Artist Talk: new.now.
Join 2023–25 Hamiltonian fellows Kat Thompson and Neha Misra in conversation with Hamiltonian Fellowship Manager Anisa Olufemi, discussing their artworks featured in the New Now group exhibition.
About the exhibition
Hamiltonian Artists is pleased to present new.now., our annual group exhibition debuting the work of Hamiltonian’s distinguished 2023–25 fellows: Ali Kaeini, Neha Misra, Hien Kat Nguyen, and Kat Thompson. Each year, new.now. serves as a snapshot of the newest Hamiltonian Artists fellows’ creative practices, exhibiting the work they plan to expand upon during their two-year fellowship.
This year, the group exhibition will present artworks that recontextualize cultural, religious, and political symbols and signifiers. Across painting, sculpture, photography, and game art, each artist conjures a distinctive visual language in which icons, objects, images, and materials are given new meaning.
About the artists
Neha Misra नेहा मिश्रा (she/her) is a contemporary eco-folk artist, poet, and an award-winning climate justice advocate. Misra’s creative practice centers her Global Majority lineage as a first-generation, multi-lingual immigrant woman from New Delhi, India, who calls a solar-powered community in the Washington metro region her adopted home. She has been honored as a Presidential Leadership Scholar, and as a Regenerative Artivist by the Design Science Studio—a partnership of the Buckminster Fuller Institute and habRitual for leading planet conscious artists. Misra is a 2022 fellow of the Public Voices Fellowship on the Climate Crisis, an initiative of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, the OpEd Project, and Ann MacDougal, to change who writes history.
Kat Thompson (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Afro-Jamaican American artist based in Virginia, who works in photography, textile, sculptural collage, and installation. She earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Photography from George Mason University and her Master of Fine Arts in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University. Her work combines these mediums to explore notions of Black selfhood within the African Diaspora. Her work has been exhibited at the Fenwick Gallery and the Gillespie Gallery of Art at George Mason University, and the Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, Reston, VA. She was the 2021–2022 recipient of the Young Alumni Commissioning Award from George Mason University’s College of Visual and Performing Arts.