MoAD’s physical building may be closed due to the mandatory shelter-in-place, but you can still get your fill of art and artists of the African Diaspora. Each Wednesday at 1:00 pm PST, join MoAD staff members as we visit some of our favorite artists in their studios to see what they’re currently working on and how their work is changing as a result of the quarantine. This is a rare opportunity to hear from artists directly from their studios. We will follow all talks with an audience Q&A.

Albert Chong is a contemporary artist working in the mediums of photography, installation and mixed media art. His works have referrenced personal mysticism, spirituality, race and identity. My work in photography sometimes utilizes found, appropriated and familial photographs as well as many types of objects primarily of a organic nature that serve as shamanic talismans and symbolic and referential signifiers. These works aspire to visually embed the narratives of race and ethnicity with the aesthetic whimsy required to sublimate and catalyze meaning and references. These works use analog and digital layering to create the sometimes dense but usually simple arrangements that infer, relate, connect and signify the complex nature of the struggles of the displaced peoples of the Asian and African diaspora.Born in Kingston, Jamaica, W. I. He is the last child of a large family of merchant Afro Chinese Jamaican parents. Chong immigrated to the USA in 1977 at the age of 19 years. He lived in Brooklyn and attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City where he received a BFA with Honors in 1981. Chong became active in the New York art scene up until 1988 when he left to go to Graduate School at the University of California in San Diego. He received his MFA from UCSD in 1991 and in the same year accepted a faculty appointment at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Chong is presently professor or art at the University of Colorado in Boulder. Chong has also taught at the School of Visual Arts in New York City from 1982 – 88. Mira Costa College in Oceanside California from 1989-91 and Rhode Island School of Design in Providence from 1996 –97 and visiting professor at Stanford Univesity in 2006Chong has received various prestigious awards for his work in the visual arts. These include a 1992 Individual artist Fellowship from the national Endowment for the Arts. In 1998 he was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship in the field of photography and in the same year the Pollock Krasner Grant. Chong has also been commissioned by Absolut Vodka to add his work to the ongoing series in the work titled Absolut Chong.Chong’s art in whatever form has been a constant presence in Museums and Galleries internationally for the last two decades. His work has contributed to the discourse around race, identity and spirituality in art and is in collections public, private and corporate and has been featured in publications, books and periodicals too numerous to mention. He has represented his home country Jamaica in many international biennials, national and international exhibitions, including the 2001 Venice Benniale, the 1998 Sao Paulo Biennale and the seventh Havana Biennial in Cuba in 2000.See a list of our upcoming In The Artists Studio features here.Generous support for this project provided by Art Bridges and the Westridge Foundation

This series is supported by the Facebook Art Department, UNTITLED, Art Fairs and The Art Report.