Exhibitions
The Afro-Futurist Manifesto Blackness Reimagined Myrtis Bedolla Curator Venice…
The Afro‐Futurist Manifesto: Blackness Reimagined
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Myrtis Bedolla, Curator
Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.
Established in 2006, the mission of the gallery is to utilize the visual arts to raise awareness for artists who deserve recognition for their contributions in artistically portraying our cultural, social, historical, and political landscapes; and to recognize art movements that paved the way for freedom of artistic expression.
Bedolla has recently gained national press in the New York Times article “Black Gallerists Press Forward Despite a Market That Holds Them Back” in June 2020 and authored “Why My Blackness is Not a Threat to your Whiteness” in Cultured Magazine in July 2020. Past coverage also includes being voted Best Gallery by the Baltimore Sun in 2017; “Black Art in the Spotlight,” Baltimore Magazine, September 2018; “Living with Art: Myrtis Bedolla Builds a Home and Gallery in Old Goucher,” BMORE Art, Issue 3; “Women in the Arts,” which honored women at the helm of the Baltimore art scene, Baltimore Style Magazine, October 2013.
Bedolla holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Business Administration from the University of Maryland, University College, received her curatorial training at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland, and earned online certificates in Cultural Theory for Curators and Curatorial Procedures from the Node Center for Curatorial Studies, Berlin, Germany.
Board appointments: Association of Art Museum Curators & AAMC Foundation Trustee; University of Maryland Global Campus, Arts Program Chair; and the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Board.
Professional membership: Arttable
Image courtesy photographer Grace Roselli, “Pandora’s BoxX Project”
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Tawny Chatmon (b. 1979, Tokyo, Japan) is a self‐taught, award‐winning artist who has been working in the field of photography for more than 17 years. The primary theme that drives Chatmon’s practice is celebrating the beauty of black childhood. She is currently devoted to creating portraits that are inspired by artworks spanning various periods in Western Art with the intent of bringing to the forefront faces that were often under‐celebrated in this style of work.
Larry Cook (b. 1986, Laurel, Maryland) is an award-winning photographer and conceptual artist whose work spans installation, video, and photography. Cook’s work explores the cultural aesthetic of “club” photography to examine how urban culture and incarceration systems become entwined through backdrops. The backdrop is central for its relationship to the formal, social, and cultural aspects of photographic history.
Morel Doucet (b. 1990, Pilate, Haiti) is a Miami‐based multidisciplinary artist and arts educator that hails from Haiti. He employs ceramics, illustrations, and prints to examine the realities of climate‐gentrification, migration, and displacement within the Black diaspora communities.
Monica Ikegwu (b.1998, Baltimore, Maryland) is a figurative painter. She presents her ideas of the figure in a way that is not only captivating, but also unconventional in her use of color, texture, and composition.
M. Scott Johnson (b. 1968, Inkster, Michigan) is a New York City‐based artist and educator, has carved out a legacy as one of the most stimulating and unique artists of his generation. M. Scott has explored, both in his practice and through his 20‐year visual arts teaching residency at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York, a rich vision of contemporary Afro‐aesthetics.
Delita Martin (b. 1972, Conroe, Texas) is a master printmaker, illustrator, and painter based in Huffman, Texas. Through the weaving of history and storytelling, Martin offers a new narrative on the power of women whose stories are not only layered in textures and techniques but also symbolism.
Arvie Smith (b.1938, Houston, Texas) transforms the history of oppressed and stereotyped segments of the American experience into lyrical two‐dimensional master works.
Felandus Thames (b. 1974, Jackson, Mississippi) is a conceptual artist living and practicing in the greater New York area. Thames’ work attempts to transcend didacticisms that are typically associated with anachronistic understandings of representation and instead aligns itself with ideas around the taxonomy of human difference.
Myrtis Bedolla is the owner and founding director of Galerie Myrtis, an emerging blue-chip gallery and art advisory specializing in twentieth and twenty-first-century American art with a focus on work created by African American artists. Bedolla possesses over 30 years of experience as a curator, gallerist, and art consultant.
Exhibition Catalogue
