CHRISTOPHER GOMEZ • GABRIEL PILAR PALA • QUARAN AHMAD • CASTAGNETTE

Meet Our Artists

Christina M. Tapper

I am fascinated by the transformative act of becoming. Guided by this intrigue, I create figurative mixed media collages to reflect the ways Black women and girls construct selfhood amid the cultural, political, and material conditions we experience. Working with contemporary and archival images and found materials, I explore the influences that shape and embolden our lives: the choices we make, the agency we claim, and the histories we hold.

Nadia Bongo

I am a self-taught multidisciplinary artist and poet. Through photography (film, digital, cyanotypes), collage, drawing, and video, I explore, sometimes playfully, themes such as belonging, places, and languages. I use motifs (eyes, blur, clothes) playing around with what's visible, or not. An undertow of languages (from French to familial) and symbols frame my work. As a Gabonese woman, partly raised in France, I grew up in many realities: Gabonese, Batéké, French, Malian, Christian, Muslim. 

A “reality”, to me, combines cultural exposure and experience of something. Throughout my work, bodies can be altered (fragmented, blurred,...) to evoke kinship or migration. Natural spaces are often the setting of my teaching, artistic explorations, practices, and even screenings.  Nature imbues my work thanks to my early childhood in my homeland (Libreville): its landscape and society's tinges of animism when I grew up. Nature nourishes the poetry in my work; across mediums I invite the viewer to wander and wonder. 

Dylan Castagnette 

Dylan Castagnette is a Mauritian filmmaker living in Brooklyn. He also practices photography, experiments with cyanotype printing and has previously worked as an intimacy director in theater productions in New York City. Dylan holds a bachelor in Mathematics from Columbia University.

Roselyn Grullon

My work explores memory, identity, and place through the lens of growing up Dominican in theBronx. I’m interested in the everyday people, spaces, and moments that shape  how we understand home and belonging.

Through painting, fashion, and material experimentation, I draw from family history, neighborhood landscapes, Dominican culture, and personal archives. I often focus on ordinary scenes and objects because they can hold larger stories about migration, community, nostalgia, and change.

My work is also influenced by the ways neighborhoods and cultural histories are preserved, transformed, or erased over time. By returning to familiar imagery and memories, I want to document the environments and experiences that shaped me while creating space for stories that are often overlooked.

Dara Etienne 

Dara Etienne (b. 2000, Randolph, MA, currently based in Alfred, NY) is a multidisciplinary textile artist working between sculpture, installation, and performance. Their work investigates domesticity, embodied knowledge, and belonging in a postcolonial world. Through discarded objects, scrap fabric, and soft sculpture, they utilize their own material-based language to reimagine Afro-Caribbean identity.

Quaran Ahmad

I’m an award-winning multidisciplinary artist telling stories across photography, filmmaking, event curation, music, and architectural design. At the heart of everything I create is the philosophy of ubuntu, meaning "I am because we are." This belief in collective identity and cultural responsibility drives my work, which exists to document, challenge, and reimagine the systems that shape our lives.

Each medium I engage is a tool for building immersive worlds rooted in truth, community, and counter-narrative. I create spaces that hold memory, provoke dialogue, and give voice to those historically pushed to the margins.

Antoinette Legnini

Assemblage asks you to deeply see.  Ordinary objects like bottle caps and MetroCards suddenly become studio materials.I cut and paste these objects, collaging them alongside mediums like paint and pencil  on paper. Through this unification, I create portraits of people and places I call home.  I see everyday objects as “connective tissue”: mundane and glossed over, but interwoven into our daily rituals. In my work, their transformation and recognizability spark attention, reconsidering what (and who) in everyday life is overlooked. This is a practice of attention, interdependence, and sustainability, centering the collective home that has shaped me (and shapes us).

Christopher Gomez

At the center of the most important stories is a person. The question quickly becomes “Whose stories are being told?”. My work seeks to center people whose stories have often gone untold. I want to focus on the moments that may seem insignificant at first glance, but when looked at in context, with enough volume, bring a larger story into view. I pay my respects to this grand story by painting portraits of the people that fill the roles in it.

Ruotai Tang

My practice centers on sculpture and installation. I work with construction materials, found objects, and natural elements, focusing on structures used to measure, mark, divide, or define space. Fences, rails, measured distances, and temporary boundaries appear stable and neutral, yet quietly shape how we move through our surroundings. 

Mariaclara Golfo

I make art about finding stillness inside the storm of becoming.

Born in the Bronx to a Sicilian father and a Puerto Rican mother from the south side, I grew up between worlds, never fully claimed by either. That tension became my expression. My paintings explore nature, identity, and transformation through abstract markings of small deaths and quiet revelations. Paths forward emerge from where I choose to wander and what I allow to flow out in visual reflection.

Paige Medlin

Sunday Service is a reflection of faith, community, and the spiritual energy that can be found within the Black church experience. Through this painting, I wanted to capture not only what a church service may look like, but also the feeling of being present within that sacred space. Much of my work centers on Black culture, everyday experiences, and portraiture because these are the stories and communities that I know, value, and love.

As I began this piece, I was experiencing a renewed closeness with God through daily prayer and reading scripture. The sense of peace and spiritual awakening I felt during that time inspired the creation of this work. The Bible is placed at the center of the composition because, for me, it represents peace, wisdom, and the foundation of faith. While the congregations attention is directed toward the pastor, his eyes remain fixed on the Bible, emphasizing that he is not the source of the message, but rather a guide pointing toward it.

Using acrylic paint, vibrant color, and impasto-inspired texture, I sought to create a work that feels alive with spirit and emotion. Whether viewers have attended church or not, my hope is that they connect with the sense of reverence, joy, and peace within the painting.  

Teri Gandy-Richardson

My artistic practice expresses resilience and rebirth from what has been endured, stolen and lost. Themes interconnect my family history and personal experiences as an African-American woman artist, yoga teacher and breast cancer survivor.

As an abstract painter working primarily in denim, the materials I use carry reputations for utility, resourcefulness, oppression and control. With them, I push form, dimension, tension and compression to create complex compositions. Exclusive use of worn Levi’s denim weaves together specific phenomena within American history, culture, industry, labor and civil practices. They mark the end of slavery, and a rise in human rights’ initiatives which significantly intersect, and drive musical genres as well as fashion. New work incorporates burlap and jute. Each has branded our efforts and emotional memories of who we are. My goal and subject are the same— triumph after struggle, bittersweet beyond justice, and balance against chaos.

Through work that ranges from six-inches to six-feet, my invitation to each viewer is an intimate entry to their own familiar denim story. From there, my hope is for an engaging dialogue with my gestured constructions that reference the human body, how we interact, and the connections we make within ourselves.

Mieyoshi Ragernoir

I create celebratory paintings highlighting the radiance, connections and joy of Black American heritage; predominantly portraits illuminating the expressiveness of Black femininity and women who are often overlooked. Beyond capturing the vibrant essence of Black femmes, my artwork serves as a visual commentary and social lens on my experience in the world through color theory and moments of surrealism.

Kenny Shiloh Russell

Kenny Shiloh Russell (they/them) is a Panamanian-Jamaican interdisciplinary artist and arts administrator based in Brooklyn, NY. With photography at the center, they create art with preservation at the forefront of their mind through a Queer, Afro-Caribbean lens.

Russell interrogates the definition of fluidity in all forms, from literal depictions of the environment to abstract explorations of gender. Their work toes the line between passion and tenderness; an ever evolving display of reverence to the intimate nature of connection.

JD Baez

My artwork is rooted in the past and dedicated to the present. We live in a digital world where we no longer see one another, before we respond. I paint people to slow that process down. Our faces, expressions and the way we carry ourselves hold our stories and experiences. Through my work I bring attention to small details that make us who we are.

I focus on familiar expressions, gestures, and body language that we show unconsciously. Just like our stories, I build on a foundation and add layers that create depth. Features are sharpened, and adjustments are made to complete the piece. Sometimes we don’t stop long enough to see what makes a person who they are. I highlight those small details so we can see one another’s unfiltered beauty and complexity.

The artwork is not meant for a glance or to force a reaction, it’s meant to slow you down, so you can observe and connect with what’s in front of you. I believe when we do this we might be able to connect naturally by recognizing something familiar, connecting to the visual story, or just appreciating and enjoying the beauty of it all. 

Tony Plata

This photo is from my series, Two Weekends in June: Puerto Rican Pride Is Alive. It ismy photographic love letter to identity, resilience, and joy. Two Weekends in June: Puerto Rican Pride Is Alive captures the quiet strength and vibrant spirit of a community.

These photos reflect the pride we carry in being Puertorriqueño. Through these images, I explore how pride doesn’t always roar, it dances in the street, waves from a flag, and smiles at the camera. It lives in the flags hanging from balconies, in the faces of elders who remember everything, and in the youth who inherit it all, even before they fully know what they carry.

This project isn’t nostalgia. It’s proof. Puerto Rican pride isn’t a relic of the past, it is breathing, marching, grilling, styling, and standing proud.   

Gabriel Pilar Pala

Inspired by late-2000s hip-hop music video low-angle shots and drawing from Elizabeth Way’s Fresh Fly Fabulous, “She My Mini Me” introduces a street fashion-inspired intergenerational duo. The term “mini me” is used as a form of endearment towards a younger spirit, 

mirrored through matching apparel and playful motifs. A physical metal chain signifying resilience on the older figure and a replica chain showing aspiration, akin to bright eyes looking up to a protective guardian. Gabriel encourages the viewer to establish a dynamic between the two figures, as there is no set one.

Through portraits of people who don’t exist, three-dimensional adornments, and semi-realist mixed-media painting, Gabriel directs attention to the complex, prideful, and authentic personalities within polyethnicity. Gabriel’s upbringing as a native New Yorker in an inner-city community and an immigrant household shapes his practice & visions.

NICOLA

To imagine another self is to change the self. To imagine another world is to change the world. 

In NICOLA’s universe, the artist’s imagination is the catalyst for eternal transformation: at the heart of which exists a wild, free, and ferocious magic. In her works, NICOLA calls in the extraordinary: from the figure abstracted in Blue Darling’s azure, to a pooling oasis amidst Sweetwater's spiritual wilderness, these works are an act of bringing Heaven to Earth. In a world of unrelenting chaos, profound brokenness, and violent realities, there is an escape.

 

BRAC's arts programs are made possible with support from the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, including Council Members Oswald Feliz, Althea Stevens, Eric Dinowitz, and the Bronx Delegation. Additional support is from Bronx Borough President Vanessa Gibson, the NYS Council on the Arts with support from Governor Kathy Hochul and the NYS Legislature. Foundation support is from Con Edison: The Power of Giving, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. Private support is provided by individual donors like YOU!