AHL Foundation is pleased to announce the artists selected for Space Uptown 2024. Co-curated by Savona Bailey-McClain, Executive Director & Chief Curator, West Harlem Art Fund and Jiyoung Lee, Gallery Director, AHL Foundation.

The artists for this year’s exhibition are Ara Ko, Carlos Mateu, Bishop McIndoe, Kai Oh and Kejoo Park.

Supported by Manna’s Exhibition Grant, Space Uptown has showcased Korean and New York City artists since 2022 for cross-cultural exchanges. Space Uptown will open March 28, 2024 and run through April 26, 2024 at AHL Foundation’s gallery, located at 2605 Frederick Douglass Blvd. 

Artists Bios

Ara Ko (b. 1988, Hongseong, Korea) received a BFA from Ewha Womans University (Seoul, Korea) and an MFA from MICA’s Hoffberger School of Painting (Baltimore, MD). She has exhibited at the CICA Museum (Seoul, Korea), Gallery We (Seoul, Korea), Washington Square Park (New York, NY), Miboo Art Center (Busan, Korea), and Sung Nam Art Center (Seongnam-si, Korea), Oxford Art Alliance (Pennsylvania), C. Grimaldis Gallery (Baltimore). Ko won the Mural Project Award from Winthrop Apartment (Bozzuto Management Company) and MICA and has received numerous awards during her graduate studies including the Leslie King Hammond Graduate Fellowship (MICA) and a CCC Community Art Grant (MICA).

Carlos Mateu was born in 1970 in Havana, Cuba, and has resided in the United States since 1997. As a teenager he attended The Paulita Concepcion Vocational Middle School of Art where he studied painting, engraving, sculpture, drawing and art history. He later studied mechanical drawing at the Fernando Aguado y Rico Technological Institute, and completed his formal art education at the renowned San Alejandro National Academy of Fine Arts. He also worked for nine years at a Publicity Agency as a model maker, silk screen assistant, illustrator, and designer of fair and exhibitions. This combination of studies and experiences served to develop and refine his technique and style, as well as to solidify his desire to make art a lifelong profession.

Bishop McIndoe was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. He is an artist and an arts activist, whose work has been shown at galleries and art spaces throughout NYC. Since 2017, Bishop has been working with the nonprofit arts organization Artistic Noise, which works to create artmaking experiences for young people at its Harlem-based studio space. Bishop has worked as a Teaching Artist there, and also develops programming for the organization’s alumni network. As an Art & Entrepreneurship alumnus himself, Bishop enjoys working with the program’s youth because he sees potential in all of them. In 2023, Bishop became Artistic Noise’s first ever Alumni Artist in Residence. Apart from his long career in arts education, Bishop is a talented visual artist who has exhibited his work at Pace Gallery, Hannah Traore Gallery, Maysles Documentary Center, and more. He has designed commissioned artwork for organizations such as Harlem Stage and others. He currently lives and work in Brooklyn New York.

Kai Oh (b. 1992, Seoul) is a visual artist who focuses on expanding the boundaries of photography, capturing the non-human-centric life force in urban spaces through her lens. She emphasizes the fluidity of digital images, exploring their inherent possibilities. By bringing digital images from the computer into physical space, Oh challenges conventional norms and historical values linked to flat images/surfaces on the wall, crafting otherworldly scenarios. Before attending Columbia University’s School of the Arts, Kai Oh earned her Bachelor’s degrees from Seoul National University and the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Alongside her solo exhibitions, including Half Sticky, IBK Korea (2023) and Softsharp, Cylinder, Seoul (2021), Kai Oh has participated in numerous group exhibitions: Autohypnosis, G Gallery, Seoul (2023); The Postmodern Child Part 2, Busan Museum of Contemporary Art, Busan (2023); Rales, Wheezed and Crackles, Doosan Gallery, Seoul (2022); Super-fine, Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul (2021); and Foam Talent, Foam Amsterdam (2017).

As a Korean-American architect, landscape artist and visual artist, Kejoo Park has been working and living abroad, primarily in German-speaking countries for many years. She is now in the process of returning to New York. After graduating from graduate school in landscape architecture, she worked briefly with Peter Walker – the landscape architect of the Ground Zero memorial in New York – and then moved to Switzerland, where she worked together with many Swiss, German and American architects, such as I.M. Pei and Mario Campi, as a freelance landscape architect for international competitions. During her time teaching landscape architecture and ecology as an assistant professor at the Technical University of Stuttgart, Germany for about eight years, she continued to work as a landscape architect on a few projects in Beijing, China. For about 9 years, she has given up all her previous work to devote herself entirely to being an artist. She is in a phase where she is synthesizing all her previous work and the insights she has gained over the years into the visual arts (total-art, Gesamtkunst).