P.6 Artists Hannah Chalew, Mel Chin, Christopher Cozier, and Tessa Mars will be in conversation with Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson. Registration is required.

Hannah Chalew is an artist, educator, and environmental activist raised and currently working in New Orleans. Her artwork explores what it means to live in an era of global warming with an uncertain future; it unearths the historical legacies that got us here to help imagine new possibilities for a livable future. This work is specifically rooted in Southern Louisiana as a microcosm of our shifting time. Chalew received a BA from Brandeis University in 2009, and an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. She has exhibited widely around New Orleans and has shown around the country at the Laumeier Sculpture Park, St. Louis, MO; Wave Hill, Bronx, NY; Minnesota Center for the Book Arts, Minneapolis, MN; Dieu Donné, New York, NY; among other venues. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, American Craft, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Burnaway, Hand Papermaking, the LA Times, The Boston Globe, and more. Chalew’s work is held in the collections of the City of New Orleans and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA. She is the 2022 South Arts Southern Prize winner as well as the South Arts Louisiana State Fellow.

Mel Chin creates unique, idiosyncratic objects that require multi-disciplinary, collaborative teamwork. His public projects are insistently dosed with a rigorous pragmatism and an elevated poeticism, while his studio work is without a signature style resulting in works suffused with a deeply considered restraint or excess to promote an unpredictable aesthetic. Chin’s project Revival Field (1991-93) pioneered the scientific use of plants to remove toxic, heavy metals from the soil. He then founded the collective In the Name of the Place (1995-1998) to bring conceptual art ideas onto American prime-time television. His 9-11/9-11, (2007) won the Pedro Sienna Award for Animation in Chile. His nationwide initiative Fundred Project gave tangible form and political value to over 500,000 individuals opposed to the threat of childhood lead-poisoning. Unmoored and Wake (2018) in Times Square, New York City, was a visual portal into a future of rising waters. He established S.O.U.R.C.E. Studio (2017) to both enlarge the dialogue and realize sustained engagements with community and environment. He is the recipient of many awards, grants, and honorary degrees, including the MacArthur Fellowship, 2019, and election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2021.

Christopher Cozier is an artist, writer, and curator, and is a co-director of Alice Yard, a space for creative experimentation, which participated in documenta fifteen (2022). From his notebook drawings to installations derived from recorded and staged actions, Cozier investigates how Caribbean historical and current experiences can inform understandings of the wider contemporary world. Cozier received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1986, and an MFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 1988. He was awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2004, was a Prince Claus Award laureate in 2013, and received the Pérez Prize in 2023. Exhibitions include the 5th & 7th Havana Biennials (1994 & 2000); Infinite Island, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2007); Afro Modern: Journeys through the Black Atlantic, Tate Liverpool, UK (2010); Entanglements, MSU Broad Art Museum, East Lansing, MI (2015); Relational Undercurrents, Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, CA (2017); The Sea Is History, Historisk Museum, Oslo, Norway (2019); and Forecast Forms, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, IL (2022). Cozier exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial 14 in 2019, the Liverpool Biennial 2021, and participated in the public program of 10th Berlin Biennial in 2018. 

Tessa Mars is a Haitian visual artist who explores gender, landscape, migration, and spirituality in relation to Haitian history. Working primarily in painting and papier maché, the artist takes distance from colonial narratives to reconnect to a Haitian perspective of the world and embrace other forms of collective belonging. Mars received a BFA from Rennes 2 University in France in 2006. She has had solo exhibitions at Casa del Lago in Mexico City, Mexico; Le Centre d’Art as well as the French Institute, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; and has participated in collective exhibitions at Tiwani Gallery, London, UK; Denver Art Museum, CO; Framer Framed, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Kulturstiftung Basel H. Geiger, Basel, Switzerland; the 10th Berlin Biennale, Germany; the Ateliers ’89, Oranjestad, Aruba; Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago; Musée du Panthéon National Haïtien, Port-au-Prince, Haiti; 30th International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul, Canada; and the Haitian pavilion at the 54th Venice Biennale. Mars is an alumna of the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam.

For more information on the P.6 Susan Brennan Co-Artistic Directors Miranda Lash and Ebony G. Patterson, visit here.