Meet the Artists: Session 6
Armani Howard, Autumn Knight, and Sonia Barrett
Armani, Autumn, and Sonia will be in residence at Fountainhead from August 6 to September 3, 2025. Their residency programs are sponsored in part by Francie Bishop Good and David Horvitz.
Armani Howard
Armani Howard (b. 1993, USA) is a multidisciplinary African American-Thai artist based in Chicago. His practice transforms memory into visual mythology—where experiences, past or present; re-emerge as figurative, symbolic, and often otherworldly forms.
Rooted in the language of animism and inspired by traditions such as Baroque and Thangka painting, Howard’s body of works unfold like contemporary folklore. Floral, dream-like, and suspended in time, they conjure a world where personal history, spirit, and imagination coalesce.
Through each piece, Howard reimagines the self, emotions and experiences as a mythic presence. His work invites viewers to explore identity not as a fixed truth, but as something fluid and reflective—an ever-shifting dialogue between ancestry, memory, and becoming.
Autumn Knight
Autumn Knight is an interdisciplinary artist working with performance, installation, video and text. Her performance work has been on view at various institutions including DiverseWorks Artspace, Art League Houston, Project Row Houses, Blaffer Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, Skowhegan Space (NY), The New Museum, The Contemporary Art Museum Houston, Optica (Montreal, Canada), The Poetry Project (NY) and Krannart Art Museum (IL), The Institute for Contemporary Art (VCU), Human Resources Los Angeles (HRLA) and Akademie der Kunste, (Berlin). Knight has been an artist in residence with with In-Situ (UK), Galveston Artist Residency, YICA (Yamaguchi, Japan), Artpace (San Antonio, TX) and a 2016-2017 artist in residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem (NY). Knight is the recipient of an Artadia Award (2015) and an Art Matters Grant (2018). She has served as visiting artist at Montclair State University, Princeton University and Bard College. Her performance work is held in the permanent collection of the Studio Museum in Harlem. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2016) and holds an M.A. in Drama Therapy from New York University.
Sonia Barrett
Hailing from the United Kingdom, Sonia Barrett’s sculptural practice includes placemaking with a view to assembling communities under the threat of climate change. Her work incorporates composites of plants, animals, elements and people to create interventions that presence their objectification and commodification. Born in the UK of Jamaican and German parentage Sonia E Barrett grew up in Hong Kong, Zimbabwe, Cyprus and the UK. She studied literature at the University of St Andrews, Scotland and her MFA at Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her work unpacks the boundaries between the Determined and the determining with a focus on race and gender. She makes sculptural works so she can run her hands alone the fissures and manifest strategies for multiple compatible existences and mourn.
Sonia is a MacDowell fellow and has been recognised by the Premio Ora prize, NY Art-Slant showcase for sculpture and the Neo Art Prize. She has been exhibited at the National Gallery of Jamaica, Tate Britain, 32 Degrees East Gallery, Kampala, Uganda, the Heinrich Böll Institute Germany, the British Library, The Museum of Derby, and the Kunsthaus Nürnberg. Her work has been shown at a number of galleries, including the OCCCA California, the NGBK Berlin, Tete Berlin, The Format Contemporary in Milan and Basel, John Hansard Galley, Southampton and the Rosenwald Wolf Gallery Philadelphia.
Her works have been published and written about in the International Review of African American Art, The British Art Studies Journal, Black History 365, Kunstforum International, Protocollum Journal, ELSE, Financial Times, Evening Standard, Open University Geography Textbooks and Contemporary & América Latina.
