Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
December 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
November 30th - December 13th
David Bowen
Duluth, Minnesota
Photo by: Rik Sferra
David Bowen is a studio artist and educator whose work has been featured in exhibitions at ZKM Karlsruhe, Fundación Telefónica Madrid, Eyebeam New York, Ars Electronica Linz, BOZAR Brussels, Science Gallery Dublin, Itau Cultural, São Paulo, Laboral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial Gijón, The Israel Museum Jerusalem, The Cranbrook Museum of Art, Intercommunication Center Tokyo and Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona. He is currently an Associate Professor of Sculpture and Physical Computing at the University of Minnesota.
”Using intersections between natural and mechanical systems, I produce unique relationships within my sculpture and installations. With robotics, custom software, sensors, tele-presence and data, I construct devices and situations that are set in motion to interface with the physical, virtual and natural world. The devices I construct often play both the roles of observer and creator, providing limited and mechanical perspectives of dynamic situations and living systems. These devices and situations create a dissonance that leads to an incalculable changeable situation resulting in unpredictable outcomes. The phenomenological outputs are collaborations between the natural form or function, the mechanism and the artist.”
Chelsea T. Hicks
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Chelsea T. Hicks belongs to the Tsizho Washtake clan of the Osage Nation and her tribal district is Waxakoli^. She grew up in Southern Virginia on Nansemond land, and now lives in Tulsa where she holds a Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She is at work on a collection of poems in Wazhazhe ie, and her first book, A Calm & Normal Heart, examines the effects of disconnection from one's ancestral land and community through story. Hicks holds an M.A. from UC Davis and an M.F.A. from the Institute of American Indian Arts. She is mixoke (queer). Her writing has been published in the LA Review of Books, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, the Believer, The Audacity, Yellow Medicine Review, Indian Country Today and elsewhere.
JD Scott
Providence, Rhode Island
JD Scott is the author of Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day (&NOW Books, 2020), a debut short story collection which won the 2018 Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer’s Residency Prize. Moonflower, Nightshade, All the Hours of the Day was a finalist for both the 2020 Shirley Jackson Awards and the 2020 Foreword INDIES Awards—as well as being called one of “The Best Books of 2020” by Tor.com. Scott is also the author of the poetry collection, Mask for Mask (New Rivers Press, 2021) and two poetry chapbooks: FUNERALS & THRONES (Birds of Lace Press, 2013) and Night Errands (YellowJacket Press, 2012), which was the winner of the 2011 Peter Meinke Prize. Scott’s prose and poems has appeared in Denver Quarterly, Prairie Schooner, Indiana Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Ninth Letter, Salt Hill, Sonora Review, The Pinch, Spoon River Poetry Review, Mississippi Review, Cream City Review, Poetry Daily, and elsewhere. Other writing has been featured in the Best American Experimental Writing and Best New Poets anthologies. Scott’s accolades include being awarded a Lambda Emerging LGBTQ Voices fellowship, attending the Poetry Foundation’s inaugural Poetry Incubator, and being awarded residencies at the Millay Colony, the Edward F. Albee Foundation, and Writers at the Eyrie.
Lu Chekowsky
Poughkeepsie, NY
Lu Chekowsky is an Emmy-winning writer and creative director who built a successful career in media through gut, intuition, and addiction to approval. Throughout her career, Lu has used her creativity in service to capitalism at such iconic institutions as: Conde Nast [Details and Lucky], Wieden+Kennedy [the advertising agency for Nike], Viacom [MTV, Comedy Central] and Facebook. In these positions, it was her responsibility to help corporations come across as real human beings with relatable feelings, personalities and beliefs; so that audiences would watch screens for hours at a time and then buy things they didn't need. In the four years since leaving her media career to focus on healing her body and mind, Lu's been working to tell her own stories, in her own voice. She's currently working on a memoir about her years spent as a nearly 300 pound woman in the advertising business called: I Don't Buy What I’m Selling. Her essays and poems have been published in The Rumpus, Pigeon Pages and Hobart and she's been an artist in residence at MASS MoCA, SPACE on Ryder Farm and Gullkistan in Laugarvatn, Iceland. You can see more of Lu's work, including that one time she threw eggs at Justin Bieber, at: luchekowsky.com.
Natani Notah
Tulsa, Oklahoma
Natani Notah is an interdisciplinary artist and a proud member of the Navajo Nation. Her current art practice explores contemporary Native American identity through the lens of Diné womanhood. Notah has exhibited her work at institutions such as Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art (BMoCA); Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (Marin MOCA); Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Massillon Museum (MassMu), Ohio; apexart, New York City; NXTHVN, New Haven; Tucson Desert Art Museum, Tucson; Gas Gallery, Los Angeles; Mana Contemporary, Chicago, and elsewhere. Notah has received awards from Art Matters, International Sculpture Center, and the San Francisco Foundation. Her work has been featured in Artforum, Art in America, Hyperallergic, Forbes, and Sculpture Magazine and she has completed artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, This Will Take Time, Oakland, and Kala Art Institute. Notah holds a BFA with a minor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies from Cornell University and an MFA from Stanford University. Currently she is a 2021-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellow.
Arthur Youngblood
Baltimore, Maryland
Arthur Youngblood was born in New York City, New York in 1994 and moved to Augusta, Georgia shortly after. He attended Augusta University with his BFA in Studio Arts (2017) and Maryland Institute College of Art with his MFA in Painting from the Hoffberger School of Painting (2022).
Growing up, Youngblood enjoyed listening to personal stories that gave insight into the lives of people. He is deeply affected from the narrative stories of the people he meets and learning from their stories like their culture, traumas, experiences, joy, environments, politics, etc. Youngblood’s work addresses the mental and physical narrative space his figures encapsulate in their identity from their childhood to adolescents. He uses color as a way to create and navigate a mood from the figure and the space. He employs their personal memories and experiences from their conversations, as well as his own, into his work. Youngblood stages an idea from these sources like a scene, creating a dramatic experience using color and spatial design. He retells these stories as a narrator.
Poet and translator Ellen Doré Watson’s most recent volume of poems is pray me stay eager (Alice James Press, 2018). Earlier books include Dogged Hearts and This Sharpening, from Tupelo Press, and two from Alice James, We Live in Bodies and Ladder Music, winner of the New England/New York Award. Her work has appeared in APR, Tin House, Orion, Field, Ploughshares, and The New Yorker. Library Journal named her “One of 24 Poets for the 21st Century.” Other honors include a Rona Jaffe Writers Award, fellowships to the Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center’s Zoland Poetry Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship.
Watson has translated over a dozen books from the Brazilian Portuguese, including three volumes of poetry by Adélia Prado, The Mystical Rose (Bloodaxe, 2014), which was short-listed for the 2015 Popescu European Translation Prize. She has also co-translated contemporary Arabic poetry with Saadi Simawe. She served for decades as poetry and translation editor at The Massachusetts Review. She served for decades as Director of the Poetry Center at Smith College, Poetry & Translation Editor of The Massachusetts Review, and core faculty faculty in the Drew University MFA Program in Poetry & Translation. Currently, she teaches regularly at the Colrain Manuscript Conference, and offers writing workshops online, as well as developmental manuscript editing with private clients.
”I write poems to figure out—and then interrogate—what I’m thinking/feeling/percolating/approaching. I write to ask myself (and the reader) questions, to push my wonderings further, to process my experiences and to imagine others’. Our crevasses and divides. I write from awe and trembling. I’m interested in the farty, sexual call of frogs and the “confederacy of fences.” I worry brain plaque and 6 x 9 foot prison cells “that break brains.” I worship trees. I celebrate idiosyncrasy and astonishment. I grieve and exult. The two qualities I feel are essential to poetry are intentionality and surprise.”
Elizabeth Knowles
Norfolk, Connecticut
Photo by: Skyler Knudsen
Utilizing a variety of media, Elizabeth Knowles’ sculpture reveals both static and dynamic patterns in nature. Elizabeth has a BA from Pomona College, Claremont, CA and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL.
Knowles recently completed outdoor sculptures for NYC Parks on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the University of CT, Avery Point. Other projects include site-specific installations for Unesco’s Artistes + Science, Monaco, The Pelham Art Center, NY, Ely Center for Contemporary Art, New Haven, CT, Rockrose Lobby for Chashama, NY, NY, Flat Iron Prow Art Space, NY, NY, the New Canaan Sculpture Trail, CT, NYU Langone, NY, NY and Montefiore Hospital, Bronx, NY. Additionally, Knowles has created projects for Edith Wharton’s House, The Mount in Lenox, MA, Bank of America Plaza, Charlotte, NC, the Housatonic Museum, Bridgeport, CT, Artspace, New Haven, CT, the Painting Center, NY, NY, Five Points Art Center, CT, Studio 80 +Sculpture Grounds, Old Lyme, CT, the Kingston Police Building, Kingston, NY, Chesterwood National Trust for Historic Preservation, Stockbridge, MA and Governor’s Island, NY, NY. She has collaborated with Saks Fifth Avenue on window installations and VOGUE magazine for the “Last Look” page.
Knowles has received numerous grants and residencies including MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists program, Weir Farm Art Center, Puffin Foundation, Miami Beach Cultural Council, Millay Colony, Yaddo, Banff Centre, E. D. Foundation, Artist’s Space, and Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation.
FUNTO
Granby, Massachusetts
FUNTO is a Nigerian-American poet, performer, and visual artist based in New York. They utilize text, photography, sculpture, and performance as throughlines for inquiries regarding illness, disorder, inheritance, and processes of healing. Their work attempts to map the disabling effects of disease while envisioning a language or theory of listening to a ruptured body. Their pieces are sites of ritual, gestation, rupture, and folklore.
FUNTO is a 2022-2023 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow with the Poetry Project. They hold an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and are the founding editor of ẹwà journal, an online literary journal that publishes work exclusively by immigrant writers."
Eliza Malecki
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Olivia Moon Photography
Eliza Malecki is a Cambridge based dancer, choreographer, administrator, and producer. She graduated from Goucher College with a BA in Dance and was a Young Artist in Residence at Bearnstow in Mt. Vernon, ME. Eliza is a founding member of The Picnic Sisters, a quirky dancing duo comprised of herself and collaborator Molly Hess. Her personal choreographic projects have been funded by the Mayor's Office of Arts and Culture and The New England Foundation for the Arts. In 2021 she was an Artist in Residence for the City of Lawrence, funded by the Transformative Development Initiative.
Eliza has performed for Natalie Johnson Dance, Molly Hess Dance Projects, Grant Jacoby, Luminarium Dance, Caitlin Canty, and Catherine Siller. Her choreographic works - which display strong inventive movement and an undeniably unique sense of humor - have been presented in Massachusetts, Maryland, Maine, Rhode Island, and Arezzo, Italy. Eliza is a passionate arts administrator serving as the Associate Director of Operations and Events for Dunamis, a nonprofit committed to providing professional development for emerging artists and arts managers of color.
Molly Hess
Florida, Massachusetts
Molly Hess is a choreographer, dance educator, and arts administrator known for her humorous, tender, and whimsical creations. Her performances and events are interdisciplinary and often interactive. Most of the year she lives in the Northern Berkshires and is a teaching artist with Studio North Dance Arts, Berkshire Pulse, and a member of Commonfolk artist collective. Besides her independent creative practice, she is a member of the Picnic Sisters, an ongoing collaboration with Eliza Malecki. Molly is also the Director of Bearnstow, an arts and nature-based non-profit in Mount Vernon, ME, which is where she spends the summer.