Gift Guide for the Art Collector

Inspired by The 1960 film directed by Richard Quine, The World of Suzie Wong, starring a young Nancy Kwan in the titular role, Oscar yi Hou’s enigmatic print confronts gender, femininity, desire and identity. With his current solo exhibition on view at the Brooklyn Museum, these effervescent one-of-a-kind works reframe the subjects, personal friends of Hou, with reverence through American iconography, embracing the qualities that make them unique.

Internationally renowned Iranian artist, Shirin Neshat, works with photography, video, and film to create complex human narratives that address the universal themes of gender, displacement, oppression, and identity. In Film Still from Land of Dreams from her 2021 feature film, Land of Dreams, the protagonist, Simin, travels throughout the United States photographing subjects and collecting their dreams in vast landscapes of the American Southwest. The two-year long project took the artist all over the country by car, and transformed a personal photography series into a vast exploration of the duality of personhood in the wake of the Middle Eastern Travel Ban that restricted nationals from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen in an islamophobic attempt to curb “extremist terrorism”. The balanced, quiet composition compliments the artist’s early photoworks and photography that engage with her Iranian heritage, turning the lens to her understanding of belonging as an American Immigrant and defining what the imaginations of the American Dream look like.

Inspired by the English artist Joseph R. Derby’s work, The Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 1768, Marisa Adesman reenvisions the candlelit work through a feminist lens that engages some of the wonders and mysteries of life. With surrealistic hand-embellishments like butterflies in the border, crisped edges lifting up from the corners, or bugs crawling across the table in her distinct, delicate, realist style, Shadow of a Doubt, captures the intrigue and wonder of Enlightenment thinking through a contemporary, feminist lens—showing we have more in common with our past than we think.

Hyegyeong G Choi reimagines the Hamlet heroine of John Vincent Millais’ classic 1852 composition in a deified, confrontational position. In Ophelia, Quieter and Colder, depth is abstracted with swells of green and blue fauna creeping from the edges of the work. Ophelia maintains her power, refuting weakness and creating beauty in the wake of trauma and loss. Transforming personal anxieties and embarrassments into indulgent fantasies toying with the excessive and perverse, Choi’s Ophelia is vibrant and resplendent—marrying the tragic and beautiful.

Becky Kolsrud's most recent ART FOR CHANGE print, Dryad (Cypress), is a playful rendition of the Ancient Greek myth of Cyparissus and the Stag from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The sullen son of Telephus and grandson of Heracles accidentally slays his prized stag with a hunting javelin and in grief prays to the gods to be able to mourn his loss forever. In return, Apollo, the god of prophecy and oracles among many others, turns young Cyparissus into a tree bearing his name—his spirit living on through tears of sap dripping to the ground. Kolsrud’s Cyparissus, whose boyish legs almost appear to take steps, tremble on the patch of grass surrounded by puddles of his tears, speaking to the experience of collective grief in what can feel like isolation.

Darryl Westly’s naturalist, figurative style melds the digital and the physical in this nod to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’ controversial 1814 painting, La Grande Odalisque. Odalisque 1 work epitomizes his understanding of this present, image-saturated moment as a fundamental reflection of the disciplines and values that preceded it, again demonstrating we are never far removed from the traditions that created the now.

Designed and commissioned specifically for ART FOR CHANGE, Let Live is a series of screenprints from Joel Mesler shedding light on climate change in the artist’s quintessential pop-influenced style. The former art dealer’s keen sense of color and choice of natural paper play to the importance of preserving nature with balance and restraint, marrying hope and joy with introspection and progress. Inquire with hello@artforchange.com regarding availability.

Erik Parker’s Future Forecast engages the constant cacophony of visual media as it communicates contemporary issues through aesthetics of psychedelia, comic and street art. His neon-drenched scene juxtaposes the vibrancy and splendor of an idyllic poolside haunt with the chill of a rainy day. Engaging still life traditions and pictorial framing, Parker multiplies the visual forms, creating scenes within scenes for the viewer—staring through the windows of both the ideal and reality.

In Nikki Maloof’s Crab and Oranges, the artist depicts a world hidden in her mind and the absurdity of living. With twisted cutlery and shining reflections as a proxy for human experience, her evocative compositions of consumption and stillness evoke the Dutch vanitas paintings of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals—laying bare the semantics of domestic life.

A meditative scene in Xiao Wang’s signature cool blue palette, Ghost/Fire crafts narrative and movement into the meditative composition, with wisps of fire and a glowing eclipse shining above the horizon. The figure is at one part of the environment, yet part of the viewer, looking onto the quiet destruction of a growing flame lit by a lunar eclipse spreading diffuse light across the work.

Alec Egan’s frantic florals eschew simplicity and flatten space, in this whirling still life. Exploring domestic rituals and the creation of intimate spaces, Flowers on Flowers collates disparate influences into a cohesive maximalist assemblage—imbuing a sense of wonder and panache into the banal.

Ebony G. Patterson’s immersive collages use beauty and gardens as a tool for investigating social and political inequity. The Jamaican artist's resonant, polysemic mixed-media collage She is the Mourning, intertwines mythical and cultural signifiers in a sprawling work that speaks to the unacknowledged and underappreciated labor of Black women. Patterson plays with language as she plays with image, entangling and obscuring expectations to bring forth uncomfortable truths.

Featured in Art in America, Jamaal Peterman’s 30 for 30 marries realism and modernism with modernist, bold architecture and a hand-embellished trompe l’oeil frame with a translucent figure both emerging and receding from his environment. Both a self-portrait and illegible figure in a palette evoking Mondrian or Ellsworth Kelly, Peterman’s figure floats above the sidewalk with hands and face obscured, nodding to the shortcomings of temporal identity in defining the self.

With work currently on view with the likes of Jacob Lawrence and Carrie Mae Weems at The Baltimore Museum of Art, Jamea Richmond-Edwards' Fly Girl with Four Orbs from the artist’s 7-Mile Girl series, combines a breadth of techniques and influences, from Romare Bearden to collage and Japanese Block Printing techniques, to illustrate the importance of self-expression. Nodding to the spiritual and material, glowing orbs collaged with splashes of watercolor and textile prints float around the female figure, surrounded by the fluid, magenta aura complimenting her vivacious printed top in a vast array of patterns from a breadth of cultures.