IN THE ANNEX: Annex Fellows 2022

Rocky Cotard, Priya N. Green, and Jerry Russo

November 2–27, 2022

SoWa First Friday Art Walk: Friday, November 4, 2022, | 5:00–8:00 PM

PRESS RELEASE (PDF) ➢

PRICE LIST (PDF) ➢ 

Rocky Cotard

Rocky Cotard, born in Mirebalais Haiti and raised in Boston Massachusetts, USA, is an illustrator and fine artist that finds color in everything. His work delivers a cultural awareness highlighting his origin hoping that other people feel compelled to look into their own. Cotard draws inspiration from a list of Haitian artists Gontran Durocher, Phillipe Dodard, and Ronald Mevs. He also learns from the work of portrait artists starting with Van Gogh moving on to Kehinde Wiley and Jordan Casteel. Cotard returns to Haiti as often as possible as he feels it is his well of creativity. His wide body of illustrations and fine art work depict the perspective of the Haitian Diaspora, in defiance to the narrow representation of it through the media.

 

Cotard received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 2018 at Lesley university in illustration minoring in fine arts. Since then, he has been very active as a freelance illustrator publishing a few collaborative books, The Revolution that Gave Birth to Haiti and The Call. In May of 2022 Cotard was a winner of the Mural Masters competition in Cambridge. That same year he was invited to the Ishibashi Gallery at the Middlesex school for a solo show. Currently Rocky is looking for studio spaces as his work has outgrown his basement studio space, but in the meantime he continues to create.

Priya N. Green

Priya N. Green is a painter whose work explores found imagery and the human condition. Her recent series "Hyperbole" and "Smoke and Mirrors" use images found in the news and media of the 2020 riots that took place both in the U.S. and in India. Green was struck by the synchronicity of these events and the phenomenon of experiencing them through a screen. She portrays the dilemma of witnessing these events through second or third hand experience as a condition of the 21st century. Her paintings make reference to the interruptions and distance felt through abstracted silhouettes of thick paint which block the viewer from seeing the whole image.

 

Green received a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work has been shown at the Jersey City Museum, University Museum of Contemporary Art, Zimmerli Art Museum, the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, Cuchifritos Gallery and the Investec Capetown Art Fair, South Africa. She is a recipient of the international Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant as well as a fellowship from the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her work is in public and private collections including the University Museum of Contemporary Art, the Forbes Library, and Western New England University. Green lives and works in Springfield, MA.

Jerry Russo

Jerry Russo has photographed people on the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (T) buses and subway trains since 2013. This series, “Alone Together,” is an examination of people while confined to the crowded spaces of the T. Russo captures people when their guard is down and the mask is off, showing a vulnerability in the faces of those weary from work after longs days and tiresome commutes. The too-small personal space and the structure of the bus or train all contribute to the commuter’s state of being and are a participant in the photograph. It is in the moment when space, expression, and opportunity come together that he makes his image.

 

For over three decades Jerry Russo has had careers as a commercial/editorial photographer and as a fine art photographer. Often the lines are blurred. His projects are always content driven.  Russo received a BFA from Tufts University Medford. He is a Commercial/Editorial Photographer and lecturer at Harvard University, Cambridge and Suffolk University, Boston. His photographs are in numerous public and private collections including the Smithsonian, Washington, D.C., New York Public Library, New York, NY UMass Amherst, and the Polaroid Collection, Wellington Management Company, Boston and Fidelity Investments, Boston.