ART ON PAPER 2025
📍PIER 36 NYC
SEPT 4 - 7 of 2025
BLU MURPHY
BLU MURPHY artistry is a passionate tribute to the Black community and education, celebrating its inherent beauty, legacy, and historical resilience.
Based in the culturally vibrant city of Washington, D.C., Blu's distinctive style merges photography, graffiti, texture, and bold colors to create powerful narratives rooted in African American culture and history. She employs innovative collage techniques featuring striking black-and-white photography enhanced with acrylic paint, set against quilted and felt fabric backdrops on upcycled frames. Murphy's vision of recognizing Black individuals as art comes to life through layered commentary that is both educational and deeply emotive. Her works inspire audiences to see themselves as essential threads in the rich tapestry of Black culture and history.
MOSES SALIHOU
MOSES SALIHOU is a Cameroonian artist based in Toronto. 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.
O'NEIL SCOTT
O’NEIL SCOTT is a Philadelphia-based artist, born in Spanish Town, Jamaica whose practice is rooted in portraiture. Influenced early by his grandfather and uncle, both of whom pursued creative paths. Scott began drawing as a child, filling notebooks with characters both imagined and observed. Scott’s work is inspired by the Old Masters and contemporary realists alike. His transition from acrylic to oil paint marked a pivotal moment in his practice, allowing for greater depth, pliability, and exploration of complex narratives. Through his portraits, he engages with themes such as social justice, climate change, police brutality, and the Black Lives Matter movement, subjects that speak to both personal truth and collective urgency. In 2025, Scott debuted his first solo museum large scale works exhibition at the Zillman Art Museum (University of Maine) in Bangor, Maine, a milestone that showcased the breadth of his evolving work and his commitment to storytelling through a Black diasporic lens. At the core of his paintings is a desire to invoke mindfulness, inspire contemplation, and foster deeper understanding of the human condition. Scott’s work has been featured at several prominent art fairs in the US and exhibited with notable galleries, and his paintings are part of esteemed corporate collections as well as private collections both in the U.S. and internationally.