Reconstruction in Relief:
Nicole Awai & Teri Gandy-Richardson

Tiger Strikes Asteroid New York is pleased to present Reconstruction in Relief, a two-person show featuring the works of Nicole Awai & Teri Gandy-Richardson.
Reconstruction involves taking apart and reshaping prevalent and pervasive ideas and repurposed materials. It is an endemic component in the processes
of both artists in this exhibition; a key tool in the dismantling, reconfiguring and altering of a variety of materials to build something new, something that is
enshrined with meaning. The materials become elements of their visual language.

Nicole Awai’s practice is extensive and uses a variety of materials and techniques to construct visual allegories, about our histories, our present, and our future. Each individual mark, medium, and technical approach used in the construction of her work becomes more than metaphor.

“My art is an examination and response to the interconnectivity and fluidity of our societal interaction and materiality. In the Americas, we are the actualization, the embodiment of multiplicity, dualities, the confluence of coherence and contradiction. There are inescapable narratives embedded in all materiality; posited historically, culturally, and genetically, the inextricable union of narrative and matter.”

Current works in her “Conjuring Abstraction” series recalls the transformative power of women in ancestral practices through the consideration of their resonant presence in the formulation of female identified folklore characters in the southern Caribbean.

Teri Gandy-Richardson's constructions are at once meditation and physical embodiment of the breath. A teacher and practitioner of yoga, her complexity of simplicity is grounding and revelatory. Her focus on denim, specifically Levi’s is a commentary on the history of the material relationship between slavery and Jim Crow era in our country.

“Extracting properties from this beloved material, my intention is to feed our individual intimacy with denim through the lens of its less known history by reminding us of who we are, and a challenge for who we could be.”

Nicole Awai is a multimedia artist who is based in Brooklyn, NY and grew up in Trinidad and Tobago. Awai is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant for Painting and Sculpture, an Art Matters Grant, a Puffin Foundation Grant and an inaugural BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. She has exhibited at such venues as PS1 MOMA, Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum, Kemper Museum, Museum of Latin American Art, California African American Museum, MCA Denver, the Biennale of Ceramic in Contemporary Art, the Busan Biennale, The Times Art Center Berlin, and the Vilcek Foundation. Awai has been awarded several artist residencies since the 1990’s including the Studio Museum in Harlem, Art Omi, the John Micheal Kohler Arts and Industry Residency, Smack Mellon, the BRIC Workspace Residency, the Joan Mitchell Center Residency, LMCC Arts Center and the Materials for the Arts Residency, NY. She is currently a participant in the residency at Art Cake in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. In January 2026, Awai will be an artist in residence at the Rauschenberg Foundation Residency, FL.

Born in Austin, Minnesota, Teri Gandy-Richardson is a humanist, abstract artist, African American woman, yoga teacher and cancer survivor based in Brooklyn, NY. Having shown nationally and internationally, Teri Gandy-Richardson has recently been included in group exhibitions at MoCADA, Brooklyn, New York; the Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn, New York; The Brooklyn Artists Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York and the Jamaica Arts Center, Queens, New York. Internationally, she participated in DENIM—Stylish, Practical, Timeless Blue Fabric with A History, at the Spielzeug Welten Museum in Basel Switzerland. Teri’s most recent art residencies were at Packer Collegiate Institute, Brooklyn, NY and the Work in Progress (WIP) Residency at the Textile Arts Center, Brooklyn,NY, 2025. Previous residencies include Summer Residency at the School of Visual Arts; DVCAI Residencies in the Bahamas, Barbados, and twice in Puerto Rico, as well as a Saltonstall Summer Residency at the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, Ithaca, NY. Teri has received three Puffin Foundation Grants, and was originally an Architecture major at The Cooper Union, before changing majors and earning her BFA from Cooper Union in Painting.