Living
Exhibition dates: X to February 27th, 2026
Opening Reception: X
Open Hours: Friday-Sunday 12-4pm, or by appointment
Exhibition Overview
Living marks AnkhLave Arts Alliance’s 2nd Biennial exhibition, uniting two vibrant cohorts of AnkhLave Garden Project artists, 2024 and 2025 into a single, expansive conversation. Across disciplines, geographies, and lived experience, ten artists present work that asks not simply what it means to live, but how life expresses itself, transforms itself, and remembers itself.
All exhibiting artists are alumni of AnkhLave’s flagship initiative, the AnkhLave Garden Project: an annual fellowship and public art exhibition for BIPOC artists. The program was created to bring art directly into the public realm, gardens, parks, and open green spaces where audiences of all backgrounds can encounter creativity without the barriers of traditional art institutions, which have historically underrepresented communities of color. Public art is for the world, and the Garden Project centers artists who continue the legacies of their Indigenous and diasporic heritage through contemporary practice.
The 2024 fellowship marked the 6th annual Garden Project, presented at The Artist Gardener Community Garden in Harlem. The 2025 cohort followed as the 7th, installed across the green lawns of AnkhLave’s Art Residency campus on Governors Island.
Representing the 2025 group are Yupin Pramotepipop (Public Artist-in-Residence), of Chinese descent raised in Thailand; Tijay Mohammed, of Ga descent from Ghana; Kevin Gordon, of Jamaican descent; and Hong Wu, of Chinese heritage. The 2024 artists include Kraig Blue, an African American artist and Public Artist-in-Residence; Damali Abrams, of Trinidadian descent; Coralina Rodriguez Meyer, from Cali, Colombia; Diego Espaillat, of Dominican descent; Xiong Wei, of Chinese descent; and Chihiro Ito, from Japan.
Together, their works traverse the full spectrum of existence, human and more-than-human, earthly and ethereal. They explore living as a continuum connecting breath and spirit, ancestry and futurity, identity and ecosystem. The exhibition moves fluidly through animal, plant, and fungal realms, invoking wisdom embedded in biological form as well as metaphysical dimensions that cannot be measured, only felt.
Beneath its surface, Living proposes that life is not an isolated condition but a relational act. The exhibition imagines existence as an ecology of mutual influence where identity is shaped through ancestry, where culture is transmitted through making, and where the human body participates in a broader field of shared life with plants, animals, ancestors, and spirit. In this way, the works do not merely depict life—they contribute to the ongoing creation of cultural, biological, and spiritual continuity.
Living challenges the notion that existence is singular or static. Instead, it proposes a vibrant, ever-shifting network where memory becomes matter, where culture and environment intermingle, and where human and nonhuman bodies participate in the same vital choreography. Through sculpture, installation, painting, and multimedia expression, the artists expand the question of what it means to be alive, offering narratives grounded in resilience, interdependence, and creative force.
In this shared space, living reveals itself, not as an endpoint, but as an unfolding field of possibility.Curated by AnkhLave Founder and Director Dario Mohr, with gratitude to Old Stone House for providing space to celebrate two years of extraordinary artistic practice.
Enjoy this virtual tour slide show of the exhibition, photographed by Etienne Frossard.
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
“Living”, art exhibition at the Old Stone House 
Annual Mural Project at the Old Stone House at Washingotn Park 
Annual Mural Project at the Old Stone House at Washingotn Park
Damali Abrams
Dissolving, 2025
Diptych, mixed media on canvas
18” x 24”
Price available upon request
Dissolving is a diptych about healing. Untitled (wooden book) was created during the Ankhlave Garden Project fellowship on Governors Island. It was my first time crafting a book using wooden panels and resin. I was looking for a way to create a book that could survive outside for several months at The Artist Gardener community garden in Harlem. Guyanese Queens honors my matrilineal lineage in Guyana. The central figure was found in the archives of NYP, titled simply “Negress, Guiana”. This piece honors her and all ancestors whose faces or names we may never know.
Artist Statement
My practice is interdisciplinary, pulling from Black feminist thought in order to create mixed media collage and community engagement. Utilizing art as a healing modality and a spiritual practice, my work is influenced by Afro-Caribbean folklore, folk medicine and folk magic. The DIY aesthetic in my work is influenced by early Hip Hop culture, riot grrl zines from the 90s, and junk journal videos on YouTube, as well as ornate Afro-Caribbean decor.
Wei Xiong
Spectator, 2021
Ceramic
40” x 16” x 36 “
$3,000
Vultures are scavengers, surviving on the deaths of others. Ancient Egyptian rulers created their gods in hybrid forms that combined human and animal features and used these divine images to govern and intimidate the populace. This sculpture embodies a unified whole of the sacred natural order represented by these gods and the humanly constructed rule.
Artist Statement
Wei focuses on the reinterpretation of classic aesthetic images and symbols in history, and the dilemma people encounter under the guidance of various philosophical thoughts and ideologies in the different geographical regions and cultural environment. Within the framework of visual research based on social anthropology, Wei establishes shared spaces where humans and sculptural bodies are equal, deconstructing the implicit order and inviolable rules inherent in traditional sculpture, combining historical image with contemporary social reality, politics and geography, reexamines history while also scrutinizing the roles of contemporary humanity as individuals, communities, ethnicities, nations, one of the species and biotic factor.
Hong Wu
The Synthetic Self, 2025
Photography and Digital Art Printed on Silk
11’ L x 24” W
Not For Sale
The air we breathe in
The waves we hug
The thoughts we transcribe
The love we withhold
The conscience we compose
I am the air I breathe in
I am the waves I hug
I am the thoughts I transcribe
I am the love I withhold
I am the poet of my synthetic self
Artist Statement
A self-taught visual artist, Hong interrogates the social discourse rooted in Imperialism, Colonialism, Capitalism through her works. Public interactive experiences are often built into her works, not only to challenge viewers’ visual and visceral responses, but also to offer time and space for viewers to create collective responses to making our world more just.
As an immigrant from China, Hong aims to advocate and promote immigrant joy and representation, and
to spark conversations among young children from immigrant families on engaging in promoting civic rights and responsibilities.
With an emphasis in creative use of up-cycled materials, Hong continues to experiment with photography, illustration, textiles, digital art, and any new medium that supports extrapolating complex messages.
Yupin Pramotepipop
Family Mushroom, 2024
Aqua-Resin
H17.25” x W10.5” x D2”
$1,700
I started the family series by drawing tiny sketches of the elements, in this exhibition are fish and mushroom. I chose the design I prefer and drew on the paper, then added related plants or geometric patterns on top of the drawing to create shapes for filling in acrylic paint.
The Family Mushroom relief sculpture was modeled in water-based clay with a similar approach as the painting mentioned above. After the piece was completed, a rubber mold was made for multiple editions. It was cast in Aqua-Resin with a light, thinned-color spray finished.
Yupin Pramotepipop
Family Mushroom Green Yellow, 2025
Acrylic on Paper
H8” x W6”
$800
Family Fish Orange Yellow Red, 2025
Acrylic On Paper
H8” x W6”
$800
Artist Statement
My work often expresses bonding, love, family and peace. Growing up with Thai- Chinese cultures, symbolism plays a big role unconsciously in my ordinary life. “พ่อ แม่ ลูก”, Ph̀ x Mæ̀ lūk, a Thai word which means Family (Father, Mother, Child) has been my recurring concept for my art. I combine nature, repurposed, representational and symbolic approaches to explore visual images in drawing, sculpture, environmental art in sites where it is possible.
Peace starts from within ourselves among families, friends, communities… I always hope everyone is being treated fairly and equally regardless of race, gender, religion, and class differences in our society. If we all are together as one, as a whole, it will form a loving peaceful foundation and become a wonderful place for all to live.
Tijay Mohammed
Black Black Black, 2020
Acrylic, resin, glitter glue on Baltic birch plywood
120” x 20” x 2”
$15,000
This work reflects on what it means to be Black, shaped by the layered experiences of Black and Brown lives in the United States. It introduces a shared symbol that honors all races, faiths, genders, and nations who continue to affirm that Black Lives Matter. Rooted in over 400yrs of history stretching from Africa to America, the work carries ancestral knowledge forward. Kente fabric colors speak of power, wisdom, and spirit, while Adinkra symbols function as a living language of values and ways of being. Together, their forms create an immersive field of Black love and joy, affirming dignity, heritage, and collective memory, while echoing Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream of freedom, justice, and equality.
The piece was originally designed on the street in front of the Thurgood Marshall United States Courthouse in New York, now known as Black Lives Matter Boulevard.
Artist Statement
As an artist, I am driven by a commitment to issues affecting my community and humanity at large. My work centers on the idea of excess in production and consumption, offering material reuse and upcycling as both aesthetic practice and ethical response. Through multimedia collage, site-specific installation, mixed-media painting, and public sculpture, I transform discarded materials, fabric scraps, MetroCards, paper, jewelry, and photographs into poetic reflections on migration, childcare, gender, and social and environmental justice. Rooted in history, my practice reinterprets objects and stories to evoke memory, place, and utopian possibility while acknowledging the complexities of African and African American experiences. Guided by the Adinkra principle Sankofa, my work looks backward to build a more just and sustainable future.
The Synthetic Self, 2025
Photography and Digital Art Printed on Silk
22’L x 55”W
Not For Sale
Diego Espaillat
Scream, 2024
Paper, plaster, resin, resin dye
40” x 38” x 24”
$2,500
Screamradiates from a central open mouth, this starfish-like form merging playful color with quiet menace. The organic limbs suggest both movement and vulnerability, as if a voice or body is pushing through a surface. Drawing on carnival aesthetics and bodily symbolism, the sculpture evokes the moment of breaking through a mask to reveal what is hidden beneath.
Artist Statement
Diego Espaillat’s labor-intensive process draws from carnival craftsmanship, playful color, minimal abstraction, and organic forms modeled or cast from life. Through these techniques, he transforms poetic symbols into physical form. His work explores the tension between colorful playfulness and aggression, reflecting the transition from adolescence into adulthood. Informed by art history, folklore, and lived experience, Espaillat uses both organic and constructed forms to shape personal narratives that navigate growth, conflict, and transformation.
Diego Espaillat (b. 1994) was born, raised and is currently based in New York City. He is of Dominican and Puerto Rican descent and completed his BFA in sculpture from Lyme Academy College of Fine Art in Old Lyme, Connecticut in 2017. Diego is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, photography, installation, and text. He exhibited at “La Rueda” at Future Art Fair and “Calido” at Black Brick Project. Diego made his international debut in a group show at Deli Gallery in Mexico City (2023). Also in 2023 “Tradition, Oh my love…” at El Borinquen Residence, curated by Blanka Azemuka (2023), Flux Factory, (2021), as well as group exhibitions like “Cálido” at Black Brick Projects, Brooklyn, NY (2023) “Pal Patio” at Calderon Gallery, New York, NY (2022); “Shape & Color,” New World School of Art at Dade County College (2021); “Ceno Group Art show 1,” at 98 Orchard, New York, NY (2019).
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer
Semillas Rodajas y Balas Resbalosas,
Seed Slices & Slippery Bullets, 2024
Flora Aura painting of intimate waste & environmental ephemera cast in domestic construction materials
24” x 20” x 2” in each painting
Intimate waste & environmental ephemera cast in domestic construction materials onto interior upholstery textile
Individual work, $3,500
Diptych, $7,000
Flora Aura paintings (2022-present) cast exotic or endemic, endangered species and activists into vibrantly textured paintings onto interior domestic textiles such as serapes, upholstery or drapery fabric. Cradling critical yet comforting apparitions of abolition legacies, Flora Aura landscape paintings consider fertility culture across reproductive and climate crisis in America: a complicated historical, political, and geographic context wherein conquering the tropical landscape and diasporic bodies stem from a colonial legacy.
Artist Statement
Born in a car in an Everglades swamp on Miccosukee territory, Coralina Rodriguez Meyer is a mixed-race indigenous Andean American (Muisca/Inca) Quipucamayoc artist. Raised Ital & Tinkuy in the Caribbean, Coralina founded Mama Spa Botanica workshop after her infertility diagnosis in 2007, to offer full spectrum cultural care for survivors of conflicting man made and climate crisis. Their collective works destigmatize the material refuse of structural violence into fertile, maternal refuge with mummification rituals from doulas, griots, advocates and her Botanica curandera matriarchs. Coralina studied painting at MICA, anthropology at Hopkins, holds an Architecture BFA from Parsons and MFA Hunter College CUNY. They taught at Pratt, FIU, Miami Dade College, and held residence at Baxter St CCNY, Ankhlave Arts Alliance and Bronx Museum AIM. She was featured in NY Times, Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Guardian & Art Forum with exhibitions at Queens Museum, Bronx Museum, Perez Art Museum & Smithsonian.
Damali Abrams
Guyanese Queens, 2026
Mixed media on canvas
12” x 16”
Price available upon request
Damali Abrams
Untitled (wooden book), 2024
Medium: mixed media on wooden panels
12” x 12”
$5,000
Coralina Rodriguez Meyer
Luna de la Memoria Perdida (Sous la pave, la plage)
Miscarriage Memory Moon (Under the paving stones, the beach) Mother Mold monument w Foliage Obscura installation, 2018-2024
Intimate waste, environmental ephemera cast in domestic construction materials with textile installation including Mother Mold: Installation variable
18”d x 8’h x 4’w (figure 24”w x 50”h x 12”d)
$8,500
Refuse rests in the refuge of a fertility effigy’s caving belly with its limbless grip & salty disposition. A concrete moon crater and sandpaper surface scintillates crystals, coral and littoral litter (chancletas, condom wrappers & spirit bottles) along a hemispheric Linea Negra (melanin line) dividing a figure between its anthropogenic origins and divine dignity. Cast during the artist’s miraculous pregnancy a decade after their infertility diagnosis, the Mother Mold monument reconciles radical reproductive justice practices with 7000bce mummification rituals from the artist’s indigenous Andean ancestry.
MotherMold monuments (2018-present) are fertility effigies reclaiming stigmatized, material refuse as a maternal refuge in and of our bodies, landscape and our movement. Cocreated by casting melanated, LGBTQIA+ immigrant neighbors, documentary sculptures bond intimate textiles such as serapes, curtains, bedcovers or baby blankets to bodily ephemera, environmental waste cast in domestic construction materials. Bearing the fruits of chosen or biological family’s cultural labor, the works transgress generational trauma with collective healing. Archiving endangered flora, fauna and activists spiraling above tidelines and beyond redlines, the works integrate ethnic origins into an ethics of liberation theology.
Tijay Mohammed
I am…3, 2025
Fabric, paper, yarn, thread, acrylic, watercolor, found objects, and plaster on a wooden board
38” x 50” x 6”
$12,000
I Am…3 is part of a mixed-media collage series shaped by childhood memory, ambition, and becoming. Inspired by the artist’s early discovery of creativity while collecting recycled objects and aluminum scraps on the streets of Nima, Accra, Ghana and from primary boarding school years spent drawing and writing on walls. The work honors imagination born of play, resilience, and curiosity. Childlike drawings and Ghanaian Adinkra symbols are layered with toys and jigsaw puzzles, forming an interactive language of memory and heritage. African wax, Kente, batik, and tie-dye fabrics gathered from seamstresses across Africa, Trinidad and Tobago, and New York wrap each portrait like a communal embrace. Together, the compositions celebrate overlooked lives and labor while embodying hope, wisdom, strength, positive energy, and self-love.
Wei Xiong
Segment (3 piece set)
Ceramic
7” x 4” x 7”
$700 each
Segment: Ceramic is hard yet fragile. In contemporary society, people often appear confident, proud, happy, and positive—despite the fact that we all know this is largely a performance. The authentic self is gradually lost beneath layers of masks. Anger, confusion, fear, and anxiety are so widely suppressed that it is as if they never existed. The figures in this series are shaped into square or circular geometric forms by external forces—human power, represented by the artist, who assumes the role of a god. Yet these figures do not refuse, nor are they afraid, to reveal their sadness and pain. Drawing on the visual language of Han dynasty brick engravings and high relief, the sculptures appear clumsy yet sincere. Ultimately, reconciliation with one’s own vulnerability becomes the most effective antidote.
Outcasts (2 piece set)
Ceramic
8” x 1” x 8”
$1,200 each
Outcasts: Fossilized mouse and pigeon remains that had been flattened by motor vehicles. In this series, I want to use a form of fossil excavation of future archaeology to preserve the tiny traces which indicate the past existence of the victim of neglect. Materials, tools, animals, and people consumed in human-dominated social life. They are abandoned by their time, but in the context of this series, eventually turns eternal.
Roast Chickens (6 piece set)
Ceramic
6” x 4” x 4″ apx. size varies
$500 each
Roast Chickens: The roast chickens function as a metaphor for people, for us. This work is inspired by Costco’s famous $4.99 rotisserie chickens and the mass-production system behind them. We know that each chicken is an individual living being, a standardized 45-day feeding process transforms life into an item and product. Life is produced by humans and converted into commodities for the sole purpose of consumption. Those ceramic chickens are cast from one mold, echoing the logic of industrial mass production. However, the legs of each chicken are adjusted and reshaped by hand, giving them characteristics. When viewers encounter the installation, they tend to say, “There are chickens!” Individual distinctions are quickly overlooked. Different glazes introduce variations in color tone and appearance—some appear glossy and polished, others matte and richly textured. Yet despite these differences, they—and we—are first chickens—human.
Artist Statement
Wei focuses on the reinterpretation of classic aesthetic images and symbols in history, and the dilemma people encounter under the guidance of various philosophical thoughts and ideologies in the different geographical regions and cultural environment. Within the framework of visual research based on social anthropology, Wei establishes shared spaces where humans and sculptural bodies are equal, deconstructing the implicit order and inviolable rules inherent in traditional sculpture, combining historical image with contemporary social reality, politics and geography, reexamines history while also scrutinizing the roles of contemporary humanity as individuals, communities, ethnicities, nations, one of the species and biotic factor.
Kevin Gordon
ARtist Unbound, 2026
Wood Engraving
16” x 20”
$7,500
ARtist Unbound is an immersive AR art gallery. This project is a posthumous artistic collaboration between a father and son that blends contemporary and digital immersive art. The father, Hugh Gordon, was a naturally gifted artist born in Kingston, Jamaica. Hugh Gordon’s work includes a variety of drawings and paintings highlighting slices of Caribbean Life and Black Culture. Engraved in wood is a sketch his father drew of himself in years past, embedded with a QR code. Upon scanning the QR code, users are transported to an immersive art gallery that showcases more of Kevin Gordon’s father’s work.
Artist Statement
Kevin H. Gordon is a 3D artist, XR developer, and educator from Mount Vernon, New York. While Kevin wears many hats in life, he’s most proud to be a professional 3d artist and game developer who has worked on various pieces worldwide. Like his father before him, he was fascinated by comics, video games, and the art of creating new things. As he got older, he saw a pathway towards creating his own art medium of choice is AR/VR game development.
Kraig Blue
In The Beginning…42, 2025
Wood, acrylic, metal, vinyl, and cloth
4’ x 11”
$700
In the beginning Jackie Robinson broke the racist color barrier of American baseball in April 1947. My 87-year-old mother and my 90 year old father remember this with great pride, along with many African Americans. Robinson literally beat American racism with a mighty bat – Americans’ symbol of a great past-time. He did it with grace, strength and dignity. On December 20, 1986, just days before Christmas in Howard Beach, Queens, Michael Griffith and two of his friends were brutally accosted by a group of young white men resulting in Michael’s untimely death. The black bat in this piece serves as an altar to symbolize the strength and perseverance of the legacy of all people who resist injustice. The piece is bi-tonal. The lettering is somewhat hidden, which adheres to the Santeria tradition of not revealing all things at once. Wisdom must be accompanied with work.
Artist Statement
Kraig Blue is an award-winning multimedia visual artist and musician. He is a born and bred New Yorker from The Bronx. His sense of adventure and artistic evolution led him across the country to create new roots in Los Angeles, California from 2005 to 2015, until his return home in 2016. California was an extremely productive experience, among many accomplishments he became the recipient of The Gibson Guitar Town Sunset Strip sculpture project (2010), recorded with multiple musicians, performed at the NAAM, and began surfing with The Black Surfers Association.
He received his BFA (2015) at the Laguna College of Art & Design in figurative sculpture, painting, and drawing, and received his MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York (2019). K.A. Blue is a published illustrator, arts educator, photographer, musician, and fine artist; exhibiting in New York, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Vermont, and Southern California. His most recent artistic endeavor is exploring multimedia sculpture using found materials as metaphors to explore complex, socially constructed ideologies and paradigms; creating multilayered assemblages as altars that become vehicles for contemplation and dialogue.
Chihiro Ito (MISSING PHOTOS)
NEW FLAG for NEW PEOPLE – revenge of vegetables, (outside), 2024-2026
100” x 100” (h) x 1”
$1,000
NEW FLAG for NEW PEOPLE – revenge of vegetables – (building exterior), 2024-2026
Wood, Wood pole, acrylic paint on the wood panel.
75” x 60”(h) x 1”
$800
A New Flag for New People imagines a bright future with a flag waving for everyone. Using vegetables as symbols of radical positive energy and health that benefit all people, this film conveys my hopes for what is possible.
Artist Statement
Chihiro Ito immigrated to NYC/USA, they are a painter/multidisciplinary artist. Chihiro was born in Tokyo where they studied painting at Musashino Art University, and took a continuing education writing course at the School of Visual Arts. They were an invited artist at European Capital of Culture events in Portugal, Cyprus, Serbia, and Lithuania.
In 2018, they received a grant from the Japanese government to come to the US where they created their artwork and began documenting the remaining living artists associated with Fluxus. They are the recipient of a Holbein painting award (Japan), New York Foundation for the Arts grant (USA), Robert Rauschenberg Foundation emergency grant (USA), Jonas Makas fellow residency, Performance Residency (USA), Bronx Art Space for Artist in Residency in Governors Island (USA) and AnkhLave Annual Fellow (USA).
They also received scholarship funding from The Poetry Project (USA), and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (USA). Chihiro’s art has been shown at MoMA PS1, Pioneer Works, Queens Museum, Mizuma and Kips Gallery, and Christieʼs among other sites. His art was also archived by the UCLA music library, and Anthology Film Archives.
Chihiro’s artwork looks for the poetry opportunity in ordinary objects and everyday experiences to connect people across geopolitical boundaries. They founded their own experimental art project space “NO WORLD Project Space” in New York City with artist Mica Scalin.
This exhibition is made possible, in part, by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.
