"We were delighted to have filmmakers Steven Shainberg and Dito Montiel as our first guests, because they embody the risk-taking, forward-looking New York spirit we want this series to champion," said Gallery Director Isolde Brielmaier. "And we are very much looking forward to hearing Wangechi Mutu and Mickalene Thomas, two innovative artists who embody today’s exciting contemporary art scene."

Trained as both a sculptor and anthropologist, Wangechi Mutu’s work explores historical paradigms and cultural identities as they manifest onto the body. Using sumptuous marks and posed female-like characters, Mutu make reference to colonial history, African politics, gender and sexuality. Culled from glossy publications, her mythological renderings reference the international high-fashion industry as a way of creating ‘pseudographs’ (for mimicking and representing) the affluence and decadence of the natural-resource grubbing, over consuming, developed nations relative to the peoples and places whose backs they are built upon.

Coming from a strict Catholic private school education in Nairobi, the idea of cultural and historical contradictions is all too familiar to Mutu. Her work is filled with satirical mutilations and Frankensteinesque investigations. Collage is the ultimate form for representing dissected narratives, distorted realities, unimaginable marriages between varying myths and failed utopias. These images of corrupted bodies reference material excess, global economic interdependence, opulent places and the physical and psychological perforation that occurs at the bloodletting of historical junctions. Mutu’s work embodies the questions beneath identity ‘loss’ and crisis; origin and ownership of cultural signifiers become unsettling and dubious terrain. Using ‘bionic’ prosthetics, buttresses of ‘classical’ African Art, the scent of wasting wine and brown skinned females from hardcore pornography, the work describes the beauty and survival capabilities of the human imagination which outlives assaulted cultures, transplantation, exile and shifts in philosophical paradigms.

Mickalene Thomas’ paintings of black female American icons explore the marketing and consumption of black femininity within US popular culture. Inspired by women who personify female power in US society and the media such as Pam Grier and Mary J. Blige, Thomas translates contemporary pin-up images into vibrant, crystalline surface. Beginning with images from magazines, films, record covers, or personal snapshots, Thomas’s painstakingly encrusts her portraits with thousands of Swarovski rhinestones. Her dazzling and seductive body of work both critiques and celebrates the eroticized black urban identity. Thomas is a graduate of the MFA program at Yale University and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work was recently featured in Wild Girls at Exit Art, African Queen at the Studio Museum in Harlem and Greater New York 2005. During 2006, Thomas had a solo exhibition entitled Something About You...at Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago.

Logan Hill is a Contributing Editor and film critic at New York Magazine and a columnist at Nerve.com. He has written for I.D., The Nation, NY Press, New York Post, Poets & Writers, Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Wired, and others.

As an editor at The Fader from 2000-2005, Knox Robinson defined the magazine's editorial voice with a fresh, distinct urban style whether filing stories from around the globe - reporting firsthand on the violent, poverty-fueled funk music of Brazil's favelas, trailing the elusive commandos of the Zapatista rebellion in the mountainous rainforests of Mexico, investigating the mysticism of Puerto Rico's African settlements, uncovering musical myths on the city streets of Lagos, Nigeria-or interviewing celebrities on the verge such as Outkast and the White Stripes.

The Stoop Series has been coordinated in conjunction with DUMBO’s First Thursday Gallery Wall, a monthly event during which participating galleries and studios throughout this vibrant arts neighborhood are opened to the public from 5:30 to 8:30 pm. In-kind contributions for the Stoop Series have been generously provided by Brooklyn Brewery and powerHouse Books.

The Rotunda Gallery presents contemporary art, public events and an innovative arts education program. The Gallery’s aim is to increase the visibility and accessibility of contemporary art while bridging the gap between the art world and global culture in Brooklyn and the world beyond. The Rotunda Gallery is the visual arts program of BRIC/Brooklyn Information & Culture, which presents media, performing and visual arts programming reflective of Brooklyn’s diverse communities.

Located in Brooklyn Heights, just over the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges, the Gallery is a short walk from the 2,3; 4,5; M; or R trains at Court Street/Borough Hall; or the A, C trains at High Street.