For our fourth year, the Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to celebrate our 2022 Studios at MASS MoCA’s Puerto Rico Artist Fellows. Over the next year, we will welcome seven artists in sculpture, performance, installation, and writing for residencies at the museum. Artists will receive funded residencies of up to four weeks, including housing, studio space, daily meals, museum access, plus travel and living costs, for artists of all disciplines.
The program began under the initiative and fundraising efforts of Mari Rodriguez Binnie and William Burton Binnie in 2018, in response to Hurricane Maria. Today, our work continues to support artists on the island during what remains a tumultuous time. Get to know our newest artists below. And visit the museum this spring and summer to see 2018 Puerto Rico Fellow Gamaliel Rodriguez’s 60-foot installation in the MASS MoCA Hunter Hallway, La travesía / Le voyage.
The 2022 Puerto Rico Fellowship program is supported by the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation and several anonymous donors.
Grimaldi Baez
In residence: August 17 - September 13, 2022
Grimaldi Baez is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of printmaking, drawing, and performance. His machines, drawings and collages use reclaimed and recombined materials to explore questions pertaining to labor, technology, and speculative futures.
Jo Cosme
In residence: August 17 - September 13, 2022
Jo Cosme is a queer multidisciplinary artist from Puerto Rico. Graduated with a Bachelor's of Fine Arts in Photography. She has five years of work experience through freelancing and agency work in fields such as: photography, videography, video editing, social media and graphic design. As an artist, she encourages social justice and activism by addressing socio-political and mental health issues, helping give visibility to matters that are often overlooked. She strives to promote critical thinking and provoke relevant conversations for educational purposes. Her work can extend from photography and video to installations, sound pieces, and other fields for mixed media purposes.
photo credit: José R. Vázquez
Ada del Pilar Ortiz
In residence: March 1 - March 28, 2023
Ada del Pilar Ortiz is an interdisciplinary sculptor and fine artist born in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. Her work has been presented at the Arsenal de la Puntilla Museum as part of the 2018 National Exhibition of the Arts dedicated to sculpture, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico. She has participated in artist residencies including Área: Lugar de Proyectos Residency Program and the interdisciplinary program “La Práctica” at Beta Local. During her upcoming residency Ada will create cyanotypes and alternative photographic processes of fictional architectural spaces based on a photo essay she made in southern Puerto Rico. This area of the island was severely affected by the January 2020 earthquakes and is still recovering to this day.
Photo credit: Xiaoyue Zhang
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo
In residence: September 21 - October 11, 2022
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (b. Puerto Rico) is a theater director, filmmaker, performer, visual artist and educator, whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-trained performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging the prioritization of written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her methodologies seek to redefine how performance and film are created, and examine how the event of spectating embodied narratives is influenced by the sociopolitical, geographical & metaphysical context where it is presented.
She earned an MFA in Theatre Directing from California Institute of the Arts and a BFA in Drama from the Experimental Theatre Wing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. Her work is part of the KADIST collection, and she has been a resident artist at Amant Foundation (NY, 2022), Fonderie Darling (Montréal, QC), Miami Light Project (Florida), Beta-Local (Puerto Rico), and Konvent in Catalonia, Spain. She is a 2022 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow, and her work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago, TEA Espacio de las Artes en Tenerife, Seoul Museum of Art in Korea, Walt Disney Modular Theatre in California, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of South Florida, amongst others.
Rolando-André López
In residence: June 14 - July 11, 2022
Rolando André López Torres is a writer based between Boston and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2010, he was a recipient of the Writing Fellowship at Loyola University New Orleans. In 2020, his poem "wealth" was selected by Porsha Olayiwola for a special Afrofuturist reading at City Hall (due to the pandemic, the reading was virtual). In 2021, he was the 1st Place Winner of the Voices of Color Fellowship at Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Currently, Rolando-André is collaborating with Puerto Rican author Francisco Félix on a translation of his book, "Sobre los domingos," a chronicle about life in urban Puerto Rico post-María, originally published in 2019 by La Impresora, a homegrown, communally driven press. He is currently at work on "Yemenja's Dream" and "A Name is an Unquiet City," respectively fiction and nonfiction works which deploy hybrid uses of genre.
Mariana Ramos-Ortiz
In residence: March 2 - March 29, 2022
Mariana Ramos Ortiz is an interdisciplinary artist working between San Juan, Puerto Rico and Providence, Rhode Island. Their practice revises the imperial and colonial relationship the United States has imposed on Puerto Rico. Their recent work articulates relationships between legibility as a remnant of colonialism, play as a tactic for resistance, and how these strategies construct the experience and perceptions of the colonial subject and landscape.
Ana Rosa Rivera-Marrero
In residence: October 19 - November 15, 2022
Ana Rosa Rivera-Marrero is a multidisciplinary artist with a BFA from the School of Fine Arts of Puerto Rico. Her work has been exhibited both locally in Puerto Rico and internationally, including at Museo del Barrio, NY; The Blaffer Gallery at the University of Houston; Yale Art Gallery in New Haven, CT; the Puerto Rico Museum of Art, San Juan; The Living Art Museum of Reykjavik, Iceland; ARCO Art Fair in Madrid, Spain; and the Museum of Modern Art in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. She’s received recognitions from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture and has attended residencies at the Fabric Workshop and Museum, the Acadia Summer Art Program in Maine, and participated in the Puerto Rico Public Art project.