April 10 – May 30th
Belonging: The Long Island City Studio Collective
Co-curated by Rebecca Ibel and Laura Sanders
Participating Artists:
Elham Bayati, Laura Bidwa, Sarah Fairchild, Adrian Hatfield, Erika B. Hess, Daina Higgins, Dion Johnson, Heather Jones, Kurt Lightner, Jodi Lightner, Nikos Rutkowski, Amy Sacksteder, Laura Sanders and Johnny Taylor
Contemporary Art Matters is pleased to present Belonging: The Long Island City Studio Collective, an exhibition featuring the work of fourteen painters from this New York City collective. The show will be on view at the gallery’s 243 N 5th Street, Columbus, OH location, April 10 – May 30th with an opening reception on Thursday, April 10th, 5-7 PM. In addition, a special LIC studio exhibition will take place during the first week of May, with a May 6th reception at the studio’s 2116 40th Ave., Long Island City, Queens location.
Artists videos
Laura sanders
Erika b. Hess
Nikos Rutkowski
Heather Jones
In the exhibition
Installation views
daina higgins growing up graffiti digital catalog
Daina Higgins: At Home with Discord
Daina Higgins began her vocation as an artist in the 1990s as a quintessential outsider: she was not only a graffiti artist in her native Columbus but also one of the few young women then so engaged there. Her noirish attraction to the oblique angles and ominous shadows of a presumptively benighted urban landscape in the Rust Belt has never flagged. At the same time, her paintings and drawings have acquired the existential gravitas that comes, if an artist has the requisite talent and mind, with the travails of life, the burden of lineage, and the compulsion to reflect on them.
Her elegiacally retrospective 2024 painting Growing Up Graffiti embeds both her creative origins and their thematic throughline. She draws as well as she paints, which allows her to get very busy on the canvas without flummoxing her audience. A forbidding gray arch beneath a city bridge catches fearless light from the Day-Glo applications of two taggers at work as swirling charcoal auras waft upward from makeshift shelters and distressed flowers to the moon, struggling to break through crosshatched, tendrilled darkness. Alongside the beavering artists are railroad tracks that gain illumination as they proceed Oz-like into the distance towards a water tower – traditionally a symbol of progress, community, and providence – blessed by a setting sun, its light unimpeded.
Belonging: The Long Island City Studio Collective, celebrates the power of solidarity between artists. By establishing a presence in NYC, the collective members gain access to a thriving arts community and the vast cultural opportunities of one of the world’s most influential artistic centers. Housed in a centuries-old former factory in Queens, the studio collective equips artists to strengthen their role within the larger art world by welcoming visits from gallerists, curators, and collectors. It serves not only as a workspace but also as a professional hub. Founded in 2021 by Kurt Lightner and Laura Sanders, the collective emerged from a shared ambition to create a dedicated space beyond the artists’ home bases to cultivate new opportunities for increased visibility and career growth. With members hailing from diverse geographical regions, the studio fosters connections that extend beyond local communities, expanding the members' cultural networks.
Inspired by the resilience and ingenuity that arise from artistic kinship, this exhibition presents dynamic works reflecting a spectrum of creative visions, all bound by a spirit of camaraderie that provides fuel for an artist’s lifelong practice. An artist’s journey is uniquely unconventional, yet one constant may be the network of support formed through creative communities. Collectives have long served as both a remedy for isolation and a means of sharing resources. With the establishment of The Long Island City Studio Collective, these artist allies have nurtured a space for collaboration, resource-sharing, and mutual encouragement, where they can belong to the conversation within a vibrant, global art scene.
Coinciding with the exhibition, Contemporary Art Matters is delighted to release Growing Up Graffiti, a catalog featuring new paintings by Daina Higgins, accompanied by an essay about her work by Jonathan Stevenson, a contributing writer for The New York Times and Two Coats of Paint. Higgins’ work reflects her personal engagement with graffiti culture and a fascination with forgotten urban sites, places unguarded from the expressive hand of a spray-paint-wielding artist. In this exhibition, Higgins revisits her formative roots in graffiti while incorporating its hallmark medium, spray paint, into her compositions. In the title painting, Growing Up Graffiti, a glowing neon tag beckons to us from under a freeway overpass. Its intensity is challenged by the last rays of sunset and the eye of the moon peering out from behind wisps of suggested curtains, subtly veiling the scene. Her vivid and layered approach to painting echoes the overlapping nature of memory.
