Diaspora Dialogs [.com]

Albert ChongAlbert Chong is an contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography, installation, sculpture and artist books. His works have dealt directly with personal mysticism, spirituality, race, identity and numerous other topics as well as celebrating the beauty of images and objects. His main bodies of photographic work have been in the genres of still lifes in black and white and color. These works range from playful juxtapositions and formal still lifes to works that represent and reanimate his family history. Here we learn about Aunt Winnie, Justice, Miss Peggy, we gain an insight into one family’s story from Jamaica’s past. Chong’s other works in the photographic medium include his Throne for the Ancestors Series and his portraits of artists friends and of Jamaicans in Various parts of Jamaica. He has also produced a new body of work titled the projections.

Albert Chong is also creates installation works many of which have been funded by various museums. One work in particular titled Winged Evocations was funded by Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio. This work created in 1998 has traveled widely since it opened to the public including representing Jamaica at the seventh Havana Biennial in Cuba and is presently in an exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art titled Defying Gravity. A more recent kinetic installation titled Throne for The Third Millennium 2003 was recently created for the exhibition Un/Familiar Territory at the San Jose Museum of Art in San Jose, California.

Albert Chong was born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. in 1958 and immigrated to the USA in 1977 at the age of 19 years. He lived in Brooklyn and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City where he received a BFA with Honors in 1981. Chong became active in the New York art scene until 1988 when he left to go to Graduate School at the University of California in San Diego. He received his MFA from UCSD in 1991 and in the same year accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Chong is presently associate professor or art at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Chong has also taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1982 – 88. Mira Costa College in Oceanside California from 1989-91 and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence from 1996 –97.

Chong has received various prestigious awards for his work in the visual arts. These include a 1992 Individual artist Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography and in the same year the Pollock Krasner Grant. Chong has also been commissioned by Absolut Vodka to add his work to the ongoing series in the work titled Absolut Chong.

Chong’s art in whatever form has been a constant presence in Museums and Galleries internationally for the last two decades. His work has been intergral to the discourse around race, identity and spirituality in art. Chong’s work is in collections public, private and corporate and has been featured in publications, books and periodicals too numerous to mention. He has represented his country Jamaica in four international biennials, including the 2001 Venice Benniale, the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale and the seventh Havana Biennal in Cuba in 2000.

Eddie ChambersEddie Chambers is a curator and a writer of art criticism. He was born in Wolverhampton, England and gained a BA (Hons) Fine Art degree from Sunderland Polytechnic in 1983. He now holds a PhD from Goldsmiths College, awarded in 1998, for his thesis researching press and public responses to Black visual arts practice in England in the 1980s. Chambers began organising exhibitions while still a student. Since then, he has curated a large number of exhibitions in Britain and abroad. In 1989 he established the African and Asian Visual Artists’ Archive, a Black artists' research and reference facility, co-ordinating the project for several years until the autumn of 1992. Living in Bristol, England, he continues to research visual arts activity, curate exhibitions and write on various aspects of visual arts practice. Eddie Chambers was until recently Research Fellow in Curating at London Metropolitan University. He is a Visiting Professor in the Art History Department of Emory University, Atlanta, teaching a class on African American artists of the mid 20th century. See
http://arthistory.emory.edu/faculty/chambers.htm

Joy GregoryBorn in England to parents of Jamaican origin, Joy Gregory’s work has been influenced by a combination of race, gender and aesthetics. She attended the Royal College of Art where she was awarded a Masters in Photography in 1986. Gregory has exhibited internationally, including in Cape Town, South Africa where she first showed her series Lost Histories, reflecting on colonization and its effects on culture and self-image.

In 2002, Gregory received the NESTA Fellowship, which enabled her to combine her unique 19th century printing process with digital media. Her work is featured in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale University, New Haven. She lives and works in London.

Born in 1980, Oneika Russell is a fine artist working in Kingston with digital media and traditional media. Her work is generally made up of drawings, objects, digital animations and video. The artist started off her career working in oil on canvas but her interest in moving image aesthetics has shifted her work to more process oriented drawings and videos. She creates fictional characters in the manner of an animator or storyteller and then places them in environments which they can live out their individual fates. Much of this work is done as drawings which then become digital animations. Earlier work dwelt on the character of a faceless little girl trapped within a domestic world of feminine patterns and genteel furniture. Later work used an Aunt Jemima figurine negotiating her way through a Victorian social setting.The work featured in the show employs characters based on the Abu Graihb image of a tortured prisoner and the tragic figure of Shakespeare’s Ophelia. Russell lives and works in St. Andrew, Jamaica.

Keith PiperBorn in 1960, Keith Piper first exhibited in 1981 as a member of the BLK Art Group, an association of black British art students, mostly based in the West Midlands region of the UK.

In a series of exhibitions entitled 'The Pan African Connection', members of the group including Eddie Chambers, Claudette Johnson and Donald Rodney, sought to explore issues relevant to aspects of black political struggles through contemporary art practice.

Following the dissolution of the Blk Art Group in 1984, Piper continued to work within the context of the developing wave of black British artists who were to emerge during the 1980's.

During the mid 1980's Pipers work developed around an exploration of multi-media elements such as tape/slide, sound and video within an Installation based practice. This would go on to embrace the use of computers as a means of collaging images and sounds and constructing video installation.

Throughout the 1990's Piper has continued to explore the various applications of digital technologies within an issue based fine art practice. This has recently included the development of interactive installation based work, CD-Rom and Web site construction. He is currently working on a major project entitled 'Relocating the Remains' commissioned by InIVA (The Institute of International Visual Arts). (see: http://contactzones.cit.cornell.edu/artists/piper.html)