Arcmanoro Niles: The City Lights Can’t Shine Quite like the Stars: Got So Far From My Raising I Forgot Where I Come From

Artist Arcmanoro Niles makes vivid, brightly-hued paintings that expand our understanding of traditional genre painting and portraiture. His paintings, though intensely personal and autobiographical, engage in universal subjects of domestic and family life while also making reference to numerous art historical predecessors, including Italian and Dutch baroque, history painting, Color Field painting, and ancient Egyptian sculpture. Hailing from Washington D.C. and born in 1989, Niles attended the Duke Ellington School for the Arts. He earned a BFA from Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and an MFA from the New York Academy of Art. He currently works and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Artist, curator, and critic Andrew Woolbright is based in Brooklyn, New York, and is an MFA graduate from RISD in painting. Woolbright is the founder and director of the gallery Below Grand located on the Lower East Side in New York. In addition to curating, he is an Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail. In 2021, Woolbright curated the show Density Betrays Us with Angela Dufresne and Cash Ragona at the Hole; and curated shows at Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and Hesse Flatow in the summer or 2022. He currently teaches at School of Visual Arts and Pratt Institute and is a 2021-2022 resident at the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program in Dumbo.