Concrete to Canvas | Exhibition Opening & Artist Talk

You are invited to join West Chelsea Contemporary Saturday, August 23rd from 2-4pm for the opening reception of Concrete to Canvas.

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This iteration of Concrete to Canvas gathers four icons from across the country—artists who have become genre-defying through unwavering dedication and fearless experimentation. Their early work wasn’t polished—it was loud, raw, and unapologetically theirs. From tagging back alleys in L.A. and freight trains in Chicago, to channeling ancestral scripts in Boston and tearing up pop culture in New York, We’re bringing back two legends, RISK and Cey Adams and introducing two dynamic new forces, IMAGINE and POSE.

RISK, a trailblazer of West Coast graffiti, brings decades of momentum and color to the canvas. His work captures the raw energy of Los Angeles streets, transforming spray-can instinct into luminous, abstract expressions that pulse with movement. His groundbreaking Radiant Chill mural became the first government-sanctioned graffiti artwork on a U.S. freeway. Cey Adams, emerging from the heartbeat of New York’s hip-hop scene, reinterprets logos, icons, and pop culture. Bridging graffiti and graphic design, his work turns the familiar language of the city into charged, reflective compositions. Celebrating a landmark retrospective Cey Adams, Departure: 40 Years of Art and Design, merges an illustrious forty-year career as a visionary artist, cultural pioneer, and innovative designer. 

IMAGINE weaves her Nepali heritage with the vibrancy of Boston’s street art landscape, infusing her work with spiritual symbolism, calligraphic linework, and a global sensibility. Her pieces are luminous and layered—visual meditations crafted with deep intention. In 2024, she became the first contemporary Nepali artist to be included in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston’s permanent collection. POSE brings the high-impact energy of Chicago, by fracturing and reassembling comic books, advertising, and digital fragments into explosive compositions. Saturated with color and texture, his canvases balance chaos and control to reflect the visual noise of contemporary life. In 2013, he joined the lineage of street art legends when he painted the iconic Bowery Wall in New York, a site previously adorned by the likes of Banksy and Haring—a canon-defining moment that cemented his place in the evolution of contemporary art. 

Melding the precision of manuscript with the magnitude of metropolis, these four artists craft cultural landmarks that pulse with movement, memory, and mastery. Each piece in this exhibition is a deliberate gesture—cut, pasted, painted, electrified—forming an immersive narrative where the walls become pages in a living history of contemporary art. Together, their work becomes a singular offering, an experience shaped with intention, made for you.

Host or Publisher West Chelsea Contemporary