Yashua Klos

Wingate Studio is pleased to announce three new etchings by Yashua Klos, marking the artist’s first collaboration with the press. Klos’s practice features large-scale multimedia collage that incorporates handmade woodblock prints. In his first foray into intaglio copper plate etching, Klos chose to focus on the drawn mark while exploring the layered world of color unique to the aquatint etching process. 

The artist created three compositions, entitled The Wildflowers at Sunset, The Wildflowers at Sunrise, and The Wildflowers Will Rebuild This City, describing his aunt’s hands holding wildflowers. He weaves Art Deco patterns throughout the images and layers with saturated colors. 

In his work, Klos explores the historic Great Migration from the Jim Crow south to cities like Detroit in pursuit of vocational opportunities. He chooses wildflowers native to the urban Detroit landscape as a metaphor for the resilience of the African American population. In Klos’ words: “Sprawling wildflowers stand in for Black families, like my own, who made the city their home—even when displaced. Wildflowers grow without permission. They reclaim the landscape where factories once flourished.”

Klos draws inspiration from Art Deco design, which emerged in 19th-century Detroit as a symbol of futurist progress and industrious ambition. In these compositions, he depicts the hand of an African American woman—his reference to exploitative labor—while simultaneously defying that expectation by filling it with playful wildflowers that breathe new life into the city.

Wingate Studio

Spring 2025

In the studio

About the artist

Yashua Klos (b. 1977, Chicago, IL) received a BFA from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (2000) and an MFA from Hunter College, City University of New York (2009), both in Fine Art. A major solo institutional show, Yashua Klos: OUR LABOUR, curated by Tracy L. Adler, was presented at the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY, in 2022. Other notable exhibitions include Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN (2023), Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2024), and the Phillips Collection, Washington, DC (2024); Yashua Klos: OUR LIVING, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, ME (2022); Elegies: Still Lifes in Contemporary Art, Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco, CA (2022); and Africa, Imagined: Reflections on Modern and Contemporary Art at Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI (2022). Klos’ work is included in the permanent collections of the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, MI; the Seattle Art Museum, WA; and the Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College, Clinton, NY. He has been awarded residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, BRIC Arts, the Joan Mitchell Center, Skowhegan, and the Vermont Studio Center. Klos is the recipient of a 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation grant and a 2015 New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship. Klos lives in Harlem, NY, and works in the Bronx, NY.