Kayla Curtis-Evans speaks to nine Brooklyn-based artists about their individual practices and the city that raised them.
Brooklyn’s creative class is an ever-growing community, built up by one another and strengthened by distinct visions. Every class holds multitudes — those who channel emotions in different ways, whether sharing joy through a vibrant painting or inviting a guest into a scene from one’s childhood through a heartfelt home-cooked dish.
For the first iteration of this series, Elephant Magazine sat down with nine visual artists. These creatives turn pain into paintings, sculptures, and more, shaping the cultural zeitgeist beyond Brooklyn. Still, the borough’s influence on their craft is clear. They’re impacted by iconic Brooklyn artists like Basquiat and Kara Walker, while also setting the tone for the next generation of artists.
As one class progresses, they hand the baton off with grace. And while these artists reflect New York’s creative spirit, they also proudly represent their own backgrounds, forming a memorable mosaic. Dive into the first edition below.
Danny Cortes has been building his own worlds since he was a child. “I’d watch Saturday morning cartoons, and they always had commercials for action figures. I wasn’t really drawn to the action figures; I was always drawn to the dioramas, the background. They weren’t selling that,” he shared, “I always begged my mom, ‘Please, can you buy me that fire escape or that jungle in the background?’ So I started collecting empty cereal boxes, and I’d just tape them all together, paint on them, and let my imagination run wild.” He was enamored with the world he grew up in: New York in the 80s, a menagerie of faces, colors, and cultures that shaped him into the inquisitive person he is today.
The New York he remembers, the tight-knit Brooklyn community and graffiti-covered walls that molded him, have changed. His practice aims to memorialize those times. “Bushwick raised me, the good, the bad, all of the struggles. There was always beauty in all of it. I just wanted to document my era,” he reflected, “That rusted mailbox and that corner bodega — those elements are starting to disappear, in a sense. I want to document that so people can see what the city looked like in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s, and present-day New York City. I’m trying to freeze those special moments.”
When it comes to his process, inspiration is all around. He has an eye for finding beauty in mundane intricacies, but he maintains that lighthearted fun is always at the core of his creations.
Cortes is currently working on a landscape piece that switches up his usual depictions of cityscapes, and has another project coming up with MLB Latino as well. Keep an eye out in New York for Cortes’ work, it’s become a staple in the local scene.
Emily Manwaring creates from the soul. Just one glance at her colorful pieces infuses the viewer with invigoration. The joy she conjures is infectious — and it’s earned her inclusions in Brooklyn Museum and Venice Biennale exhibitions, among others. Manwaring’s practice is an extension of the love she surrounds herself with. It has been a haven for her since childhood. “I felt safe and secure in my art even at a young age. I always knew I wanted to do something artistic, but when I was younger, I really wanted to be a ballet dancer. That creativity ended up manifesting in me being a painter.”
Her work is almost as if you’ve jumped into her core memories. “I’m most drawn to painting as a medium because of the feeling of the medium itself. It feels like alchemy.” Manwaring’s paintings are not only inviting, but each of her brushstrokes is entangled with her Caribbean identity and explorations of Black womanhood.
“Every time I work on a piece about being Caribbean, being from Haiti and Trinidad, I feel like I’m honoring my culture. In the art world, you don’t see many people of the diaspora making this work and shining a light on the culture over there. It’s a responsibility that I have to pass on the story,” she expressed. Manwaring also weaves NYC narratives into her work as she navigates the city streets every day. “It really shows in my work that I have a true love for my city, for real [laughs].”
Manwaring’s next pursuit is to display the full range of human emotion through her paintings. “Right now, I’m working on a body of work. Currently, in my practice, I’m trying to take my color palette to a different realm. It doesn’t always have to be bright colors. I want to show the full circle of what it is to be a human,” she continued, “I want people to feel seen, even through tough times. Especially now.”
Shihori Yamamoto has been an artist since her early years, using illustration and painting as outlets — neat, organized catch-alls where she could unravel her tangled-up thoughts. “When I was younger, I was just drawing and painting without really thinking about it. It was just my thing,” she shared.
She was raised in Brooklyn by her grandparents, who both served in World War II in Japan and taught her the value of contributing positively to society. She originally planned on working for the United Nations, championing peace and learning how to communicate with individuals from all walks of life. Instead, Yamamoto found another universal language through which she could connect with others — art.
Before she landed upon painting and illustration, she studied architecture at art school. Before she knew it, she was studying at Pratt Institute in an exchange program. “After I graduated from Pratt, I no longer had any funding. I started working on my drawing series using paper because it was cheap.” In that creative practice, Yamamoto found solace. When she moved to the States for her exchange program, it was brought to her attention that she had been living with bipolar disorder and autism. “My way of approaching my art is that I’m making it because I need to make it. It’s like breathing — something that you have to do to survive.” Art became a ritualistic process for her, especially as her illustrations often showcase repetitive, intricate patterns.
I recently stopped into one of Yamamoto’s New York City exhibitions at Hannah Traore Gallery and found myself being pulled into each of her works. For Yamamoto, each concentric gesture helps the world around her quiet down. “My medication helps, and continuing to paint has helped, especially when I’m going through a mental health episode. It helps to escape what’s going on and just focus on the work,” Yamamoto reflected.
Above all else, her work references parts of us that we all share: the heart, the head, the physical body. Her latest installation at Hannah Traore Gallery also references the womb. “I’m trying to bring everyone back to a really primitive stage. Like when it gets dark, how do you feel about it? How we react to the sound of the mother’s heartbeat. It’s a way that I can communicate with everybody because we can all understand these things.”
Looking ahead, Yamamoto is excited to start working with oil paint — a luxury she could not easily acquire in her early artistic days. But no matter the medium, texture, or technique, she will always continue to relate to her audiences on a deeper human level. “When you visit ancient temples, you may not know who created these structures, but you can feel what they were thinking about. That’s what I want to do with my art. We all may have different cultures or backgrounds, but we are the same. We’re human. That’s the feeling I want to provide.”
Cary Hulbert spreads her vision across multiple mediums, working in printmaking, acrylic, and oil paints. She often creates fantastical landscape scenes, influenced by her backyard. “I am completely inspired by nature, and especially the nature in Brooklyn,” she said. Brooklyn also brings her into a colorful, cordial, and supportive community. “Proximity is one way the creative scene in Bushwick has affected my work. The arts community is truly massive and generous.”
Hulbert cherishes the influence of Brooklyn that finds its way into her practice, but mentioned that her work is often transient and reflects her moods. “Sometimes I know I want to work with a color, other times I look at my reference photos and pick a color that feels right, and make a palette that I think works with it. Although I’m sure my intuition comes from my years of experience,” she continued, “I think of my world building as a safe, pleasant place, a place to visit that isn’t here.”
The rooted-in-fantasy qualities of her artwork also stem from her vivid imagination. When she was young, she struggled with maladaptive daydreaming. Through her work, she’s able to bring her daydreams to life. “I’ve always been a huge fan of Leanora Carrington and other surrealists. I’ve also been into sci-fi from a young age. I think there is something beautiful about an unconscious state. It’s a touch of the mystical within a very real world.”
She wants to continue this pursuit, but she has plans to go bigger. “I’m about to embark on somewhat large oil paintings this summer, which I am very excited about. I have a few small ones, but these are something I haven’t shared with the world yet. We’ll see how it fares.”
For Angela Wei, artistic ability was genetic. Her grandparents were both traditional Chinese painters, while her mother worked in children’s TV animation — both of those influences merge in Wei’s whimsical work. She approached art naturally growing up — it was just intuitive.
As she matured, she expressed an interest in fashion and expanded her creative scope by working as a journalist. After a stint writing for Christie’s Fine Art and Luxury Magazine, she decided to jump into her passion headfirst. “Last summer, I decided to quit my job at Christie’s. Creativity has always been a part of me, but I didn’t think I could take that leap of faith — it was daunting for sure,” she recalled.
She immigrated from China to Canada as a young girl, before moving to America for school. Art helped her to work through these transitions and build a solid worldview at a time when her setting was rapidly changing. “I’ve always been naturally connected to expressing myself visually. Ever since I was little, I was always doodling. Growing up, I really relied on fantasy to understand the world around me,” she expressed. She gained inspiration from a variety of places, from Alice in Wonderland to Where the Wild Things Are, but most notably, her own dreams.
She also seeks to marry the two worlds she grew up in, blending both Eastern and Western elements — “For a long time, I had trouble understanding what my identity was and how to relate to both my Chinese heritage and my Western upbringing. Over the years, I’ve been able to create this visual language that is very much my own and kind of brings both elements together. There’s a really strong AAPI community in Brooklyn, especially among young emerging artists, so that’s really important to me as well. Other than here, I haven’t really felt that sort of community.”
The artist’s work also allows her to tap into her inner child while allowing her to face difficult realities. “A lot of times, I use this very whimsical, cute style of characters. I’m almost using cuteness as a defense mechanism for understanding certain realities or memories that have been repressed or are a bit more uncomfortable to represent if it were done more literally,” she explained.
Though Wei’s decision to jump into the art world headfirst may have been intimidating, her work is paying off. She plans to get her MFA in painting at NYU, and continues to expand through a new painting series that she is currently bringing to life. The pieces allow her to evolve in her practice, displaying more gestural, fluid strokes and textures.
COVL, also known as D’ana Nunes, was a theater girl growing up. She loved to perform for her family and wanted to be a dancer or choreographer. She loved to share narratives with audiences. She eventually went on to work in fashion as a production assistant until she came across UK artist Hattie Stewart’s work. “A lot of her work is kid-like, and a lot of her characters don’t make sense, but I gravitated towards it because of her use of color and her technicality. I saw a lot of that in myself as well, but I think it took me going on the journey to finally recognize that my main medium is actually storytelling within the art space,” Nunes shared.
Her practice is technicolor and bold. “Being self-taught and then going to school, you don’t really know any of the rules that pertain to this industry. So I could craft up the things that I wanted to see more of in the world. It wasn’t until later in my career that I realized, ‘Oh, there are a lot of rules,’ but I tend to be someone who doesn’t follow them anyway,” she said. “I saw this as an opportunity for me to craft up who I wanted to be and the stories that I wanted to tell without anyone telling me what I can or cannot do.”
In the same way that her artistic process taught her to be assertively authentic, it also taught her how to be open-minded to beauty. Coming from the fashion world, she’d become a bit jaded about the New York lifestyle. Brooklyn changed that. “I had a different outlook and perception of New York in my early twenties. Over time, I’ve seen the beauty in it. I think cities like Brooklyn show you that. If you’re really intentional about the spaces you cultivate around you, you can find beauty anywhere,” she reflected.
New York’s organized chaos also yields continual inspiration for COVL. She explained that she usually begins her pieces by using scenes around her as starting points and uses her imagination to fill in the rest. “I always use a prompt — maybe I’ll take a photo on the subway. And once I enter that prompt, I’m able to fantasize about all these different characters. A lot of this fantasy and whimsicality comes from a place of things that I didn’t have growing up. I grew up in a very chaotic household — imagine Miami in the nineties and all those things that come with it. All the beautiful things, but all the other chaotic things,” she shared. “With inner child work, it’s my responsibility to help rewrite those stories.”
COVL also preserves space in her work to honor her Puerto Rican heritage. “The way that I weave my heritage into my work is part story and part color psychology. I tend to drop a specific shade of blue into works or certain color references that tie back to the island. I try to capture things I saw when I was five, six years old. All of your family members dancing, it’s four o’clock in the morning — I’m capturing a moment of time that really accentuates what makes being Puerto Rican so fun,” she expanded. The work doesn’t end with her own paintings. COVL is currently the Artist in Residence at Industry City, so she helps to facilitate monthly programming and creative enrichment for local emerging artists.
“In the landscape that we’re in today, we need creative storytellers more than ever. We need access to the arts, and we need access to materials and resources. So that’s part of the residency that I’m working on now, and I’m so excited,” she concluded.
Joshua Obawole did not stumble their way into the arts; rather, artistic expression enveloped them with a warmth that couldn’t be ignored. They’ve been honoring that connection ever since. As a kid, they dipped into just about every medium that they could. Obawole was a local library writing competition winner many times over in their adolescent years, and they acted in plays and dabbled in choreography. When they were 16, they volunteered at the Durham Arts Council, helping to pass the baton onto the next generation by assisting with kids’ dance and theater classes — earning them the Mayor’s award for their initiatives within arts and community service. “As a queer kid, I always found refuge in the arts. Creativity offered a kind of freedom that was life-giving. Art has always been my compass — a way to navigate the world and imagine something greater,” they said.
It’s no surprise that Obawole still occupies space within many lanes, including performance art and portraiture. Each format honors the dreams or visions they are trying to bring to life. “Many of my works begin as dreams. My task as an artist is to honor those visions and translate them into their highest forms. Portraiture often comes first — it allows me to render a visual language for the stories I want to see in the world. But each medium simply serves to expand that same purpose.”
They continue, “Earlier this spring, I debuted Done I, a portrait exploring identity, belonging, and transformation at a commercial art gallery in Brooklyn. Later this month, I’ll perform Waves: A Meditation—a performance art piece that brings the elements of Done I to life through ritual and endurance. Each form lets me approach the same questions from a new sensory angle. Together, they form a fuller expression of my truth.” In many ways, their works symbolize resistance. The materialization of their personal stories directly combats the systems of oppression that are trying to silence those narratives. They consistently pull those storytelling elements from their current home base of Brooklyn. “I’m especially inspired by the queer and trans activists in Brooklyn reshaping it from the ground up.” they said.
Obawole has been shaped into the person they are today because art allowed them to flourish, and their art is that much more passionate, raw, and honest because of the way they bake their one-of-a-kind identity into it. They celebrate Black queer histories proudly in every artwork, honoring the trailblazers that came before. “Black queer people are some of the largest producers of wealth on planet earth. Our unique cultural production contributes to the fields of literature, beauty, fashion, language, dance, science, and more, and as a result, creates billions of dollars in revenue annually. That abundance is rarely, if ever, equitably reflected in our communities. This is the tension that my practice seeks to grapple with and create justice around,” they shared.
They’re currently working on their first experimental film, titled Waves: “I’m excited about the impact that my work can have in the medium of film. My goal in life is to make art that stirs up feelings of hope and freedom inside my viewers. The kind of work that makes your palms sweat and your heart start to flutter. Having the freedom, resources, and support to create in this new medium excites me endlessly!”
Gabriela Kramer knew she wanted her career to instill her with a sense of purpose; that’s why she originally aspired to work for the government. But her mother is a painter, and eventually, Kramer’s heart led her to the craft because it felt right. She began to paint full-time, learning from her master teacher, an 81-year-old seasoned painter whom she calls her “favorite person in the world.” Even that relationship in itself explains the doors that art can open, and the most unexpected connections that can arise from immersing yourself in the local creative community.
It fuels her every day. “I love Brooklyn. It’s the first place I moved in New York, and I don’t want to leave. There’s such a deep culture here. You can see that influence in the food, in the music, in the streets, and in the art that comes from here. I feel like it brings a lot of diversity into my work. My studio’s in Sunset Park, and Sunset Park has a very interesting array of people. I try to be really present here.”
She dives further into how her process of creating color-explosive works acts as a means of emotional unpacking. “I think there’s something very therapeutic about painting, for me, in the sense that I layer a lot in my work and facilitate the feeling of consistently letting go. I love that feeling of becoming one with the story I’m telling. Painting is just like a dance, and it feels really intimate,” she explained, “Everyone has something that they’re working through, whether it’s family events or a trauma or something. I like facing things and thinking in a very creative and positive way about difficult topics.”
Her work will continue to dissect the woman’s experience, as her next body of work includes multiple paintings of varying sizes. It’s an autobiographical range of works that she’s excited to bring into the world and into her portfolio, as it aims to show a more “in-depth” view of the artist herself.
Things have always come and gone for multimedia artist Terrell Villiers, but art has always remained. They were called to drawing at around five years old, and have been doing it ever since. They pull inspiration from the places that shaped them. “I grew up in an era where there was just so much color, excitement, and culture around hip-hop, R&B, and dance hall music. My parents are of British-Jamaican descent. I’m often very drawn to a lot of the culture around Jamaican Dance Hall. Then coming to the States, I became a first-generation American,” they continue, “I was in Miami in the 90s — I was really drawn to the bright culture, especially during the era of ghetto fabulous style music videos, album covers, and fashion. I was always obsessed with these album covers, and I just decided one day that I wanted to start drawing them.”
Their other main source of inspiration was cartoons. Growing up in the mid to late 90s, they consumed shows like The Proud Family and Little Bill — not only did they see themself represented in media, but they discovered an aspiration that they were excited to work toward. The artist cited The Proud Family as their favorite cartoon of the times and a continual source of inspiration — “I mean, Mariah Carey as a cameo appearance in her prime, mind you, on kids television, is crazy” — but the place they now call home constantly provides references for both their animations and exhibition work.
“What brought me to New York from Florida was really just this understanding through the internet that there was a Black and trans mecca that exists in Bushwick. It’s always been a little distant dream of mine to be here. Once I grew up and started to make those connections online and through my work, I realized that this is really a very prevalent space for Black people. People are doing such amazing transformative work, whether it’s in grassroots organizing, programming and nightlife, exhibition or gallery work, or just street culture.”
They shared that they treat their work like an open diary to the public. Working across contemporary art and animation, they bridge the gap between the practices. They became empowered by the fact that they could dip into their childhood passion, animation, but also exist in fine art galleries and rooms they didn’t always feel truly represented in. That confidence led them to start depicting more scenes about Black and trans individuals. “I want to document what exists in this time, especially as a Black trans person who often is dealing with the realities of identity erasure. But there’s something about the cartoon medium that I’ve always realized kind of ironically humanizes the experience even more. People pay more attention to things when they’re animated and created in this uplifting medium.”
Villiers is currently working on expanding their craft beyond animation, as they’re collaborating on a comic book with Brooklyn-based artist Kitty Cash and an album cover for Cleo Reed. They are adamant about supporting their artistic endeavors with community work as well, so they help fundraise with the Black Trans Travel Fund by overseeing merch designs. They hope to reshape the animation space through their trailblazing work — and they’ll get a chance to hone in on their skills as they received a merit scholarship to attend (a few!) prestigious animation programs in NYC. “I need to see more trans cartoons. Or culturally diverse, not just Black, but across all different cultures. I’d love to shift that narrative.”
