alex Puz (b. 1989, Long Beach, CA) is an abstract painter who focuses on the impact of color theory and optical art on the mind. He paints ornate chromatic fields in order to explore the relationship between emotion and cognition—the space between thinking and feeling. Puz’s research includes the use of color as a therapeutic tool, the power of optical art to heighten self-awareness, and the immediacy of line and color as neural phenomena.

Puz holds a BFA from Hunter College and an MFA from Yale School of Art. He has exhibited with Thierry Goldberg Gallery, Jeffrey Deitch, and Underdonk in New York City among others. He has shown internationally at the Material Art Fair, in Mexico City and at Gallery Simon in Seoul, South Korea.

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