Obsidian Bellis is an artist and DIY organizer born and raised on the East Side of Buffalo. After traveling and living in other places on the East Coast and Midwest, Bellis now resides on Buffalo’s West Side. Bellis sees her creative drive as a method to bring something new and novel into existence. Finding inspiration in such wide-ranging sources as from magical illustrations found in 15th to 19th–century Coptic prayer scroll amulets and Ethiopian illuminated manuscripts to mythology and Afrofuturism, Bellis’s signature style is a mixture of illustrative and mystical forms often incorporating spectacular natural elements with fantastical figures.

Jason Brammer is a Chicago-based visual artist known for his murals, site-specific installations, distinctive paintings, and mixed-media hand-painted assemblages. Brammer’s murals often veer into fantastic worlds but utilize a more formal trompe l'oeil style that pierces otherwise solid forms and allows viewers to envision a portal to another place. He has received commissions from prominent clients such as LinkedIn, Hulu, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Shedd Aquarium, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the band My Morning Jacket.  
  
Brammer’s art has also been exhibited in numerous prestigious venues, including the Hangaram Design Museum in Seoul, South Korea; 751D Park in Beijing, China; the Union League Club of Chicago; La Luz de Jesus Gallery in Los Angeles; Linda Warren Projects in Chicago; Rockford Art Museum in Illinois; Governors State University in Chicago; SCOPE Miami Beach; and Museo Internazionale Italia Arte in Turin, Italy. 

Cleveland-based artist Lauren Mckenzie-Pearce creates a vast variety of work that focuses on diversity and bridging the black and white halves of her identity. Originally from West Palm Beach, Florida, the artist spends most of her time either in her studio or working on murals in her community that create conversations around identity, race, and womanhood. Using an array of materials and hues to highlight the beauty of people of color in her life, most of her work features portraits of either individuals she personally knows or are derived from her own imagination as though from a melting pot of faces. She was the first Black woman to paint a mural in the City of Cleveland.

James Moffitt, aka YAMES, is a Buffalo native and co-founder of Pine Apple Company, an artist collective and gallery located in Buffalo’s Allentown neighborhood. Having formally trained at Pratt Institute, YAMES is a multidisciplinary graphic artist who specializes in hand-painted signs, typography, illustration, murals, and more. You can see his work on businesses throughout Buffalo, including Hydraulic Hearth, Sato Brewpub, Larkin Square, and the National Grid’s Terminal Station B. Though this will be YAMES’s first mural with the Public Art Initiative, he has assisted on numerous other projects for the Initiative.  

Ellen Rutt is a Detroit-based interdisciplinary artist who utilizes an abstract lexicon of layered shapes and primary colors in her improvisational and evocative installations. She facilitates conversations between materiality and movement, between place and process. Her site-specific installations, mixed-media paintings, and textiles examine notions of belonging and exclusion that expose a divide between nature and culture in the American experience.

Rutt graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Michigan. She has exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts in Grand Rapids, East Hawaii Cultural Center/Hawaii Museum of Contemporary Art, and pt. 2 Gallery in Los Angeles. She has completed murals and installations in France, New York, San Francisco, Canada, and Hawaii, among other locations around the world. She has been featured in Juxtapoz, Forbes, W, alive, and Loam, and was recently named one of 24 changemakers in 2020 by Hour Detroit Magazine.

SALUT is the visual arts moniker of the Rochester-based artist Bradd Young. Young studied graphic design and studio art in Virginia where he began organizing pop-up exhibitions that would eventually lead him to open up a studio in Western New York after graduation. It was then that Young began to develop a color palette of soft pastels and a style merging his loves of cartoonish surrealism and fine art.  
  
Young has displayed work in Virginia and at several venues in both Western New York and New York City. In 2018, SALUT was the only local muralist featured in the 11th annual WALL\THERAPY project in Rochester. In February 2019, SALUT was celebrated as one of the exciting talented artists at the Memorial Art Gallery’s MAG social. In Spring 2019, Young designed several labels for Trophy Brewery Co. in North Carolina. In 2020, Young was selected by Memorial Art Gallery to design the posters, cards, and pamphlets for the promotion of the museum’s annual fundraiser, An Artists’ Affair at the MAG.  
  
Young is a featured artist of the Rochester-based gallery UUU Art Collective, which acts as a venue to both curate upcoming young artists and musicians and promote community activism. Currently, SALUT's paintings are displayed throughout businesses in downtown Rochester. 

Monet Alyssa Kifner is a freelance illustrator born, raised, and currently residing in Buffalo. She is interested in exploring form, pattern, fashion, and nature, and crafts psychedelic and colorful motifs to adorn her figures in works that combine digital and traditional mediums. Alyssa Kifner graduated from the Fashion Institute of Technology in 2019, and her work was featured in the 2019 and 2020 editions of the Society of Illustrators Student Scholarship Exhibit and the 2021 Communication Arts Annual.

Morgan Blair is an artist based in Queens. She has painted large-scale murals in Heerlen, The Netherlands; Worcester, Massachusetts; and Montauk and Brooklyn, New York. She also makes hand-cut, artist-edition wooden jigsaw puzzles. Her work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at galleries such as The Hole, The Journal Gallery, and Kasmin Gallery in New York City; Harper’s Books in East Hampton, New York; and Shane Campbell Gallery and Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Illinois.

Thomas Evans, aka Detour, is an all-around creative specializing in interactive visuals, portraiture, immersive spaces, creative directing, large-scale public art, often based on photographs of local residents. In his ongoing experiments in visual art, music, and interactive technologies, he expands traditional views of artmaking and challenges the boundaries fine art mediums, all the while reimagining the creative process as grounded in multilayered collaboration and viewer participation.

Karle Norman is an artist living in Buffalo, New York. Born into a conservative religious group that emphasized strict adherence to the Bible, he used art as an escape. Many hours were poured into his sketchbooks, and sketching remains an integral part of his artmaking some twenty years later. Norman credits his grandmother, an artist herself, with instilling in him the desire to maintain a creative practice. His series “Same Inside” seeks to explore the relationship of our shared experiences to our physical differences.

Miriam Singer was raised in Buffalo and now lives in Philadelphia. Singer uses a combination of printmaking and drawing to create her unique works on paper and designs for public art projects. Selected public artworks include projects for St. Andrews School in Middletown, Delaware (2020), and in Philadelphia, University City Arts League (2019), Navy Yard Transit’s fleet of buses in Philadelphia (2018), and Park Towne Place apartments (2017). Singer currently teaches printmaking at Fleisher Art Memorial in Philadelphia and is a member of the artist collective Space 1026.

Quebec-based artist Cyrielle Tremblay builds dream-like worlds where she mixes poetic composition with touches of humor and traces of popular culture. Her creative explorations have led her to work in mediums ranging from mural painting, textiles, and photography to installation, and self-publishing. Tremblay has participated in various festivals and international mural events, and her work has been exhibited in Mexico, Sweden, the United States, France, Colombia, and Canada.