December 19, 2022

Welcome Cape Cod Grantees

December 19, 2022

Meet A4A’s twelve newest Capacity-Building grantees! Thanks to new a partnership with the Arts Foundation of Cape Cod, we are celebrating our first cohort of Cape Cod grantees. They’re a stellar group who represent the best of the Cape’s artistic richness and diversity. (Feel free to click on their names & learn more about them at their websites!)

Andre Lima (Brewster)

Andre Lima is a Native Brazilian who has been practicing Capoeira (a Brazilian martial art that combines elements of music, dance, and acrobatics) for over 20 years. Andre is the founder and teacher of Capoeira Besouro Cape Cod, a school serving Cape Cod for over 8 years. The school shares performances and workshops for all ages throughout Cape Cod. Andre is also a co-founder of Movement Arts of Cape Cod (MACC), a new nonprofit dedicated to fostering movement arts for the Cape Cod community.

Dominique pecce (truro)

Dominique Pecce is a green-practice printmaker with a focus on monotype, but whose creative explorations also include mixed media and kaleidoscopes. Dominique grew up on the Outer Cape. She has studied at the Penland School of Craft in North Carolina, Zea Mays (a nontoxic printmaking center) in western Massachusetts, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown.

Julian Loida (Falmouth)

Julian Loida is a percussionist, composer, and producer. Julian’s synesthesia and musical curiosity have propelled him towards a wide range of sounds, genres, and artistic endeavors. He’s performed jazz, folk, and classical, collaborating with dancers, visual artists, songwriters/composers, and musicians of all stripes. Julian often writes and arranges for his projects and ensembles (the Cuban/Brazilian band INÃ, jazz quintet Mojubá, chamber-folk band Night Tree), and he has a growing discography including Bach LIVE!, Wallflower, Piano EP, and several singles. Julian is preparing to release his second full-length solo record in the spring of 2023.

Kim Moberg (Centerville)

Kim Moberg is an award-winning singer-songwriter and guitarist. She was born in Juneau, Alaska, the daughter of a classical pianist mother of Alaskan Native Tlingit (People of the Tides) descent and a Coast Guard veteran father from Kansas. Kim’s music draws inspiration from Americana, Folk, and Country genres, and she is known for her passionate and heartfelt vocals. Kim has released two albums, Above Ground and Up Around the Bend, and has two new albums scheduled for release in 2023.

Laura Shabott (Provincetown)

Laura Shabott’s paintings, drawings and collage respond to the human form and nature with strength and originality. Since her first solo show at Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown, she has exhibited widely on Cape Cod. Laura earned a diploma in studio art from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at TUFTS, Boston, and is represented regionally by Berta Walker Gallery. She teaches at the Cape Cod Museum of Art, Provincetown Art Association and Museum and Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill.

Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor
(MashpeE / Buzzard’s bay)

Mwalim “DaPhunkee Professor” is a multi-award-winning composer, musician, theater artist, writer, media producer, and educator whose works span the mediums of sound recordings, books, plays, films, videos, and multimedia installations. Mwalim is the owner and head of production of Polyphonic Studios, a commercial-grade recording studio and content creation company specializing in the recording, production, mixing and mastering of music, audiobooks, podcasts, and sound design for media productions. He is a member of the multi-Grammy nominated band, The GroovaLottos.

Margaret Clancy
(South Yarmouth)

Margaret Clancy is a fiber artist now based in South Yarmouth, around the corner from her childhood home in South Dennis. With a focus on the mediums of knitting, crochet, and sewing, she aims to combine the creative with the sustainable as part of the slow fashion movement. When she isn’t in the studio, Margaret loves teaching, being in nature, and seeking out tiny yarn shops all over the world. You can find her work at @farmlanefiber on Instagram.

Melinda Nettles
(Eastham)

Melinda Nettles’ work is grounded in a deep awe of the play of light on the surfaces of things, especially wild things, and in a profound appreciation for plants and the rest of non-human nature. (Maybe it’s something to do with sharing a surname with a stinging plant…) Mz. Nettles has a background in architecture, which she taught and practiced for many years and, with that foundation, a fondness for buildings that are a little wonky, a little rough around the edges, with history, and quirks, and character. The output of all this inspiration most often comes in the form of paintings and drawings, photographs, and cut-paper creations, but she reserves the right to do it another way. You can find Melinda on Instagram at @lean2creativeworks.

Myra Kooy (Provincetown)

Myra Kooy is a multidisciplinary artist working in a limitless range of materials and inspirations. Her interactive installations, photographs, prints, assemblages, and books have been shown throughout the United States. Myra attributes her relationship with materials to growing up in an adoptive family of Dutch homesteaders, a childhood that taught her many practical skills and the art of creative reuse. Myra earned her MFA at City College in Harlem, New York.

Natasha Frye (Mashpee)

Natasha Frye is a visual artist whose work celebrates her Wampanoag (People of the First Light) heritage. Natasha lives in her birthplace and tribal home of Mashpee, where she tells the story of the Wampanoag on colorful, richly detailed canvases that often incorporate crushed wampum—the shells of local quahogs gathered with her family on summer clam outings. Natasha also runs children’s art workshops for the tribe.

Paul Rizzo (Provincetown)

Paul Rizzo is a painter and compulsive sketchbook artist. His subjects include vivid dream-houses, rainbows, portraits and self-portraits, socks, iced coffee, 70s queer culture, and old Hollywood—all of which are rendered with a distinctive color palette and unmistakeable nostalgia. A process painter, he loves getting lost in documenting and/or the making of art. Paul is represented by Four Eleven Gallery in Provincetown.

Sam Holmstock (Cotuit)

Sam Holmstock has been making, studying, and performing music for over 40 years. His instruments include congas, djembe, timbales, Cajun rub board, and trombone. Sam is one of the co-founders of the world fusion ensemble ENTRAIN, and has played with that group for 20 years. Sam’s main creative project is Drum Strategies for Healing, through which he facilitates drumming programs for special needs groups and individuals throughout the community.

Assets for Artists

December 16, 2022

Welcome January 2023 Studios

Assets for Artists

December 16, 2022

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

January 4th - January 17th

January 18th-31st (below)

Jenine Shereos

New Marlborough, Massachusetts

Jenine Shereos is an American artist who uses textile techniques alongside natural and organic materials to explore the complex and tenuous relationship between humans and the natural world. While her oeuvre includes installation, fibers, photography and sculptural works, she is best known for her intricately crafted leaves stitched entirely with human hair. The work of Jenine Shereos has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and has been featured in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Frame Magazine. Shereos is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Crafts, and The Rogers Fellowship for Textile Arts at The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Fibers Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.

Leslie Fandrich

Warwick, New York

Leslie Fandrich is a visual artist. Her feminist practice explores how intimate long term relationships negotiate dependency (attachment) and agency (separation) and how dualities, when treated equally, can create a third, paradoxical space where multiple things can be true at the same time. Leslie collects discarded furniture, clothing and domestic items, transforming them into parts that become raw materials to create abstract compositions and anthropomorphized objects that are both familiar and strange. She wants to connect the parts and create a sense of wholeness, but allow for space. Abstraction is a potent tool of the unfamiliar, humor is deployed to surprise and delight and she is interested in confusing what is a subject or object to delve into the abject where meaning breaks down. Leslie received a Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State.

Claude Eshun

Worcester, Massachusetts

Claude is a teacher assistant at Harvard University and co-owner of Don Claude LLC. His work has been shown at the Beacon Street Gallery, the White Room, The Nave Gallery and MassArt x SoWa graduate gallery.

“I reflect on and reimagine scenes from my own personal history: I see images from Ghana and Italy and more recently from America. I incorporate all these visual languages into the images I create. As a once-stateless person who had to learn how to navigate institutions, cultures and languages, my work merges my distinct identities as an African, black, hypervisible, and invisible man in America. Performance, gesture and costume allow me to conjure the people and places of my life. The tableaux I create provide a stage to elicit emotional registers of individual experience and the specific concerns of black individuals from a multiplicity of backgrounds. I am in conversation with my family and friends – I listen closely to stories about their experiences and lives that both overlap with and differ from my own – I am asked to challenge, yet be sensitive to, the stereotypes in Western, African and afro-descendant portraiture. By assembling photographs of family and friends — found, collected, and made — I explore my multiple pasts and possibilities for the future.”

Ruth Margraff

Baltimore, Maryland

Ruth Margraff’s writing sits in the edges of opera, music and poetry. She places pressure on language to resist corporate clarity and cultures of fear. Her lyrics disrupt the comforts of evangelical prosperity and anti-artifice currently in vogue. Margraff’s long-term goal has been to push the form of American opera into a more working-class direction that furthers its distance from Eurocentrism.

Margraff has been called a leader in the American avant garde with productions in more than 30 countries, translated into 20+ languages. She is critically acclaimed for her six martial arts operas with Fred Ho for the Apollo, Guggenheim Museum, LaMama, Brooklyn Academy of Music and CAMI. Margraff’s writing for SEVEN began touring the world in 2008 introduced by Diane von Furstenberg, featured in 2010 by Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep at the Broadway Hudson Theater. She has received awards from Rockefeller, McKnight, Jerome, NEA, TCG, TMUNY, NYSCA, IAC, Fulbright foundations; published by Innova Records, Dramatists Play Service, American Theatre, Theater Forum, Performing Arts Journal, Playscripts, Inc., Backstage Books, Autonomedia, New Village Press, Lexington Books, among others. She is an alumna of Theater Without Borders, New Dramatists, Playwrights’ Center and Chicago Dramatists.

Keith Wilson

Chicago Illinois

Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, the Millay Colony, and James Merrill House, among others. Keith was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.

Keith’s nonfiction has won an Indiana Review Nonfiction Prize and the Redivider Blurred Line Prize, and has been anthologized in the award-winning collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. His poetry and prose have appeared in Elle, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.

Keith’s work in game design includes “Once Upon a Tale,” a storytelling card game designed for Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in collaboration with The Field Museum of Chicago, and alternate reality games (ARGs) for the University of Chicago. He has worked with or taught new media with Kenyon College, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the University of Chicago.

Lynn Yarne

Portland Oregon

Lynn Yarne is an artist and educator from Portland, Oregon. She works within animation and collage to address collective memory, generational narratives, histories and space. A fourth generation Chinese and Japanese American, her current work explores themes of displacement and loss, resilience and community, particularly within Old Town Portland.
She is curious about participatory works, magic, and rejuvenation.

As a teacher in a public high school she facilitates a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on equipping young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. Yarne and her students began building a screen printing studio in a classroom closet in 2015, it is now a printmaking studio that trains over 120 youth printers a year.

Vessna Scheff

Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Vessna Scheff is a visual album maker from the San Francisco Bay Area, whose works center on articulations of Black liberation and the nuances of moving towards equity. She creates performances, portraits, and installations that use movement, vocals, and projection as mediums of inquiry. Grounded in watercolors, her work reclaims a medium often described as “difficult” or solely “sketch” for its uncontrollable qualities, and rather conceptualizes the freedom of watercolors as an expression of Black liberation- always being, responding, and adapting despite the confines of oppression. Scheff’s visual albums situate the listener/ viewer inside the work to experience the scents, sounds, emotions and sensations of the journey towards self-learning and social love. Her mesmerizing works dance with time and fall to gravity; they blend, bleed, and bloom. They stretch, they resist, they flood, they drip- potent in texture, heavy in meaning, and rich in nuance.

Porsha Olayiwola

Boston, Massachusetts

Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives and loves in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist -In -Residence as well as the 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American poets. Olayiwola earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere.

Jingqi Steinhiser

JBMDL, NEW Jersey

Jingqi Steinhiser is a multi-media painter born in China and raised in Mongolia.
Her paintings prioritize asian immigrants who have trouble identifying their communities and belongings. Her research project seeks to go beyond the painting surface, building on her current practice to discover new existences. Jingqi’s goal is to disrupt cultural boundaries and embody the liminal spaces between Asian and American identities, and to ultimately imagine a new kind of inclusivity that embodies the transnational, the multiracial, the non-binary, and ultimately, the undefinable.

Depicting the mythical and chaotic, her work revisits traditional and pop-cultural icons. She borrows her framing of absurdity and detachment from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. [...]This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”

She grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats, a learning journey that mutated across geographies. Born in China, she lived in Russia, Mongolia and Korea before coming to the USA. Her world is an aesthetic amalgamation of dissonant cultures. Constant moving bred insecurity: the feeling of detachment surrounded her tightly. Having been an alien her whole life, she has been struggling with and also interested in community-building as an ‘alien’.” This feeling of being an ‘alien' is literal and abstract. It’s a feeling of detachment, a search for belonging, a step further than nostalgia. Currently she is interested in the in-betweenness and absurdity that resonates with the feelings of not being part of something to get detached from, not having a home or community to be nostalgic about.

Jingqi received her MFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design and BFA in painting at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, she received the Emerging Artist Grant (Nellie Taft Award for Painting) from St.Botolph Club Foundation.

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

January 18th - January 31st

Heather Flor Cron

Portland, Maine

Flor (she/they) is a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist who works with intuitive movement, dirt, installation, printmaking, fiber, and food. From a young age Flor frequently travelled to Peru to visit her maternal family. There, her passion for movement, food and textiles was ignited. Flor lives in Portland, Maine, which is settled on stolen and occupied territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
Through performance and making with available materials, Flor locates the present moment and the relationship between her two cultures. She explores the defeat and transformation of trauma through the twin powers of vulnerability and forgiveness, and how exposing pain can transcend trauma.

”My practice is rooted deeply in healing from generational trauma, making something pleasurable from the crumbs and seeing beauty in the flower that grows from the cracks. I use food, textiles, found objects and dirt to connect with ideas of home, the domestic sphere, family and community, and the invisible labor of women of color. The objects and performances I make are hybridizations of traditional craft and what it is to relate to our bodies. I use what is found in the pantry to share moments of vulnerability and give voice to identities often overlooked or silenced, this practice is a meditation of my experiences. By exposing pain, I am reminded I am alive and the gift it is to be alive. I want to celebrate life and plant seeds for futures where Black and Indigenous people are centered.”

Kamari Carter

Providence, Rhode Island

Kamari Carter is a sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, RISD Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and has been featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, LevelGround and WhiteWall. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.

I enjoy erecting work(s) with an opaque approach to overt issues, with the goal to uproot conversations on topics that are sometimes difficult to discuss. Subjects such as perception, surveillance, structure, participation, parallelisms and memory are all common motifs in my body of work. There’s a phenomenology in both the audible and oral histories of these themes that I’m always encapsulated by. Often my work interrogates and investigates who is viewing, why they are viewing, and what exactly are they viewing? The work itself tends to take up many forms, be it sculpture, sound, mixed-media, or moving image with an aim to spark dialogue in critical thought; and perhaps, tell a familiar story with a medium much less familiar.

Nia O. Witherspoon

Brooklyn, New York

Nia O. Witherspoon(Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist + healing justice practitioner investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire, and diaspora, as they track across the space-time continuum. Combining Black feminism, indigenous epistemologies, eco-feminism, and auto-critogrophy with mediums in writing, performance, sound, and installation, Witherspoon creates portals for communion, witnessing, and healing. Current and recent works include: Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure (HERE Art Center/Musical Theatre Factory, 2024), Chronicle X: The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed, 2021), and MESSIAH (La Mama, 2019). She is a NEFA/NTP recipient, a Creative Capital Awardee, an NPN and APAP awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, a current artist in residence at HERE Art Center and Musical Theatre Factory, and former resident at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and New York Theatre Workshop. Her work has been or will be featured by The Shed, BRIC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Joe’s Pub, HERE, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, Links Hall, National Black Theatre, Brava Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. Her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women and Collective Creation; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands. Follow her @niasoli on Instagram to stay up to date on all the happenings!

”I am a concept-driven artist invested in creating spaces where Black/Queer/Femme folks, and, more largely BIPOC are placed in the expansive realm of the sacred. This means that while contemporary tragedy and inter-generational trauma often trigger a project’s inception, ultimately, I aim for my works to place my communities in a context that far exceeds the 500-years of colonial time, and places us in close communion with expanse, imagination, futurity--distant galaxies, and the deep sea. Freedom is not something I have achieved yet, but it is something I feel pulled uncontrollably toward. I am working to cultivate freedom in myself, in my works, and in my collaborators, by any means necessary. I am also learning that freedom is very much about surrendering to what Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic” calls “feeling,” so I try to create spaces (from plays to rituals to rehearsal rooms) where vulnerability is the most valuable currency, continuing and building on the legacy of my Black feminist elders.”

Thương Hoài Trần

Chicago, Illinois

Thương Hoài Trần is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Tây Ninh, Vietnam, and raised in Kansas. Being a Vietnamese immigrant, this part of their identity informs and influences a large part of their artwork. Art has become a method of self-discovery, learning, and healing. Most of their artwork features a level of distortion or fragmentation. In their recent works, they have been examining the process of weaving, disassembling clothes made in Vietnam, and recreating family photographs to learn more about their origin. This process becomes an approach of connecting to their heritage, paying homage, and filling in the gaps created through various barriers such as language, displacement, generational disconnect, and cultural complexities.

Tran received their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her MFA in Printmedia and a BFA in Painting and Printmedia at Emporia State University. Their work has been exhibited in The Research House for Asian Art, Janet Turner Print Museum, Megalo Print Studio, The Fiber Artists of San Antonio, and Artists Image Resource. Most recently, their work was published in The Mid America Print Council Journal, Volume 34/35: “Repair.”

Sonja John

Bronx, New York

Mikayla Patton

Roswell, New Mexico

Mikayla Patton (she/her) is a visual artist born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation of so-called South Dakota. Patton is a dual citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. In 2019, Patton obtained a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a focus in Printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Patton is represented by the Chiaroscuro Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe. She has exhibited at the Texas Tech School of Art (Lubbock); All My Relations Gallery (Minneapolis); and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Her work is included in private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, Tia Collection, and Atka Lakota Museum. As of 2022, Patton has received the Artist in Business Leadership from First Peoples Fund; and LIFT: Early Career Support for Native Artists from Native Arts and Culture Foundation.

“Currently papermaking is a prominent part of my practice as I am curious about the texture of the paper's surface and what it might provide in terms of its physicality as well as its symbolism. There are traces of its history, but mostly it has been washed out. I pulp the paper until it no longer resembles a document. I rarely make marks on the paper, but sometimes erase residue from burning or other treatments. The clean surface provides me with a sense of peace, a place to hide, a safe place for me. There is a sense of self embodiment in much of my works. When I use the paper to make other forms, such as boxes, they feel as though they were made from a handmade membrane. This version of skin is made from the seemingly endless stream of paper products flooding the landscape.”

Christina Martin

Portland, Oregon

“I am a Mexican-American, queer, experimental printmaker. Originally from Texas, I moved to Portland, OR where I received an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I am a printmaker who enjoys challenging traditional printmaking as well as traditional ideas. My material exploration transforms the print past paper, introducing and interlacing new forms of media with various printmaking techniques. This includes sculptural works like molds and casts, liquid latex, textiles, ceramics, and even the body. I am an explorer of material and identity.

Within my artistic practice, I often engage in the conversation of identity and expression. My work is rooted within my own intersectional identity and alternative embodied experience. This often includes speaking about my own feminine, queer, kinky, and cultural expressions. Overall, my work evokes space for self-exploration, self-love, and pleasure.
I am an activist and participant in my community, working and making art toward forging connections and speaking on.”

Kindall Gant

New York, New York

I am a poet and creative nonfiction writer from New Orleans currently based in New York City. I find myself in evolution through lyrical storytelling. My main inspirations are rooted in relationships, home, heritage, and erased histories. I have won the Lucy Grealy Prize for poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. My debut poem Elegy for [Redacted] was published online in TORCH. I have received scholarships for residencies and fellowships from The Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow, Brooklyn Poets, and more. In my free time, I currently serve as founder and EIC for Arcanum Magazine, a newly established online literary magazine for Black creatives, and volunteer reading poetry manuscripts for the Tenth Gate Prize, an imprint for mid-career poets. While my poetry can feel individual during the process, I volunteer my time to make opportunities for historically disenfranchised folks like myself accessible. In my professional life, I work in publishing as a book publicist and believe the narratives shared widely and commercially are disproportionate and don't represent our diverse everyday lives.

Fabiana Comas

Mexico City, Mexico

Through drawings and strokes, Fabiana Comas (Caracas, Venezuela) gaze goes to the essentials of objects, nature, and the human body. Her marks are gestures that respond to the physical impulse to draw, turn over, and evoke what is recycled in her memory to represent or transform experiences. The artist experiments with the shape of the human body to explore femininity, queerness, and the power structures that act on bodies. Likewise, she is interested in the contemplation of lines, studies on nature, and the abstractions of popular culture.
The artist has nine years of experience in graphic production and reproduction, which has allowed her to use photography and engraving as study tools for drawing. Between 2019 and 2022, she was in the Yirrkala community in East Arnhem Land (Australia), where she worked for the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Art Center. There, from the immersive experience and the practice of Deep Listening (process of listening to learn), she was able to observe, work and collaborate with the community of indigenous artists of Yirrkala; thus becoming involved with their different daily and professional activities, such as the mixing of pigments and the production of the graphic arts archive. Unassuming and full of curiosity, the Yirrkala community left a relevant mark on her exploration as an artist. In addition, Fabiana has studied Visual Arts and graduated from the National Experimental University of Arts (Caracas, Venezuela). Her work has been exhibited in Venezuela, Mexico, Australia, and Japan. She currently continues to develop her art practice in Mexico City.

Christina P. Day

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Christina P. Day is a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. She is an alumna of the University of the Arts (Crafts/Fiber) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (Fiber). She has held residencies at Sculpture Space, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Open Studio Residency, RAIR, and The Studios at MASS MoCA. In 2016 she was a Finalist in the Open Call for Cue Art Foundation (New York, NY). She is an alumna of Pink Noise Projects artist collective, formerly NAPOLEON, (2012-2016) and has written articles both on her own work and in critique of others for Architecture and Ideas (Canada) and Textile:  Journal of Cloth and Culture (Oxford, UK). She is a full-time faculty member, and served as Chair from 2021-2022, of the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, MD. 

“My collaged constructions and installations are guided by traces of past and person that lie deep within used objects and spaces. Though my work shifts in scale from the handheld to life size, my pursuit of a fragment of person and place remains. My background in Fiber influences how I arrive at my work and keeps me thinking about how to communicate with material. I use good craft to amplify the uncanny and mix metaphors between unlikely surfaces and materials. “

Assets for Artists

December 7, 2022

The Studios Announces 2023 Winter/Spring Fellowship Awardees

Assets for Artists

December 7, 2022

*Pictured:* *Silvia Lopez Chavez, 2022 Fellow, Picture by Carolina Porras Monroy*

The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees for its 26 Winter/Spring 2023 residency fellowships. Each of these artists will receive a fully funded residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.

Learn more about how you can support an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA or establish a fellowship in your name.

The Studios at MASS MoCA’s next call for applications is now open from Nov 8, 2022 - Jan 8, 2023 for residencies during July 2023 - Jan 2024. Learn more about the Studios’ fellowships and financial aid.

Congratulations to the Winter/Spring 2023 Awardees:

General Fellowships

(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)

Andrés Argüelles Vigo
Clare Hu
Fabiana Comas
James Kaun Balo
Kamari Carter
Keith Wilson
Mikayla Patton
Nia Witherspoon
Sonja John
Thương Hoài Trần
Vessna Scheff

Learn more

Fellowship for Oregon Visual Artists

(funded by The Ford Family Foundation)

Christina Martin
Lynn Yarne

Learn more

Massachusetts Artist Fellowships

(funded by the Barr Foundation)

Asma Khoshmehr
Grace Talusan
Julio Cesar Diaz
Juyon Lee
Sarah Stefana Smith

Learn more

Iris fellowship

(in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center)

Hanna Sobolieva
Cima Khademi
Clemente Sajquiy-Ramirez

Learn more

Puerto Rico Artist Fellowships

(funded by the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation and an anonymous donor)

Elsa María Meléndez
Garvin Sierra Vega
Norma Vila Rivero
Ana Portnoy Brimmer
Natalia Sánchez

Learn more

Assets for Artists

December 7, 2022

Welcome 2023 Winter / Spring General Fellows

Assets for Artists

December 7, 2022

The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees for 2023 Winter/Spring residency fellowships. Each of these artists will receive a fully funded residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.

Learn more about how you can support an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA or establish a fellowship in your name.

The Studios at MASS MoCA’s current open call for applications will run until January 8th for residencies during July 2023 - January 2024. Learn more about the Studios’ fellowships and financial aid.

Andrés Argüelles Vigo

Lima, Peru

Andrés is a visual artist who constantly works on the manipulation of iconographies and discourses of art history, through painting and text. He studied at the National School of Fine Arts of Peru in the specialty of painting and graduated in 2017, obtaining the gold medal of his class.

“I experiment and play with the contrasts of historical and local (personal) iconographies. A relationship inspired by my fascination with the great pieces of universal art history (which I have only seen in photos) and my dissatisfaction (or disappointment) when I understand that it is only western art history. The history of art in my country, Peru, is not part of the history of universal art; it is a small history, annexed to the world.

At this moment, I am exploring the possibilities of fiction within the concept of the "Multiverse" in the process of colonization in Peru… a project I call "THE INCAVERSE"; a project of history, fiction and humor that takes up the theme of the Spanish colonialist process in America with a fictional twist, in which certain events in that historical record never happened.

Inspired by the rise of the "Multiverse" concept due to superhero movies, this project takes the "multiversal" concept of parallel worlds to raise questions such as, What would happen if the Spanish had not been able to conquer the Inca empire? And even more, What would have happened if the Incas had conquered important areas of Europe? What would happen if Peru won a World Cup? How would the Inca influence the West? etc.... These are the questions I would like to explore and materialize in this residency.

The Incaverse, besides being a set of playful exercises that explore the subjectivity of history, also seeks to propose reflections on the emotions that result after the traumas of history that have not been retributed. And by proposing an interpretation through humor, fiction and parody, I intend to present a new Latin American narrative of resistance to the historical traumas of colonialism.”

Clare Hu

Brooklyn, New york

Clare Hu is an artist and weaver currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her BFA with a focus in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Haptic skips of woven textiles gone awry, the distortion of image dictated by the hand, and games of hide and seek, inform the use of weaving, mended imagery and installation, to examine false histories and notions of the South. By utilizing slow craft, Clare Hu draws from her own experience living in the Southern United States and her research documenting and archiving how Southern narratives are made and maintained throughout the history of Georgia. By exploring how Southern myths are acted and re-enacted in the stories and objects surrounding them, Hu iteratively pieces, mends and patches as a way to respond and dissect the physical and personal distances between cultural spaces - both set a far and rewritten one on top of the other.
A tarp becomes a boundary, dividing the complete with the unfinished - a blinder, hiding spaces that become momentary place holders. Images taken from Hu’s family photos are printed onto warp to then be distorted by the tension of the hand. Making use of woven offcuts, Southern iconography and collage, prospective patches are both used and exhibited as objects in action. Hu magnifies the blurry edges of vision, piecing together moments of her personal narrative to subvert larger myths of the South. Creating patches for unmaterialized textiles, becomes a guarded optimistic practice used to conserve personal places in memory and allow space to consider something new.

Hu has shown in various group shows including Considering Mass and Density at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn, NY and CONTINUUM at the Textile Center in Minneapolis, MN, as well as a solo show, Blow/Bellow, at Dream Clinic Project Space in Columbus, OH in 2021. She is a past Hambidge Center fellow and resident at the Textile Arts Center in Brooklyn. In 2022, Hu took part in Alfred University’s inaugural Summer Residency Program and was a Visiting Artist at the Gibbes Museum in Charleston, SC.

Fabiana Comas

Mexico City, Mexico

Through drawings and strokes, Fabiana Comas (Caracas, Venezuela) examines the essentials of objects, nature, and the human body. Her marks are gestures that respond to the physical impulse to draw, turn over, and evoke what is recycled in her memory to represent or transform experiences. The artist experiments with the shape of the human body to explore femininity, queerness, and the power structures that act on bodies. Likewise, she is interested in the contemplation of lines, studies on nature, and the abstractions of popular culture.

The artist has nine years of experience in graphic production and reproduction, which has allowed her to use photography and engraving as study tools for drawing. Between 2019 and 2022, she was in the Yirrkala community in East Arnhem Land (Australia), where she worked for the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Art Center. There, from the immersive experience and the practice of Deep Listening (process of listening to learn), she was able to observe, work and collaborate with the community of indigenous artists of Yirrkala; thus becoming involved with their different daily and professional activities, such as the mixing of pigments and the production of the graphic arts archive. This experience with the Yirrkala community left a relevant mark on her exploration as an artist. In addition, Fabiana has studied Visual Arts and graduated from the National Experimental University of Arts (Caracas, Venezuela). Her work has been exhibited in Venezuela, Mexico, Australia, and Japan. She currently continues to develop her art practice in Mexico City.

James Kaun Balo

Miami, Florida

James Balo is a Haitian-Jamaican multidisciplinary-artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, but originally from Carol City, FL, raised by the vast Caribbean communities in greater Miami.

Balo, who is a 2018 United States Presidential Scholar in The Arts and National YoungArts Foundation Finalist in Visual Arts will receive his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art.

James’ work has been experienced throughout and outside of the country, including Miami, Fl, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Virginia, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, and Haiti.

Balo, who has performed and exhibited at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Miami, Florida’s Adrienne Arsht Center, Sullivan Galleries, and the National YoungArts Foundation Gallery, considers himself to be a Griot or a Banton-- a rakontè istwa or an mc who keeps up the tradition of passing down history. He is in awe of the origin of black love stories.

Balo is creating interdisciplinary collages that take the form of psalm, prose, installation, photo, film, textile, fashion, and performance. His work dances and evolves through medium and presentation. James is archiving an encyclopedia of his family’s history, culture, and tradition.

Kamari Carter

Providence, Rhode Island

Kamari Carter is a sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, RISD Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and has been featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, LevelGround and WhiteWall. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.

”I enjoy erecting work(s) with an opaque approach to overt issues, with the goal to uproot conversations on topics that are sometimes difficult to discuss. Subjects such as perception, surveillance, structure, participation, parallelisms and memory are all common motifs in my body of work. There’s a phenomenology in both the audible and oral histories of these themes that I’m always encapsulated by. Often my work interrogates and investigates who is viewing, why they are viewing, and what exactly they are viewing. The work itself tends to take up many forms, be it sculpture, sound, mixed-media, or moving image with an aim to spark dialogue in critical thought; and perhaps, tell a familiar story with a medium much less familiar.”

Keith Wilson

Chicago, Illinois

Mikayla Patton

Roswell, New Mexico

Nia Witherspoon

Brooklyn, New york

Nia O. Witherspoon (Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist + healing justice practitioner investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire, and diaspora, as they track across the space-time continuum. Combining Black feminism, indigenous epistemologies, eco-feminism, and auto-critography with mediums in writing, performance, sound, and installation, Witherspoon creates portals for communion, witnessing, and healing. Current and recent works include: Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure (HERE Art Center/Musical Theatre Factory, 2024), Chronicle X: The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed, 2021), and MESSIAH (La Mama, 2019). She is a NEFA/NTP recipient, a Creative Capital Awardee, an NPN and APAP awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, a current artist in residence at HERE Art Center and Musical Theatre Factory, and former resident at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and New York Theatre Workshop. Her work has been or will be featured by The Shed, BRIC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Joe’s Pub, HERE, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, Links Hall, National Black Theatre, Brava Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. Her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women and Collective Creation; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands. Follow her @niasoli on Instagram to stay up to date on all the happenings!

”I am a concept-driven artist invested in creating spaces where Black/Queer/Femme folks, and, more largely BIPOC are placed in the expansive realm of the sacred. This means that while contemporary tragedy and inter-generational trauma often trigger a project’s inception, ultimately, I aim for my works to place my communities in a context that far exceeds the 500-years of colonial time, and places us in close communion with expanse, imagination, futurity--distant galaxies, and the deep sea. Freedom is not something I have achieved yet, but it is something I feel pulled uncontrollably toward. I am working to cultivate freedom in myself, in my works, and in my collaborators, by any means necessary. I am also learning that freedom is very much about surrendering to what Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic” calls “feeling,” so I try to create spaces (from plays to rituals to rehearsal rooms) where vulnerability is the most valuable currency, continuing and building on the legacy of my Black feminist elders.”

Sonja John

Bronx, New York

Sonja John is a queer, first generation, Bronx-based artist, educator, and curator. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Her contributions to museum education have been featured at the RISD Museum, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic. She is curator-in-residence for The Yard, Greenpoint. Her poetry has been featured at Jazz At Lincoln Center and The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and her work has been featured on I Like Your Work Podcast, n+1 magazine and Seeing Color Podcast with Zhiwan Cheung.

”Gardens are simultaneously natural and unnatural constructed spaces. Their aesthetics are informed by taxonomy and hegemony, systems of colonial oppression. Race and gender are also constructed spaces. Entire territories are cultivated, and queer bodies of color are excised. If migrants are forced to relocate due to war, racism, or state-sanctioned homophobia, are they considered invasive species in new homes, or do they gain endemic status? The Middle Passage—a forcible uprooting—brought enslaved Africans to the Caribbean. When these diasporic organisms propagated in their new territories, they bridged the flora and fauna of multiple continents. I explore this cultural, botanical, and material hybridity through paintings, textiles, printmaking, and site-responsive installations that reference plant forms across equatorial zones. These plant motifs investigate nostalgic fictions of the Caribbean built from history, memory, and family lore. Using collage, abstraction, stencils, and natural dyes, I both preserve and transform references to my parents’ birth countries (Trinidad, Jamaica, the Philippines) in order to visually undo the simultaneous invisibility and exotification of tropical bodies. Drawing from decorative and scientific visual languages, my work explores landscape, fantasy, queerness, migration, endemism vs. invasiveness, and the relationship between body and environment.”

Thương Hoài Trần

Chicago, Illinois

Thương Hoài Trần is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Tây Ninh, Vietnam, and raised in Kansas. Being a Vietnamese immigrant, this part of their identity informs and influences a large part of their artwork. Art has become a method of self-discovery, learning, and healing. Most of their artwork features a level of distortion or fragmentation. In their recent works, they have been examining the process of weaving, disassembling clothes made in Vietnam, and recreating family photographs to learn more about their origin. This process becomes an approach of connecting to their heritage, paying homage, and filling in the gaps created through various barriers such as language, displacement, generational disconnect, and cultural complexities.

Tran received their MFA in Printmedia at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a BFA in Painting and Printmedia at Emporia State University. Their work has been exhibited in The Research House for Asian Art, Janet Turner Print Museum, Megalo Print Studio, The Fiber Artists of San Antonio, and Artists Image Resource. Most recently, their work was published in The Mid America Print Council Journal, Volume 34/35: “Repair.”

Vessna Scheff

Providence, Rhode Island

Vessna Scheff is a painter and performance artist based in Providence, RI.

“My current interdisciplinary practice in painting and performance focuses on how Black diasporic identities hold, create, and teach subsistence narratives through embodied sounds and movements. With this focus, I am asking the questions: How are unspoken histories conveyed through movement, silence, the glance of an eye, fat crackling in cast iron, pushing play on a walkman, and seeds thrown in the garden? How can my practice map these diasporic ways of knowing and amplify ongoing struggles for Black womxn living? My research expands on how diasporic identities ‘map’ ways of knowing and create/ share resistance strategies. Disparate ways of knowing present in my research include embodied knowledge, negotiations of code switching, slowing pace to reclaim power, and sampling/ looping in R&B music performed by Black womxn. Grounded in watercolors, my work reclaims an often described as “difficult”/ “sketch” medium for its uncontrollable qualities, and conceptualizes the freedom of watercolors as an expression of Black liberation- always being, responding, and expressing freedom despite the confines of oppression. These active works dance with time and fall to gravity- they blend, bleed, and bloom; they stretch, they resist, they flood, they drip- potent in texture, heavy in meaning, and rich in nuance.”

Oregon Visual Arts Fellows

Supported by The Ford Family Foundation, this fellowship awarded two visual artists from the state of Oregon:

Christina Martin

Portland, Oregon

I am a Mexican-American, queer, experimental printmaker. Originally from Texas, I moved to Portland, OR where I received an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I am a printmaker who enjoys challenging traditional printmaking as well as traditional ideas. My material exploration transforms the print past paper, introducing and interlacing new forms of media with various printmaking techniques. This includes sculptural works like molds and casts, liquid latex, textiles, ceramics, and even the body. I am an explorer of material and identity.

Lynn Yarne

Portland, Oregon

Lynn Yarne is an artist and educator from Portland, Oregon. She works within animation and collage to address collective memory, generational narratives, histories and space. A fourth generation Chinese and Japanese American, her current work explores themes of displacement and loss, resilience and community, particularly within Old Town Portland.
She is curious about participatory works, magic, and rejuvenation.

As a teacher in a public high school she facilitates a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on equipping young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. Yarne and her students began building a screen printing studio in a classroom closet in 2015; it is now a printmaking studio that trains over 120 youth printers each year.

Assets for Artists

December 5, 2022

2023 Capacity Building Grants for Connecticut Artists!

Assets for Artists

December 5, 2022

Artist John Vo. Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

We know that artists require working capital to build the success of their creative practice. This year, we are pleased to partner with the Connecticut Office of the Arts to support a Capacity-Building Grant Cohort for Connecticut artists!

Application opens: jan 1, 2023

Application Closes: Feb 22, 2023

DEADLINE EXTENDED!
(Previously Feb 15)

APPLICATION EXTENDED TO FEB 22.

Preview the application by downloading a PDF of the application here.

APPLY NOW

program overview

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists Capacity Building Grant Program pairs an unrestricted micro-grant of $2,000 with professional development tools for artists to design and build their creative future. In this program, each artist determines what they need from a broad array of opportunities, which means that each artist's path through the program will look a little different. There are no requirements, only opportunities. After being accepted into the program, grantees complete a brief onboarding call with one of A4A's Program Managers to learn more about the resources available to them. This also gives our team a chance to learn more about you and your creative goals.

details

Each grantee will have access to:

An unrestricted grant of $2,000 paid out at a time of your choosing.

Free, priority access to Assets for Artists online workshops for the year (some specifically designed with your cohort in mind).
At least one, free individual coaching session with an A4A trainer of your choice.
Support for setting goals and making an action-oriented plan to reach them.
Peer-networking opportunities within your cohort of fellow grantees.

ELIGIBILITY

Applicants for this specific grantee cohort must be full-time Connecticut residents.

Yes, we really mean CT-based artists only. You must also maintain full-time residency throughout the duration of the program. All full-time CT residents can apply, regardless of US citizenship or immigration status.

Open to artists and creatives of any discipline.

We define “artist” very broadly to include visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater practitioners, craftspeople, jewelers, fashion designers, puppeteers, fiber artists, drag performers, photographers, filmmakers, woodworkers, traditional artisans, and more!

Priority to emerging or mid-career artists as well as artists from under-resourced communities and backgrounds.

While we welcome artists at any stage of their career to apply, most of the artists we’ve served identify as emerging or mid-career. Some of our artists are self-taught, while others have MFAs; some are relatively new to art while others have been making work for decades. Many of the artists we work with have never before received a grant. We strongly encourage artists from under-resources communities and backgrounds to apply. Learn how Assets for Artists endeavors to work within an anti-oppression framework.

Readiness to take your practice to the next level.
The Capacity-Building Grant is best suited for creatives who are excited to engage with program offerings, ready to build a more sustainable practice and expand their network of creative peers.

APPLY NOW

Questions? Read our FAQ. Then contact: assetsforartists@massmoca.org

Assets for Artists

November 22, 2022

Welcome December 2022 Studios

Assets for Artists

November 22, 2022

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
December 2022 Artists-in-Residence!

November 30th - December 13th

David Bowen

Duluth, Minnesota

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.

Ellen Doré Watson

Conway, Massachusetts

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

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

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.

Assets for Artists

November 18, 2022

Announcing 2023 Puerto Rico Artist Fellows

Assets for Artists

November 18, 2022

For our fifth year, the Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to celebrate a new group of Studios at MASS MoCA Puerto Rico Artist Fellows. Over the next year, we will welcome five artists in sculpture, photography, painting, and writing for residencies at the museum. Artists 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, including the impacts of Hurricane Fiona in September 2022.

We invite you to meet our newest Puerto Rico Artist Fellows below. And if you haven’t yet seen 2018 Puerto Rico Fellow Gamaliel Rodriguez’s 60-foot installation in the MASS MoCA Hunter Center Hallway, La travesía / Le voyage, be sure to visit before the exhibition closes January 15, 2023.

The 2023 Puerto Rico Fellowship program is supported by the Dorothea L. Leonhardt Foundation.

Elsa María Meléndez

Caguas, Puerto Rico

In residence: March 1st - March 28, 2023

Elsa María Meléndez is a visual artist born in Caguas, Puerto Rico (1974) with a 25 year artistic career. She has exhibited collectively in more than 95 exhibitions in the United States, Uruguay, Cuba, Ireland, Romania, Portugal, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.

Meléndez was one of the Commended artists and also received the People’s Choice Award at the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, National Portrait Gallery at Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Her first solo exhibition in the United States, “Vengo de una isla de confusión” (“I Come from an Island of Confusion”) opened at Alabama Contemporary Art Center on September 2022, traveling to the Rollins Museum in May 2023. In 2019 she received the Flamboyán Artist Fellowship in partnership with NALAC. She was nominated for the 2019 USA Fellowship, United States Artists. In 2014 Meléndez was invited to a mid-career solo exhibition “Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción”, by the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña at the Museo Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina, La Puntilla, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Among other distinctions, she has received the Lexus Fellowship, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico in 2009.

Meléndez stands out for incorporating printmaking techniques, embroidery and large accumulations of textiles and synthetic materials. The iconography in her work draws on characteristics that define the social and cultural idiosyncrasies of her environment. Meléndez's work documents uncertainty, while defending the right to doubt in debates between tragedy, comedy, innocence and malice. Her work makes visible cultural contradictions and the lack of public policies that enhance the quality of life of Puerto Ricans. Through the representation of women in public and private life, she develops an antithesis of behavioral judgments by denouncing misogyny.

Her work is included in the contemporary art collections of the Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; Glendale Community College in California; Newcomb Art Museum at Tulane University, New Orleans; Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; La Casa de Las Américas in Havana; Museo de Arte de Ponce; Ateneo Puertorriqueño; Lolita Rubial Foundation in Minas, Uruguay and in the Museo de Arte de Caguas, among others. Her work has also been reviewed in important journals and in the contemporary art books "Hinca por ahí, escritos sobre artes y asuntos limítrofes" by Nelson Rivera, Ediciones Callejón 2016, "Frescos: 50 Puerto Rican Artists under 35" by Celina Nogueras Cuevas, Muuaaa 2011 and, in the catalog published by the Programa de Artes Plásticas del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña "Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción de Elsa María Meléndez", 2015, among others. After completing the Fine Arts Bachelor degree at the Universidad de Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus, she studied curatorship, registration and collection management at the Smithsonian Center for Education Museum Studies in Washington, D.C. and in SUAGM in Gurabo, Puerto Rico among many others institutions.

Meléndez has also worked on curatorship and research projects with the Colección Nacional of the Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña and has curated and designed more than 50 exhibitions for the Museo de Arte de Caguas, Puerto Rico, where she works as Curator.

Elsa María Meléndez es una artista visual nacida en Caguas, Puerto Rico (1974) con 25 años de carrera artística. Ha expuesto colectivamente en más de 95 exposiciones en Estados Unidos, Uruguay, Cuba, Irlanda, Rumania, Portugal, República Dominicana y Puerto Rico.

Meléndez recibió una Mención honorable y también recibió el premio People's Choice en el Concurso de Retratos Outwin Boochever 2022, National Portrait Gallery en Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. Su primera exposición individual en Estados Unidos, “Vengo de una isla de confusión” inauguró en Alabama Contemporary Art Center en septiembre de 2022 y viajará al Museo Rollins en mayo de 2023. En 2019 recibió el Flamboyán Artist Fellowship en asociación con NALAC. Fue nominada para la beca United States Artists 2019 USA Fellowship. En 2014 Meléndez fue invitada a realizar una exposición individual de mitad de carrera “Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción”, por el Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña en el Museo Antiguo Arsenal de la Marina, La Puntilla, San Juan, Puerto Rico. Entre otras distinciones recibió la Beca Lexus, Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico en 2009.

Meléndez se destaca por incorporar grabados, bordados y grandes acumulaciones de textiles y materiales sintéticos. La iconografía en la obra se nutre de rasgos que definen la idiosincrasia social y cultural de su entorno. Documenta la incertidumbre, al tiempo que defiende el derecho a la duda en debates entre tragedia, comedia, inocencia y malicia. Su propuesta visibiliza contradicciones culturales y la falta de políticas públicas que procuren calidad de vida para los puertorriqueños. A través de la representación de la mujer en la vida pública y privada desarrolla una antítesis de los juicios del comportamiento al denunciar la misoginia.

Su obra está incluida en las colecciones de arte contemporáneo del Rollins Museum of Art, Florida; Glendale Community College en California; Newcomb Art Museum en la Universidad de Tulane, Nueva Orleans; Museo de Historia, Antropología y Arte de la Universidad de Puerto Rico; Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico; La Casa de Las Américas en La Habana; Museo de Arte de Ponce; Ateneo Puertorriqueño; Fundación Lolita Rubial en Minas, Uruguay y, en el Museo de Arte de Caguas, entre otros. Su trabajo ha sido reseñado en importantes publicaciones periódicas y en los libros de arte contemporáneo "Hinca por ahí Escritos sobre artes y asuntos limítrofes", 2016 de Nelson Rivera, Ediciones Callejón, "Frescos: 50 Puerto Rican Artists under 35", 2011 de Celina Nogueras Cuevas, Muuaaa y, en el catálogo publicado por el Programa de Artes Plásticas del Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña "Perreta al argumento: 18 años de producción de Elsa María Meléndez", 2015 entre otros.

Meléndez ha trabajado también en proyectos de curaduría e investigación con la Colección Nacional del Instituto Cultura Puertorriqueña y, ha curado y diseñado más de 50 exposiciones para el Museo de Arte de Caguas, donde se desempeña como Curadora.

Fotografía: Rafael Collazo @rafacollazofoto

Garvin Sierra Vega

San Juan, Puerto Rico

In residence: May 17th - May 30th, 2023

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1977. Garvin Sierra Vega holds a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. During his formative years he worked as an assistant to prominent sculptors such as Ramón Berríos and Soucy de Perellano. Parallel to his work as a visual artist, Sierra Vega currently works as a freelance graphic designer, exhibition designer and set designer. His work has been exhibited internationally in countries such as Argentina, Colombia, Japan, Slovenia, Mexico, Portugal and the United States, among others, and is part of prestigious private and institutional collections, most recently appearing in no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum and also at Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) and the Museo de Historia y Antropología de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (MHAA). His artistic production has been reviewed in important publications on Puerto Rican art including: "Interconexiones, lecturas curatoriales de la colección del MAPR", "careos/relevos: 25 años del museo de arte contemporáneo de puerto rico" and "Frescos: 50 artistas puertorriqueños menores de 35 años". He also designed the scenery for the play "El Maestro II". Some of the distinctions he has received include: First Prize Poster for "Retorno 1903-2003, University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus and Honorable Mention in the Plastic Arts Contest of the Puerto Rican Athenaeum (both in 2001); First Prize Design Bombay Sapphire Cup (2003); First Prize Collective of Puerto Rican Artists 26th Graphic Biennial, Ljubljana, Slovenia (2005) and Honorable Mention in the Young Art Contest Oriental Group (2009).

Nace en Ponce, Puerto Rico en 1977. Posee un Bachillerato en Bellas Artes con concentración en Escultura y Artes Gráficas de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras. Durante sus años de formación trabajó como asistente de destacados escultores como Ramón Berríos y Soucy de Perellano. Paralelo a su trabajo como artista plástico, Sierra Vega se desempeña actualmente como diseñador gráfico independiente, diseñador de exhibiciones y escenógrafo. Su obra ha sido exhibida internacionalmente en países como Argentina, Colombia, Japón, Eslovenia, México, Portugal y Estados Unidos, entre otros, y forma parte de prestigiosas colecciones privadas e institucionales recientemente en no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria at the Whitney Museum, y tambien en el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico (MAC), Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico (MAPR) y el Museo de Historia y Antropología de la Universidad de Puerto Rico (MHAA). Su producción artística ha sido reseñada en importantes publicaciones sobre el arte puertorriqueño que incluyen : “Interconexiones, lecturas curatoriales de la colección del MAPR”, “careos/relevos: 25 años del museo de arte contemporáneo de puerto rico” y “Frescos: 50 artistas puertorriqueños menores de 35 años”. Tambien diseñó la escenografía de la obra teatral el Maestro II. Algunas de las distinciones de las cuales ha sido merecedor incluyen: Primer Premio Cartel por "Retorno 1903-2003, Universidad de Puerto Rico, Recinto de Río Piedras y Mención de Honor en el Certamen de Artes Plásticas del Ateneo Puertorriqueño (ambas en el 2001); Primer Premio de Diseño Copa Bombay Sapphire (2003); Primer Premio Colectiva de Artistas Puertorriqueños 26a Bienal de Gráfica, Ljubljana, Eslovenia (2005) y Mención de Honor Certamen de Arte Joven Oriental Group (2009).

Norma Vila Rivero

Caguas, Puerto Rico

In residence: May 17th - May 30th, 2023

Photographer, multimedia artist, exhibit coordinator and cultural manager Norma Vila Rivero received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (2005) and a master’s degree in Art Administration in Ana G. Mendez, Universidad del Turabo (2010). In 2011, she co-founded METRO: plataforma organizada, an artist-run space, and from 2015 until 2018 was the Director of ÁREA: lugar de proyectos. In 2017, she was selected to participate in DebtFair by the Occupy Museums Collective at the Whitney Museum Biennial. In 2018 she presented her project "A metaphor against oblivion", at The John & June Allcott Gallery at Chapel Hill University in North Carolina, USA. In 2020, she received the NALAC Fund for the Arts to continue with her ongoing project "A metaphor against oblivion". In 2021 she was invited to be part of "Suspended Time: Myrna Báez and Norma Vila Rivero" a duo show with Myrna Báez curated by Cheryl Hartup at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Oregon, USA. Subsequently, the Museum acquired one of her works for their collection. Currently, Vila Rivero is the director and co-founder of REUNIÓN, an artistic collective and a space for exhibition projects that was launched in March of 2022. Vila Rivero's work has been presented in Puerto Rico, Mexico, Norway, Switzerland, Argentina, Mallorca, Ecuador, the Dominican Republic, St. Croix, and and many states of the U.S. Her work is included in the contemporary art collections of the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (Oregon), the Luciano Benetton Collection (Italy), the Puerto Rico Museum of Art (MAPR), the Dra. Josefina Camacho Museum and Center for Humanistic Studies in la Nuez (Universidad de Turabo, Caguas, PR) and the FIART Foundation (Madrid, Spain), as well as in several private collections.

Vila Rivero employs a broad spectrum of mediums to explore social science, phenomenology, semantics, and the human condition in an artistic practice that weds aesthetics to social engagement. The aim is to subtly address emotional issues or intense social themes from a humanist point of view. Through photography, installation, sculpture and mixed media, Vila Rivero has criticized and offered a comment on the role of religion in wars, the immigrant condition, economic inequality due to gender, and recently the threat/aftereffects to environmental sustainability by disproportionate development without long-term planning and the privatization and subsequent overexploitation of the natural resources in Puerto Rico. This type of development ("economic growth") usually prioritizes foreigners over citizens. Her aim is to subtly create works whose meaning is elaborated and interwoven in a contemplative-collective network instead of being suspended in a space for individual consumption. She often responds to social oriented themes, objects with high significance, or situations in her surroundings. Site specificity is usually the point of departure for her creative process, involving research into the site and its surrounding geographical impacts. Vila Rivero always tries to combine many disciplines that work inclusively and socially.

"Currently, my work offers a critical look at the transformation of Puerto Rico’s environment. Inspired by two themes, landscape and absence, my intention is to convey a wake-up call about the effects of economic growth on environmental sustainability and the island’s inhabitants. For 16 years, through photography, interventions-installation or mixed media, I have commented on social problems that concern me. Whether to criticize or comment on our condition as a colony, the role of religion in wars, the condition of the immigrant, economic inequality by gender and recently environmental sustainability in the face of economic growth. I analyze and aesthetically approach those conflicts and resistances. It is important to make them relate to each other to unite aesthetics with social commitment."

Ana Portnoy Brimmer

Luquillo, Puerto Rico

In residence: June 14 - July 11, 2023

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a poet and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love an Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. The Spanish edition is forthcoming from La Impresora. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets.Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Gulf Coast, Society and Space, Sixth Finch, Foundry Journal, Sx Salon, The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, among others. Ana is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico and finds hope in the poetics of dance parties and revolution.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer es poeta y organizadora de Puerto Rico. Obtuvo su bachillerato y maestría en Literatura en Inglés de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, y es egresada del MFA en Escritura Creativa de Rutgers University-Newark. To Love an Island, su primera colección de poesía, fue originalmente ganadora del premio Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest 2019 de YesYes Books. La edición en Español del libro está próxima a salir con La Impresora. Ana es ganadora del premio 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020 y fue nombrada una de les Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. Su trabajo ha sido publicado o está próximo a salir en el Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Gulf Coast, Society and Space, Sixth Finch, Foundry Journal, Sx Salon, The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, entre otros. Es hija de inmigrantes Mexicanxs-Judixs, reside en Puerto Rico y encuentra esperanza en la poética del bailoteo y la revolución.

Natalia Sánchez

Arecibo, Puerto Rico

In residence: August 23 - September 19, 2023

Natalia Sánchez was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1992. She received her BFA at Columbus College of Art and Design in 2015. After Hurricane Maria, she returned to Puerto Rico, basing herself in the town of Arecibo where she continues to develop her painting, multimedia and community engagement practices with themes influenced by her immediate landscape.

Through her work, she seeks to document and deconstruct neglected moments found in Puerto Rico’s current urban landscape, which reveal our collective psyche in the context of Puerto Rico’s colonial history. She reconfigures this as a reflection: We shape the landscape that shapes us, acknowledging the landscape as a mirror. Her project “Pais Espejo” (2021), funded by the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture (NALAC), consisted not only of paintings of the historic yet destitute town of Arecibo, but also gathered anecdotes and history about the town told by elders, historians and urban planners. These efforts resulted in a 50 minute documentary that Sánchez shared back with her Arecibo community. Her most recent series of paintings, “Fracto” (2022), while still responding to the paradigms of architecture in Puerto Rico and the reality of decay in our landscape, also embraces abstraction. These new works exist between the realm of reality and the imaginary; in a plane of constant ideation and timelessness.

Assets for Artists

November 18, 2022

Welcome ValleyCreates Grantees

Assets for Artists

November 18, 2022

A4A is delighted to introduce our 2022 cohort of Capacity-Building grantees in Western MA! These fifteen artists are based throughout Franklin, Hampshire, and Hampden counties, and are uplifting their communities through work in theater, music, painting, social practice, writing, illustration, glass, movement, clowning, and more.

This is our third year of partnership with the ValleyCreates program of the Community Foundation of Western MA, a collaboration that has allowed us to connect with and support more than 100 artists in the Valley region of Massachusetts. In the second half of this post, you can find names of the grantees we worked with in 2020 and 2021.

Aria Acevedo (South Hadley)

Aria “Lune” Acevedo is a detribalized Indigenous Latine actor, designer, writer, and educator. Her work focuses on authentic intersectional representation of the Latine, specifically the Mexican-American diaspora and detribalized experience, Queer identity, and life with mental illness and disabilities in the U.S. media, by exploring and combining different mediums of storytelling and ritual. She graduated from Hampshire College with a BA in Theater and Creative Writing, and Mount Holyoke College with an MA in Teaching for Middle and High School Theater and Special Education. Lune has been chosen as this year’s resident playwright for Play Incubation Collaborative where she will be developing her play Return to Abya Yala.

Carlos REC McBride (Northampton)

Carlos McBride is an educator, community organizer, and social justice advocate, as well as a DJ and multidisciplinary artist working in audio, video, and photography. Carlos’ work often takes the form of creating spaces for people to develop and share their own narratives. For five years, he was the director of New England Public Radio’s Media Lab, a program that gave high school students from Springfield and Holyoke a platform to tell their stories. In his HEALERS project, Carlos documents the challenges men of color face in the streets, school, the workplace, and the prison system. He is currently a Language, Literacy, & Culture doctoral student at UMASS Amherst.

Chelsea Catherine (Springfield)

Chelsea Catherine is a writer of fiction and nonfiction. In 2018, they won the Mary C Mohr award for nonfiction through the Southern Indiana Review and their 2020 novel, Summer of the Cicadas, won the Quill Prose Award from Red Hen Press. Most recently, Chelsea won an Emerging Artist’s Award from Creative Pinellas and spent a month in Alaska at the Alderworks Artists Retreat. Chelsea graduated from the University of Tampa with their MFA in creative writing.

Dani Schmidt (Holyoke)

Dani Schmidt is a queer, neurodivergent illustrator and painter. They use both analog and digital mediums to create narrative- heavy work with organic themes and varying styles. Dani considers themselves to be a multidisciplinary visual storyteller, seeking to forge human connection through their art. In their artwork, they focus on organic life and nature as a consistent theme that is explored. Other themes explored are queer identities, motherhood, grief, and power. They devote much time to their personal projects such as illustrations for books, comics, and pattern making. Dani graduated from the Institute of Art and Design at New England College in Manchester, NH in 2021. Their goal is to use their art as a function of storytelling; as one of the most time honored and important traditions of humanity.

Ebbie Russell (Holyoke)

Ebbie Russell is a self-taught artist whose writing, choreography and visual art is heavily rooted in African diasporic movements, belief in time travel, and exploration of how dance can address, heal, and honor intergenerational trauma and chronic illness. Their current mediums of focus include speculative memoir writing and poetry and hand-cut mixed media collages. Ebbie is also a teaching artist who designs arts-based popular education: zine-making and workshops with young people and community members in and around western Massachusetts. They are dedicated and drawn to spaces that center the lived experiences of QTBIPOC, Queer Trans Gender Expansive / Black / Indigenous / People of Color.

Gabriela Sepulveda (Springfield)

Gabriela Sepulveda is a painter and illustrator from San Juan, Puerto Rico, who graduated from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has a Masters from Atlantic University College. Her work is influenced by pop surrealism, science fiction, and comics, and often studies organic subjects in conjunction with mechanical ones. Gabriela was a muralism apprentice and currently volunteers with Commonwealth Murals to create community projects all over the city of Springfield. Her work has been displayed in the The Trust Transfer Project and the Springfield Museums. She plans to continue working to better her community through her art while continuing to grow her visual language.

Jasper McCoy (Springfield)

Jasper McCoy is a creative whose work mirrors his cultural influences and experience growing up in Springfield, MA. He’s a graduate of Northeastern University with a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Architecture. His paintings express African-American heritage, black thought and development through intergenerational lives. Painting is his current creative outlet but of his firsts were poetry, music, and writing. Jasper is also the founding leader of the LoveArtCollective, a nonprofit that offers training, business development, and creative outlets in Springfield for artists by artists.

K Adler (Greenfield)

K Adler is an artist whose work draws from the study of movement and theatrical expression, creating and collaborating in immersive performance work as well as more traditional theater environments. Since 2017 K has worked as their persona "Karl", a silent vaudevillian who uses humor and absurdity to address and abstract social commentary including gender politics, climate change, capitalism, and oppressive institutions. K has a BFA in Modern Dance from the University of Utah.

Lora Talbot (Williamsburg)

Lora Talbot is an abstract painter whose works convey a distillation of lived experience. Physical engagement with materials and an elegant economy in composition are signature aspects of her larger-than-life-sized oil paintings on canvas. Lora’s paintings, in her words, are “energy, expression, and communication.” Lora earned an MA at Lesley College and studied at the Penland School of Craft and the Appalachian Center for Craft. Her paintings have been exhibited throughout New England.

Malaika Ross (Easthampton)

Malaika Ross is a Caribbean American artist who makes contemporary botanical paintings of native and introduced flora. In her words: “The act of observing and documenting nature through painting and drawing as a black woman, is a form of liberation, environmental stewardship and anti-oppression work.” Malaika earned her B.A. from Hampshire College with a focus in soil microbiology. She studied Painting and Drawing at RISD and completed intensive coursework in sustainable faming, ecological restoration and Hawaiian ethnobotany at the University of Hawai’i, Hilo.

Marc Austin (Springfield)

Marc Austin is a visual artist whose mediums include canvases, walls, apparel, utility boxes, and pianos. His current practice revolves around creating emotive color combinations, conveying the beauty of the melanated female form, and questioning ideals based in archaic beliefs. He is fascinated by ancient ways of creating, as well as finding innovation in the junctions between disciplines.

Maya Cunningham (Springfield)

Maya Cunningham is a "triple threat" - a jazz vocalist, visual artist and scholar. As a vocal artist, she is in the lineage of Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughan, and Etta Jones. She is a master storyteller through song, a virtuoso improvisor and has a shimmering five octave range. Her approach draws on the emotional delivery of the Holiday lineage and the improvisational spontaneity of Vaughan. She sings in several African languages, including Ewe, Bamana, and Setwana. Maya is also a composer and fuses her music with visual arts works in collage/montage, fused glass, paint, monoprint and mixed media. As an ethnomusicologist, her research focus is on African American cultural identity and traditional African and African American musics.

Meem Carry (Amherst)

Meem Carry is a performance artist and, foremostly, a clown. They create clown performances as a highly expressive, nonverbal character named Moimus who is constantly experiencing conflict, failure and injustice, as a way to generate empathetic dialogue between the performance and audience. This conversation points people towards tools they have within themselves to grapple with the anthropocene, bringing intention and resilience into their communities. Meem is a Hampshire College graduate and is also a preschool teacher who teaches clowning to children.

Mydalis Vera (Springfield)

Mydalis Vera is a writer, educator, and podcaster. Born to a Puerto Rican mother who spoke little to no English, Mydalis is dedicated to intertwining English and Spanish. She is motivated to create pieces that acknowledge her Guerrera foremothers and create visibility for the Guerreras of today. Mydalis has published essays at Multiplicity Magazine and The Nasiona. She created the Guerrera Writer LLC to encourage self-identified women to reclaim space, reclaim their position in history, be visible in their present/future, and appreciate their worth.

Sunny Allis (Westhampton)

Sunny Allis is a non-binary multidisciplinary artist, musician, designer, and educator. Many of their projects focus on community and connection through different forms of play and storytelling. In their paintings, Sunny explores consciousness through dynamic motion and transformation. They have created interactive public art installations that take people through imaginary worlds, and their animations have won awards internationally, including at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Sunny recently released a gender-inclusive, bilingual children’s book called Hooray, What A Day!/¡Viva, Qué Día!, as well as a dance remix album of lesbian anthems from the 90s called LEZ DANCE.

2020 + 2021 ValleyCreates Grantees

We began our partnership with ValleyCreates at the height of the pandemic, providing grants to 87 Valley artists over 2 years. This was during our busiest period ever at A4A, and we fell behind (way behind) on some of our usual marketing! We’re excited to make this very belated announcement of our previous three ValleyCreates grant cohorts.

2020 ValleyCreates Community Practice Cohort

2o20 ValleyCreates Cohort

2021 ValleyCreates Cohort #1

2021 ValleyCreates Cohort #2

Assets for Artists

November 17, 2022

Winter + Spring 2023 Open Studios Season

Assets for Artists

November 17, 2022

Photo of Studios AIR Jamie Denburg Habie (November 2022). Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

Mark your calendars for this season’s Open Studios at MASS MoCA:

Thursday, February 23

Thursday, March 23

Thursday, April 27

Each event will take place from 5-7PM in Building 13 + Building 34.

AS ALWAYS, FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL.

We are so excited to bring back our Open Studios events and invite you to meet the artists-in-residence!

Visit the museum until close and then come over to Building 13 and 34 for drinks, snacks and great conversation. After Open Studios, enjoy a cold brew at Bright Ideas and food at the Chingon Taco Truck!

IMPORTANT: Masks are NO LONGER REQUIRED to enter the Studios.

Directions to the Studios:

B.13 When you park in the main visitor lot at MASS MoCA, Building 13 is right in front of you. You’ll see Ferrin Contemporary and Eckert Fine Art galleries on the first floor. Enter through the side door (on the end of the building farthest from Rt. 2) and take the stairs or elevator to the second floor.

B.34 Is located across from Bright Ideas Brewery in the front entrance courtyard of MASS MoCA’s campus. When looking out from Bright Ideas, just head straight and then to the left up the ramp to the Studios entrance (black door).

Learn more about the current artists-in-residence

Photo of Studios AIR Maren Jensen (November 2022). Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

Learn more about the Studios at mass moca

Assets for Artists

October 17, 2022

Welcome October + November 2022 Studios

Assets for Artists

October 17, 2022

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
October + November 2022 Artists-in-Residence!

October 19th - November 15th

OPEN STUDIOS: November 10th 5-7PM

Learn more ABOUT OPEN STUDIOS

Ella Jacobson

Fairbanks, Alaska

Ella Jacobson is a cultural critic and writer originally from interior Alaska. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Drift, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, High Country News, and Real Life, among other publications. Much of her work explores how people metabolize their exposures to violence and death. She holds a masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and she is the recipient of residencies and support from Edith Wharton House, Straw Dog Writers Guild, Monson Arts, I-Park Foundation, Good Hart, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust Foundation. She is a former New York University Abu Dhabi Fellow in Writing. You can find her on Twitter @_ellajacobson.

Ana Rosa Rivera-Morrero

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Sculptor, photographer, video artist and creator of installations and performances. She graduated from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico with a concentration in sculpture in 1992, and took graduate courses in sculpture and art criticism at the Yale School of Art in Connecticut. Since the 1990s, she has been involved in countless collective and individual projects, including public art, and her work has been shown in twenty collective exhibitions, as well as several individual ones, in and outside of Puerto Rico. She did an artistic residency at the Fabric Workhouse and Museum in 2006. She is interested in exploring the political reality of the island through pieces and events in which she uses symbols such as the transvestite, the conch shell, and everyday objects of traditional life. It also examines historic architecture from its associations with patriarchal power in mixed media pieces that expose and disrupt such associations, inviting reflection. He stands out for the multiplicity of materials that he skillfully handles, from raw materials to found objects, photography, video and mixed media, whose combinations add meaning to his proposals.

Maren Jensen

Portland, Oregon

Weaving is a ruminating act, hours spent laboring in repetitive motion. Weaving an image, and even text, demands a deep deliberation of that image as it is frozen, built permanently into the textile over many days and weeks. Originally inspired by the landscapes of Joshua Tree, CA, where she studied weaving with Andrea Zittel at her experimental living site, A-Z West, she noticed the roads and property lines could easily be seen scratched into the dirt over the wide and flat expanses of land. Maren began to create work using grid imagery to work with ideas around these borders and what they perceived to be contrived permanence, exposing these lines as truly fluid; imperceptible to certain eyes. More recently, she began incorporating text and poetry into her tapestry weavings. Playing with impermanence by working with loose and indirect phrasing, by way of a belabored and confined medium, she continues to demand fluidity within infrastructure and systems we deem concrete. In the place of limitation, of lines drawn in sand, what can be dreamt up?Maren is the recipient of a Make|Learn|Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Coalition and has recently shown work with Noon Projects in Los Angeles, CA, Lowell in Portland, OR and was selected as a featured artist for Portland Textile Month 2022. She is currently living and working in Portland, Oregon.

Silvia Lopez Chavez

Chelsea, Massachusetts

Silvia Lopez Chavez is a Dominican-American artist whose community-centered murals form connections across disciplines and cultural boundaries. She uses joy as an act of resistance and celebration through her vibrant murals, and her work transforms urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. Silvia is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and was awarded the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) Leadership in Public Art award (2021). Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University.

I am a visual artist working in painting, mural-making, and illustration. Much of my work is framed by my experience as an Afro-Caribbean woman living and working in Boston. Growing up in the Dominican Republic fed my appetite for bold color palettes and my interest in how our environment influences who we become. At the core of my practice is a desire to bring joy, connection, and agency to the places where my work lives.

As a muralist, my process is fueled by understanding a site's context and its relationship to how the public engages with that space. I strive for my work to be approachable and easily understood. My style is energetic, layering bright colors and graphic elements with realistically rendered focal areas. Content is often determined through a collective, neighborhood-based co-designing and re-envisioning space, which I consider part of my social practice.

My studio work provides a space for play and experimentation, allowing me to look inward to bring balance and create personal work.

Jingjing Lin

New York, New York

Jingjing Lin is a conceptual artist whose work deals primarily with social-political themes.

Lin explores the depths of social and personal identity in the context of modern society, often examining themes such as confusion and quest, existence and absence, constraint and resistance through a lens of paradox. Of particular focus is how individuals define themselves amongst the effects of the outside world,vis-à-vis culture, politics, history and the economy.

Her artwork spans painting, drawing, performance, installation, mixed media, sound, light, photography, and video.

She is also well known for layering thread over painting, installation, and other mixed media to create dazzling worlds. The surreal effect created via this method immerses the viewers into another consciousness.
Jingjing was profiled by TATE research Center: Asia, as part of their ongoing study of “ Women Artist in Contemporary China”.

Jingjing ’s works have been exhibited in major public museums including Neues Kunstforum in Cologne(Germany), the National Art Museum of Chile in Santiago, the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Ivam in Valencia(Spain), the Kunstraum in Vienna, Galeria Herold in Bremen, Saint Mary’s University Art Museum in Halifax(Canada), the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in Philadelphia, the Tikanoja Art Museum in Vaasa (Finland), the Nanjing Museum, Guangzhou Art museum, the Du Land Modern Art Museum (Shanghai) and Song Zhuang Art Museum(Beijing) in China, Ljubljana Castle in Slovenia, etc.

Jingjing's work has been reviewed in major publications such as Asia Art Pacific, Artforum, Artnet News, AsiaArt, Southern Weekly, Kolaj magazine, Randian, China Daily, Luxuo, Hong Kong Economic Journal, South China Morning Post, etc.

Jamie Denburg Habie

Antigua, Guatemala

Jamie Denburg Habie is a Guatemalan artist and cultural practitioner living and working in Antigua, Guatemala. Jamie is interested in intermeshing earth, mind and body as an exercise in decentralizing consciousness, particularly through the lens of neuroscience and materiality.

Jamie is the Co-founder and Director of La Nueva Fábrica, a contemporary art space in Antigua, Guatemala that promotes creative experimentation through exhibitions, public programs and education, residencies, and multidisciplinary workshops.

Jamie holds a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, where she focused her research on the role of art in conflictive cultures, and the effects of violence on art-making.

Kerri Scharlin

New York, New York

Kerri Scharlin is an American artist who has shown nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Postmasters, Wooster Gardens, Jose Freire, Kustera Tilton Gallery, and New Release in New York, as well as Schaper Sundberg Galleri, Stockholm. She was included in a three-person exhibition at David Zwirner, New York and other group shows at The Aldrich Museum of Art, Connecticut; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Galerie Herve Mikaeloff, Paris; and Momenta, 303 Gallery, and American Fine Arts, Co. in New York. She also curated the exhibition “The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien,” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Scharlin's work has appeared in numerous international publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, Vogue, Artnet, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Flash Art, and Purple.

Ak Jansen

Brooklyn, New York

Born in the Netherlands, based in Brooklyn - Ak Jansen’s ceramics, soft sculptures, and sewn drawings occupy queerness on poetic and political terms, and honor queer community’s ethic of creative self-making. Care and intimate relation are at the center of Jansen’s works; how does care manifest between subjects and objects? How does care create subjectivity? How does an artwork it/themselves acquire perspective, life, and history? Clay and fiber are materials with a rich history in art, craft and design, Ak’s practice is focussed on the in-between spaces of those disciplines, and how those spaces can be brought together through material by the human-hand.

Recent exhibitions include a solo show, WE’RE HERE, at Ivy Brown Gallery (NY); group shows at 601 Artspace (NY), South Etna (Montauk, NY), and Tchotchke Gallery (NY). He is a BFA graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands and a MFA graduate of Brooklyn College NY, and a Wolff Ravenal Fellowship recipient, and the inaugural recipient of the Corrine Holiber Szabo '54 Art Residency fellowship at Studios at MASS MoCA.

Sheri Wills

New York, New York

Sheri Wills an artist who works with film, video, and sound to make single-channel videos, installations, sound works, and live video performances. She explores the material, physical, and philosophical potentials of cinema to reveal small moments that often go unseen and pull forward the emotional content of abstract imagery.

She has participated recently at residencies including the Narva Art Residency in Estonia and At Home Gallery in Slovakia. She has had one-person shows at venues including the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her films have been screened at venues including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art in NY. Her films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.

“I am attracted to half-seen imagery that disappears just before you might affix a firm meaning. While I work with contemporary technologies, I see my work in the tradition of women’s lap craft. I am drawn to that which is intimate, everyday and personal. Small stories, soon to be placed in a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. I hope when people experience my work, they will engage differently with the acts of seeing and hearing, and afterwards perhaps they will be open experiencing that which has always been a part of their environment but they had not previously noticed.”

Alumni in residence for a special project:

Nancy Edelstein

Seattle, Washington

Nancy Edelstein is now working on an installation project in B6.1A, a raw space with notable 12 foot tall windows on both sides and original concrete and brick supports.

Nancy writes: “I explore the experience of light, in response to space and time, through installation and technology.”

Nancy came to MASS MoCA this autumn specifically to work in this space. Her focus is a response to the light streaming inside, and its changing properties throughout the course of her 6 weeks in residence. She begins with marking light’s patterns, bringing awareness to the continuously moving light around us. During this time she will be assembling a site specific installation in three dimensions. Her goal is to create an engaging experience. Nancy's work is temporary, as are her materials: artists tape, vellum, mylar, and of course light.

Andre Lima (Brewster)

Dominique pecce (truro)

Julian Loida (Falmouth)

Kim Moberg (Centerville)

Laura Shabott (Provincetown)

Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor (MashpeE / Buzzard’s bay)

Margaret Clancy (South Yarmouth)

Melinda Nettles(Eastham)

Myra Kooy (Provincetown)

Natasha Frye (Mashpee)

Paul Rizzo (Provincetown)

Sam Holmstock (Cotuit)

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

January 4th - January 17th

New Marlborough, Massachusetts

Warwick, New York

Worcester, Massachusetts

Baltimore, Maryland

Chicago Illinois

Portland Oregon

Pawtucket, Rhode Island

Boston, Massachusetts

JBMDL, NEW Jersey

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

January 18th - January 31st

Portland, Maine

Providence, Rhode Island

Brooklyn, New York

Chicago, Illinois

Bronx, New York

Roswell, New Mexico

Portland, Oregon

Kindall Gant

New York, New York

Mexico City, Mexico

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Congratulations to the Winter/Spring 2023 Awardees:

Lima, Peru

Brooklyn, New york

Mexico City, Mexico

Miami, Florida

Providence, Rhode Island

Chicago, Illinois

Roswell, New Mexico

Brooklyn, New york

Bronx, New York

Chicago, Illinois

Providence, Rhode Island

Oregon Visual Arts Fellows

Portland, Oregon

Portland, Oregon

We know that artists require working capital to build the success of their creative practice. This year, we are pleased to partner with the Connecticut Office of the Arts to support a Capacity-Building Grant Cohort for Connecticut artists!

Application opens: jan 1, 2023

Application Closes: Feb 22, 2023

APPLICATION EXTENDED TO FEB 22.

program overview

details

ELIGIBILITY

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s December 2022 Artists-in-Residence!

November 30th - December 13th

Duluth, Minnesota

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Providence, Rhode Island

Poughkeepsie, NY

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Baltimore, Maryland

Ellen Doré Watson

Conway, Massachusetts

Norfolk, Connecticut

Granby, Massachusetts

Florida, Massachusetts

Aria Acevedo (South Hadley)

Carlos REC McBride (Northampton)

Chelsea Catherine (Springfield)

Dani Schmidt (Holyoke)

Ebbie Russell (Holyoke)

Gabriela Sepulveda (Springfield)

Jasper McCoy (Springfield)

K Adler (Greenfield)

Lora Talbot (Williamsburg)

Mwalim DaPhunkee Professor
(MashpeE / Buzzard’s bay)

Margaret Clancy
(South Yarmouth)

Melinda Nettles
(Eastham)

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!

Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
December 2022 Artists-in-Residence!