About Uman 
Uman’s dazzling visual vocabulary reflects her life and expansive cross-cultural experiences. Born in Somalia and raised in Kenya, she migrated to Denmark as a teenager and later to New York NY as a young adult. Now, with a home and studio in Upstate New York, Uman paints richly hued worlds replete with gesture, geometry and the sublime. An intuitive artist, her influences abound from memories of East African childhood, a rigorous education in traditional calligraphy and a fascination with kaleidoscopic color and design. With nods to self-portraiture and fictional topographies, Uman’s paintings speak fluently of liminal navigation. Her work contemplates both the physical and spiritual, intertwining abstraction, figuration, meditative patterning and a reverence for the natural world. 
 
About Lauren Cornell 
Lauren Cornell is the Artistic Director of the Hessel Museum, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (CCS Bard). From 2017 to 2025, she served as Chief Curator and Director of the Graduate Program in Curatorial Studies at CCS Bard, where she oversaw the graduate curriculum and guided the trajectories of more than 100 students, now alumni. 
 
At the Hessel Museum, Cornell has organized surveys of Stan Douglas, Leidy Churchman, Sky Hopinka, Daniel Steegmann Mangrané, Martine Syms, and Erika Verzutti, as well as career retrospectives of Dara Birnbaum, Stan Douglas, Ho Tzu Nyen (with Tom Eccles and the Singapore Art Museum), and Nil Yalter (with the Museum Ludwig). In 2019, she organized Phantom Plane: Cyberpunk in the Year of the Future (with Dawn Chan, Jeppe Ugelvig, Xue Tan, and Tobias Berger). 
 
From 2005 to 2017, Cornell worked at the New Museum in New York, where she also served as Executive Director of its digital art affiliate Rhizome (2005–2012). While at the New Museum, she co-curated the 2009 and 2015 Triennials, among other exhibitions; commissioned works across media, including digital formats; and founded the annual conference Seven on Seven in 2010. 
 
She is the coeditor, with Ed Halter, of Mass Effect: Art and the Internet in the Twenty-First Century (New Museum and MIT Press, 2015), and has edited and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues and art magazines. Cornell is a recipient of ArtTable’s New Leadership Award. 
 
About Matthew Higgs 
Matthew Higgs is an artist and the director and chief curator of White Columns, New York. Over the past three decades Higgs has organized more than 250 exhibitions and projects with artists, including Uman's solo debut at White Columns in 2015. Higgs' writing has appeared in more than 50 publications, and he was a regular contributor to Artforum for almost twenty years. Higgs is currently a contributing editor at both The Paris Review and Arena Homme+. 
 
About Amy Smith-Stewart 
Amy Smith-Stewart has organized nearly one hundred exhibitions across museums, collections, galleries, and temporary spaces. Her writing has appeared in books and catalogues published by institutions and publishers including the Bates College Museum of Art, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Charta, Colby College Museum of Art, DelMonico Books, Gregory R. Miller & Co., KW Institute for Contemporary Art, MoMA PS1, Revolver Publishing, Rizzoli, Taschen, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum. As both curator and writer, Smith-Stewart is a dedicated advocate for emerging and overlooked artists, as well as for erased and forgotten histories.  

She currently serves as the Diana Bowes Chief Curator at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, where she has organized fifty-five exhibitions and projects since 2013. She launched Aldrich Projects, a series that presents a single work or focused body of work by a singular artist, and co-created The Aldrich Box, a program that commissions artists to produce original works designed to travel beyond the museum’s walls. Her visionary approach has brought artists to The Aldrich at pivotal moments in their careers, including solo museum debuts by Uman, Nickola Pottinger, Hangama Amiri, Genesis Belanger, Layo Bright, Milano Chow, Lucia Hierro, Michelle Lopez, Hayal Pozanti, Jessi Reaves, Eva LeWitt, Sara Cwynar, Chiffon Thomas, Elif Uras, B. Wurtz, and others. She has also organized major survey exhibitions with artists such as Martha Diamond, Harmony Hammond, Loie Hollowell, Raven Halfmoon, Karla Knight, Suzanne McClelland, Ruth Root, Frank Stella, and Jackie Winsor.