OPENING

Visual artist and technologist Vincent Peters known as ÆTHELSTAN presented the Art is Dead exhibition featuring new works for Black History Month at Carlton Fine Arts on 5th Avenue. ÆTHELSTAN partnered with Decree349R, a non-profit organization created to counter Decree 349 in Cuba, which forbids artists from creating any type of music or art without the government’s permission, to create this new series.

Peters connected with Decree349R’s board members Elis Pacheco, Amaury Pacheco and Luis Eligio Perez, who reached out about creating this collection to help the families of the artists in prison, including Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, one of Time Magazine’s Top 100 Most influential people in 2021 and Cuban performance artist, and Maykel Castillo, a Latin Grammy winning rapper. Both are members of the San Isidro Movement, where artists have banned together to protest against the government’s increased censorship of artistic expression in Cuba.

The collection was born out of conversations Peters had with these two imprisoned artists to showcase the magnitude of the damage Decree 349 had on the Cuban artist communi- ty. Art is Dead features 18 acrylic and oil pastel paintings with highlights including Life & Country, The Artist, Farenheit, Libertad, Samo Samo Stewart, Pananoia and Libertad Burning. Ice-T bought the first work in this series entitled Flames and was a key figurehead in a freedom of speech saga in 1992 and now serves as a spokesperson for the movement.

The artist creates paintings with acrylics and oil sticks with two main styles of artistic expression: one being neo expression paintings made for current and in the now events and the other being hyper realistic paintings/portraits of customers and well-known individuals. 100% of the profits from Art is Dead goes to supporting artists through Decree349R.org.

In addition, Vince spotlighted four portraits including Ice-T, Jay-Z, Basquiat and NASA Astronaut Victor Glover, a new series that features African Americans who have inspired and influenced ÆTHELSTAN’s career.

Vincent Peters is a former alum of Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Starlink companies. He studied engineering, Ai and Blockchain at West Point,

Oxford and MIT. The success that he found with the blockchain and the NFT spaces afforded him the opportunity to dedicate himself fully to the arts.

Vincent is also the CEO and Founder of Inheritance Art, an artificial intelligence and animation laboratory focused on creating hyper realistic and volumetric intelligent content. Over the next three years, inheritance Art aims to become a top leader in the NFT/ intelligent NFT space supported by our studio for mixed reality and hyper realistic productions.

He is a technologist at heart and most of his creations are in the not-so-distant future. The reason he makes art is to more clearly share his vision of the future and to commentate with as little words possible on things that are going on in the world. For more information visit: www.inheritance-art.com or @vincentpeters