Meet the Artists: Session 4
Anthony Akinbola, Nao Bustamante, and Napoles Marty
Anthony, Nao, and Napoles will be in residence at Fountainhead from May 13 to June 10, 2026.
Anthony Akinbola
Anthony Olubunmi Akinbola is a Nigerian-American artist (b. 1991, Columbia, Missouri) working across painting and sculpture, whose practice centers on the use of found objects associated with African-American culture. His work explores the dual nature of these materials as both intimate markers of identity and symbols of mass production, examining the intersections of commercialization, cultural representation, and personal experience. Central to his practice is the ongoing Camouflage series, in which he assembles and sews together durags of varying textures, colors, and materials to create compositions that engage with the legacies of abstract painting and art history more broadly. Through subtle chromatic transitions and bold gestural arrangements, Akinbola expands the expressive potential of this ubiquitous object, transforming it into a visual language that both celebrates and critiques the commodification of Black identity. His sculptural works further extend these investigations, incorporating minimally altered found materials to reflect on systems of cultural production, resource circulation, and lived experience.
Nao Bustamante
Sponsored by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz
Nao Bustamante is a multidisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles, originally from California’s Central Valley, whose expansive practice spans performance, video installation, filmmaking, sculpture, painting, and writing. Her work operates across genres, combining rigorous research with deeply emotive approaches to explore histories of violence, embodiment, and representation, particularly as they relate to race, gender, and power. Bustamante’s practice interrogates systems of visibility and marginalization, often reimagining inherited narratives through performative strategies that foreground vulnerability, resistance, and transformation. Her work has been presented internationally at institutions and festivals including the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Sundance International Film Festival, Outfest, the Park Avenue Armory, and El Museo del Barrio. She is the recipient of numerous honors, including the Anonymous Was a Woman award, fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts and Lambent Foundation, and the Chase Legacy Award in Film.
Napoles Marty
Napoles Marty is a sculptor and painter whose practice centers on the human body as a vessel for meaning, exploring its capacity to carry psychological, cultural, and spiritual narratives. Working with materials such as wood, plaster, clay, and oil, he creates figures that blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, drawing from both classical traditions and modernist aesthetics. His work often embraces a raw, visceral quality—at times grotesque—through which he examines themes of power, vulnerability, and transformation. Central to Marty’s practice are hybrid figures that function as spiritual guardians or protectors, merging human and creature-like elements into forms that reflect memory, myth, and ritual. His sculptural process is intensely physical: carving wooden logs with chainsaws before burning and charring their surfaces, he activates the material through elemental gestures that infuse each piece with a sense of life and presence. Marty’s paintings and drawings extend these investigations into two-dimensional forms, creating a cohesive language rooted in his Cuban heritage and engaging the body as both subject and symbol.
