Meet the Artists: Session 4
Gabriela Ruiz, Monsieur Zohore, and Navot Miller
Gabriela, Monsieur, and Navot will be in residence at Fountainhead from May 14 to June 11, 2025. Their residency programs are sponsored in part by Leslie and Michael Weissman, and Artis.
Gabriela Ruiz
Gabriela Ruiz is a multidisciplinary artist working across painting, performance, sculpture, and installation. Rooted in her experience as a first-generation Mexican-American from the San Fernando Valley, Ruiz’s work explores themes of surveillance capitalism, mass consumerism, and the tension between technology, memory, and fantasy. She is particularly interested in how marginalized communities, especially queer BIPOC individuals, experience surveillance and respectability politics in their everyday lives. Using vivid, “unruly” color palettes, Ruiz challenges the sterile aesthetics of traditional art spaces and subvert ideas of modernity, cleanliness, and racialized notions of visual value.
Largely self-taught, Ruiz was shaped by the punk, DIY, and drag scenes of the SFV—spaces that fostered experimentation and community-based learning. Her work has been exhibited in solo shows at the University of Michigan, Palm Springs Art Museum, La Pau Gallery, and Vincent Price Art Museum, and in group exhibitions at Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, MOCA Santa Barbara, Museo de las Artes Guadalajara, ICA LA, and others. Ruiz has participated in residencies at the University of Michigan and the Palm Springs Art Museum, and has lectured across the U.S. and Mexico at institutions such as CalArts, USC, UC Santa Barbara, and Centro de las Artes in Monterrey.
Monsieur Zohore
Monsieur Zohore is an Ivorian-American artist whose practice delves into the alchemical potential of transformation, using the acts of consumption, digestion, and labor as metaphors for personal and societal change. Working across performance, painting, sculpture, installation, and video, Zohore intricately weaves domestic and artistic labor to expose the transformative power of the everyday. His work, marked by wit, poignancy, and dark humor, draws from queer and art historical theory, popular culture, and his bicultural heritage to explore the ritualistic undercurrents of both private and public life. Through a dynamic use of humor, mourning, and spiritual inquiry, Zohore challenges conventional notions of identity and value, inviting audiences to reconsider the intersections of routine, transformation, and meaning.
Zohore received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2020 and his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2015. He is currently Assistant Professor of Painting and Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University and maintains a studio practice between Richmond, VA, New York, NY, and Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. His work has been exhibited widely in the U.S. and internationally, with solo shows at Magenta Plains, M+B, De Boer, von ammon co., Jack Barrett Gallery, and KDR305, among others. He has participated in group exhibitions at institutions including the Kunsthalle Recklinghausen, Baltimore Museum of Art, SculptureCenter, and Pace Gallery. Zohore’s work is held in prominent public collections such as the Walker Art Center, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Rubell Museum, and will be featured in upcoming exhibitions at the Kreeger Museum and Asia Society Houston.
Navot Miller
Navot Miller is a Berlin-based artist whose deeply personal practice blends emotional honesty with a vivid visual language shaped by both his religious upbringing and his contemporary identity. Originally moving to Berlin in 2013 to study architecture, he pivoted toward fine arts, completing his BA and MA at Weissensee Art Academy in 2022. His work is an extension of himself—rooted in intimacy, melancholy, and desire—often portraying friends, lovers, and moments of significance from his personal life. Through bold colors and layered compositions, he explores the intersection of past and present, juxtaposing themes from his Orthodox childhood with his queer, secular adulthood. Influences such as highway signage, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, David Hockney, and Amy Sherald surface in his paintings, which often render vulnerability and sadness in joyful hues.
Since 2021, Miller’s work has gained growing recognition, marking a turning point in his career with exhibitions in Austria, Germany, London, New York, and Tel Aviv. In 2023, he completed his first public murals—one on a high school building in Israel and another in the cafeteria at C/O Berlin. His first solo exhibition with Carl Freedman Gallery further cemented his presence in the international art scene. Whether on canvas or in public space, Navot’s work invites viewers into a world of emotional candor and visual brightness, offering a sincere and nuanced look at identity, longing, and transformation.
