Hey, Sis
Band of Vices presents Hey, Sis, a group exhibition bringing together five Black women artists whose distinct practices move through painting, mixed media, sculpture, poetry, portraiture and collage.
At its center is a simple question:
What might an artist create when she feels free enough to follow her own curiosity?
Hey, Sis offers its artists room to explore without requiring their work to represent an entire community, respond to a particular social moment, or conform to expectations around what art made by Black women should address.
Their work may engage identity, ancestry, culture, womanhood, history, beauty, spirituality, memory, politics, or none of these exclusively. What connects the exhibition is not a prescribed subject, but the freedom to pursue the stories, questions, images, and ideas that genuinely belong to each artist.
“Through color I have sought to concentrate on beauty and happiness in my painting rather than on man’s inhumanity to man.”
— Alma Thomas
Thomas’ words offer a fitting spirit for Hey, Sis: the assertion that a Black woman’s imagination is expansive enough to contain beauty, complexity, experimentation, history, pleasure, contradiction, and whatever else she chooses.
The title itself is both greeting and affirmation.
Hey, Sis. I see you. There is space for you here.
Fawlene Aziza is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary artist working across painting and mixed media. Her practice serves as an archive of culture, community, memory, and identity, using color, material, and abstraction to explore how the past informs the present and future. Aziza holds a B.A. in Studio Art from the University of Miami and an MFA from Otis College of Art and Design.
Magnolia LaFleur is a Los Angeles-based fine artist, journalist, poet, and arts educator whose practice brings painting and poetry into dialogue. Drawing from ancestral wisdom, literature, spirituality, psychology, and observation, her ongoing The Nature Of... series approaches each painting as a proverb, parable, or page in a larger meditation on the human experience.
Roxanne Lewis is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist working across painting, collage, photography, textiles, typography, and installation. Her work centers Black experience, cultural memory, womanhood, identity, and representation while embracing an increasingly experimental and interdisciplinary practice.
Eloise Osyris is a Los Angeles-based multimedia artist working in painting, sculpture, photography, and print. Centered within their Black American and Filipina American identity, their practice considers ancestral memory, anti-colonialism, culture, religion, gender, indigenous worldviews, and the tension between conformity and the human soul.
Riea Owens is a Los Angeles-based multidisciplinary visual artist whose work celebrates beauty, dignity, identity, and shared humanity through portraiture and the figure. Influenced by a lifelong relationship with visual storytelling and a professional background in entertainment advertising and digital imagery, Owens approaches each subject as more than a likeness, seeking instead to reveal presence, spirit, and individuality.
HEY, SIS is presented concurrently with the solo exhibition, Read in Red by Monica Ikegwu.