Miami-Dutch, "A Peace Conference in the Desert" (2017), welded swords, 47” x 17” x 5”
André & Evan Lenox-Samour (b. Boston, MA) are an identical twin artist duo, and members of the 4-person collective Miami-Dutch, a collaborative that revisits sites of public assembly and memorial, and addresses the rise and fall of civic entities through fictional and ancestral narratives. The name utilizes a hyphenate of regional dialects to suggest a fabricated encounter during the colonization of the Americas, creating a satirical nation-state and imagined lingua franca. Informed by the collaborative’s inherited narratives of Cambodian, Iraqi-Jewish, and Palestinian diasporas, Miami-Dutch’s practice centers on the formation of new identities as borders and political climates shift. André & Evan attend the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving their BFAs in Studio Art in 2012. Their work has been exhibited nationally and internationally at Honor Fraser (Los Angeles, CA), Club Pro Los Angeles (Los Angeles, CA), Shoot The Lobster (New York, NY), Interstate Projects (Brooklyn, NY), Rod Barton (London, UK), and Queer Thoughts (Chicago, IL), among others. Their work has been published in Post Internet Survival Guide (Ed. Katja Novitskova, Revolver Publishing, Berlin, Germany, 2010), with press including Art21, Artspace, Cultured Magazine, and Contemporary Art Review Los Angeles.
Leslie Rogers is a sculptor, performance artist, and puppeteer. Her arts background is in puppetry and quilting, with degrees from the Maryland Institute College of Art (BFA) and Virginia Commonwealth University’s Sculpture & Extended Media program (MFA). Her work draws from slapstick entertainment, collaborative relationships, gender tropes, and the fiber arts to disregard or erase perceived hierarchies between performer and object, and amongst art forms and social groups. Rogers has been awarded artist residencies at ACRE, AS220, Art Farm Nebraska, Mildred’s Lane, the University Musical Society at the University of Michigan, and postdoctoral research fellowship from the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan. She lives and works in Detroit.
