Our Stories Unite US
Eriko Tsogo, Jessica Alazraki, Leasho Johnson
Joining us in October 2022, Eriko, Leasho and Jessica are part of Fountainhead's Our Stories Unite US residency, dedicated for foreign-born artists who now live and work in the United States. The residency is sponsored by the Shepard Broad Foundation.
Eriko Tsogo
Eriko Tsogo is a Mongolian American multidisciplinary artist, curator and cultural producer working between the spectrums of fine art, social practice and media justice. Her identity as a first-generation Mongolian American woman, immigrant and artist creates duality where opposing social values and spiritual norms of Eastern and Western cultures constantly clash and fuse. She is interested in expressing the embattled emotional middle space of this marginal identity, be/longing and the meaning of home. She seeks to present a holistic visual guide in how one can remedy the soul to resilience and authentic personal self-empowerment.
In her social practice work, she creates a forum that inspires, challenges and creates understanding and dialog about equity, diversity and inclusivity through the power of art and culture. She is passionate about social justice and civic engagement through the arts and utilizes art as catalyst to help educate and empower marginalized and underrepresented communities. Eriko’s work has been exhibited in venues across Denver, Los Angeles and Boston. She currently lives and works in Denver.
Jessica Alazraki
As a Mexican woman living in New York City, Jessica feels a responsibility to open a dialogue about immigration. Her work intends to bring Latinx life into contemporary art by celebrating the culture. The narrative shows scenes of ordinary life that highlight family values.
Bright colors and decorative patterns are characteristic of her works; in her oil paintings, portraits are always in the foreground and close to the viewer. Composition and color are prominent in the pictures, as she opts for the placement of the elements versus the realistic quality of the form. Jessica intends to break traditional viewing rules and create unpredictable images with intense brushwork that provides unique character, combined with texture and flat backgrounds to highlight emotion. Jessica’s work was recently exhibited at Marianne Boesky, the Black Wall Street Gallery, and the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, among others. She lives and works in New York.
Leasho Johnson
Leasho Johnson is a visual artist working primarily in painting, installation, and sculpture. He was born in Montego Bay, Jamaica, and raised in Sheffield, a small town on the outskirts of Negril. Leasho uses his experience growing up Black, queer, and male to explore concepts around forming an identity within the post-colonial condition of Jamaican Dancehall street culture. Working at the conjunction of painting and drawing, Johnson makes characters that live on the edge of perception, visible and invisible at the same time. His work lives to disrupt historical, political, and biological expectations of the Black queer body.
Leasho is currently a fellow of the Jamaica Art Society. He was a Leslie Lohman Museum fellow for 2021 and a recipient of the New Artist Society Scholarship from the School of Art Institute Chicago (SAIC) 2018 - 2020. Leasho has shown his work in his home country at several National Gallery of Jamaica exhibitions, and has exhibited in Canada, France, and Brazil, among others. Leasho is currently based in Chicago, where he works and lectures at the School of Art Institute Chicago.
