Painting Hope in the Metaverse

Portraiture has been at the center of Sophia Victor’s work since her early days of painting at the prestigious LaGuardia High School of Music and Art, the only specialized high school for the arts in New York City. The Brooklyn-based artist, famous for her activism and large public murals, discovered her passion while working on a portrait of her father. “Everything at that point was just an experiment,” she said.

Victor, who was formerly known as Sophia Dawson, said her early pieces were created as “vibrant, over-the-top” portraits to evoke reactions of joy, excitement, honor and adoration. “I really enjoyed being a part of that reaction,” she says.

But the purpose behind her art changed when a close family member, a woman she describes as a second mother, was imprisoned at Rikers Island and then sent upstate to serve a ten-year prison sentence. “I went from just doing things to get a reaction out of people to [making art] that would invoke a remembrance of a person.”

Victor says having a family member incarcerated opened her eyes to a community of relatives who every week get on the trains and buses, go through security, and subject themselves to search by prison guards to visit their loved ones behind bars. That experience gave her compassion for a demographic to which she suddenly belonged. The lasting effect of this experience paved the way for her later work, “To Be Free,” a series of portraits depicting current U.S.-held political prisoners from the Black Liberation Movement. It also led to her involvement in workshops by Artistic Noise, a Harlem-based nonprofit organization for adolescents detained at facilities such as Rikers Island. “I realized art can transform a space. It can tell a story that no one has time to listen to,” she says.

Now the muralist is venturing into a new medium: digital art for the metaverse. Victor recently teamed up with the OZY Genius Awards program to create a series of original non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, which will be minted this fall. She is optimistic about the potential of NFTs for artists and contends that the digital world, in her experience, made the arts community much more accessible by bringing together artists, collectives and art dealers from across the world into one space.

Victor emphasizes the benefit of potential immediate visibility that comes with an exhibition in an open digital platform. The issues reflected in her work are urgent, she says. In that sense, the process of preparing an exhibition in a physical space — all the steps from finding a location and partners, to months of promotion — can feel “selfish” and counterproductive to the cause. The digital world, on the other hand, is free from those restrictions, and can help spread “the word behind the work.”

There is, however, another side worth considering. Victor says the internet is good at raising awareness and amplifying the causes of social justice, but at the same time minimizes the visibility of both victims and activists. She also observes how being active in the space of social media can make us complacent about our political activism. Social media activism, in her eyes, does not necessarily carry the same gravity as physically getting together to act.

The series created for OZY, spotlighting nine previous winners of the OZY Genius Awards, will be Victor’s first major digital commission opening her work to new audiences and elevating her career to a new level. Having spent years transforming the lives of young people on Rikers Island and across New York, Victor says she’s excited to make a positive imprint on the metaverse and engage with its community.

— by Sylwia Serafinowicz

TRYING Means Discovering: Innovation Under the Sun!

It's not always easy to change the world — but that's not slowing down Antonia “Toni” Ginsberg-Klemmt. The 22-year-old renewable energy entrepreneur's GismoPower™, a fully portable solar carport, is primed to revolutionize solar and help consumers take the power into their own hands.

“This is actually a startup that can change the world, or change the whole idea of affordable renewable energy,” affirms Ginsberg-Klemmt, who, with her engineer father, designed the first compact, fully collapsible, affordable and very powerful system to use at home — all before her 20th birthday. Now, a few short years and several prestigious grants later, the Florida native is sailing toward her goal. But the journey hasn't always been smooth.

By integrating a modular portable solar carport and EV-Charger, GismoPower's patented MEGA™ system (Mobile Electricity Generating Appliance) can easily generate enough energy to power a home and an electric vehicle (EV). In Florida, though, this system doesn't fall under any easy regulatory category." And that's causing some friction with the state's power company. “Florida’s regulations favor the utilities over distributed solar,” Ginsberg-Klemmt said. “When individuals control their own electricity generation, Florida Power and Light (FPL) loses money. Utilities monopolize the power industry. What they're trying to do is have consumers pay for them to control electricity generation. We need to take that back.”

To bypass regulatory red tape, Ginsberg-Klemmt plans to get her GismoPower MEGA rack officially UL-listed with Intertek as an electricity generating appliance. “Appliances that consume electricity can easily be purchased and plugged into the electric grid with ease and without onerous permitting, but as soon as someone wants to generate and feed electricity into the grid, permitting purgatory breaks loose. We should no longer accept this unjustified roadblock,” said Ginsberg-Klemmt.

While the Sunshine State may be in no mood to capitalize on its greatest free resource, other states are. “We packed up three GismoPower MEGAs and drove them to California, where we have plenty of support. We also know now that we have enthusiastic support in North Carolina, where our first clients just ordered a second system. So we're thinking, ‘Okay if we can get these systems approved in California and North Carolina, then hopefully we'll be able to bring everything back to Florida.’”

Not only has Ginsberg-Klemmt found enthusiastic backing in two other states, she's gained the seal of approval from several impressive organizations, including the U.S. Department of Energy, which has awarded her a $206,000 SBIR grant. She also won this year’s $175,000 American Made Solar Prize and others, for a grand total of $437,000.

In her spare time, the soon-to-be college senior also taught herself CAD (computer-aided design) to digitally render blueprints as her projects mount and her designs evolve. “I've done all our different prototypes and sent them to the structural engineering firm to create signed and sealed plans. They review my work and basically put their stamp of approval using my drawings. I'm like, ‘wow, I can be an engineer. This is totally possible!’ So it's been very, very fun. But also very difficult.”

Difficulty is something Ginsberg-Klemmt and her role models — including climate activist Greta Thunberg and Green New Deal champion Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — have no problem facing head-on. And neither does her father and business partner, Achim Ginsberg-Klemmt, the other great influence in her life. “If it weren’t for my dad, I probably would not have gotten into solar energy,” she says. “I was born in Hawaii and literally raised on a sailboat. We moved off the boat when I turned 6, but I remember the solar panels on the back of the boat and my dad telling me that it was thanks to those panels that we had lights in the cabin or that we could plug in our laptop for playing games.”

At home in Florida, Ginsberg-Klemmt got her original idea from her own EV: “Every time I plugged in my Nissan Leaf at the college, I knew that electricity was still coming from FPL [Florida Power and Light]. Back at my house, I knew we were running on sunshine. Why could we not shade my car and create energy from the burning Florida sun at the same time? It’s absolutely not rocket science!”

It wasn't just Ginsberg-Klemmt's dad who believed in her — her first solid financial backing came in 2021 in the form of a $10,000 OZY Genius Award. “OZY was basically our little feeder into this insanely amazing experience.”

With exciting projects, partnerships and possible prizes on the horizon, Ginsberg-Klemmt thinks more about what's working than what isn't, and is nothing if not sunny about what lies ahead. “I tried surfing for the first time, and that was for me kind of a visualization like, ‘Hey, you won't catch every wave but, you know, if there's a wave that works for you, just take it.’” We, and the world, can be very glad Toni Ginsberg-Klemmt has taken this wave.

— by Jennifer Ladonne

Do you have a Genius idea?