Assets for Artists is thrilled to announce the latest group of artists to join our Massachusetts Matched Savings cohort! In this post, you’ll find the first half of this year’s fabulous enrollees.
Phil Berman
Phil Berman (Somerville) is a singer-songwriter whose band, Phil and the Flying Leap, marries early jazz, Golden Age Musical theater, and bluesy, radio-ready Americana to tell unabashedly queer stories that navigate, question, and affirm the human heart in an increasingly absurd digital world. His newest record, Play the Part, will be released later in 2020. Phil has also served as music director of Rock and Roll Daycare since 2013, where he designs and curates the school’s world music curriculum that brings the arts, culture, and foreign language study into the early childhood classroom. He is the co-founder and creator of Fiddlefox which publishes world music curriculum resources for young children, teachers, and families. The A4A Capacity-Building program will allow him to promote his latest album to a broader audience.
Eli Brown
Eli Brown (Revere) is an interdisciplinary artist working in living media, drawing, sculpture, performance, video, and social practice. His work explores the histories and futurities of queer and trans subjectivities, communities and intimacies, and deals with anthropocentrism as it relates to conceptions of evolution and species. Eli is the founder of A Stitch In Time: Trans Family Archives. Recent work has been featured at venues including Creative Time, The deCordova Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts Memorial Hunt Library, and Fountain Street Gallery in Boston. Brown is a recent recipient of The Boston Foundation's Collaborate Boston Grant and Culture Push's Fellowship for Utopian Practice. He will use the takeaways from A4A’s Capacity-Building program to make projects like A Stitch in Time more sustainable.
Eva Camacho-Sanchez
Born and raised in Andalucía, Spain, Eva Camacho-Sanchez (Florence) is a fiber artist who works most often with hand-dyed wool that is felted with silk or mulberry paper and then stitched, beaded, or printed on. Her work uses 100% natural and biodegradable materials, including natural dyes, and locally-sourced and sustainable raw materials, all with an emphasis on low-impact creative processes like reduced water consumption. Her goals for 2020 include teaching herself how to make mulberry paper, which currently has to travel a global distance to reach her studio. Her work often takes on questions of climate change, and her inclusion in an opioid awareness exhibit at the Fuller Craft Museum recently expanded her creative work into broader social realms. In 2020, she hopes to invest in developing a platform for online workshops for her growing network of students, while also beginning work on upcoming solo exhibitions. She will use her A4A Capacity-Building grant funds toward materials for these new shows.
Heather Cassano
Heather Cassano (West Newton) is a documentary filmmaker and the founder of Spin One Films. Her films are reminiscent of the direct cinema movement, adopting a patient invested approach with her subjects. Heather blends this observational style with deeply personal narratives, striving to tell authentic stories through her personal experiences. In 2018, Heather premiered her first feature-length documentary The Limits of My World to a packed cinema at the Independent Film Festival Boston. The film went on to screen at numerous festivals across the United States and internationally, winning three Best Documentary awards and a Jury Prize. Heather is now hard at work on her second feature-length documentary The Fate of Human Beings. The project was recently awarded a pre-production grant from the LEF Foundation Moving Image Fund. She will use the A4A Capacity-Building program to strategize future funding streams and to establish an emergency fund.
Jourdan Christopher
Jourdan Christopher (Dorchester) is an African-American artist and photographer born in Detroit, MI, and raised in Memphis, TN. Inspired photographically by the likes of Andre Wagner, Roy DeCarava, Garry Winogrand, Gordon Parks, James Van Der Zee, and Carie Mae Weems, Jourdan turns moments into images of both fine art and social commentary. Focusing on race, class, gender and normality, community activism, and his own life experience, Jourdan creates visuals and narratives that place the viewer before and within the moment. His photography and writing have been featured in the Boston Globe, Boston.com, and a number of other galleries and publications in Boston and beyond. He is in the midst of developing a short film series, about many of the struggles he and other artists in Boston have faced in their creative lives and will direct his A4A Capacity-Building grant funds toward this project.
Eli Epstein / Union Press
Eli Epstein (Somerville) is a letterpress printer, designer, educator and co-founder of Union Press. The neighborhood printshop began in 2010 using the tools and equipment of an old union printshop that once operated in the same space. Fusing a contemporary understanding of design principles with a growing mastery of analog printing techniques, Eli collaborates with artists, organizations, and the local community to design and print posters for cultural events, host apprenticeships for art and design students and teach workshops. All of his imagery is drawn and carved by hand from linoleum and wood and all printed text is set by hand. He enjoys utilizing moveable type as a populist information-sharing technique and a form of public art. He currently teaches at Raw Art Works in Lynn, MA and at Montserrat College of Art. He is most looking forward to the professional development opportunities the A4A Capacity-Building program offers in order to design a sustainable business model and plan for the irregular flow of project income.
Tsar Fedorsky
Tsar Fedorsky (Gloucester) is an art photographer and 2018 Guggenheim Fellow whose work has been exhibited nationally and published worldwide. She was awarded an Artist Fellowship Grant from the Massachusetts Cultural Council in 2015 and was a Critical Mass Finalist in 2015 and 2017. Her series The Light Under the Door was published by Peperoni Books in 2017. Tsar continues to work on projects, including her most recent series, Long Way Home. She is currently editing “The Light Across the Border," a series of black and white photographs from Mexico. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Tsar will focus on developing a marketing plan for both the local and national levels of her work.
Sam Fein
Sam Fein's (Cambridge/Somerville) large-scale paintings and mixed media drawings deconstruct interpersonal relations and emotional conditions within social frameworks of power. Drawing upon her upbringing in Southern Arizona, she fuses memory with imagination to create densely layered narratives that are both comedic and bizarre. Rather than replicating the literalism of the physical world, each piece gives voice to a uniquely individualized reality. Sam’s artwork has been exhibited at The American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), Smack Mellon (Brooklyn, NY), and Hillyer Art Space (Washington, D.C.). She will use her Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant to fund a limited edition print series featuring a select number of her paintings.
Ana Fernandez
Ana Fernandez (Longmeadow) is a visual artist originally trained in her home country of Spain who turned to printmaking, digital, fiber arts, and papermaking after moving to the U.S. Her method involves alternating between the digital and analog realms, oftentimes within the same piece, as she compiles physical and digital layers of paint, fabric, prints, and drawings. Her work focuses on the interaction between fashion and the female body as a repository for a range of cultural and psychological experiences. Recently, she has turned her research to the formal relationships between clothing and the body by considering clothes as a second skin. She will use the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant funds to purchase a large-format inkjet printer, which will allow her to print and collage larger-scale images.
Elizabeth James
Elizabeth James (Boston) was born and raised in Roxbury, MA, and attended Boston public schools. She was introduced to musical theatre in the third grade, where she landed the role of “Annie,” and in the fifth grade she penned her first play, “Maya’s Party”. She continued her love for theatre throughout high school and studied theatre arts at Bennett College in Greensboro, NC. She completed her degree at University of Massachusetts Boston in 2006. Elizabeth believes that everyone has a story, and that sometimes, to stay alive, a person must tell their story.
Photo credit: Jon Beckley
Rebecca Kopycinski
Rebecca Kopycinski (Medford) is a singer/composer, filmmaker, and multimedia performance artist. For the past several years, her work has focused on the creation of an elaborate and sprawling dystopia collectively known as Reagan Esther Myer (the name of the protagonist at the center of the story). The narrative unfolds through a collection of works including interactive digital experiences, immersive installations, music, and multimedia performance. From the safety of this dystopian creation, she aims to make sense of the chaotic, current-day world. In 2020 she plans to develop this project into a video game and work with new communities to host her live REM performance. Her A4A Capacity-Building grant funds will go toward these current goals.
Jennifer Langhammer
Jennifer Langhammer (Vineyard Haven) is a ceramic sculptor whose work is informed by the growth and evolution of organic material. Jennifer seeks to abstract the patterns of nature by removing them from their original contexts. Her most recent series involves ceramic reproductions of obsolete technologies being consumed by a natural element such as barnacles, moss, lichen or mold. This work ties into Jennifer’s undergraduate degree in Industrial Design, her love of nature, and her feelings about aging after turning fifty. To others, it is a meditation on a post-COVID world. She lives and works on Martha’s Vineyard with her family. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, she will develop a new website and situate herself in her new home studio.
Frantz Lexy
Frantz Lexy (Medford) is a Haitian-born, self-taught artist who works primarily in acrylic on canvas. His work explore themes of human relationships with nature, immigrant experience, and that of reality in the face of our increasingly digitalized lifestyle. In the future, he plans to use his work to better investigate black and brown people’s ability to access ethereal landscapes despite the politicized nature of their existence. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Frantz hopes to better understand how his work fits into the larger creative economy and how he can leverage public funding for his art.
Rebecca Lockhart
For the last 6 years, Rebecca Lockhart (Easthampton) has made her career as a full-time jeweler after leaving her job as a high school English teacher in NYC and gaining formal training in silversmithing and contemporary jewelry design in Mexico and Italy. Today, her jewelry draws from an industrial aesthetic, geometry, and modernist art and architecture using found, recycled, and hand-fabricated metal parts painted with powder coat. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Rebecca’s goal is to design and execute a business plan that lifts her creative practice from surviving to thriving.
Gabriella Magnani
Gabriella Magnani (Amherst) is a composer, arranger, vocalist, and pianist who has composed for student films, live theater, and improvisational dance works. In college, she was the first female student to complete a composition capstone (in nearly 30 years of required capstone projects). In 2016, she worked with composer Michael Friedman to create the original show "Purple State Purple Haze" in partnership with WNYC and The New Yorker, and was invited to participate as a composer in the International Summer Academy of Music in 2017. For the past year, she has been experimenting with electro-acoustic works and site-specific recorded audio. She will use the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant funds to professionally record three short pieces she has been working on to use as work samples for future projects.
Kristina Martino
Rendered with a single, black pencil, Kristina Martino’s hyper-realist drawings find themselves hovering between traditional and conceptual art as they explore the ways women have been represented throughout history and in contemporary society. With roots in the appropriation-based imagery that began with the “Pictures Generation” of the 70’s, Kristina’s images reveal a reverence for drawing and the techniques of the Old Masters filtered through a modern photographic lens, as pencil grain becomes reminiscent of film grain. Ultimately, the carefully chosen images, when grouped together, explore the archetypal roles of women on and off the screen. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Kristina is challenging herself to see her practice as a profession with more financial focus.
Rebecca McGowan
Choreographer and dancer Rebecca McGowan’s (Somerville) practice is rooted in traditional and original Irish dance. Her aesthetic draws from traditional step dancing and the musicality of sean-nós (“old style”) Irish dance, the grace of soft shoe, and the joy of social dance traditions. In a form typically taught as an athletic discipline in which the body carries a lot of tension, Rebecca continually seeks to find ease of movement through musicality that allows the freedom to look for the effortless. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Rebecca aims to create a viable financial model for both her dance school and company Rising Step to allow her greater stability in her creative work.
Jen Parrish-Hill / Parrish Relics
Jeweler Jen Parrish-Hill (Worthington) creates what she calls wearable shrines with references to nature, folklore and gothic architecture. Handcrafted in her studio with frames of individually sculpted polymer clay, for the past thirty years, Jen has sold her work through museum gift shops in Boston (ISGM) and London (British Museum, Tate Britain). Jen is now transitioning to a more sustainable practice of metal-smithing to be able to scale up production appropriately. Her jewelry uses hand-cut stained glass, semi-precious stones, and glass vessels, and are hand-painted and layered with patinas of silver and gold. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Jen will work with our trainers to translate her long-standing business into the new medium of metal-smithing in order to design a more financially sustainable practice.
Daisy Patton
Daisy Patton’s (Easthampton) artistic practice is focused on history and memory, with specific interests in family relationships and reproductive justice. In one on-going series, "Forgetting is so long," she enlarges abandoned family portraits to life-size and paints over them with oils to invite the viewer to consider who is worthy of being remembered. Two additional projects are "Would you be lonely without me?" a portrait series about women who died before Roe v. Wade and the portrait series "Put Me Back the Way They Found Me," that highlights female survivors of forced sterilization in the United States. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Daisy looks forward to learning more about financial strategizing for long-term life goals.
Sarah Pollman
Visual artist Sarah Pollman’s (Medford) work explores the tenuous nature of post-traumatic memory by interrogating the items often associated with memory: grave markers, discarded family photographs, and childhood objects. While working primarily with photographic media, her projects are designed to connect contemporary culture with its historical counterparts, and are becoming increasingly political following the 2016 election. Through 2020, this will take shape through her work as the Lead Artist for the Community Arts Initiative Artist Project at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. As she moves more into community-based works informed by education and social practices, Sarah is looking at ways to make this new direction of her practice sustainable, a goal she will set herself during the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program.
Polina Protsenko
Born in Estonia, Polina Protsenko (Boston) makes work through a performative process that focuses on human intimacy and agency in a social context. These experiences are often produced through gestures, collaborations, scripted interactions, site specific installations, print media, and videos. Lately, her work invites participants to re-imagine the potential capabilities our bodies and voices hold within a space. She recently earned her MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and is looking forward to expanding the production of her thesis work with the new audience of the Boston community.
José Rivera
José Rivera (Cambridge), aka Proxemia, is an architecturally-trained artist, designer, and educator investigating the intersections of aural and spatial experience. His practice is often expressed through electroacoustic music and experimental placed-based sound works, multichannel installation and performance, sound design for film, location recording, cartography, and graphic and architectural design. His works have been exhibited internationally, as well as at the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, Goethe-Institut Boston, ICA Boston, MIT’s MediaLab and more. His current research probes UFOs, psychonautics, and Puerto Rican identity. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, José plans to fund fieldwork on the island that will contribute to his on-going research.
Zoe Sasson
After many years of living in North Carolina, painter Zoe Sasson (Florence) has returned to her Western Massachusetts roots. Her creative work explores perplexing forms in an invented realm, where the unknown is transformed through a series of trials and errors—material risks and mishaps—until characters emerge and proudly proclaim joy while poking fun at their own existence. As shapes and patterns repeat themselves, painted lived-environments become more identifiable. From paper to fabric to canvas, in raised surfaces, crevices, and pockets, the characters become distinguished within a turbulent mismatch of materials. Now that she’s in Florence, her long-term goals are to teach art to high school students and to make a home for herself and her art within the Valley. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, she hopes to further her financial goals in these directions.
Alyssa Songsiridej
Fiction writer Alyssa Songsiridej (Cambridge) creates characters who ponder their own “moral inventory” to ascertain whether the ethical and emotional sum of their lives has damned them. Whether realist or surrealist, her short stories typically feature young women working and longing against the constrained circumstances of their lives. Recent publications include StoryQuarterly, the Offing, and Columbia: A Journal of Literature and Art. She earned her MFA at Temple University and has received residencies at the Ucross Foundation, Radgale Foundation, VCCA, VSC and others. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Alyssa hopes to assemble an effective business plan for her writing career.
Chanel Thervil
Chanel Thervil (Boston) is a Haitian American artist and educator obsessed with all things art, pop culture, and history. She recently completed a highly praised solo exhibition, “ENIGMA: Reactions to Racism” as a part of her residency at The Urbano Project. The recurring themes that steer her practice include: public dialogue, attentive listening, and reflective art-making that empowers those willing to engage in any part of the process. A recent resident at the Studios at MASS MoCA, Chanel plans to use the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program to better understand the business and financial underpinnings of a career as a full-time artist.
Erin Woodbrey
Erin Woodbrey’s (Orleans) body of cross-disciplinary work—videos, photographs, prints, and sculpture—mines the relationship between the natural world and architecture, as well as the processes inherent in human activity. Recently Erin’s work has interrogated the global environmental crisis as seen through objects, forest and mountain landscapes. Taking cues from the Deep Ecology, Land-based, and Ecological Art movements of the 1960s and ’70's, as well as contemporary Ecofeminist discourse and environmental studies, she creates images with the goal of illuminating the importance and urgency of preserving the natural environment. During the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building program, Erin plans to redesign her website and add new documentation of recent work.
Aya Yamasaki & Jason Brown / Opertura
Working under the name Opertura, Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown (Greenfield) create hand-drawn animation, illustration, comics, installations and other visual media. Their animations describe the workings of the natural world using playful characters and straightforward stories inspired by personal experience and folk storytelling traditions. Opertura is interested in dream/ subconscious logic, as it informs Aya and Jason’s own practice as collaborators and is reflected in much of the mediums they employ, in the flowing, morphing nature of hand-drawn animation and the blending in watercolor. Opertura’s work has screened and been presented domestically and abroad.
Photo Credit: Guzman
Miss Expanding Universe / Ashley Yang-Thompson
Ashley Yang-Thompson (Great Barrington) works in a wide range of media, from hyperrealist oil paintings to erotic mystical poetry to coloring book memoirs and experimental music. Using humor and grandiosity, her work tells stories of addiction, healing, self-implication, and egregious mistake-making. She publishes sketches, diary entries and community conversations in a weekly, four-page zine, Worm House. With the Assets for Artists Capacity-Building grant, Ashley plans to professionalize the zine’s production and distribution.
Michael Zachary
A big part of Michael Zachary’s (Brookline) practice is about using the landscape painting tradition as a way to help us understand our current situation. He wants to understand how and why we have constructed our picture of nature the way we have and exactly where our blind spots are. He is particularly fascinated by the similarities and connections between old technologies like printmaking and new technologies like digital algorithms and by the insights we can gain by comparing and combining them. Michael maintains a studio in East Boston and teaches drawing and color at Simmons University in Boston. He will use his A4A Capacity-Building grant funds to expand and sustain his studio’s physical infrastructure.
Our 2020 programming in Massachusetts is possible because of our wonderful funders & partners, specifically the Barr Foundation, Massachusetts Growth Capital Corporation, and the United States Department of Agriculture.