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Announcing the Featured Artists for the Freelancers Hub Fall 2025 Art Show
The Freelancers Union and Freelancers Hub are proud to once again present our Freelancers Hub art show, this time highlighting work focused on Cityscapes and Architecture.
Join us for the Opening Reception on September 10 to celebrate the incredible work created by the members of our community. RSVP today.
All events at the Freelancers Hub are made possible thanks to the support of NYC Mayors office of Media and Entertainment.
Featured Artists
Alex Korolkovas
Bio: Alex Korolkovas was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, and considers himself an artist first, photographer second. Moving to Los Angeles in 1992, he refined his craft at the Art Center College of Design and worked as a master printer before dedicating himself to photography full-time. His work blends reality and fantasy, capturing human stories through powerful expressions and emotions. With a background in both art and fashion, Alex has collaborated with world-class magazines such as Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Glamour, and Cosmopolitan, as well as celebrities and athletes on campaigns across the US, Brazilian, and Asian markets.
Artist Statement: New York Upside Down is my first photographic series created in New York, approached with the curiosity of an outsider and the rhythm of my Brazilian roots. Drawn to the city’s grafismo, its bold lines, contrasts, and layered geometry. I crafted each image entirely in-camera using double exposures: the first frame as it is, the second with the camera turned completely upside down. This inversion transforms familiar streetscapes into abstract compositions where architecture collides with itself and reflections merge with shadows.
Robert A. Ripps
Bio: Born and raised in New York City, Robert A. Ripps personal work explores the interaction and intersection of nature and the man-made world, both visually, as well as technically. He received his BFA in photography from Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), and has studied at the Center for Creative Imaging (CCI), and Maine Media Workshops.
Robert has won numerous awards, including being named one of the 200best digital artists (2023) by Lürzer’s Archive, inclusion in American Photography 36 and 39 Annual Award books, Honorable Mention in the 2021 IPA Int’l Photography Awards, multiple honors from Photo District News (PDN), as well as having his work be a part of the Polaroid collection.
In 2020, he was included in the exhibit #ICPConcerned, a selection of photographs collected from the ICP Concerned hashtag on Instagram, and displayed at the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.
Robert’s most recent solo exhibition, Negativityness Abounds, was at the Christine Frechard Gallery in Pittsburgh.
Artist Statement: This ongoing project started as a response to the political climate in the country the past several years- everything seems to be about negativity, about division, about what is truth (and what is inarguably false, yet touted as truth), how the surface of things can be 180 degrees opposite from what is underneath. It is about falsehoods and unseen influence. What was familiar and perhaps mundane has now taken on a sense of surrealism and unfamiliarity, which leaves us feeling unsure, confused and helpless, powerless to have control in events affecting our daily lives.
Viewers are encouraged to enjoy the beauty of the images, while also acknowledging the incongruity and surrealism that they present, which hopefully encourages them to look deeper into things they experience, challenging what is presented to them, as what is presented in the media or social media, and now the government, is often not reality and rarely objective.
Cat Willet
Bio: Cat Willett is a Brooklyn-based artist. She has written, illustrated, and published two full-length books, as well as two mantra card decks. She is currently working on her third book, Unconditional, a collection of comic interviews with women about the special bonds they have with animals, coming out in 2026 through Princeton Architectural Press (Chronicle Books). Cat holds her MFA from the Fashion Institute of Technology in Illustration. She received her BFA from the University at Buffalo with a minor in Art History and also studied at the Scuola Lorenzo de’Medici in Florence, Italy.
Artist Statement: My ongoing illustrated postcard series reflects an effort to capture some of the charm and wonder of my home, New York City. Inspired by vintage postcards and a nostalgic love of snail mail, I made these pieces in hopes of reminding collectors of the colors, creatures, and feelings that only NYC can offer. I am also the author and illustrator of three published books, and I make illustrated comics about parenting, motherhood, gender, and animals, and am a regular contributor to the Washington Post and Vox.
Linda Byrne
Bio: Linda Byrne, a visual artist, was born and raised in New York City where she continues her practice. Her many exhibitions include “Current/Undercurrent” at UMass Amherst, “Altered States” at Marymount Hewitt Gallery, and “Brimming On The Edge” produced by The West Harlem Art Fund. Linda collaborated with the poet and sound artist, Maggie Dubris, on two installations about our disappearing natural world, with their “Vanishing Oceans Project” shown in the international traveling exhibition “The Universal Sea: Pure or Plastic”. Linda has received several artist residencies, and a Jerome Foundation Grant and chashama Grant.
Artist Statement: The 59th Street Bridge is part of a series of bridge paintings using the wood panel as an element, with the camouflage shapes of the grain becoming sky or water against the bold linear quality of the subject. My work is about place and our connections and the NY bridges have always held connection for me. From growing up in Queens with Manhattan roots and Brooklyn relatives to living for years on the Lower East Side, they are still an ever present part of my life.
Paul O'Malley
Bio: Paul O’Malley is an award-winning street photographer whose images have appeared in 19 exhibitions over the past year, including four solo shows in New York City. His latest series, Shizukesa, finds moments of calm and grace in the everyday bustle of Japanese life.
Artist Statement: Paul’s work merges abstraction and documentary, drawing on the surrounding environment to create layered compositions that explore a dual search for belonging and solitude.
Dat Nguyen
Bio: New York-based digital artist specializing in illustration-style art based on city life.
Artist Statement: This piece is based on an interpretation of New York City, but isn't a replica. I've included many landmarks both famous and not, capturing the energy of individual neighborhoods. As an urban planning enthusiast, I've done all to make sure this can be a functioning community, from schools to hospitals to parks to transit and water treatment.
Gaspar Marquez
Bio: Gaspar Marquez was born in Mexico. He's a self taught photographer, but took plenty of classes at prestigious schools such as the School of The International Center of Photography and The School of Visual Arts in New York city, not to mention he's got a BA in Business Administration in Mexico. He’s been influenced over the years by the great masters of the medium like Man Ray, Nick Knight and Helmut Newton besides amazing painters like Picasso, Jackson Pollock and Urban Art.
He’s working as a Freelance photographer/videographer doing Fine Art, Portraits, Fashion & Lifestyle. He loves music, traveling, nature, animals, and great documentaries. He lives in Brooklyn, New York, but would love to retire and live in a cool and safe beach on the Sea of Cortez or in a cool cabin by The Grand Canyon.
Artist Statement: This is a graphic interpretation of a meditation of what it is like to observe/watch silently an urban escapade, in this case, happens to be Times Square in New York city.
Nicky Conti
Bio: Nicolette (Nicky) Conti is a Maltese-born fine art street photographer based in New York City. Since 2018, she has explored the urban landscape through a painterly lens, using natural light and shadow to transform fleeting moments into striking visual compositions. A travel enthusiast, Nicky challenges herself to capture the essence of the cities she visits through the landscape of their streets. Nicky is also the concept creator of Embodied Moments NYC - a limited-edition project that reimagines her street photography as wearable couture. Her journey along this project can be followed on Instagram: @embodiedmoments.nyc
Artist Statement: This photograph strips Paris to its essence and rebuilds it with three elements that make it instantly identifiable: the Eiffel Tower, a passerby and a pigeon. In their alignment, the city reveals itself anew; monumental yet human, captured in an everyday moment of chance.
Eric March
Bio: Eric March is a painter and draftsman whose work explores the formal possibilities of realism with themes of urban life, urban environments, and narrative-often through dense multi-figural compositions.
Eric earned his BFA at Indiana University and continued his studies in New York City with Andy Reiss and at the Art Students League. He has had solo shows in New York City and New Haven, CT. His paintings are featured in a permanent exhibitions at Yale New Haven Hospital at 150 Sargent Drive, Cornell Scott Hill Health Center and Yale School of Medicine in New Haven, CT. You can also see his public outdoor murals in downtown New Haven at the State Street Station and in Temple Plaza.
Honors include a the 2025 CT Artist Fellowship, New Haven Arts Council Grant, Queens Council on the Arts Individual Artist Grant, the Provincetown Dune Shack Residency and the Hudson River Fellowship. Eric served as the Department Head of the Painting and Drawing Department at the National Academy School in NY in 2014-15. He currently teaches at the Art Students League (NYC) and Creative Arts Workshop (New Haven). He lives in New Haven, CT with his wife and two boys and has a studio in Erector Square.
Artist Statement: My cityscapes of New York, created between 2005 and 2014, were a way for me to discover and celebrate a city that I had newly moved to in 2001. Painting, mainly plein-air paintings and drawings done on the street, was a way to create a record of a city that was always changing. This painting, for example, was started when the Vinegar Hill power plant had four smoke stacks-and by the end of the painting it had only one.
Christina Joy
Bio: Christina Joy is a multidisciplinary visual artist born, and raised, in New York City.
The artist works with photography, collage and digital media to capture intimate scenes and details within, both, natural and urban landscapes.
To her, fleeting moments are intriguing. As are the extraordinary items that hide in plain sight. She finds beauty and complexity in flickers of light, dark shadows, billowing storm clouds, wilted petals and physical structures in states of glory or decline. Her aim is to document and memorialize the uniquity and impermanence of moments, places and things.
After receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree, Joy honed her design skills and artistic style at venerable advertising agencies DDB Worldwide, N.W. Ayer and TBWA Worldwide. During her agency tenure she was entrusted with an array of creative responsibilities that ranged from designing corporate identities and brand communications to producing and styling photo and video shoots. Craving independence, she eventually founded an interdisciplinary creative consultancy that utilizes an integrative approach for crafting compelling visual expressions and communications.
Joy believes that her artwork benefits from her creative experience with the applied arts. She finds that a certain synergy can be achieved with an eclectic blend of concepts, elements and techniques from both practices.