OCHI
Atlanta Art Week Event:
Hana Ward: Cowpea Consciousness | Midtown
Hana Ward in conversation with Melissa Messina
Friday: Oct 4, 2024 | 7:00-9:00pm
680 North Avenue NE
Daily Tours
Monday - Sunday at 2: 00 PM
680 North Avenue NE
About Event:
OCHI is pleased to participate in the third edition of Atlanta Art Week to take place at 680 North Avenue NE in Atlanta, GA from September 30 through October 6, 2024. The gallery will feature a solo presentation of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Hana Ward. The exhibition will be open to the public daily from 10am to 5pm EST and will also be on view by appointment. On Friday, October 4 at 7pm, OCHI will welcome curator Melissa Messina and artist Hana Ward for an in-person exhibition walkthrough and conversation. Hana Ward’s new body of work, Cowpea Consciousness, expands upon the artist’s ongoing explorations of the complexities of identity, introspection, and transformation as informed by Black land justice, spirituality, agricultural and art histories, and the cycles of the natural world. In meditating on the delicious cowpea and its rich history, Ward focuses on the legume as a symbol of abundance, luck, and prosperity—also known as the black-eyed pea, cowpeas have historically been referred to as "the mortgage lifter" and "the poor man’s bank" for their ability to enrich soil and improve the land's yield.
About Artist:
Hana Ward makes paintings and ceramic works that explore themes of identity, introspection, and transformation. Appearing both ethereal and visceral, Ward weaves together moods, motives, and narratives to depict Black and Brown feminine figures who reflect and dream, creating their sovereign worlds from the inside out. These multitudinous visions of unfolding self-actualizations are sometimes sheltered in the solitude of domestic space and other times liberated into landscapes. Influenced by anticolonial histories, spiritual texts, and cycles of the natural world, as well as the canon of art history, Ward’s work excavates inner dimensions to discover a world where one’s sovereignty is in the here and now.
Hana Ward (b. 1989, Los Angeles, CA) received a BA from Brown University in 2011. Ward’s work has been exhibited internationally at venues including the Carolyn Campagna Kleefeld Contemporary Museum in Long Beach, CA; the California African American Museum, Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Harun Gallery, Beyond Baroque, and OCHI in Los Angeles, CA; The FLAG Art Foundation in New York, NY; Mrs. in Queens, NY; Roche Projects in Kyoto, Japan; and The Breeder in Athens, Greece. In 2023, Ward attended the Hayama Residency in Japan. She was awarded a 2017 Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Artist-in-Residence Grant. Ward’s work has been featured in numerous publications including Artforum, Frieze,The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Financial Times, Amadeus, Artillery Magazine, and AUTRE. Ward currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and is represented by OCHI.
About Curator:
Melissa Messina is a nationally recognized arts professional who has developed thought provoking exhibitions, dynamic site-responsive projects, and engaging educational public programming both independently and in leadership positions at museums and non-profit arts organizations. For 20 years, her work with regional, national, and international artists has been presented in the U.S. in Atlanta, Kansas City, Miami, New York, New Orleans, Richmond, Savannah, and Washington, D.C., as well as in Bermuda, France, and Hong Kong. She has lectured extensively, published widely, and her research has been funded by Creative Time and The Andy Warhol Foundation, as well as by fellowships at Emory University’s Stuart A. Rose Library, Atlanta, GA, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR.
In addition to serving select public and private clients, she is the curator of the Mildred Thompson Estate. She has also recently served as guest curator at the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art, Spelman College Museum of Fine Art, the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and was the co-curator of the 2018 and 2020 Bermuda Biennials. In 2017, she co-created Magnetic Fields: Expanding American Abstraction, 1960s to Today, an intergenerational exhibition highlighting 21 Black female abstract practitioners that traveled from Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City to The National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
About OCHI:
Founded in 2015, OCHI is a contemporary art gallery with locations in Sun Valley, Idaho and Los Angeles, California. Nurturing and contextualizing a diverse roster of interdisciplinary artists, OCHI highlights a mix of traditional and experimental practices that investigate the conceptual and material boundaries of art. OCHI’s program focuses on emerging and mid-career artists, collaborating with each artist to build momentum and visibility through robust activities such as institutional exhibitions, gallery partnerships, artist-initiated opportunities, educational and curatorial platforms, art fairs, and a range of press and publications.
Drawn to the culture and community of the Arlington Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, Pauli Ochi opened the doors of Ochi Projects in 2015 after Noah Davis recommended a storefront at 3301 W. Washington Boulevard, a couple of blocks from The Underground Museum. Ochi Projects began as an experimental space in which the artists were handed keys and encouraged to dream big—a journey that mirrors the origins of OCHI’s Idaho space.
The original Ochi Gallery was founded by Pauli Ochi’s parents, Roberta and Denis Ochi, in Boise, Idaho in the 1970s. What began as an artist-run space evolved into an impressive program of exhibitions that featured renown artists. In the 1990s, the Ochi’s designed and built a 6,000 square foot white box gallery with 30-foot ceilings located at 119 Lewis Street at the base of a ski mountain in Sun Valley—a gallery that OCHI still uses for year-round programming alongside its Los Angeles location.
OCHI is built upon a multi-generational belief that art has the power to build community, to evoke joy, expand horizons, to define culture, and to create a future that has not yet been imagined.
OCHI is a proud member of Gallery Association Los Angeles (GALA), New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) and the Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC).
https://www.ochigallery.com | @OCHIGALLERY
Hours of operation
Monday: 10am to 5pm
Tuesday: 10am to 5pm
Wednesday: 10am to 5pm
Thursday: 10am to 5pm
Friday: 10am to 3pm ( AAW Event: 7:00-9:00pm)
Saturday: 10am to 5pm
Sunday: 10am to 5pm