Meet the Artists

Aristotle Forrester (b.1993) is a black painter and printmaker, originally from the South Side of Chicago and currently based in New York. He received his Bachelor of Fine Art degree from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2016, and his Master of Fine Art from Columbia University, New York in 2024. 

Recent exhibitions include such venues as [CONTAINER] (Santa Fe), LatchKey Gallery (New York), Thierry Goldberg (New York), Frederic Snitzer (Miami), Storage Gallery (New York), M Fine Arts Galerie (Boston), the Inside Out Museum (Beijing), the Obama Foundation Democracy Forum (New York). His work can be found in the permanent collection of Harvard University (Boston). 

Forrester’s work visualizes the racial constructs and power structures that have defined my experience and that of so many people of color living in America today and over the course of history. He examines themes of diaspora, family, cultural heritage and identity while disassembling the manifest destiny fervor culture of colonialism. By extending the traditions of quilting, collage, printmaking, pigment, and text, he subverts the colonial pillars of visual culture and highlights the duality of imprisonment and freedom personified by these symbols.

Through his work, Forrester decolonizes the Western pedigree of abstraction and returns it to its origins, people of color, pulling back the skin of representational painting so we can see its abstract blood and muscles. As a black artist navigating the intersections of personal and collective history, he presents his perspective on the human experience through the emotive power of pigment and gestural mark-making.