LatchKey Gallery in partnership with the Core Clubs Bold Notion Art Series presents,Summer Schoola multi medium exhibition by MFA students occupying every floor of the Core Club from June 19 through Labor Day with an artist reception on June 23, 2019. 

As a platform for curators, collectors and art enthusiasts to discover artists of diverse practices and perspectives. LatchKey Gallery continues its mission to introduce, and highlight emerging artists whose work speaks to a more global human condition. These artists, either recently graduated or entering their second year of graduate school come together to discuss the varying themes associated with Americana, its culture and history. 

As the definition of America is being challenged, Summer School looks to the next generation of artists - as insight and knowledge of the future and to school us in what America is today.  

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Adam Shawis an artist who lives and works in New York. Shaw is a painter whose work focuses on the absorbent nature of painting. He is interested in the operations of this lineage. The process is then one that mutates those operations, folds them back upon themselves and reformats them. Painting becomes a kind of mirroring. Attempting to take shape, to continually look to one’s past to piece together a potential future. Shaw received a BS in studio art from Skidmore College in 2010, and completed a post-baccalaureate year at the San Francisco Art Institute in 2011. He is currently a 2020 MFA Candidate at Hunter College.

Bat-Ami Rivlinis a sculpture and mixed media artist based in New York City. Her work focuses on found materials that explore bodily functionalities in different social and artificial spaces. Her work has been exhibited in venues such as David & Schweitzer Contemporary, NARS Foundation Gallery, Bronx Art Space, Time Square Space, and Knockdown Center. Rivlin is a 2019 MFA recipient from Columbia University.

Bob Szantyris a polydisciplinary artist based in New York, NY. His work is centered in the home space, the sentimentality of its contents, and the beliefs on which it is founded—safety, stability, containment, separation. Szantyr received an MFA in painting and drawing from CUNY Brooklyn College in 2019 and a BFA in studio art from New York University in 2009. In 2018 he was in a two-person exhibition with L.G. White at Galerie Jan Dhaese in Ghent, Belgium.

Carlos Rosales-Silvaconsiders oral histories from Mexican and Indigenous peoples, post-colonial historical texts, and spaces that are safe and inclusive for people of color the foundation and central cosmology of his work. His most recent output reclaims the colors and forms that have long been (ab)used to create oppressive stereotypes of Mexican and Indigenous peoples. Rosales-Silva’s central intellectual and artistic project is de-centering his white, hetero, Euro-centric western education. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States and was most recently an artist in residence at Artpace in San Antonio, Texas and at Pioneer Works in Brooklyn, NY. He is currently pursuing an MFA at the School of Visual Arts in New York, NY. 

Celeste Wilsonis currently pursuing her MFA at Brooklyn College. Her work uses a range of materials but is always centered on themes of materiality and deconstruction and an interest in making and manufacturing. Much of Wilson’s work is process-based and involves using traditional techniques with modern materials. She has received many awards including fellowships at the Creative Glass Center of America at Wheaton Arts (2013)

Dominic Chambersis an African-American emerging artist from St. Louis, MO. who received his MFA at the Yale University School of Art in 2019. Chambers creates large scale paintings and drawings that references literary narratives cited in the books, various mythologies, and African-American history. Specifically working through color field paintings, His current work is invested in exploring moments of contemplation and meditation through reading and leisure.

Kate Liebmanis a visual artist and writer who lives and works in New York. She graduated from Columbia University with her MFA in 2019, and from Yale College with a BA in the Humanities in 2013. Her senior thesis at Yale, on Barnett Newman’s Stations of the Cross paintings, was nominated for the Wexler Prize. She has been a resident at Andrea Zittel’s AZ West residency program, and was a resident at the Vermont Studio Center in 2015. She will be a resident at the New Works/NAVE residency in Guayllabamba, Ecuador in the Fall of 2019. She has contributed art criticism to the Brooklyn Rail, among other outlets. Her visual work has been shown in galleries and museums both nationally and internationally. 

Michael Kondelpaints from distant memories of growing up on a farm in Michigan and the proximity those have to the urban life he currently lives. The rural landscape provides a fertile language that connects and details aspects of land and humanity.  His paintings employ hand-hewn wood beams, the gold of a wheat field and other textures to set up a framework used to sift through these ideas. This framework acts as a scale weighing out ideas from his agrarian upbringing and the urban world he inhabits today. Kondel is a recent graduate of PAFA ‘s MFA program. 

Michael Serafino is a Brooklyn-based painter whose wide-ranging interests, from physics to fashion, influence the direction of his painterly attention.  After undergraduate study at the School of Visual Arts he has exhibited in numerous galleries He is currently living and working in Brooklyn and is enrolled as an MFA candidate at Brooklyn College.

Melanie Delachis a painter and mixed media artist based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She received her MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2019. Her mixed media paintings push the boundaries and borders of what it means to look inside the self through intimate interiors. Her work has been exhibited in group shows at PAFA’s museum and many other Philadelphia galleries. She has received the Fine Arts Venture Fund Grant and The Judith McGregor Caldwell Purchase Prize at PAFA. Her work was recently acquired by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts permanent collection.