On Wednesday, October 22nd at 7 p.m. stars will fill Ramscale's Manhattan penthouse at 463 West Street to honor Danny Simmons and the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation. In 1995 brothers Russell, Danny and Joseph Simmons established the Foundation to provide disadvantaged urban youth with significant exposure and access to the arts, as well as providing exhibition opportunities to under-represented artists and artists of color. For thirteen years the Foundation has been steadfast in its mission via three core programs: providing grants, establishing exhibition space and mentoring young people.

The evening's "Urban Renaissance" theme will feature an art auction of the work of seventeen outstanding artists. The auction will benefit Sybarite Productions' non-profit Artist Development Center, which provides underprivileged children with classes in dance, fine arts, photography, video and music production. Mr. Simmons notes, "We are proud to be assisting Sybarite Production's Artist Development Center as they continue their mission and our joint vision of bringing outstanding arts programs to underserved urban communities."

Guests will enjoy a dance performance from the Sybarite Dancers, DJ stylings from Rich Medina and Tommy Bones, and the chance to bid on artwork and photography by noted artists including Marc Baptiste, Cecile Chong, Barron Claiborne, Lauri Lyons, Jamel Shabazz, Hank Willis, and burgeoning artists Alaric Campbell, Cochrane, Chanel Cook, Cricket, Craig LaCourt, Diana Reyes, Dwayne Rodgers, Dister Rondon, Amy Sherald, Francis Simeni, and Stacey Wilson. (For images of the artwork to be auctioned, please visit sybariteproductions.net/charityauction.)

Dinna Alexanyan, Founder of Sybarite Productions Artist Development Center says, "As a young organization, Sybarite is proud to be involved with Danny Simmons and Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation; Mr. Simmons has been an invaluable role model and mentor for us during our continuous growth process. We are most grateful to Scion which has been a faithful supporter of ours from the beginning; Scion's loyalty and assistance to our arts program has helped us flourish."

Mike Lemke, Region Scion Manager, states, "We are proud to sponsor this Urban Renaissance event in support of the Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation and Sybarite Productions' Artists Development Center; Scion values being 'united by individuality' and we're happy to help recognize both of these marvelous organizations which enable the youth of our City to study and become empowered through the arts."
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Marc Baptise was born in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti. He moved to New York at an early age and began to study photography in high school. After receiving his formal training in photography, graphic design and advertising, he pursued his passion for photography, traveling between Paris, New York and London shooting the collections for various magazines. His work continues to appear in magazines such as Vanity Fair, Elle, Cosmopolitan, Trace, German Glamour, and Clam. He has photographed celebrities including Yoko Ono, Eva Mendez, Colin Farrell, Forest Whitaker and Chloe Sevigny. Solo exhibitions of his work include Milk Gallery in New York, Exposure Gallery in London and Modernbook Gallery in San Francisco. His books include Beautiful Nudes 2001, Intimate Nudes 2003, and Marc Baptiste Nudes 2007. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and children. www.marcbaptiste.com

Born and raised in the New York City area, Alaric Campbell studied at the School of Visual Arts and is best known for his portrait photography. His works has been featured in Urban Ink, Platinum Plus, Antenna, Scratch, Private Air, and Trader Monthly, among others. He is the curator of the Urban Renaissance Art Auction. www.alaricphoto.com

Cecile Chong was born in Ecuador of Chinese parents. Her work has been included in exhibitions at El Museo del Barrio's Bienal: The (S) Files, Danny Simmons' Corridor Gallery and Kenise Barnes Fine Art. Cecile's work is in the collections of Citibank Art Advisory and El Museo del Barrio. This spring she participated in the Aljira Center for Comtemporary Art's Emerge 10 program, and in July she was a resident at Vermont Studio Center. Cecile is a Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Grant 2008 recipient and her work was selected for the Lynn Gumpert Award at ISE Cultural Foundation. She obtained an MFA from Parsons The New School for Design, an MA in Education from Hunter College, and a BA in Studio Art from Queens College. Her early schooling took place in Ecuador, Macau and Mainland China. She lives in New York City. www.cecilechong.com

Barron Claiborne was born and raised in Boston, Massachusetts. He is a self-taught photographer and began taking photographs at the age of ten after receiving a camera as a gift from his mother. Claiborne works primarily in large format. In 1990 he moved to New York City. His work has appeared in numberous publications including Newsweek, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Interview, among others. His photos are featured in museums and private collections throughout the world. His work has appeared in group exhibitions at the Time & Life Building, the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Skylight Gallery, and is in the permanent collections of The Polaroid Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts and The Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas. www.barronclaiborne.com

Brooklyn native Cochrane, was born into a West Indian culture filled with color and passion. During his early adolescent years he became fascinated with the way cinema photography was used as an artist's tool of the trade on some of the movies he enjoyed. Armed with a Canon digital SLR, Cochrane seeks to recreate a similar approach through his photography. He shoots a wide range of subjects and scenery, always questioning the perfect angle and lighting to best convey the emotions he hopes to invoke within the viewer.

James "Cricket" Colter is a hip-hop dancer who has opened concerts for major recording artists and performed in international hip-hop competitions. He is an accomplished illustrator whose work is heavily influenced by hip-hop culture. Cricket is a founding member of the Crazy-Natives, an artistic collective fusing visual and physical art to gain creative options.

Chanel Cook is an artist singularly devoted to the texture of art. Her love of texture eventually caused hero to experiment with layering, creating subtle topographical landscapes to her paintings. Layering and obscuring certain parts of an image with another, she then began cutting entire completed paintings into strips and reassembling them, forming finished pieces, which while still containing the original subjects, became entirely different works of art in the process. Her exploration of texture continues today, as she works on her next series involving pencil and charcoal sketches and collage. Ms. Cook studied studio art and art history at Drew University. She is also an intellectual property attorney, counseling artists, gallery owners and private institutions on all aspects of the art industry. She lives in Montclair, NJ with her husband and three children. www.artbychanel.com

Photographer Craig Albert LaCourt was born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and raised in the Upper Peninsula of Micihigan. He studied fine art photography in the BFA program at Western Michigan University, where he won multiple awards for his intriguing imagery, while holding several solo shows and participating in multiple group shows. He moved to New York in 2000, where he has worked with other talented photographers, traveling throughout the world on editorial and advertising projects. His own work has been featured in several magazines, on numerous album covers and as national promotions for record labels. He currently lives in Red Hook, Brooklyn with his wife and two dogs. www.calindustries.com

Lauri Lyons was born in the Bronx. She earned a BFA in Media Arts from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. From 1993 to 1998, she worked as a freelance photo editor for Magnum Photos, The Source, B.E.T. and Essence Magazine. During that time, she also worked as a photo assistant for Bruce Davidson and National Geographic photographer David Alan Harvey. In 2003, she became the first Black woman to shoot the cover of Fortune magazine and in 2006, she became the first Black female photographer to be signed to Getty Images. Her work is also represented by Corbis Sygma. From 2000 to present, she has served as a faculty member for the International Center of Photography, Rhode Island School of Design and as the Director of Photography for the Leave Out Violence youth program. She is a recipient of the Sacatar Fellowship. "In the Frame" is an award-winning documentary short about her life and work as a photographer. She currently resides in New York City. www,laurilyons.com

FLY LADY DI has lead a life as bright and colorful as her mosaic-like paintings. Also revered as a fashionista and dancer, this multi-dimensional Toronto native has won Art Awards in both elementary and high school and briefly attended McGill University for Art History. Her dance skills were featured in the movie "Honey" (2003 Universal) as well as music videos for Tweet, Fabolous, Ashlee Simpson, and Fall Out Boy's "Dance Dance" (winner of the MTV's"Viewer's Choice" Award). She has performed in 35 live art shows in her first 6 months of doing live art, which gave her highlighted press in THE VILLAGE VOICE, TRACE, COMPLEX, YRB, LUSSW (Japan) and FREE and to name a few. With a style unseen before in the History of Art, Di combines her influences of Art Deco, Graffiti and Cubism to create work that pulsates from canvas to viewer, providing a soulful look into her inner thoughts and emotions. www.myspace.com/flyladydi

Dwayne R. Rodgers is a photographer based in New York City. His works are included in the Ross Bleckner Collection, the Cisneros Collection, the Sackler Collection, the Rose Family Collection, Susan Sarandon's collection, and Richard Gere's collection, among others. He holds a degree in Philosophy and Math from St. John's College, Annapolis, Maryland. He has traveled extensively to work on a series of photographs about global sacred water rituals.

Dister Rondon (DisterNYC) is an artist, dancer and choreographer from Washington Heights. www.disternyc.com

Jamel Shabazz first started taking pictures at the age of fifteen, and hasn't put the camera down since. The Author of four monographs Back in the Days, The Last Sunday in June, A Time Before Crack, and Seconds of my Life, Jamel has been greatly influenced by photographers Leonard Freed, James Van Der Zee, and Gordon Parks. In 2007 Jamel founded Project Positivity in Toronto, a series workshops geared towards teaching youth documentary photography, thus affording the students opportunities to exhibit their work in galleries. Jamel is also a teaching artist with the Rush Philanthropic foundation, and has worked with the "Expanding the Walls" program, supported by the Studio Museum in Harlem. His work has been exhibited at the Brooklyn Museum of Arts, the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, the Corridor Gallery in Brooklyn, The Museum of the City of New York, the Nathan Cummings Foundation, and the Memphis College of Arts. Jamel is a retired member of the NYC Department of Corrections and currently works as a documentary photographer. He is also a member of the photo collective Kamoinge. www.jamelshabazz.com

Amy Sherald was born in Columbus, Georgia and received a BA in Painting at Clark-Atlanta University. She was a participant in the Spelman College International Artist-in-Reisdence program in Portobelo, Panama in 1997, where she also assisted in installing and curating shows in the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo and for the 1999 South American Biennale in Lima, Peru. She attended the Maryland Institute College of Art where she earned her M.F.A. in Painting. After graduating, she secured a prestigious private study residency with Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrum whom she lived and studied with in Larvik Norway. She has just returned from an artistic residency assistantship in Beijing at the Tong Zion Art Center and is currently living in Baltimore, Md. www.amysherald.com

Francis Simeni was born in Lagos, Nigeria and was raised there, in Poland and in New York City. He studied Illustration and Toy Design at FIT. He works in oil, acrylic, watercolor and ink. His work has appeared in several MadArts Group Shows and he has participated in the AGAST (Annual Gowanus Artists Studio Tour) in fall 2006 and 2007. He had a solo show at the Sensei Gallery in New York City in July, 2007. His work can be seen at the Red Horse Caf� in Brooklyn, the OneWay Gallery in Narragansett, RI and the Hammonds House Museum in Atlanta, GA. www.francosi2.com

Hank Willis Thomas was raised in New York City. He received his B.F.A. from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and an M.A. in Visual Criticism and an M.F.A. in Photography from California College of the Arts. He has exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the US and abroad, including the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, MA, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, GA, the African American Museum in Philadelphia, PA, Artists Space, NY, the Leica Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, the National Museum of American History and the National Portrait Gallery. He has received a Media Arts Fellowship from the Rockefeller Foundation, an Investing in Artists Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation, San Francisco and held numerous Artist in Residence positions in the US and in Paris, France. His photographs have been featured in a number of books and publications, including Forty Million Dollar Slves: The Rise, Fall, and Redemption of the Black Athlete by William C. Rhoden, Reflections in Black: A History of African American Photographers and Black: A Celebration of a Culture, both edited by Deborah Willis, and The Spirit of a Family, by Al and Tipper Gore. www.hankwillisthomas.com

Multi-tasking artist Stacey Wilson is an acclaimed graphic designer, flourishing artist, widely sought after promoter, and owner and (co)-creator of squarebiz & FLYGIRRL, her new venture that brings together her art, design and events efforts. She attained her love for drawing, illustrating and painting while studying graphic design at Philadelphia's Hussian School of Art, and began her design career creating promotional materials for the entertainment and restaurant industries while managing an urban nightclub, Brave New World. Her promotion and event planning company, Squarebiz has been a staple of Philly nightlife since 2001. She has also been responsible for branding a merchandise line, those infamous "jawn" t-shirts as well as creating a much needed urban newpaper for Philadelphia, The Jawn. Her works on wood, canvas and sneakers have been featured on the walls of MTV's The Real World Philadelphia house and on UPN 57's Half and Half, the pages of Jill Scott's book of poetry, The Moments, The Minutes, The Hours, and a pair of Air Force One's for the Sneaker Pimps Tour. www.flygirrl.com