My work invites people to challenge our narrow patriarchal ethos, in small and personal ways. I believe that such piecemeal, spiritual changes can one day add up to a momentous one. I use formal strategies such as figurative painting, ink drawings, and graphic symbolism to express my relationship with anti-patriarchal experiences. I collaborate with community organizations and citizens, and enlist audience involvement using t-shirts; such practices seek in turn to prompt authentic, responsive expression from those around me.

The prevailing order continually enfeebles an expansive spiritual paradigm; it reproduces generic symbols of gender, especially womanhood, in place of specific expressions of personhood, and seems to exclusively value archetypes that express progress, triumph and fixed ideals. I seek to use art as a language to complicate this state of affairs and prompt my viewers to do the same. I create to exalt the deep mysteries around stagnation, defeat, and the inevitable chaos of human existence. I would like to ‘speak art’ with anyone who is willing, to the end of sharing a murkier, richer, truer reality.

Julia Bottoms is a visual artist based out of Buffalo, NY working primarily in oils and acrylic. Her work often addresses the topic of race and identity as it relates to one's position in mainstream culture. She views her portraits as an opportunity to counter the harmful stigmas and stereotypes imposed by popular media. Some of her most notable projects include a collaboration with the Buffalo AKG Art Museum (formerly known as the Albright Knox) for The Freedom Wall, the Mamie Smith Memorial Mural in Cincinnati Ohio, and her most recent exhibition’s A Light Under The Bushel at Burchfield Penney Art Center, and Before And After, Again at The AKG Art Museum. Her work has been featured in EBONY, The New York Times, The Public, The Buffalo Spree, The Challenger, HBO’s Insecure, online through AfroPunk, and Hyperallergic. Additionally her work has been acquired in the permanent collections of the Burchfield Penney Art Center, the Flint Institute of Art, and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum. 

Contact: jbottomsart@gmail.com

Kyla Kegler is a choreographer, visual artist and curator who makes paintings, videos and performances that explore existential humor, dynamics of care, community and pleasure. She is the founder and director of performance / movement space Agatha Falls.

Kegler’s practice draws from her past work with Bread and Puppet Theater (Vermont) and as co-founder of the underground theater, “Zuhause” (Berlin). She received an MA in Solo/Dance/Authorship from the Art University of Berlin and an MFA in Studio Art from the University at Buffalo. Her past projects include: Feel Me, a multi-modal project exploring the mindfulness industry exhibited at Box gallery, Canisius College and Big Orbit; The House on Fire Show, a teen web-drama about the climate crisis screened at Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art; Mountains: a puppet soap opera performed at Artpark, Torn Space Theater, and Undercurrent Gallery (Brooklyn) and The Frontier, a performance about cults and community (2023); R.d.f.t.c. (Relationships don’t finish, they change): an installation including video and sculpture exhibited at the Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY (2024).

Contact: kylakegler@gmail.com

Megan A. Evans-Rakeepile, Founder, Director, and lead choreographer of MahataMmoho Collective.
A Buffalo NY, native Megan Rakeepile has studied a wide range of dance styles and techniques for the past thirty plus years. The two genres of dances that she specializes in, Afro Caribbean and Afro fusion. They both share similar foundations influenced by the African diaspora and the survival of colonization, Megan began her dance training at Miss Barbara School in 1992-2006, Buffalo City Ballet in 1998-2007, graduated from Buffalo Academy for Visual and Performing Arts with a dance degree in 2008. She moved to Toronto in 2008 and received her professional dance certification at Ballet Creole in 2010, then came back to the States in 2010 to dance with Garth Fagan Dance Co. until 2011. Today Megan still works as a freelancer all over western New York and has established her own company MahataMmoho Collective in Buffalo NY.

MahataMmoho Collective
Established in 2015 in Buffalo, NY. MahataMmoho Collective is a community of artists that aims to create unity-focused works. For the past eight years, MahataMmoho Collective achieved significant milestones. In February 2022 by teaming up with Buffalo Opera Unlimited and Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra. This collaboration spotlighted "Sahdji," a ballet celebrating Black Composers, during Black History Month at Buffalo State University's Rockwell Hall. In the same year celebrating Juneteenth, the company then performed a street performance for the community at Martin Luther King Park making their presence known as a diverse and vibrant group. Within the same summer the company performed at the Taste of Diversity Festival, for the past three plus years highlighting a variety of artists and their choreography they have created within the collaborative company.
The collective has since continued to collaborate with local partners like Community Health Center of Buffalo Inc., Art That Heals, Devi Bollywood Performing Arts, El Batey, Nancy Hughes, Naila Ansari, and others. Their renewed mission focuses on making the arts accessible to the community through funded classes, while also providing school tours to encourage self-expression and confidence in today's youth.

Contact: mahatammoho.collective@gmail.com