Australian arts leader Dr. Melissa Chiu who is enjoying an impressive international career, is the host of a new reality TV show looking for ‘the next great artist’.
Competing artists have the chance to win $100,000 and show their work at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden.
Airing on the Smithsonian Channel on MTV, The Exhibit is a competition format, in each episode seven artists are tasked with creating an artwork in response to a theme such as exploring gender norms, social media, personal reactions to the covid19 pandemic, injustices such as police violence and animal rights, and in the latest episode – the future!
The creations are assessed by other artists as judges, as well as some intriguing people from a digital museum strategist to an art collector and a former football player, who come on board each episode as guests. The group of artists on ‘The Exhibit’ are comprised of individuals from around the United States from a range of cultural backgrounds and experiences, most seemingly with early to mid-career practices. Let’s introduce them below.
Jamaal Barber is an artist and printmaker based in Atlanta that is exploring Black identity. Jamaal creates woodcuts, screen prints and mixed media paintings. Frank Buffalo Hyde is an Onondaga artist who explores ‘fragmented contemporary life’ from an Indigenous American perspective. New York based artist Baseera Khan presents patterns and repetitions ‘of exile and kinship shaped by economic, social, and political changes in local and global environments, with special interests in decolonization processes’.
Known for their assemblage art in a maximalist style Misha Kahn is a designer and sculptor. Clare Kambhu is a painter with a focus on the commonplace surroundings of daily life. Jillian Mayer explores the intersection of humanity and technology through video, sculpture, photography, performance, web-based experiences, and installation. Jennifer Warren is a Chicago-based oil painter, her artworks consider nature, beauty, and the Black body.
Dr. Melissa Chiu was born in Darwin and completed her higher education in Sydney. She was the founding Director of the 4A Contemporary Art Centre in Sydney’s Chinatown which supports artistic dialogue in the Asia-Pacific region. Moving to New York she was a pioneer as the first curator of contemporary Asian and Asian American art at the Asia Society.
Chiu’s illustrious career includes several books, and continued ‘firsts’, as she is now the first non-American Director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC.
‘The Exhibit’ has the potential to bridge a gap between the contemporary art world and the public, in an exciting format that shines a light on or perhaps demystifies different creative processes, mediums, practices, personalities and artistic outcomes.