HARLEM: 2504 Frederick Douglass Blvd, New York, NY 10030. 646-964-5062
Calabar Gallery represents underserved artists locally and globally: African, African American and Caribbean artists, with the mission of providing a place for community, exhibition, creative initiatives and projects. It provides a venue for them to innovate, sustain, grow and expand ideas, concepts, projects and leverage opportunities by the use of our space, networks and relationships, and a distinctive location in Harlem New York City
We end the year with several things that we will announce in the new year. 2021 like 2020 was full of drama and intrigue. What will 2022 bring: The 2022 year of the water tiger promises a year of positive changes. Change is a constant in life - how you deal with it really defines you.
We are delighted to add ELAN CADIZ to our roster of artists that we represent. In 2020, the Scaffold Project got our attention and was shown across several galleries in the New York City area. We sat down in November to discuss what our gallery would be able to do and what opportunities were out there. See our full announcement below.
For Calabar Gallery - we have created a distinctive gallery focused around African Artists revolving around Nigerian, Ghanaian and Congolese Artists. In 2022, we will grow our focus around Caribbean and African American Artists. We will expand some of our collaborations and partnerships online and offline.
This year, our work concentrated on African artists from showing and selling the work of Dallas based Nigerian American photographer Inyang Essien to our new relationship with Brooklyn based Toag, whose abstract pieces were what brought us to him. We are continuing our work with Ghanaian artists Musah Swallah and Kwesi Nyarkoh and showing Kwesi O. Kwarteng with Winfred Nana Amoah just recently in our gallery. We have scheduled an exhibition of Musah Swallah with Nii Narku Thompson. The pairing model we are using are about art conversations. Congolese artists we work with include Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe who we represent and he just signed a book cover licensing deal for a noted Congolese academic with a British publisher. More soon on that in the new year. We have added Serge Diakota to our roster of artists we continue to work with from 2020. He along with Ange Sawa are the next generation of Congolese artists we know are the future.
Next year, our art fair activities will be both virtual and on person. We will commence with Atlantic World Art Fair. We are excited to show both our artists and a range of artists that we will introduce in March 2022. In May, we head to Art Vancouver to do the same and in July to Sante Fe. Hopefully by May and July - covid-19 will be lessen.
We will continue our auctions again in 2022. It gives us a chance to highlight and sell the work of artists we feature. We are still looking for partners and collaborators. Our exhibitions will again happen in-person and virtual. We will expand our online exhibitions in 2022 as well as our Art sales to compliment the work we do all year round.
Our last active act of 2022 is to offer you this amazing end of year gift:
Make your time here in this universe more about friends, family and people. It's an "US" and "WE" mode of critical engagement. Be proactive, be creative and make a difference. Be open, be different and be you. Love, life and most important, laugh, and laugh again.
Towards 2022, a new chapter of this book call life.
We are still here.
Atim
Atim Annette Oton
Curator/Director
We are excited to bring on Elan Cadiz as one of the artists we represent. We will begin our relationship with our first exhibition of the year. Elan calls herself a North American Artist and her heritage as both Black and Puerto Rican growing up in New York City. It defines her in a way that is what this city is about - two cultures meeting. She is Harlem based, New York raised and educated as an artist both in the best of public and private universities. Please discover her work and welcome her to our gallery by beginning to acquire her work. We have confidence in her work and value so please feel free to visit her website at https://www.elancadiz.com/. This week - we will continue to select work to our website and if you do love work on her website like we do - please contact us directly as she will refer you back to us anyway.
Elan Cadiz is an interdisciplinary North American Visual Artist that deconstructs and balances her intersectionality through her projects. Her art and practice are grounded in the documentation of her personal narrative through the use of historical imagery and the domestic. Cadiz sees herself as a cultural interpreter and visual documentarian. She immerses herself in environments, documenting the familiar and the unfamiliar all the while expressing these inquiries with artworks she create. The artworks created and the materials used are all determined by her experience and interactions with the places and people she comes in contact with, in the present and the past. Elan Cadiz graduated from City College of New York with a BA in Studio Art and received a MFA Fine Arts degree from the School of Visual Arts where she was awarded the SVA Merit Scholarship, Paul Rhodes Memorial Award and the Martha Trevor Award. Cadiz has been commissioned by the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo de Barrio, Art in Flux Harlem, Mount Vernon Hotel Museum and more. She was one of the first Sustainable Arts Foundation AIRspace Parent Artist Residence at Abrons Art Center and her An American Family Album series was featured in VOGUE. Her artworks can also be found in New American Paintings magazine, issue No.146.
SYNERGIES Community: Equity: Elan Cadiz Cartography: Scarification: Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe
SYNERGIES is a conversation between the work of two artists: North American and New York based Elan Cadiz and Congolese And Kinshasa based Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe about mapping their journey's through art ideas and life. Each is a series of pivotal stories capturing community through geography, places, people and moments. Both are using ethnographic processes, material and mediums as well as techniques to talk about equity, migration and the cities they inhabit and work in.
Calabar Gallery
2504 Frederick Douglass Boulevard
New York, NY 10030
646-964-5062