Soft Shadows: Dominic Chambers

The recipient of, among other awards, the Robert Reed Drawing Scholarship (Yale University 2018), Dominic Chambers creates vibrant paintings that engage art historical models, such as color-field painting, and contemporary concerns around race, identity, and the necessity for leisure and reflection. Interested in how art functions as a mode for understanding or renegotiating one’s relationship to the world, Chambers sees painting as an intellectual endeavor, as much as an aesthetic one. A writer himself, Chambers draws inspiration from W.E.B. Du Bois, particularly The Souls of Black Folk, and one of its central themes―the veil. References to this metaphorical lens through which Black bodies are observed appear throughout his work. Chambers currently lives and works in New Haven, CT.

Zoë Hopkins is a writer and critic based in New York. She received her BA in Art History and African American Studies at Harvard University, and is currently working on her MA in Modern and Contemporary Art at Columbia University. Her writing has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Cultured and Hyperallergic.

Artist, writer, and independent curator Phong H. Bui is Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Among many other awards, Bui received The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize for Arts Writers in 2017, was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021.