Carole Harris was the first artist that we featured in this collaboration during the month of September, 2020. Carole is a fiber artist who has redefined and subverted the basic concepts of quilting to suit her own purposes.

She extends the boundaries of traditional quilting by exploring other forms of stitchery, irregular shapes, textures, materials, and objects Her process emulates that of a painter, often revising her earlier decisions and doubling back in a medium that traditionally progresses linearly. 

Carole is captivated by the interplay of hue and pattern, often drawing inspiration from the color, energy, movement, and rhythms of ethnographic textiles she collects, as well as the music of, and changing rhythms and history of the city of Detroit where she lives.

Jova Lynne was our October featured designer.

Jova is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and curator of Jamaican and Colombian heritage, born and raised in New York City, and currently based in Detroit, MI.

Lynne is interested in the parallels between fictional, historical and personal archive in identity development. In her practice Lynne seeks to subvert anthropological practice in utilizing the lens and performance. She is interested in the cognitive dissonance one experiences when navigating material, text and media-based archive. Lynne is a grantee of the Astraea Foundation's Global Arts Fund, which has supported her work in media and social practice based projects in Kingston, Jamaica and Berlin, Germany, in addition to her work in Detroit. Lynne completed a Masters of Fine Arts in Photography at Cranbrook Academy of Art in May 2017, and most recently was a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit.

Jova Lynne’s work has been presented at galleries and museums across the globe including Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Torrance Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum, and Stroboskop Art Space, Warsaw Poland.

The final artist featured in the SPOTLIGHT by Eugenie in collaboration with Simone DeSousa Gallery was Tyanna Buie in November, 2020.

A Chicago, IL and Milwaukee, WI native, Tyanna Buie was born the youngest of four siblings on the city’s south side. By the age of four, Buie and her siblings were placed in the foster care system where they were temporarily housed, moving from one home to another throughout Illinois and Wisconsin.

Buie’s life and work have been highly influenced by this experience. Early on she was guided toward the art-making process as an outlet for self-expression and to cope with a challenging environment. In the midst of this chaos, Buie was free to create and this gave her a sense of release and enjoyment to find her voice, her creative vision and a connection with the outside world. Through the memory of these childhood experiences aided by a few family photos from her aunt, Buie has the ability to reclaim and rewrite her own past in her work: to not just focus on the hardships, but to highlight the celebrations.

Buie believes in maintaining a connection to the community around her by hosting printmaking workshops and demonstrations and participating in Healthy Neighborhood Initiatives through the production of public art created for underserved neighborhoods and communities in Milwaukee, and Madison, WI.

Currently, Buie is an Assistant Professor/Section Chair of Printmaking at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, MI, while undertaking a 2019/2020 Grant Wood Fellowship in Printmaking at the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA.