SHE: VOICES OF COLOR 2025

SHE: Voices of Color brings together a dynamic group of women artists — Francine Tint, Iris Kufert-Rivo, Luisa López Celada, Michelle Hoogveld, Serena Bocchino, Eunmi Chae, and Elize Bae — whose practices explore identity, emotion, and the intangible forces that shape lived experience. Through vibrant palettes, layered textures, and intuitive mark-making, the exhibition highlights how color becomes a language of its own — one that communicates presence, memory, and inner worlds that cannot be expressed through words alone. Each artist approaches abstraction uniquely, yet their works collectively honor the depth, strength, and complexity of women’s voices.

This exhibition invites viewers to experience color not only as a visual element but also as an emotional and psychological landscape. From bold gestures to quiet luminosity, the artworks create a dialogue about resilience, sensitivity, and the unseen energies that define contemporary womanhood. SHE: Voices of Color celebrates the power of artistic expression to illuminate stories, bridge perspectives, and reveal the subtle, intangible light within each artist’s practice.

Francine Tint is a New York–based painter whose five-decade career is defined by a powerful commitment to abstraction, creating works that merge bold, intuitive gestures with a distinctive sense of color across scales ranging from intimate compositions to monumental 20-foot canvases. Rooted in Abstract Expressionism and Colour Field painting, her practice reflects deep engagement with art history, drawing inspiration from the New York School as well as artists such as Turner, Manet, Goya, and Pontormo, along with influences from Asian brush painting and Paleolithic cave art. Tint paints with immediacy and instinct—what she calls “the now”—where each spontaneous brushstroke carries the weight of decades of experience, emotional memory, and dialogue with the canvas. Formerly a successful costume designer who collaborated with figures like David Bowie and Ridley Scott, she later devoted herself fully to painting, exhibiting widely in the U.S. and abroad, with works held in more than 28 museum collections including the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Heckscher Museum of Art, the Portland Museum of Art, and the Krannert Art Museum. She continues to work and teach abstract painting at the Art Students League in New York City.

Iris Kufert-Rivo is a geometric painter based at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City whose work explores how we process the world both intellectually and emotionally. Using a restrained toolkit of straight edges, tape, and palette knives, she creates rectilinear compositions animated by nuanced color relationships, balancing order and freedom through subtly imperfect, hand-revealing forms. Her paintings serve as metaphors for the social, political, and personal upheavals that shape human experience—each work becoming a cumulative record of choices, perceptions, and responses, much like the way we integrate life’s complexities into understanding. Inspired by the physical and emotional landscape around her, Kufert-Rivo captures the fragility and persistence of humanity through a unique visual language. She holds a BS from Skidmore College and an MFA from Bard College, and her Structure Series reflects patterns and repetitions drawn from her urban environment, emphasizing process as the driving force of her artistic practice.

Luisa López Celada is a purpose-driven, award-winning Spanish-born oil painter whose work merges activism and art to address human rights, climate change, and social justice. A cancer survivor, she views painting as both a sanctuary and a transformative tool for healing, using her practice to evoke memory, emotion, and spiritual connection. Trained at the Complutense University of Madrid and later at Pratt Institute through a Fulbright Scholarship, Luisa built a successful parallel career in advertising and design before dedicating herself fully to painting. Her art has been exhibited internationally—including Art Basel Miami and Gracie Mansion—and she is recognized for empowering women through networking and mentorship in the arts. Now based in New York, her recent work reflects her commitment to fostering dialogue around contemporary global challenges.

Michelle Hoogveld is a contemporary artist known for her vibrant, colour-driven works that span mediums from canvas and print editions to large-scale murals, public installations, sculpture, design, and fashion. Blending intuition with intention, she creates a visual language rooted in human emotion and colour resonance, weaving gestural marks and washes with hard-edge geometric forms influenced by geometric abstraction, Colour Field painting, and Abstract Expressionism. Her bold patterns and textile-like colour blockings explore identity, place, and the universal thread of love, while her monumental murals—such as “Dazzle My Heart” in Montreal and “Technicolor” in Hoboken—have captured audiences worldwide. Exhibited across North America, Europe, and South America, Hoogveld’s work celebrates the dynamic relationship between colour and emotion, offering a joyful, uplifting artistic experience that encourages viewers to embrace connection, passion, and the essence of being human.

Serena Bocchino is an American contemporary abstract artist whose practice spans painting, sculpture, and installation, drawing inspiration from Abstract Expressionism, jazz, and Fluxus to transform sound into vivid visual form. A synesthete, she experiences sound as color and movement, a perception that fuels her dynamic compositions and has earned her numerous honors, including grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation and residencies at PS1/MoMA and the Brodsky Center. Exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the United States, her work has been acquired by major institutions such as the Nicolaysen Art Museum, Museo Italo Americano, and the Taoxichuan Art Museum of China’s Central Academy of Fine Arts. Bocchino has received extensive critical recognition—from The New York Times to ARTnews—and her practice has been the subject of films and multiple monographs. Her large-scale projects reflect her continued exploration of color, gesture, and the visual language of sound, expanding the possibilities of contemporary abstraction.

Chae Eunmi is a South Korean artist known for her innovative fusion of mother-of-pearl fragments, traditional Korean lacquer, gold, and printing techniques to explore the theme of light and eternity. Educated in both Korea and Japan, she has held international solo exhibitions in Seoul and Stockholm and participated in major art fairs worldwide, with her work included in notable museum and private collections. Centering her practice on the concept of eternity, Chae uses gold to symbolize permanence and mother-of-pearl to reflect resilience and the beauty shaped through hardship. Through reflective surfaces and luminous materials, her works create endlessly expanding spaces of light, expressing her belief that human lives—like light—interconnect, influence, and continuously evolve.

Elize Bae’s Projection Brut: Echoes and Revelations examines how identity is shaped through layers of internal doubt, interpersonal entanglement, and societal projection, using intuitive palette-knife painting, collage, and mixed media to translate lived experience into raw gestural portraits. Each work centers a solitary figure absorbing different forms of energetic and narrative pressure—self-imposed expectations, intimate psychic exchanges, and media-driven public scrutiny—revealing how identity forms and fractures under these forces. Across the series, Elize amplifies silenced voices through expressive color, unstable surfaces, and purposeful negative space, tracing vulnerability, resilience, and the tension between visibility and erasure. As a first-generation, self-taught Korean American artist, her practice is rooted in intuitive ritual, healing, and the exploration of how personal and collective histories shape belonging, legacy, and the emotional architecture of contemporary life.