H Boone (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist who combines their love of science fiction and body horror with their gender-nonconforming identity into 3D printed semi-representational sculptures and drawings. The artist intentionally glitches and reconstructs 3d scanned figures to stretch the limitations of the gendered body. They often flow back and forth between digital and traditional art processes, including VR sculpting, 3D scanning, animation, painting, and drawing. Boone utilizes the hard to pin down nature of the abstracted body and the fluidity of digital processes to probe at ideas of legibility, euphoria, and revulsion. Boone grew up in Midcoast, Maine, and earned a BFA in Painting from the Maine College of Art in 2016. In 2022, they moved to Western New York, where they received their MFA as a Schomburg Fellow from the University at Buffalo in 2025.

Megan Mi-Ai Lee (b. 1996, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the ways fantasy diffuses through popular culture. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions internationally, including at Tiffany’s (Los Angeles, 2026), Afternoon Projects (Vancouver, 2025), IAH (Seoul, 2025), and Room 3557 (Los Angeles, 2023). Recently, her work has been included in group exhibitions at Sawhorse (Chicago, 2026), BANK/Mab Society (New York, 2025), Astor Weeks (New York, 2025), Pumice Raft (Toronto, 2024), White Columns (New York, 2024), and Art Lot (Brooklyn, 2022). Lee has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art (Saugatuck, 2018), Storm King Art Center (New York, 2019), and Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, 2021-2022), and was a 2024-2026 Van Lier Fellow and Resident at Abrons Art Center, where she was mentored by program alumna Park McArthur. In 2026, she was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship for sculpture. Lee holds a BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art.

Zack Boehler (he/him/his) joined the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in 2017 as Public Art Project Coordinator. In this capacity, he has worked to broaden the scope of the Public Art Initiative to include internationally recognized muralists and artists including Jun Kaneko, Logan Hicks, Felipe Pantone, Bunnie Reiss, and Tavar Zawacki. Boehler worked closely with museum staff to help realize Swoon: Seven Contemplations at Albright-Knox Northland and Sarah Braman: Finding Room at Frank Lloyd Wright’s Graycliff, opening in summer 2022.

Boehler received his Bachelor of Sciences and Master of Sciences degree from the State University of New York College at Buffalo in Art Education. He has held previous positions at The Ashford Hollow Foundation, Griffis Sculpture Park, and Big Orbit Gallery’s Soundlab. During his graduate work, Boehler was selected as a SUNY Fellow. He maintains a studio practice.

Julio César Morales is an influential artist, curator, and educator known for his multidisciplinary work exploring migration, underground economies, and labor on personal and global scales. Morales has a range of experience: executive director and lead curator at Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, Arizona State University Museum,Yerba Buena Center for The Arts in San Francisco, Queens Nails Annex,  2013 Venice Biennale, he currently serves as the Executive Director of Southern Exposure in San Francisco and has curated more than 100+ exhibitions to date. Morales’ artwork has been shown at Lyon Biennale; (Lyon, France), Istanbul Biennale; (Turkey), Los Angeles County Art Museum (Los Angeles); Singapore Biennale; (Singapore), Frankfurter Kunstverein (Frankfurt, Germany); Prospect 3 (New Orleans, Louisiana) SFMOMA (San Francisco); MEWO Kunsthalle (Germany); Perez Art Museum (Miami, Florida), The British Museum (London) and The UCLA Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) amongst others.

Devin T. Mays (b. Detroit, MI) is an artist interested in the here and there of things. He uses sculpture, installation, performance and pictures for pleasure. He often refers to his practice as a place for things to become Things.

Mays has exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna; The Power Station, Dallas; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; gta exhibitions, Zürich; Sweetwater, Berlin; F Gallery, Houston; SculptureCenter, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Regards, Chicago among others. 

Mays is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Art Rice University. 

Photo: Morgan Mueller

John Riepenhoff was born and resides in Milwaukee, where he founded The Green Gallery. Riepenhoff engineers art to serve as connective tissue between cultural entities. He established the Beer Endowment in 2014 to support and advocate for artist-run organizations. Riepenhoff pays homage to other artists, creating renditions of their work. As an artist, he uses his own platform to uplift others and acknowledges the influences of community and collaboration in the process of making. Riepenhoff also ideated Double Cream Colby Cheese, started the Milwaukee International Art Fair, administers The Open Fund, and paints the night sky in the dark.

Photo: Daniel McCullough

Rachel Shelton centers an experimental and process-based practice around printmaking, expanding into book arts, enamel, public art, and sculpture. She received her BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and her MFA from SUNY at Buffalo. Her work has been most recently exhibited in the Buffalo AKG Art Museum and at Hunt Art Gallery. 

Rachel is also a Co-Founder and collaborative printer at Mirabo Press, a fine art printmaking studio in Buffalo, NY. While she spends a good deal of time making solo work in her studio, collaboration and facilitation are also at the heart of Rachel’s practice. From making collaborative work with fellow artists to facilitating and printing the work of many artists through her print shop, the collective energy of community drives her practice forward and outward.

Dana Murray Tyrrell is an artist, curator, and writer from Niagara Falls, New York. Tyrrell was a 2024 Kinetic Grantee with the Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art's Generator Fund. His artwork is in the permanent collections of the Castellani Art Museum, Roger Tory Peterson Institute, University at Buffalo Department of Art, and the Pride Center of Western New York.

Recent solo exhibitions include Love Canal at the Earl W. Brydges Library (2024-25), Floater at Kingfish Gallery (2021), and Blue at the Castellani Art Museum (2017). He has contributed to group exhibits across Western New York including at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery (2014), the Burchfield Penney Art Center (2021, 2023), and ECHO Art Fair (2016). He currently works at the Burchfield Penney with past roles at Rivalry Projects, the Niagara Arts & Cultural Center, Castellani Art Museum, and former Albright-Knox Art Gallery. 

Njeri Rutherford is an arts administrator, entrepreneur, and dance artist from Detroit, MI. After graduating from Johnson C. Smith University with a B.A. in Communication Arts and Dance, Njeri moved to New York City where she worked for many arts organizations including Lar Lubovitch Dance Company, Brooklyn Arts Exchange, Movement Research, and Dance/NYC among others. She danced professionally for Davalois Fearon Dance where she ultimately served as both Development Manager and dance artist. In April 2020 at the height of the global pandemic Njeri founded The Barre, an artist services company that caters to the administrative and performative needs of BIPOC artists. In April 2023 Njeri graduated from the University of Michigan’s School of Music Theatre & Dance with her Masters in Dance and certificates in World Performance Studies and Arts Entrepreneurship and Leadership. She is the program manager over events and grantmaking at CultureSource where she continues in her mission of serving artists in tangible ways.

Jenine Marsh (b. 1984, Calgary AB, works in Toronto ON) is an artist who uses sculpture and installation to explore illicit and intimate responses to the shared conditions of end-stage capitalism. Marsh’s work has been exhibited at Morris and Helen Belkin Gallery, Vancouver (2024); Prairie, Chicago (2024); Ashley, Berlin (2024); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2023); Joe Project, Montreal (2023), Gianni Manhattan, Vienna (2023); Union Pacific, London (2023); Night Gallery, Los Angeles (2022); Essex Flowers, New York (2020); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2019), Franz Kaka, Toronto (2019); and Lulu, Mexico City (2015). Marsh lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Ryan Arthurs is a visual artist and the founder of Rivalry Projects, a commercial art gallery and arts production space located in Buffalo, NY. Founded in 2021, Rivalry exhibits emerging, mid-career, and underrepresented artists working in all media, with an emphasis on unique approaches to materiality, non-traditional photo practices, and queer voices.

He received his M.F.A. in Photography from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and holds a B.F.A. in Studio Art from Carleton College. His work has been exhibited at The Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (Buffalo, NY), Radial Survey, Vol. II at Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA), The National: Best Contemporary Photography at the Fort Wayne Museum of Art, Indiana. His solo exhibitions credits include Carleton College (Northfield, MN) and Room 68 (Provincetown, MA). His work was selected by The Magenta Foundation Flash Forward Top 100 in 2018. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the Oseroff Memorial Purchase Prize administered by CEPA Gallery, and in 2015 was nominated for the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Artist Award. He has participated in residencies at the Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Snowmass Village, Colorado and The Bothy Project, Isle of Eigg in Scotland. Ryan was a visiting professor at Carleton College, and was a photography teaching assistant at Harvard University.

Tiffany D. Gaines is a curator, writer, photographer, and multimedia creator. Stemming from her experiences as a Black woman in America, her multidisciplinary practice focuses on the most fundamental elements of the human experience to engage new, diverse perspectives and activate the past in ways that can lead to a more understanding and empathetic future. Currently, she is the Curatorial and Digital Content Associate at the Burchfield Penney Art Center. She holds a BA in Journalism from SUNY Buffalo State and an MA in Visual Studies from the University at Buffalo.

Pablo Guardiola is a visual artist. His work points to different modes of narration and how these are perceived and understood. Recently he curated with Yina Jiménez Suriel, one month after being known in that island (ways of working in the Caribbean). He is co-director of Beta-Local, an arts non-profit dedicated to support and promote contemporary art practices and aesthetic thought in Puerto Rico.

Julia Dzwonkoski is a visual artist based in Buffalo, NY. She studied at SUNY Buffalo and UC San Diego. Living in Los Angeles for many years, she collaborated with Kye Potter on paintings, books and the record label, Orion Read. Her recent work explores the highs and lows of modern life though the lens of ghosts, stars, snails and inventions for the end-times.