agni, fire

Gerry Bergstein, the American artist, has had work on exhibition at the Danforth Museum; The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Davis Museum at Wellesley College; the MIT List Visual Arts Center; the deCordova Museum; the Rose Art Museum; and elsewhere, and has a solo exhibition upcoming at Gallery NAGA in 2023. Among his numerous awards are a grant from the Mass Cultural Council, an Artadia grant, and a career achievement award from the St. Botolph Club. He taught for forty years at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. (updated 10/2022)

Christopher Cozier is a Trinidadian visual artist whose mediums range from notebook drawings to video installations. His exhibitions include “Infinite Island” at The Brooklyn Museum (2007), “Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic” at Tate Liverpool (2010), “Entanglements” at the Broad Museum, Michigan (2015), “Relational Undercurrents” at MOLAA, LA (2017), and “The Sea is History,” at the Historisk museum, Oslo (2019). Cozier participated in the public program of the tenth Berlin Biennial and has exhibited in the fifth and seventh Havana Biennials and the fourteenth Sharjah Biennial (UAE). Later this year he will participate in the Liverpool Biennial and in “one month after being known in that island” at the Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger. Codirector of Alice Yard and a Prince Claus Award laureate, he lives and works in Trinidad. (updated 10/2022)

Katherine Jackson’s work has been shown in galleries, universities, and public spaces across western Europe and the United States, including in solo shows at Bennington College and Hobart & William Smith Colleges. Two of her large-scale windows exhibitions were placed long-term at New York Public Library and the Manhattan Bridge to celebrate their centennials. Another windows exhibition appeared at New York’s Tenement Museum. Her recent work has been exhibited at Park Place Gallery, 1 GAP Gallery, Kunstraum LLC, and also at Odetta Gallery (Chelsea), Odetta Harlem, and Space 776. Another installation, exhibited at the Venice Architectural Biennale 2021, is on view in the same location for the Venice Art Biennale 2022. She is the coeditor of Uni-Verse (Battery Journal Publications, 2021), a book of visual art and poetry juxtaposed. (updated 10/2022)

Deepa Jayaraman is an Indian visual artist based in New Delhi, whose visual language ranges from drawings on paper to animation. She received a 2022 100artists grant from Südkulturfonds (Switzerland) and a 2020 Five Million Incidents grant from Goethe-Institut/Max Mueller Bhavan in collaboration with Raqs Media Collective. Her work has been part of curated presentations such as OUTSIDE:IN, Sound Paintings: A Series of Vignettes by Raw Mango, curated by Sneha Khanwalkar (2020); Framed Feline at Art Houz India (Chennai, 2016); Books Meet Art at Art Centrix Space (Delhi, 2016); and LOC-Line of Control at Birla Academy of Fine Arts (Kolkata, 2016). (updated 10/2022)

Wosene Worke Kosrof was born in the dynamic center of Addis Ababa, Arat Kilo, in 1950. He completed a BFA at the Addis School of Fine Arts in 1972 and an MFA at Howard University in 1980. He is the first Ethiopian-born artist to use Amharic script forms in contemporary fine art, and this “WordPlay” has become the internationally recognized signature of his paintings. Central to his work are also the rhythms, riffs, counterpoints, and improvisations of jazz. The works of Wosene (his professional name) are in many permanent museum and private collections worldwide. He resides and has his studio in Berkeley, California. (updated 10/2022)

Anne Neely is a painter and printmaker who spends her time between Boston and Jonesport, Maine. Her work has been shown in galleries in New York, Boston, and San Francisco and in museums around the country—most recently in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Science, Boston, entitled Water Stories. Her work is in the collections of, among other institutions, The Brooklyn Museum; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Smithsonian American Art Museum; and The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A finalist for the Prix de Rome and twice a Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship finalist, she taught advanced drawing and painting at Milton Academy and directed the Nesto Gallery there for over forty years. To see more of her work, visit anneneely.com (updated 10/2022)

Rosamond Purcell grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and received her BA from Boston University. She is an acclaimed art and natural-history photographer. A retrospective of her work, Nature Stands Aside, is currently on exhibit at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, Massachusetts. She took the photographs that appear in A Glorious Enterprise, an overview of the 200 years of the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia; installed into the permanent collection of the Natural History Museum, Copenhagen, a reconstruction of the seventeenth-century museum of doctor and professor Ole Worm, based on his 1655 catalog; published, with Michael Witmore, Landscapes of the Passing Strange: Reflections from Shakespeare (Norton); and curated, also with Michael Witmore, “Very Like a Whale,” a 2012 exhibition of books, artifacts, and images at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Her books include Illuminations: A Bestiary (with Stephen Jay Gould), Pole Dancing: Close Encounters with Utility Poles, Finders, Keepers: Eight Collectors (text by Stephen Jay Gould), Dice: Deception, Fate & Rotten Luck (text by Ricky Jay), Special Cases: Natural Anomalies and Historical Monsters, Owls Head: On the Nature of Lost Things, Bookworm: The Art of Rosamond Purcell (introduction by Sven Birkerts), and Egg & Nest. (updated 10/2022)

Anna Schuleit Haber’s works range from museum installations made with paint to large-scale projects in forests, on uninhabited islands, and in psychiatric institutions, using extensive sound systems, live sod, thousands of flowers, mirrors, antique telephones, bodies of water, and neuroscience technologies. She was named a MacArthur Fellow for work that has “conceptual clarity, compassion, and beauty.” Schuleit Haber has served as visiting artist at Brown University, MIT, Smith College, Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, The New School, and many other colleges and universities. As part of an NEA grant and a museum commission, she embedded herself in a small-town newsroom, where she staged a serial “takeover” of twenty-six front pages in collaboration with typographers from around the world, poets, writers, journalists, local citizens, and students. Other recent projects include a commission for the stage in Copenhagen, at Teater Grob. Her works are included in private collections in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia, as well as in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. (updated 10/2022)