A JOURNEY INTO SOUL SONGS

Moses Salihou is a Cameroonian artist based in Toronto. He explores the ideas of belonging and existence by creating work that blends elements of portraiture and abstraction. Salihou's thick application of paint creates a textural intensity that mirrors our own internal complexities. Central to Salihou's work is his belief that human beings are composites of various identities, experiences, beliefs, and emotions.Salihou's gestural application leaves the defining features on the faces of his portraits only loosely representational.The portraits become composites of various people rather than fixed and stable identities, allowing the observer to be a participant rather than just a viewer. These rich surface effects provide Salihou's work with a sense of dynamism that captures the fluidity and movement he ascribes to the concepts of identity and personhood. Salihou has exhibited across the United States and Canada. His work is also in private collections globally, including in Europe, New Zealand, Africa, Asia, Canada, and the US.

Gregory Saint Amand, also known as GOGO, is a contemporary and figurative American and Haitian artist. He was born in New York but spent much of his early formative years growing up in Haiti. His perspective on what speaks to human consciousness and understanding, the visual lexicons that influence our communication and culture, is gentle but observantly powerful in its nature. He displays his conversation with art, loving to paint in layers to open the canvas and its limits, bringing about a never-ending exploration. His signature vision is evident in the work, which uses bright colors, inks, and other intriguing mediums and details. He plays with ideas that carry weight and then juxtaposes them with more light-hearted subjects. GOGO attended and graduated from The Cooper Union School of Art. His work has been featured in multiple venues and publications such as the Huffington Post, Scope, The Grio, Crème, Art Voice, 101 Top Artist, and MILK mag, to name a few.  

Brandy “Blu” Murphy is an artist, educator, and creator who was born and raised in Washington, D.C. She is a proud graduate of Morgan State University, a distinguished HBCU, where she studied Fine Arts with a concentration in Mixed Media and received recognition as an award-winning student. With over a decade of teaching experience in low-income urban communities, Blu is deeply committed to amplifying the voices of individuals who are often undervalued, unappreciated, and unseen. Her signature style blends photography, graffiti, texture, and bold color to tell compelling stories rooted in African American culture and history. Blu is renowned for capturing the innocence and resilience of her students through her lens, transforming their narratives into striking, layered visual expressions. Her work has been featured in prominent publications such as The Washington Post, Architectural Digest, Washington City Paper, and DC Fray Magazine. Additionally, she has exhibited her art in esteemed venues, including The Target Contemporary Gallery and Dupont Underground.

O’Neil Scott is a self-taught, Philadelphia-based artist. Influenced early on by both his grandfather and uncle, each of whom pursued creative careers, he took to drawing as a child and spent much of his youth filling the pages of empty notebooks with images of individuals, both fictional and real. In college, he had hoped to study art. But was awarded a football scholarship from Syracuse University and therefore had to prioritize his activities, which meant dropping my studio courses since they conflicted with the school’s training schedule. 

Inspired by the Old Masters as well as contemporary realists, he has always been captivated by portraiture and its capacity to impart the complexities that comprise the human condition. It wasn’t until he stopped working with acrylic and started experimenting with oil that he started spending so much more time at the easel. 

He found the material’s pliability so much easier to navigate, but it’s ease of use has pushed him to delve that much deeper into subject matter and risk voicing his trepidation about the many issues that he holds close to his heart, such as social justice, climate change, police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement.