Jurying Artists & Curators
Here at MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists, our quality and diverse programming cannot happen without the cohort of artists and curators who advise and jury the artist selection for A4A’s various programs. We are beyond grateful to all of these individuals who have devoted time, energy and expertise to selecting the top artists, writers and performers for The Studios at MASS MoCA and Assets for Artists’ Capacity-Building Grants.
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2024 Residency Season:
Silvia Lopez Chavez (she/her)
Silvia Lopez Chavez is a Dominican-American visual artist whose collaborative murals aim to forge meaningful cross-cultural connections and transform urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. She explores personal stories of adaptation, assimilation, and resilience at the studio through painting, printmaking, and drawing. Most recent collaborations include Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute (DATMA) in New Bedford, MA, and The Outlaw Ocean Project in the Dominican Republic. Local works can be seen across Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem. She is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the recipient of the New England Women's Leadership Award by the Boys and Girls Club of America (2022), and a New England Foundation for the Arts Leadership in Public Art award (2021). She recently completed art residencies at MASS MoCA, Haystack, and Vermont Studio Center. Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, Peabody Essex Museum, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University. Silvia is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Altos de Chavón, the School of Art Design in the Dominican Republic. She continues her fine art studio practice at Atlantic Works Artist Studios in East Boston.
Mike Vos (he/him)
Mike Vos (b. 1986) is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR.
Vos utilizes his 4x5 film camera in experimental ways to advocate for the preservation of the environment through immersive storytelling. Drawing inspiration from various literary movements and themes such as Surrealism and Magical Realism, his photographic projects all exist within a shared universe; each focusing on different facets of an overarching story.
Traditional landscape photography lacks the ability to fully translate the complex emotions that come when viewing places firsthand that are ancient, beautiful, and strange. Much like variant adaptations of the same subject matter, Vos pushes the capabilities of analog photography to interpret landscapes into ethereal and otherworldly dreamscapes to capture the awe and wonder that exists in the natural world.
Norma Vila Rivero (she/her)
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.
Natani Notah (she/her)
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, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Massillon Museum, Tucson Desert Art Museum, apexart, 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 Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, 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.
Garvin Sierra Vega (he/him)
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).
Jo Cosme (she/her)
Jo Cosme is a Boricua award-winning multimedia artist who was displaced from Borikén (colonially known as Puerto Rico) to Seattle a year after Hurricane María. Her shock over North Americans’ ignorance of the archipelago inspired her to create works that provoke reflections on US Imperialism, disaster capitalism and neocolonialism in her homeland.
Cosme holds a BFA from PR's School of Fine Arts majoring in photography in 2014. Her work’s been exhibited in places such as the Museo de las Américas (PR), Photographic Center Northwest (Seattle), Dab Art Gallery (LA), and Galerie Rivoli 59 (Paris). She’s been invited to give talks in places such as Allied Media Conference, and MIT Game Lab to name a few. By 2022, she was awarded the new project grant from NWFF’s Collective Power Fund and the GAP award from Artist Trust. She was granted the Puerto Rican Artist Fellowship at MASS MoCA’s A4A Residency, where she started working on her first solo show, Welcome to Paradise. The first iteration of this show is set to open March 7th of 2024 in Gallery 4Culture, Seattle.
Lynn Yarne (she/her)
“I am a 4th/5th generation Chinese and Japanese American working in Portland, OR. Given the prevalence of historical and ongoing race-based displacement and community separation,themes of community, resilience and loss often come up for me in explorations of space and stakeholdership. I wonder about the capacity for art to engage and create stakeholders, to actively involve people in repair and visionary thinking.
I have worked in education for over 18 years. In the past 8 years I have worked as a classroom teacher in a public school facilitating a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on cultivating a critical social justice lens. The program aims to equip young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. In 2015, we built a screen printing studio that now trains over 120 youth printers a year. Creating opportunities for young people to express their visions and engage and community members is of great importance in my work as an artist.”
Carolyn Clayton (she/her)
Carolyn Clayton is an artist and residency director living in North Adams, MA. She is the co-founder of the Walkaway House, where, with her partner Benjamin Westbrook, she lives, works, and operates the Tend and Center of Gravity artist residencies. In addition to being their home, the Walkaway House provides physical space and opportunities for visiting artists, overnight guests and the local arts community to make meaningful work and connections in downtown North Adams.
Clayton uses the framework of her 1850’s historic home and the facilitation of an artist residency within its walls as a social practice from which to consider the melding and overlap of art and life. Through this lens she makes installations, participatory systems, and sculptural displays. Her work examines the allure of cleanliness and order in contrast to the human drive to accumulate, hold close and imbue objects with meaning. She received her MFA from University of Michigan in 2016 (with a certificate in Museum Studies) and her BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009. She was awarded the Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in sculpture in 2016 and a National Arts Strategy Creative Community Fellowship in 2018, where she began to develop the concept for the Walkaway House.
sTo Len (he/him)
sTo Len is an interdisciplinary artist whose recent work has centered on collaborations with environmentally abused landscapes and municipal agencies. The cross-disciplinary nature of Len’s work has included printmaking with polluted waterways, 3D scanning Fresh Kills landfill, recycling waste into art materials, and hosting performances at Superfund sites. He has been the Public Artist in Residence at the Department of Sanitation in NY and the first artist in residence at AlexRenew Wastewater Treatment Facility in Virginia. Len is based in Queens, NY with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, and his work incorporates these bonds by connecting issues of their history, environment, traditions and politics.
Roscoè B. Thické III (he/him)
Roscoè B. Thické III (b. 1981) is a Miami lens based artist whose work examines themes of family, community, and intimacy through his narrative arrangements and presentation of his images. Roscoè’s work ranges from traditional photography to experimental printing techniques and unique framing concepts. Roscoè’s work is inspired by literature and contemporary documentary practices. He creates environmental lifestyle images that give context clues to his subjects state of being. Roscoè’s education into the arts started while enlisted in the U.S Army. While stationed at Camp Casey, South Korea Roscoè studied Photography and Art. Roscoè continued his studies of Photography and Design at Broward College in Fort Lauderdale, Fl.
Alicia Ehni (she/her)
Alicia is a multidisciplinary artist who uses pure geometry and pre-Columbian iconography to address territory concerns in shifting landscapes. She studied at Univ. Católica (Perú), Pratt Institute and Hunter College.
Ehni is Program Officer at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA) where she works closely with fiscal sponsored projects. She served on GIA’s Support for Individual Artists committee and was Director of Frederico Seve Gallery in her previous role.
Natalie Shapero (she/her)
Natalie Shapero is the author of the poetry collections Popular Longing (2021), Hard Child (2017), and No Object (2013); her recent pamphlet, Today Hamlet, was published in 2023 by Out-Spoken Press (UK). Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The London Review of Books, The New York Review of Books, The Paris Review, The Nation, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles and teaches at UC Irvine.
Sean Desiree (they/them)
Sean Desiree is a self-taught artist, born and raised in the Bronx. They produce life-size structures and sculptures that serve as sanctuaries, protectors, and symbols of empowerment for marginalized communities. In addition to being an artist they are an educator facilitating the BIPOC Builders Immersions at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, NY. Equipping and inspiring change makers and community members to utilize building and construction is a large part of their practice. They have been awarded residencies at More Art, MASS MoCA and Wave Hill. They were a 2022 Leslie Lohman and Socrates Sculpture Park Fellow. Through their residency at More Art they received funding to produce their debut socially engaged public art sculpture, entitled BEAM ENSEMBLE with the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (she/her)
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-platform projects explore familial and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms.
Chelsea T. Hicks (she/they)
Chelsea T. Hicks is an experimental artist and literary writer working in her Indigenous language of Wahzhazhe ie. Her work has been published or pictured in World Literature Today, Poetry, The Paris Review, McSweeney’s, and shown at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Manetti Shrem Museum, and elsewhere. She holds an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and an MA from UC Davis. Her debut ‘A Calm and Normal Heart’ received the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award and was longlisted for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection. She is an enrolled member of the Osage Nation, and lives in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Artist Jurors for the Studios 2023 Residency Season:
Anina Major
(she/her)
Anina Major is a visual artist from the Bahamas. Her decision to voluntarily establish a home contrary to the location in which she was born and raised motivates her to investigate the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation. By utilizing the vernacular of craft to reclaim experiences and relocate displaced objects, her practice exists at the intersection of nostalgia, and identity. She holds an MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and is the recipient of numerous awards and residencies, including the Socrates Sculpture Park Fellowship and serving as a mentor for the Saint Heron Ceramics Residency Program.
Laura Escobar
(she/her)
Laura lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia. Within her art practice, she writes, researches, teaches and cooks. Her work takes place between visual arts, writing and intuitions about presence, voice, food and gathering. Guided by an intense and conscientious interest in time and the way we perceive it and condition ourselves to that perception, from physical to socio-political scenarios noted in natural phenomena. The way we relate to reality, language and other beings is in the core of her research.
Currently, Laura is a professor at the U. Javeriana and U. Jorge Tadeo Lozano in Bogotá, she is a part of todoestamal, an art and food collective based in Bogotá, while collaborating with independent publishing houses in Colombia.
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez (they/them)
Mandy Gutmann-Gonzalez is a Chilean poet, novelist and text-based artist. They are the author of A/An (End of the Line Press) the La Pava (Ediciones Inubicalistas). They hold an MFA in Poetry from Cornell University and teach creative writing at Clark University.
Sammy Seung-Min Lee (she/her)
Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018. Lee is recently a resident artist at Redline, serves as an ambassador for Asian Art at Denver Art Museum, and operates a contemporary art project and residency space, called Collective SML | k in Santa Fe Art District, Denver.
Lee's work has been exhibited internationally and can be found in collections at the Getty Research Institute, Bainbridge Island Museum of Art, Spencer Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, and the Spanish National Library in Madrid.
Erick Ramos-Jacobo
(he/him)
Erick Ramos-Jacobo is immigrant writer, image-maker, and curator. His work focuses on increasing visibility and regional opportunity for Newcomers through artistic practices. His social practice has led him to co-founding and directing The Mariposa Project, A collective of Immigrant creatives and academics based in the Berkshires. Erick has worked with MASS MoCA’s education department as a curatorial assistant and social-emotional learning curriculum reasercher. He was recently named MCLA’s Feigenbaum Scholar for his research.
Feda Eid
(she/her)
Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist from Quincy, MA (Wampanoag, Nipmuc, and Massachusett People territory). Her work explores the expression of culture and identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US.
Dāshaun Washington
(he/him)
Dāshaun Washington is a poet living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is a 2021 92Y Discovery Contest runner-up and Missouri Review 2020 Jeffrey E. Smith Editor’s Prize in Poetry finalist. He has received support from the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Tin House, and beyond. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Poetry magazine, The Nation, Indiana Review, Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, and elsewhere.
Michi Meko
(he/him)
Michi Meko (b. 1974) is a multidisciplinary artist currently residing in Atlanta, Georgia. His work can be found in the collections of the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Atlanta, among other institutions. In 2019 Meko had solo exhibitions at the Alan Avery Art Company in Atlanta; the Sumter County Gallery of Art in Sumter, South Carolina; and the Chimento Gallery in Los Angeles, and he was featured in Hulu’s Artist in Residence documentary series.
LeAndra LeSeur
(she/her)
Le’Andra LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.
LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018).
Vida James
(she/her)
Vida James is a Nuyorican social worker from Brooklyn, NY. She is a Delaney Fellow at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers. She is the winner of the 2021 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award and a 2021 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Her writing has been supported by MASS MoCA, Tin House, Bread Loaf and VONA/Voices. She has work appearing or forthcoming in Story, New England Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere.
Lani Asuncion
(they/she)
Lani Asuncion is a Boston based multimedia artist working within public spaces to create socially engaged art by weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance in relation to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx. They use new media technologies as a tool to encourage conversations to magnify connections that work to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.
Luiza Folegatti
(she/her)
Luiza is a Brazilian artist based in North Adams (USA). She spent five years in Berlin (Germany) integrating artistic practice, teaching, and social advocacy work around the rights of women immigrants. Luiza’s artistic practice focuses on gender and migration, and she applies photography, video, performance, and visual anthropology methods. She also designs and facilitates photography workshops for youth and women groups and strongly believes in projects that combine photography, education, and community building. Currently she is producing a photo essay about mothers and daughters and their experience with migration in Germany and the in the US, as well as experimenting with photo books formats.
Mae Ramirez
(she/her)
Mae Ramirez is a Chicana poet originally from Los Angeles. She holds an MFA from California State University Long Beach and is currently working on a full-length manuscript. She is a recipient of the 2020 Sustainable Arts Foundation Award and the 2021 San Francisco Foundation / Nomadic Press Literary Award. In 2021 she was a writer-in-residence at Elsewhere Studios in Paonia, Colorado. She currently resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
William Burton Binnie (he/him)
William Burton Binnie’s (b. 1985, Dallas, TX) work prods the American mythos: the imagery enshrouding a land with a complex and often dark and troubling past and present, cloaked in a smokescreen of stoic heroism—as well as larger concerns surrounding notions of power, nationalism, bigotry, war, land, death, and the visual markers connected to each. By distilling a pictorial language from a range of sources–film, photography, politics, history, quotidian life–the artist aims to examine these topics, predominantly through painting and drawing, in order to approach the social constructs that underpin them. This altering, colliding, and reconfiguring of images allows the him to mine the complicated and often paradoxical nature of these issues, allowing space for connections between a range of imagery compiled over many years. Through these tactics, he seeks to straddle an apparent bleakness with a genuine humanism, rendering a fraught balance between hope and despair, doubt and belief.
Carola Cintrón Moscoso
(she/her)
Carola Cintrón-Moscoso (PR) is an interdisciplinary artist whose works explore various relationships between landscape, architecture, politics and technology, with emphasis in sound. Her work has been exhibited at museums and galleries internationally and in Puerto Rico, including the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (PR), Centro Cultural España (Perú), Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (Spain), Museo de Arte Contemporáneo (Chile), China Millennium Museum (Beijing) and Empire-Fulton Ferry State Park (NY).
She currently lives and works from Santurce, Puerto Rico, exploring the intersection between art and technology.
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez (she/her)
Arantxa Ximena Rodriguez (AXR) is a Mexican artist living in NYC. She has exhibited her work nationally and internationally, including three solo shows in Mexico City. She has participated in The Affordable Art Fair in NYC, Crossroads Art Fair in Shoreditch London, Museo Internazionale Italia Arte (MIIT) in Turin, and Untitled Art Fair Miami.
She holds an MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts NYC (SVA), and an undergraduate diploma in Media Communications by Universidad Iberoamericana Mexico, including a yearlong exchange at Regents Business School of London.
Arantxa is has been studying Tibetan Buddhism for the past seven years, philosophy that permeates her whole life and artistic practice.
Ella Jacobson
(she/her)
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. Much of her work explores how people metabolize their exposures to unintentional violence and death. She is the 2022 Miami Book Fair Nonfiction Fellow and holds a masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University. She is the recipient of residencies and support from the Elizabeth George Foundation, 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.
Jamie Denburg Habie
(she/her)
Jamie Denburg Habie is a Guatemalan artist and cultural practitioner living and working in Antigua, Guatemala. Jamie is co-founder and director at La Nueva Fábrica, a contemporary art space in Antigua, Guatemala dedicated to empowering communities through exhibitions, public programs and education, residencies, and multidisciplinary workshops.
As an artist, Jamie is interested in decentralized expressions of consciousness, drawing inspiration from neuroscience, materiality and the politics of the Anthropocene.
Pantea Karimi
(she/her)
Pantea Karimi is an Iranian-American multidisciplinary artist, researcher, and educator based in San Jose, California. Karimi grew up in post-revolutionary Iran where her education in science and art at school was convoluted with religious indoctrination. Her art collectively explores historic, religious, scientific, and political themes. Taking the cue from her research on Iran’s historic, religious, and scientific manuscripts and objects, Karimi’s work highlights Iran’s visual culture, and personal narratives reflecting upon her gender and upbringing in Iran, intertwined with conflicting political, religious, and societal issues. Karimi has exhibited internationally across a range of solo, group, and traveling exhibitions in Iran, Algeria, Germany, Croatia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. She teaches Studio Art and Digital Media courses at the College of San Mateo and Santa Clara University.
Firoz Mahmud
(he/him)
Being born in Bangladesh, artist Firoz Mahmud has been a prominent artist for his large scale and ongoing art projects for the last few years.
Firoz’s work has been exhibited at the Bangkok Art Biennale, Congo Biennale, Ostrale Biennale, Lahore Biennial, Dhaka Art Summit, Setouchi Triennale (BDP), Aichi Triennial, Sharjah Biennale, Cairo Biennale, Echigo-Tsumari Triennial, Busan Biennale, Immigrant Artist Biennial NYC, Geumgang Nature Art Biennale, Asian Biennale.
He has also exhibited at the Asia Art Initiative (PA), Hunter East Harlem Gallery & Art at a Time Like This (NY), Berkshire Art Museum(MA), Office of Contemporary Art (OCA), Norway, MAXXI Museum of 21st Century Arts Rome, India, Bangladesh and Pakistan Contemporary Art at Asia House London/UK, BAB BOX- One Bangkok, Jamaica Flux 2021, Center Pompidou Paris (Screening COAL Prize works), Sharjah Art Foundation, Art Dubai, Twelve Gates Arts, Hiroshima Museum of Contemporary Art, University Art Museum, Metropolitan Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo & Geidai PS1, Fuchu Art Museum, Mori Art Museum (CG) Tokyo, and more.
Natani Notah
(she/her)
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, Marin Museum of Contemporary Art, Wattis Institute of Contemporary Art, Massillon Museum, Tucson Desert Art Museum, apexart, 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 Studios at MASS MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, Grounds for Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, 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.
S. Erin Batiste
(she/her)
S. Erin Batiste is an interdisciplinary poet and artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She is a 2022-2023 The Poetry Project Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow and a 2022-2023 Recess Critical Writing Fellow. She has received fellowships and support from Cave Canem, PEN America, Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Rona Jaffe Foundation, and The Jerome Foundation, among other honors. Author of the chapbook, Glory to All Fleeting Things, her work has exhibited in New York and has appeared internationally in Interim, Michigan Quarterly Review, wildness, You Don't Have to Be Everything: Poems for Girls Becoming Themselves, and forthcoming in, In the Tempered Dark: Contemporary Poets Transcending Elegy.
Batiste’s writing and collage centers Black women, her ancestors and matrilineage, and is influenced by Afrofuturism, maximalism, beauty, the desert, the cosmos and other expansive places, migration, tarot and divination, archives, ephemera and moments left behind. She is currently working on her first full length collection, Hoard.
Sean Desiree
(they/them)
Utilizing the craft of woodworking, Sean Desiree produces life-size structures and sculptures that serve as sanctuaries, protectors, and symbols of empowerment for marginalized communities. They're interested in contributing to systems and structures of care. Applying conducive architecture, a term they have claimed to give language to functional forms that heal rather than harm, they aim to disrupt the oppressive building standards that have been normalized by society. The craft of timber framing is employed to create large-scale designs that are connected using wood-to-wood joinery with hemlock beams. Through this traditional craft, they're creating sculptures that provide alternative solutions to government and bureaucratic failure to meet our basic needs as a society.
With each installation and/or public art sculpture, they reclaim components and ideas from preceding works and reanimate them in an evolving self-reflective, interdisciplinary practice. The themes and content fluctuate, but central to their work is a commitment to a socially engaged practice.
Laura Christensen
(she/her)
Laura Christensen’s artwork has been featured in galleries and museums, including Kidspace at MASS MoCA, The Art Complex Museum, Bennington Museum, and The Rotch-Jones-Duff House.
Laura received MASS MoCA’s “Assets for Artists” Professional Development Grant and a 2021 Finalist Award in Photography from the Artist Fellowship Program of the Massachusetts Cultural Council.
In 2016 she was awarded her second Artists’ Resource Trust (A.R.T.) Grant, a fund of the Berkshire Taconic Community Foundation, this one in support of her book project, THEN AGAIN: Vintage Photography Reimagined by One Artist and Thirty-One Writers.
Jamele Wright, Sr
(he/him)
Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22 Jamele Wright, Sr. moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. While raising a family Jamele produced art, jazz, and poetry events throughout Atlanta. Realizing that there were many young artists not being represented he started a gallery called Neo Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After a number of solo and group exhibitions Mr. Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History. He concentrated on African and African American Contemporary Art. Jamele graduated with Master of Fine Art from School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. He completed a residency at MASS MoCA as well as artist in resident at Gibbes Museum, Charleston, SC. He currently maintains his practice in Atlanta, Georgia.
Pallavi Sen
(she/her)
Pallavi Sen (1989) is from Bombay, India. She works with installation, printmaking, textiles, and intuitive, musical movement. Current interests include planting gardens and meadows, the inner lives of birds and animals, and what emerges from grief of the anthropocene. Pallavi is the author of Dead Planet Cookbook published by GenderFail Press, and runs the Skowhegan Bird Club with her collaborator Ash Ferlito. Together they have also created the Skowhegan Book of Birds.
She received her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from the Virginia Commonwealth University, and is the Assistant Professor of Multiples + Distributed Art at Williams College.
She has been an artist-in-residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, PICA's Creative Exchange Lab, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, Shandaken Projects, Mildred’s Lane, Ox-Bow, ACRE, and the Yale Norfolk School of Art, among others.
Natalia Lasalle-Morillo
(she/her)
Natalia Lassalle-Morillo (B. Río Piedras, Puerto Rico) is a visual artist, filmmaker, theater artist, performer and educator whose work reconstructs history through a transdisciplinary approach to research, form and narrative. Melding theatrical performance, intuitive experimental ethnography, and collaborations with non-professional performers, Natalia’s practice centers on excavating imagined and archived history, decentralizing canonical narratives through embodied reenactments, and challenging written history by foregrounding instead the creation of new mythologies. Her multi-channel films, performance works and multiplatform projects explore familial, neighborly and citizen relationships in the context of Caribbean colonial history, and the resulting imperialist oppression that has altered generations of families’ material and spiritual trajectories. Bringing the practice of theater into the camera, Natalia explores a methodology that creates its own decolonial rhythms.
Carlos Vielma
(he/him)
Carlos is a visual artist graduated as an Architect who works with painting, video and installation.
He has been an artist in residence in the Banff Center, Casa Wabi and Mass MoCA, among others.
Recently he was honored as a member of the National system of creators (SNCA) and is currently living and working in Mexico City.
Sue Huang
(she/they)
Sue Huang is a new media artist whose work addresses collective experience. Her current projects explore ecological intimacies, human/nonhuman relations, and speculative futures.
Huang has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati; Philadelphia Contemporary; ISEA in Montreal; and Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria; among others. She has previously been an artist-in-residence at LMCC, NEW INC, and the Studios at MASS MoCA. Huang has received funding and support from Science Sandbox, Rhizome, the James Irvine Foundation (MOCA, Los Angeles), and Creative Scotland (NEoN), among others.
Silvia Lopez Chavez (she/her)
Silvia Lopez Chavez is a Dominican-American visual artist whose collaborative murals aim to forge meaningful cross-cultural connections and transform urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. She explores personal stories of adaptation, assimilation, and resilience at the studio through painting, printmaking, and drawing. Most recent collaborations include Massachusetts Design Art & Technology Institute (DATMA) in New Bedford, MA, and The Outlaw Ocean Project in the Dominican Republic. Local works can be seen across Boston, Cambridge, Chelsea, Lynn, and Salem. She is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, the recipient of the New England Women's Leadership Award by the Boys and Girls Club of America (2022), and a New England Foundation for the Arts Leadership in Public Art award (2021). She recently completed art residencies at MASS MoCA, Haystack, and Vermont Studio Center. Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, Peabody Essex Museum, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University. Silvia is a graduate of Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Altos de Chavón, the School of Art Design in the Dominican Republic. She continues her fine art studio practice at Atlantic Works Artist Studios in East Boston.