Tiger Strikes Asteroid Philadelphia is excited to announce their next exhibition, Sagas. This group show brings together artists of various backgrounds who all explore their cultural and personal histories through their artmaking processes. The show will feature Sachiko Akiyama, Mary Henderson, Megan Hueble, Susan Lichtman, Juan Logan, Naomi Nakazato, Enrico Riley, and Anna Tsouhlarakis. The exhibition, co-curated by Mark Brosseau and Mary Henderson, runs from February 1 to March 9, 2019 with a reception on Thursday, February 14th from 6 to 9pm.

Sagas ask questions of how myth and folklore are different than fiction. All of these genres are types of storytelling, but myth and folklore are rooted in the exploration of cultural histories. They are stories that attempt to make sense of complex social and personal interactions, and to organize seemingly overwhelming information and events into a form that is approachable and relatable.

The show grew organically, in a way that parallels the passing down of myths and folktales. The curators built it by pulling in people from their various experiences as artists – colleagues, former instructors, artists they have admired. This exhibition is a way of bringing these stories together and looking for themes and challenges shared among a broad range of perspectives and artistic practices.

Sachiko Akiyama’s sculptures and drawings explore how to create physical representations of the complex and mysterious world of internal, psychological states. She received her BFA from Boston University in 2002. She is best known for her sculptures that combine hand-carved wood forms with other materials such as clay, resin and metal. She has exhibited in the United States and abroad, including solo exhibitions at the Akinofuku Museum (Hamamatsu, Japan), the University of Maine Museum of Art (Bangor, ME), and group exhibitions at the Kohler Arts Center (Sheboygan, WI), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), and Field Projects (NYC, NY). Her work has been reviewed favorably in Art New England, The Boston Globe, and The Portland Press Herald. Among numerous honors, Akiyama was awarded a Joan Mitchell Award, an Artist Resource Trust Grant, and residencies at UCross and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her work is in the permanent collections of Decordova Museum and Sculpture Park and Gordon College. Akiyama currently lives in Portsmouth, NH.

Mary Henderson’s painting installation, “Serious Men,” adopts the format of the typology as a mode of symbolic storytelling. The work considers public performances of masculinity and the notion of “seriousness,” as part of the artist’s ongoing exploration of displays of collective identity, power and the relationship between the public and private self. Henderson received an AB in Fine Arts from Amherst College in Amherst, MA, and an MFA in Painting from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. Recent exhibitions include the solo show, “Public Views,” Lyons Wier Gallery (New York), and group shows at the Mesa Contemporary Arts Museum (Mesa, AZ), the Woodmere Museum (Philadelphia, PA) and Ringling College of Art and Design (Sarasota, FL). She is a 2019 finalist for the Bennett Prize and has been the recipient of a Pennsylvania Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship, a PCA SOS grant, and a residency at the Jentel Foundation. Her work has been featured in Harper’s Magazine, L’Espresso (Italy), New American Paintings, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Art in America, among other publications. She teaches painting and drawing part-time at St. Joseph’s University; she is also the assistant director for the Philadelphia site of the non-profit network of artist-run spaces,Tiger Strikes Asteroid. She lives and works in Philadelphia, PA with her husband and two children.

Megan Hueble explores biblical themes of knowledge, good and evil. Her paper cutouts hide and reveal, using floral elements to evoke the imagery of Eden and plants of knowledge. She earned a BFA in Visual Arts from Clemson University in 2017. While at Clemson, she received multiple research scholarships and the Harold Cooledge Award in Undergraduate Art History. Additionally, she spent a semester abroad in Cortona Italy, and interned at the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC, and the Museum of Fine Art (MFA) in Boston, MA. Her senior body of work was informed by the wide variety of floral and decorative motifs at the MFA, and it primarily concerned the value and perception of female labor, specifically artistic and craft labor. Upon graduation, she was accepted as a Brandon Fellow at Greenville Center for Creative Arts. Her current work is a vehicle for asking questions that relate broadly to female representation in religious art, self portraiture, and the power of subjectivity. She is based in South Carolina.

Susan Lichtman’s paintings are ruminations on the social fabric of her home, in which people, pets and things are placed together intuitively, conjuring up the casual ways family members inhabit a shared domestic space. She has had recent solo exhibitions at Gross McCleaf gallery in Philadelphia, Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects in New York, and at the Wilson Museum of Hollins University in Roanoke, VA. A recipient of a 2018 Massachusetts Cultural Council grant, she also has received awards from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation. She was the Frances Niederer Artist-in-Residence at Hollins University in 2017 and the Guest of Honor at JSS Civita in 2016. Lichtman received her undergraduate degree from Brown University and an MFA in Painting from Yale University School of Art. She lives in Rehoboth, MA and is a professor at Brandeis University where she teaches painting and drawing.

Juan Logan’s “imagery mourns and affirms, transforms and quietly asks us to consider the physic cost of insensitivity and ignorance and to confer the gift of our humanity in the wake of brutality. His message comes to us in part through ritualized forms, a symbolic language constructed of graphic signs and objects the artist has selected form otherwise unnoticed day-to-day artifacts” (Excerpts from the essay Reliquaries for the exhibition catalog, “Juan Logan: Close Inspection” by Ken Bloom, Director, Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, Minnesota.) He received his MFA from Maryland Institute, College of Art (Baltimore, MD). He has shown extensively nationally and internationally, and his work can be found in private, corporate, and public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Gibbes Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum, the Zimmerli Museum of Art, and the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art. Most recently, his pieceSome Clouds are Darker became part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. His awards include fellowships from the from the John Michael Kohler Arts Center, the North Carolina Arts Council, the Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation, the Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, the Carolina Postdoctoral Scholars Fellowship, and the Phillip Morris Companies.

Naomi Nakazato makes work that attempts to understand the dichotomous nature of her Japanese-American biracial identity through constructions of artificial nature and fragmented spaces. Her piece “Fifty Days of Forever” is a response to a trip made to Japan in April 2018 to attend her grandmother’s funeral. It considers video game tutorial systems, NPCs (non-player characters) and avatars, and her inexperience with Japanese Buddhist funerary customs – particularly kotsuage, the transferring of bones of the deceased to the urn – drawing parallels between set objectives and her own personal dissociations. Nakazato’s multidisciplinary work spans drawing, painting, sculpture, printmaking, and installation to examine belonging within hybridity. She received a BA from Anderson University, South Carolina and an MFA from The New York Academy of Art, New York. Nakazato was awarded an initiate Brandon Fellowship at the Greenville Center for the Creative Arts in Greenville, South Carolina, a 2017 summer residency at the Leipzig International Artists Program in Leipzig, Germany, two Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grants, and is currently a Keyholder Resident at The Lower East Side Printshop in New York, NY. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.

Enrico Riley uses the medium of painting and drawing as a method for remembering and reflecting upon grief, and investigating links between the old world and the new, within a contemporary media context of reflexive violence perpetrated on African Americans. Riley received a BA in Visual Studies from Dartmouth College and an MFA in painting from Yale University School of Art. He is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, a Rome Prize in Visual Arts, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize in painting and a Jacobus Family Fellowship through Dartmouth College. He has exhibited work at The American Academy in Rome, Rome, Italy, The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, VA. The Columbus Museum, Columbus, Georgia, The Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas, Texas, The American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City, Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH, The Museum for the National Center of Afro-American Arts in Roxbury, MA, Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma, Rome, Italy, Rhode Island School of Design Ehp, Rome, Italy, Teckningsmuseet, Laholm, Sweden, Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT, Jenkins Johnson Projects, Brooklyn, NY, SACI School of Art Florence, Italy, Pageant Gallery in Philadelphia, PA, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA Lori Bookstein Fine Art in New York City, The Painting Center in New York City, SACI School of Art Florence, Italy, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA. He is a professor of studio art at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH. He currently lives in Norwich, VT.

Anna Tsouhlarakis’s signage installation draws upon her informal surveys among Navajos about their beliefs and thoughts on reaching harmony, or hozho. The resulting work combines oral and quasi-scientific traditions in its exploration of Navajo narratives of future worlds. Tsouhlarakis works in sculpture, installation, video and performance.  She received her BA from Dartmouth College and MFA from Yale University.  She has participated in several art residencies including Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Yaddo.  Her work has been included in exhibitions both nationally and internationally.  She has been awarded various grants and fellowships including the Eiteljorg Fellowship for Native American Contemporary Art. Her recent awards include an Artist Fellowship from the Harpo Foundation, DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities as well as a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship.  She currently resides in Washington, DC with her partner, 3 children and trusty dog.  

Mark Brosseau did his undergraduate study at Dartmouth College and received his MFA from the University of Pennsylvania in 2001 before receiving a Fulbright Fellowship to spend a year painting and making prints in Iceland. He has exhibited nationally, with his most recent solo and two-person shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Los Angeles, University of South Carolina Upstate, and The Neon Heater. He lives and works in Greenville, SC and teaches at Clemson University.