Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
June-July 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
June 22nd - July 19, 2022
OPEN STUDIOS: JULY 14TH 5-7PM
Nicholas Crombach
Ontario, Canada
Nicholas Crombach produces sculptural work that engages with subjects derived from styles and motifs attributed to the fine and decorative arts from past eras. He creates contemporary confrontations by disrupting these histories through the addition of playful and unexpected materials, details and gestures. His work twists familiar frames of reference to tell new stories.
Crombach has been awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Award (2016). He has exhibited solo exhibitions in Canada, Berlin, and London UK. From 2016-2017 Crombach participated in a year-long residency at The Florence Trust (London, UK) and was recently an Iron Light artist in residence at the Western North Carolina Sculpture Centre (2022). Crombach’s public art commissions include Billy, Nanny, and the Kids (2012) located in Burlington ON, Every Slated Lot Has a Previous Story (2021) as part of Next Door, an exhibition of temporary public artworks and Horse and Cart located in Victoria Park, Kingston ON.
Nicole Sara Simpkins
Minneapolis, Minnesota
Nicole Sara Simpkins is an artist and educator living and working in Minneapolis. Her work is informed by ecology, animism, and curiosity about interconnectedness. She makes large-scale sculptural drawing installations, prints, artist books and performances. She holds an MFA in Printmaking from Indiana University - Bloomington and a BA in English and Creative Writing from Macalester College. She has taught courses in Drawing and Printmaking at MCAD, Macalester, UW-Stout, and Indiana University. She is a recipient of an Artist Initiative Grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board and has attended residencies at Millay Arts, The Ucross Foundation, The Vermont Studio Center, The Jentel Foundation, Artspace Raleigh, The Future, and The White Page, and she has exhibited work locally and nationally. She is a 2022-2023 Mcknight Printmaking Fellow.
Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos
Providence, Rhode Island
Photo credit: Cat Laine, Painted Foot Studio.
Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos (pronouns: they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist, cultural strategist, and arts administrator. Their artistic creations span a myriad of topics, from home to capitalism to queerness and magic. Rivera has 12 years of experience in the nonprofit arts sector intersecting creative practice with urban planning and racial equity. Rivera was former Co-Director and Artistic Director of AS220, a renowned arts organization and creative incubator in Providence, RI, and successor to AS220’s founder Umberto Crenca. After 8 years at AS220, Rivera took on the role of Director of Inclusive Regional Development at MIT CoLab, in the Dept of Urban Studies and Planning of MIT, where they co-designed and implemented workshops on collective leadership and community innovation in Colombia. Today, Rivera is an independent artist and consultant for the arts sector and a working artist specializing in socially engaged art projects. Rivera is the founder of Studio Loba in Providence, a production house that designs and produces artistic and cultural projects that serve as catalysts for social change. Notable projects include: Lead curator for El Corazón de Holyoke public art project, Mi Gente Public Art project in Providence, the transmedia and research-based art works MoralDocs and FANTASY ISLAND, the Luna Loba performance series, and the theatrical productions Antigonx (2022) and Fire Flowers and a Time Machine (2020). Rivera was born and raised in Borikén/Puerto Rico and is based in Providence, RI -land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples.
Peter Campbell
Beacon, New york
Peter A. Campbell is a director, writer, teacher, and dramaturg. Recent professional productions include directing his pieces medea and medea/for medea, iph.then, and Yellow Electras at the Incubator Arts Project at St. Mark's Church. He is currently touring a new installation piece entitled Can’t Get There From Here. He has also directed August Strindberg's Miss Julie, Young Jean Lee’s Pullman, WA and Church, Charles Mee’s Trojan Women 2.0, and Sarah Ruhl's Eurydice at Ramapo College. His play Orestes/West, which was commissioned by Greasy Joan & Co. in Chicago, was a semi-finalist for the Eugene O’Neill Playwrights’ Conference in 2012. He has published essays and reviews in venues such as Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, Modern Drama, Contemporary Theatre Journal, Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, and Comparative Drama. He created the online journal Theatre/Practice, which published its sixth volume in 2017. He received his MFA in Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism and his Ph.D. in Theatre from Columbia University, and is Associate Professor of Theater History and Criticism at Ramapo College.
Jason Mena
Carolina, Puerto Rico
Jason Mena is a post-disciplinary artist working in video, sound, painting, sculpture, photography, animation, installation, and curatorial projects. Using mostly simple means and public actions, he seeks to reveal complex economic, social, and political scenarios as well as the mundanities of everyday life, in an attempt to find an acceptable balance between the rational and the irrational, with an underlying feeling of the unanswerable.
Mena holds a BFA in painting from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico, and studied Photography at the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts Low-Residency Program at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson. He earned his MFA in Art Practice from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He has been awarded residencies at The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams; B.P.S.22 Musée d'art de la Province de Hainaut, Belgium, and BACO-Batuco Arte Contemporáneo, Chile. His work has been featured in prominent publications by the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes de Mexico, Museum of Latin American Art, Yale School of Architecture, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Museo de Arte Carrillo Gil, Queens Museum, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and University of California. Notable grants include the Lexus Grant for the Arts and The Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. He has recently been nominated for the prestigious AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship Award.
Feda Eid
Quincy, Massachusetts
Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist living on occupied, unceded, territory of the Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People (Quincy,MA). Her work explores the expression of heritage, tradition, identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US. She believes in the telling of personal narratives to broaden our perspectives and to ultimately help us feel the universal emotions that connect us all.
Feda studied Sociology at Regis College and photography at New England School of Photography. Her work has been featured and exhibited at the Peabody Essex Museum, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Lesley University, SASAKI Architecture, Columbia University, and The Shed NY among others. She was awarded the Museum of Fine Arts Boston Emerging Studio Artist Fellowship in 2018, 2019 Visiting Studio Artist at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and Massachusetts artist residency fellowship at Mass MoCA in February 2022.
Picture by Sydney King (2021)
Brian Orozco
Portland, Oregon
Brian Orozco (b. Portland, Oregon) is a poet and artist who works in the still and moving image. He is interested in fathers, grand strategy, mathematics, melancholy, interpersonal relationships, pretenses, and provenances.
He holds BA in American Studies from Yale University where his academic work focused on Visual Culture and Photography, investigating the construction of national identity in order to deconstruct notions of home and belonging
He was the recipient of the Mary Hotchkiss Williams Travel Fellowship in the Visual Arts from the Yale University Art Gallery in 2016. He received the Mortimer Hays-Brandeis Traveling Fellowship in the spring of 2019. He most recently received his MFA in Photography from the Yale School of Art.
Sammy Seung-Min Lee
denver, Colorado
Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is recently a resident artist at Redline, serves as an ambassador for Asian Art at Denver Art Museum, and operates a contemporary art project and residency space, called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver.
Lee's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid.
Gregory Scheckler
Williamstown, Massachusetts
Gregory Scheckler lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts. As an art professor, he teaches drawing, painting, photography and digital media. When he’s not teaching and art-making, he and his wife ski, hike and bike the Berkshires and tend their solar-powered home in the company of two fuzzy cats.
Grounded in drawing media and methods, the core themes of his current artworks are visual and cognitive experiences of transience; processes of timespans, waves, feedback loops and gestures improvised from observing nature; and oblique references to physics, earth sciences, ecology, astronomy, neurology, and biology.
Scheckler believes that creative arts are survival strategies, playgrounds, vivid storytelling, rich ways of thinking, and delightful functions of our ability to communicate. In his view, art-making includes the whole range of silly to profound communications, open to everyone. Over the last two decades, his artworks have been in formal and informal venues, exhibited nationally and internationally such as with MCLA Gallery 51, the National Science Foundation, the Armory Center for the Arts, and the Bennington Museum in Vermont.
Erin Mckenna
Ypsilanti, Michigan
Erin McKenna is an interdisciplinary artist with a background in sculpture. Through a feminist lens, playful ‘misuse’, humor, and celebration, she makes work that dismantles stereotypes and complicates binaries of embellishment and construction. She received her BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design, and MFA from the University of Michigan. She currently lives, teaches, gardens, and makes work in Ypsilanti, Michigan. McKenna has attended ACRE (2013), Grin City (2014), and Shiro Oni Residency (2019). She has been awarded two Smucker Wagstaff Grants (2018,2019), Rackham International Research Award (2019), and an International Institute Individual Fellowship (2019). Her work has been exhibited internationally at SkyLab (Columbus, OH), ACRE (Chicago, IL), Arturo Bandini (Los Angeles, CA), and Shiro Oni (Fujioka, Japan). Her work has been published in Hiss Magazine.