Kate Bellm Rocks

Felicia Atanasiu grew up in Bucharest and arrived in Toronto not knowing what illustration was. One life drawing class later, she found her path. Her work layers post-communist Eastern European memory against 70s psychedelia and avant-garde fashion — transparencies and ornamental drawing colliding into something that is unmistakably hers. This is the conversation we had with her.

They started in a shared studio in Miami's Little Haiti, drawn to the spectacle of vibrant colour pouring out of Haitian export businesses — bales of discarded clothing sorted and piled in improbable rainbows. Alain Guerra and Neraldo de la Paz began collecting what others threw away. Then they started building worlds from it.

Fabian De La Flor works a full-time job at The Miami Herald, raises a family, and makes emotionally charged drawings of city landscapes that read like a personal timeline — each figure a photograph from his own life. He did a mural in Wynwood. The V&A hasn't called yet, but the Museo de Arte de El Salvador has. This is the conversation.

Zakee Shariff has always had one aim — to touch people through her work. Since founding her studio in 1998, that hasn't changed, even as the practice has expanded from fashion and textiles into spiritually guided painting, coaching, and collaborative projects from Chicago to Tokyo. The V&A bought one of her prints. She has drawn on walls with Cody Hudson and talked life and the universe with Futura 2000 at 2am in Japan. This is her story.

Erni Vales began painting subway cars in the mid-1980s. In 1993 he introduced 3D graffiti to the world — not a stylistic development but a dimensional one. He has since painted 500 club murals, built sets for David LaChapelle shoots with Madonna and Elton John, designed a bar in Moscow, painted a sculpture for Mercury Records, completed 169 paintings in 13 months, and currently runs EVLworld Studio in Miami. His favourite artist is Chuck Close. Jackie 60 at Mother was the last really great New York club.