Marvin Touré

Marvin Touré is an Ivorian-American artist who uses the objects of innocence as a vehicle to interrogate the intersection of race and mental illness. In 2014 he received a B.A. in New Media Arts with a minor in Architecture from Southern Polytechnic State University (now Kennesaw State University) in Marietta, Georgia. Touré then received an M.F.A. in Fine Arts from The School of Visual Arts in 2016 and soon after completed a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been included in exhibitions at the Jan Brandt Gallery (2015) in Bloomington, Illinois, the Material Art Fair (as part of an art and curatorial project) “Mini Bar” in Mexico City (2016), the PRIZM art fair in Miami, Florida (2016), and Project for Empty Space at Gateway Project Spaces in Newark, New Jersey (2016) among others. In 2017 Touré was included in “Race and Revolution: Still Separate – Still Unequal,” which was first presented at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, New York, with subsequent exhibitions at the University of Connecticut-Stamford (2018), Pennsylvania State University(2019), and the August Wilson African American Cultural Center (2019) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During the summer of 2018, Touré presented his first solo exhibition at the AC Institute in New York City, and shortly after was named as one of five 2018 FSP/Jerome Foundation Fellows. In 2019 he presented his second solo exhibition, Paranoia’s Midnight, at haul gallery in Brooklyn, New York followed by two group exhibitions in 2020 at Latchkey Gallery in New York City and Eastern Connecticut State University.

Black Bile Toys

Black Bile Toys was an American toy company founded in 1991. Black Bile was created by a
clandestine group referred to only as “The BBC. ” Research suggests, that their ranks were filled
with excommunicated doctors from the Thorne Institute for the Negro Insane. The BBC’s mission
was to create toys that reflected the melancholy they treated their patients for at the
institute. Most toy companies focused on aspirational objects and fun, the industry had
effectively cornered the market on happiness. The BBC wondered who made toys for those souls
who were not fluent in the language of happiness? It was out of this void that Black Bile Toys
was created with the tagline: “We feel your pain.”

To view more of Marvin Touré’s work please visit their website.