AHL Foundation Inc. is pleased to announce the artists selected for Space Uptown 2024, co-curated by Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director & Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, and Jiyoung Lee, Programs Director of the AHL Foundation.
Ara Ko, Carlos Mateu, Bishop McIndoe, Kai Oh, and Kejoo Park are the artists featured in this year’s exhibition. Supported by Manna’s Exhibition Grant, Space Uptown has showcased Korean and New York City artists since 2022 for cross-cultural exchanges.
The exhibition “Fantasy in Abstraction” features artists who fluidly express their inner worlds and imaginations in abstract realms.
The show contrasts with what we might consider as fantasy. There are no otherworldly symbols or mythological creatures as subjects. Instead, there is a great use of emotions and nature in these narratives, as well as a quest for new identities. There is also a wide variety of colors, from dark tones to whimsical and bright hues.
The AHL Foundation, Inc., 501(c)(3) not-for-profit arts organization established in 2003, supports artists of Korean heritage working in the United States and promotes exposure of their work in today’s highly competitive contemporary art world. Their mission is to seek, identify, and promote talented Korean and Korean-American artists active in the United States; provide the artists with a platform and resources to further develop their talents; and host educational, cultural, and artistic events to build wider public awareness of contemporary artists of Korean heritage.
Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director of the West Harlem Art Fund and guest curator of this exhibition, states, “The arts in Harlem are moving forward with bold collaborations and partnerships that invite New Yorkers to revisit our past but also feel excited about our new visions.”
“Fantasy in Abstraction” opens with a reception on Thursday, March 28, 2024, at 5 pm and runs through April 26, 2024. The gallery address is 2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10030 at the corner of 139th Street. Public hours are Wednesday through Saturday from 12 pm to 6 pm.
Artist Bios
Ara Ko (b. 1988, Hongseong, Korea) received a BFA from Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea) and an MFA from MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting (Baltimore, MD). She has exhibited at the CICA Museum (Seoul, Korea), Gallery We (Seoul, Korea), Washington Square Park (New York, NY), Miboo Art Center (Busan, Korea), and Sung Nam Art Center (Seongnam-si, Korea), Oxford Art Alliance (Pennsylvania), C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore). Ko won the Mural Project Award from Winthrop Apartment (Bozzuto Management Company) and MICA and has received numerous awards during her graduate studies including the Leslie King Hammond Graduate Fellowship (MICA) and a CCC Community Art Grant (MICA).
Carlos Mateu was born in 1970 Havana, Cuba, and has resided in the United States since 1997. As a teenager, he attended The Paulita Concepcion Vocational Middle School of Art where he studied painting, engraving, sculpture, drawing, and art history. He later studied mechanical drawing at the Fernando Aguado y Rico Technological Institute and completed his formal art education at the renowned San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts. He also worked for nine years at a Publicity Agency as a model maker, silk screen assistant, illustrator, and designer of fairs and exhibitions. This combination of studies and experiences served to develop and refine his technique and style, as well as to solidify his desire to make art a lifelong profession.
Bishop McIndoe was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He is an artist and an arts activist, whose work has been shown at galleries and art spaces throughout NYC. Since 2017, Bishop has been working with the nonprofit arts organization Artistic Noise, which works to create artmaking experiences for young people at its Harlem-based studio space. Bishop has worked as a Teaching Artist there and also develops programming for the organization’s alumni network. As an Art & Entrepreneurship alumnus himself, Bishop enjoys working with the program’s youth because he sees potential in all of them. In 2023, Bishop became Artistic Noise’s first-ever Alumni Artist in Residence. Besides his long career in arts education, Bishop is a talented visual artist who has exhibited his work at Pace Gallery, Hannah Traore Gallery, Maysles Documentary Center, and more. He has designed commissioned artwork for organizations such as Harlem Stage and others. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn New York.
Kai Oh (b. 1992, Seoul) is a visual artist who focuses on expanding the boundaries of photography, capturing the non-human-centric life force in urban spaces through her lens. She emphasizes the fluidity of digital images, exploring their inherent possibilities. By bringing digital images from the computer into physical space, Oh challenges conventional norms and historical values linked to flat images/surfaces on the wall, crafting otherworldly scenarios. Before attending Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Kai Oh earned her Bachelor’s degrees from Seoul National University and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Alongside her solo exhibitions, including Half Sticky, IBK Korea (2023) and Softsharp, Cylinder, Seoul (2021), Kai Oh has participated in numerous group exhibitions: Autohypnosis, G Gallery, Seoul (2023); The Postmodern Child Part 2, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (2023); Rales, Wheezed and Crackles, Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2022); Super-fine, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul (2021); and Foam Talent, Foam Amsterdam (2017).
As a Korean-American architect, landscape artist, and visual artist, Kejoo Park has been working and living abroad, primarily in German-speaking countries for many years. She is now in the process of returning to New York. After graduating from graduate school in landscape architecture, she worked briefly with Peter Walker – the landscape architect of the Ground Zero memorial in New York – and then moved to Switzerland, where she worked together with many Swiss, German, and American architects, such as I.M. Pei and Mario Campi, as a freelance landscape architect for international competitions. During her time teaching landscape architecture and ecology as an assistant professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart, Germany for about eight years, she continued to work as a landscape architect on a few projects in Beijing, China. For about 9 years, she has given up all her previous work to devote herself entirely to being an artist. She is in a phase where she is synthesizing all her previous work and the insights she has gained over the years into the visual arts (total art, Gesamtkunst).
Curator Bio
Savona Bailey-McClain is a Harlem based curator and arts administrator. She is the Executive Director/Chief Curator of the West Harlem Art Fund, which has organized high-profile public arts exhibits throughout New York City for the past 20 years, including Times Square, DUMBO, Soho, Governors Island and Harlem. Her public art installations encompass sculpture, drawings, performance, sound, and mixed media, and have been covered extensively by the New York Times, Art Daily, Artnet, Los Angeles Times and Huffington Post, among many others. She is host/ producer of “State of the Arts NYC,” a podcast program on Podyssey, Radio Public, Youtube, Mixcloud and other audio platforms. She is a member of ArtTable, Advisory Board member of NYC’s Dance in Sacred Places, Governors Island Advisory Council and new Board member of NY Artists Equity Association.
Jiyoung Lee is a Director of Programs at the AHL Foundation in New York, where she oversees the operations and initiatives of the Archive of Korean Artists in America (AKAA) and manages programs and exhibitions at the gallery in Harlem, New York City. Prior to this role, she served as the Communications Manager at the Asia Culture Center, the largest arts hub in South Korea established under the Minister of Culture, Sports, and Tourism.
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