Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
June-July 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
July 20- August 16 2022
OPEN STUDIOS: AUGUST 11TH 5-7PM
Sean Desiree
Albany, New York
Sean Desiree is a self-taught artist, born and raised in the Bronx. Utilizing the craft of woodworking, Sean Desiree produces life-size structures and sculptures that serve as sanctuaries, protectors, and symbols of empowerment for BIPOC. In addition to being an artist they are an educator facilitating the BIPOC Builders Immersions at Soul Fire Farmin Grafton, NY. Equipping and inspiring change makers and community members to utilize building and construction is a large part of their practice. They have been awarded residencies at More Art and Winter Workspace at Wave Hill in New York City. They are a 2022 Leslie Lohman and Socrates Sculpture Park Fellow. Through their residency at More Art they received funding to produce their debut socially engaged public art sculpture, entitled BEAM ENSEMBLE with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
Anne Spalter
Brooklyn, NY
Digital mixed-media artist Anne Spalter is an academic pioneer who founded the original digital fine arts courses at Brown University and The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in the 1990s and authored the internationally taught textbook, The Computer in the Visual Arts (Addison-Wesley, 1999).
Her artistic process explores imagery of the modern landscape. Spalter has drawn on the writings of Carl Jung as well as various science fiction novels and movies to develop a consistent set of personal symbols using a hybrid arsenal of traditional mark-making methods and innovative digital tools. She is currently creating crypto art, with works auctioned by Sotheby’s and Phillips, and featured in the New York Times. She recently completed a successful 501-piece drop entitled AI Spaceships.
Ruth Owens
Metairie, Louisiana
Ruth Owens graduated in 2018 with an MFA from the University of New Orleans after leaving her medical practice of 25 years. She resides in New Orleans where she is represented by the Jonathan Ferrara Gallery , and belongs to the artist collective, “The Front.” Owens’ work is concerned with contributing to and preserving the black archive, and she references personal super-8 film in her painting and video art.
“I’m a figurative painter and video artist whose work expands the narrative around feminine and racial identity. Putting forth the concept that identity is fluid and open, my subjects cross boundaries that hold in fixed and static constructs. Revealing the complexity, nuances, and psychology of individual people of color, I resist essential or stereotypical limits. I use myself and the intimacy of my family as models to assert the individualities, challenges, and unique perspectives of lives that are atypical by virtue of the standards and narrow vision prevalent in the world.
Much of the imagery in my paintings and videos is culled from footage found in my family’s super-8 film archive from the 1960’s and 1970’s, therefore imparting an intimate, gestural, and cinematic impression. The influence of this archive also makes my work a psychological exploration of personal memory with regards to family dynamics and relationships.”
Willoughby Lucas Hastings
Huntsville, Alabama
Willoughby Lucas Hastings has exhibited work at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Huntsville Museum of Art, Wiregrass Museum of Art, Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Kingston Gallery, Emerson Contemporary, Fountain Street Gallery, Annmarie Sculpture Garden & Arts Center, Lowe Mill Arts Center, and the University of Alabama in Huntsville, Birmingham Southern College, Mississippi State University, University of Georgia, Tufts University, Lesley University, and CalArts. Hastings was a 2019-2020 Research Fellow at Tufts Institute of the Environment, and a 2019-2020 Post Graduate Teaching Fellow at the SMFA. Hastings has received grant funding from SMFA at Tufts, Mass Cultural Council, City of Boston, CERFT+, and Verdant Fund. Her interdisciplinary art practice consists of works that examine the aesthetics and ideology of whiteness, think critically about the environments we inhabit and facilitates coalition-building through the production and use of protest garments/banners that support feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism.
Szu-Chieh Yun
Boston, Massachusetts
Szu-Chieh Yun is a Taiwanese-American painter based in Boston, MA. An immigrant, she explores the tension between place and identity in her paintings that range from photorealism to geometric abstraction. She received her MFA from Wimbledon College of Arts in 2016 and her BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2011 with a semester abroad in the Central Academy of Fine Arts Beijing, China. She was a resident artist at the Vermont Studio Center in 2014. Her work has been exhibited in the US and internationally. Szu-Chieh Yun has taught diverse groups of students throughout Boston, MA and in Shanghai, China.
My current work examines and dissects the "Karen: phenomenon, exploring the public "meltdown" as an ecstatic out-of-body experience. Her overwhelming rage escalates into an almost religious ecstasy and she climaxes in the places she feels safe and entitled. A Karen is a woman publicly weaponizing her whiteness - a specific kind of white femininity that connotes purity and false frailty and employs violence and harm to those who offend her. “Karen” is aware of the proximity to power she has over those whom she views as lesser than. Her femininity and whiteness are deserving of protection.
Jamele Wright
Atlanta, Georgia
“My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth, by creating a conversation between family, tradition, the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by the way Hip Hop gathers different cultures through sampling and is charged with an energy channeled and passed through the Pan African lineage. The “In Transit” Series and my textile work is inspired by the Great Migration of Black Americans, who left the familiar in the hope of something better.”
Shanna Merola
Detroit, Michigan
Shanna Merola is a visual artist, photojournalist, and legal worker. Her sculptural photo-collages are informed by the stories of environmental justice struggles past and present. Travelling to EPA designated Superfund sites, she has documented the slow violence of deregulation – from her own neighborhood on the Eastside of Detroit, to Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens, and Love Canal, NY. Merola lives in Detroit, MI where she facilitates Know-Your-Rights workshops for grassroots organizations through the National Lawyers Guild.
She has been awarded studio residencies and fellowships through MacDowell, Banff Centre for Arts + Creativity, Kala Institute of Art, the Society for Photographic Education, the Puffin Foundation, Bulk Space, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Art. Merola has held teaching appointments at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Wayne State University, and in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley. Her work has been exhibited both nationally and abroad.
Monica Ong Reed
Trumbull, Connecticut
Monica Ong is the author of Silent Anatomies, winner of the Kore Press First Book Award. A Kundiman poetry fellow, her has been published most recently in POETRY Magazine, Scientific American, Tab Journal, and ctrl+v. In 2021, Ong founded Proxima Vera, a micropress specializing in literary art & objects, which are now part of many distinguished institutional collections worldwide. Her solo exhibition Planetaria is on view at the Poetry Foundation in Chicago from April 21–September 8, 2022.
She is currently completing the manuscript for Planetaria, a poetry collection and artist monograph that leverages the visual language of astronomy to explore the precarious territories of motherhood, women in science, and diaspora identity.
John Vo
Worcester, massachusetts
John Vo is a working artist that paints to connect to people. Through classes and workshops they create space to explore different processes for art making. In their studio practice they could be described as a materialist, sourcing textiles with a story and origin. Their latest works are on chiffon textile and Vietnamese silk and explores Vo’s family narrative as a poetic understanding of history in development.
Liz Miller
Good Thunder, minnesota
Liz Miller’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and abroad. Her awards include a McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Fiber Artists, a McKnight Foundation Fellowship for Visual Artists, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, and several Artist Initiative Grants from the Minnesota State Arts Board. Miller has completed residencies at Stove Works (Chattanooga, TN), the Joan Mitchell Center (New Orleans, LA), and the McColl Center for Art + Innovation (Charlotte, NC). Miller lives and works in Good Thunder, MN and is Professor of Installation Art and Drawing at Minnesota State University-Mankato.
eun-kyung suh
Fridley, Minnesota
Korean-born artist, Eun-Kyung Suh completed her M.F.A. from the University of Iowa in Iowa City, IA, USA. Since 2008, she have been investigating the diasporic experiences of immigrants, transracial adoptees, and refugees, highlighting their fragmentary lives that resulted from involuntary or voluntary displacement.
Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Minneapolis, MN, Conrad Wilde Gallery, Tucson, AZ, Nord Gallery, San Antonio, TX, Galerie sei-un-do, Zurich, Switzerland, Montreal Center for Contemporary Textiles, Montreal, Canada, Barabas Villa Gallery, Budapest, Hungary, Hwasung Museum, Korea and etc. Her textile work was published in Textiles: The Art of Mankind by Mary Schoeser Thames & Hudson, Dec 2012. Currently Eun-Kyung Suh is a Professor in the Department of Art and Design at the University of Minnesota, Duluth.
Heather Renée Russ
Red Hook, New York
Heather Renée Russ works across photography, projection, installation, sculpture and bio-art. She blends organic marine materials with queer femme signifiers to engage with themes of grief and displacement. Her work also celebrates the vibrant activist and art communities artists have historically created in cities by the sea.
Her work draws from a rich history of stewarding and participating in underground art spaces. She co-produced Club Feral, a raucous art, dance and mutual-aid club in San Francisco and the queer collaborative space in Brooklyn known as Lair Fera. She also served on the Board for MIX NYC, a queer experimental film festival.
Heathe Renée used her merit awarded residency at Vermont Studio Center to develop work for Intersecional Cyber Feminism, at Satellite Art Show in Miami in 2019. In 2020, she completed a residency at MASS MoCA and created work for Futureless, an exhibition about the precarity of queer feminist futures at SomoS in Berlin. She also showed at Ethan Cohen’s KuBE gallery in New York in “Darkest Before Dawn,” an exhibit about art in a time of uncertainty. In 2021 she completed a residency at ChaShaMa North. Heather Renée has an upcoming solo show at Unison Arts in New Paltz and has been invited to participate in an alumni residency at MASS MoCA in 2022.
Anne Buckwalter
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Anne Buckwalter’s creative practice explores female identity and the coexistence of contradictory elements. Inspired by the folk art traditions of her Pennsylvania Dutch heritage, her work arranges disparate objects in mysterious rooms and ambiguous spaces. By imagining obscure narratives that embrace paradoxes, her paintings delve into questions about the female body, intimacy, and gender roles.
Anne is the recipient of a 2020-2021 Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, a 2020 Idea Fund Grant, and a 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Galveston Artist Residency, Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. Her exhibition history includes the Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; Woodmere Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA; Boston University Gallery, Boston, MA; The Painting Center, New York, NY, and others. Her paintings have been highlighted in New American Paintings, Juxtapoz, and The New York Times, and included in the collections of the Zuzeum in Riga, Latvia, and the University of West Virginia Art Museum. Her writing has been featured in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. She is represented by Rachel Uffner Gallery (New York, NY), Friends Indeed Gallery (San Francisco, CA), Rebecca Camacho Presents (San Francisco, CA), and Pentimenti Gallery (Philadelphia, PA).