2024 Capacity Building Grants for Lowell (MA) Artists!

Artist Alexander Davis (Studios at MASS MoCA and Capacity-Building Program alum).
Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA EN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ
DESCRIÇÃO DO PROGRAMA EM PORTUGUÊS AQUI

Assets for Artists is focusing resources on our artist neighbors who live or have studio space in the City of Lowell.

Application opens: APRIL 15, 2024

Application Closes: maY 30, 2024

This cohort is a partnership between Mosaic Lowell and MASS MoCA.

program overview

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists (A4A) provides professional development workshops, coaching, working capital grants, and creative community building for artists of all sorts. We envision a world where artists are paid fairly, valued for their artistic, social, and economic contributions, and given equitable access to resources to thrive. All of our programs are designed with and juried by a broad coalition of artists, activists and arts administrators.

This special Capacity-Building Program for 10 Lowell artists, and in collaboration with Mosaic Lowell pairs an unrestricted micro-grant of $2,000 with professional development tools for artists to design and build their creative future. 


PROGRAM
details

More than a grant! Our Capacity-Building Program provides individualized, artist-centered professional development to help artists strengthen their creative practice, pursue values-driven careers, build mutually-supportive networks and find resources to achieve long term sustainability and self-determination.

The 6-month program includes:

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

  • A combination of self-directed and group professional development for artists of all disciplines.

  • Individualized support and resources from A4A staff and trainers in service of your creative professional goals. 

  • Planning tools to help you explore what’s next in your artistic career.

  • Cohort events for connection and peer learning.

  • Priority access to A4A’s professional development workshops.

  • Up to 2 hours of one-on-one coaching sessions with an A4A trainer in support of your goals.

More questions? Check out our FAQ.


The Capacity-Building Experience

Over the course of six months, Capacity-Building Program artists attend a series of scheduled cohort gatherings and workshops aimed at simultaneously building professional skills and a creative community. See full timeline below. Parallel to these larger group activities, artists connect 1-on-1 with A4A staff and receive up to three hours of coaching with an A4A trainer(s) of their choice. Artists are also encouraged to attend any additional A4A workshops offered over the six months that interest them.

program timeline
(subject to change)

April 15, 2024: Application Opens
May 30, 2024: Application Deadline
July 2024: Grantees Announced
Late July / Early August 2024: Onboarding Call with A4A staff
August 6 @ 6 PM: Welcome party in Lowell (location TBD)
September 14 @ 1 PM: In-person planning workshop in Lowell (location TBD)
August 2024 - January 2025: Throughout the six-month program, participants engage in their own time with A4A coaches and any additional A4A workshops they are interested in. Artists are encouraged to take advantage of the full range of workshops and coaching opportunities to help move them closer to their goals.  
October 2024: Slide presentations sharing your work with your fellow cohort (likely online)
November 2024: Midway check-in calls with A4A
December 2025: Personal Finances Workshop (online)
January 2025: Graduation celebration

ELIGIBILITY

  • Applicants for this opportunity must be at least 18 years of age

  • Applicants are NOT a full time student.

  • Applicants must live or have a studio in the City of Lowell.
    Yes, we really mean Lowell-based artists only. All Lowell artists can apply, regardless of US citizenship or immigration status.

  • Open to artists and creatives of any discipline at any career stage.
    We define “artist” very broadly to include visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater practitioners, craftspeople, jewelers, fashion designers, puppeteers, fiber artists, drag performers, social practice and public artists, photographers, filmmakers, woodworkers, traditional artisans, and more. We strive for each cohort to contain a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

  • Priority to emerging or mid-career artists as well as artists from under-resourced communities and backgrounds.
    Our program is geared toward artists who have limited access to resources and who are looking to build a sustainable creative practice while strengthening their financial and social safety net within a community of peers. “Limited access” might mean artists who are low-to-moderate income or have little savings or access to generational wealth. This might also mean an artist who lives in a rural or other under-resourced community with fewer financial or artistic opportunities, or an artist who holds an identity that has been historically undervalued or marginalized.

  • 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.

  • Extra Grant Priorities
    Financial need will be considered a critical part of your application

scoring rubric

Each applicant will be scored by members of our artist jury. Jurors will assign each application scores based on the criteria below. Using the application score as a basis, a cohort will be selected that includes artists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

*Jurors assess how much access to other opportunities and resources the applicant has received, with artists who have faced a disproportionate number of barriers receiving a higher score.

DOWNLOAD A PREVIEW OF THE APPLICATION HERE.

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


2024 Programa de Subvenciones de Lowell Capacity-Building (Español)

Assets for Artists está enfocando sus recursos en nuestros residentes en la ciudad de Lowell con un Grupo de Subvenciones para el Desarrollo de Capacidades para artistas que viven o trabajan en la ciudad.

Fecha inicial para aplicar: 15 de abril, 2024
Último día para aplicar: 30 de mayo, 2024

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA

Assets for Artists (Recursos para artistas) (A4A, por sus siglas en inglés) es un programa de MASS MoCA por artistas para artistas.  Ofrecemos talleres de desarrollo profesional, coaching, subvenciones de capital de trabajo y desarrollo de comunidad creativa para artistas.  Nos imaginamos un mundo en el que a los artistas se les paga justamente, son valorados por sus contribuciones artísticas, sociales y económicas, y se les da acceso equitativo a recursos para prosperar.  Todos nuestros programas están diseñados con una amplia coalición de artistas, activistas y administradores artísticos, quienes forman parte del jurado.

El Lowell Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Subvenciones de Capacity Building) proporciona una micro-subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que acompaña herramientas de desarrollo profesional para artistas para que diseñen y construyan su futuro creativo.

 

¿PREGUNTAS? ASISTA A NUESTRA SESIÓN DE PREGUNTAS Y RESPUESTAS EN DIRECTO (EN INGLÉS)

9 de Mayo, 2024 | 12pm | en Zoom
Regístrese a través de Zoom.

 

DETALLES DEL PROGRAMA

¡Más que una subvención! Nuestro Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades proporciona un desarrollo profesional individualizado, centrado en el artista, para ayudarles a fortalecer su práctica creativa, seguir carreras impulsadas por valores, construir redes de apoyo mutuo y encontrar recursos para lograr la sostenibilidad a largo plazo y la autodeterminación.

El programa de 6 meses incluye:

  • Una subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que se pagará cuando tú escojas. 

  • Una combinación de desarrollo profesional autodirigido y en grupo para artistas de todas las disciplinas.

  • Recursos y apoyo individualizados por parte del personal y los capacitadores del A4A a su servicio para ayudarle a alcanzar sus objetivos profesionales creativos. 

  • Herramientas de planificación que le permitirán explorar el futuro de su carrera artística.

  • Eventos de grupo para la conexión y el aprendizaje entre colegas.

  • Hasta 2 horas de coaching (orientación) individual con un capacitador de A4A para apoyarle con sus objetivos.

  • Acceso prioritario a los talleres en línea de A4A.

Importante: Para participar de la mejor manera posible en este programa, es necesario tener un nivel conversacional de inglés. El personal del programa sólo habla inglés y la mayoría de nuestros materiales también están en inglés (aunque son fáciles de copiar y pegar en un software de traducción). Con un preaviso de al menos dos semanas, los talleres en línea tienen la opción de ser traducidos en vivo al idioma de su elección.

¿Más preguntas? Encuentra aquí las preguntas más frecuentes (FAQ ENGLISH ONLY).

LA EXPERIENCIA DEL PROGRAMA DE DESARROLLO DE CAPACIDADES

A lo largo de seis meses, los participantes del Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades asistirán a una serie de reuniones y talleres programados con el fin de desarrollar simultáneamente sus capacidades profesionales y crear una comunidad creativa. Consulte el calendario completo a continuación. Paralelamente a estas actividades en grupos con un mayor número de participantes, los artistas se ponen en contacto individualmente con el personal de A4A y reciben hasta dos horas de asesoramiento con uno o varios capacitadores de A4A de su elección. También se anima a los artistas a asistir a cualquier taller adicional de A4A que se ofrezca en su región a lo largo de los seis meses y que sea de su interés.


FECHAS LÍMITES PARA EL PROGRAMA

15 de abril , 2024: Fecha inicial para aplicar
30 de mayo, 2024: Último día para aplicar
julio 2024: Notificación a los becarios
Agosto 2024: Llamadas informativas
6 de agosto, 2024: Fiesta de bienvenida en persona.
14 de Sieptembre, 2024: Taller de planificación presencial.
Agosto - enero 2024: A lo largo del programa de seis meses, los participantes dedicarán su propio tiempo a los capacitadores de A4A y a cualquier otro taller de A4A en el que estén interesados. Se anima a los artistas a aprovechar toda la gama de talleres y oportunidades de capacitación para ayudarles a alcanzar sus objetivos.  
Octubre 2024: Presentación de diapositivas en línea, compartiendo su trabajo con sus compañeros de grupo.
Noviembre 2024: Llamadas de seguimiento a mitad del programa con A4A.
Enero 2025: Fiesta de graduación


ELEGIBILIDAD

  • Los solicitantes de esta oportunidad deben tener al menos 18 años de edad. Los estudiantes actuales a tiempo completo no son elegibles.

  • Tengo actualmente una dirección en la ciudad de Lowell para mi domicilio o estudio (y seguiré teniéndola durante el próximo año).

  • Nuestro Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building es para artistas y creativos de cualquier disciplina.  Definimos “artista” muy ampliamente para incluir artistas visuales, escritores, músicos, bailarines, artistas de teatro, artesanos, joyeros, diseñadores de moda, titiriteros, artistas de las fibras, artistas de drag, fotógrafos, cineastas, trabajadores de la madera, artesanos tradicionales, artistas de gestión cultural y más.

  • Se dará prioridad a artistas emergentes o que se encuentren en la mitad de su carrera, así como a artistas procedentes de comunidades y entornos con bajos recursos. Nuestro programa está dirigido a artistas que tienen un acceso limitado de recursos y que buscan construir una práctica creativa sostenible al tiempo que fortalecen su red de seguridad financiera y social dentro de una comunidad de colegas. "Acceso limitado" puede significar artistas con ingresos bajos o moderados o con pocos ahorros o acceso a la riqueza generacional. También puede referirse a un artista que vive en una comunidad rural o con menos recursos, oportunidades financieras o artísticas, o a un artista con una identidad que ha sido históricamente subvalorada o marginada.

  • El Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building resulta más apropiado para creativos entusiasmados por involucrarse en los programas ofrecidos, listos para crear una práctica más sostenible, y aumentar su red de contactos con compañeros creativos. 

  •  Mensaje para becarios anteriores de A4A. Mientras que en la mayoría de los casos puedes volver a solicitar, a los becarios anteriores se les dará menos prioridad comparado a aquellos que no han participado en nuestro programa todavía.  Aquellos becarios anteriores que sí reciban una segunda subvención pueden demostrar que están tomando una dirección nueva y significativa en su carrera y que requieren planificación nueva y coaching de apoyo. 


CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN

Cada solicitud será evaluada por los miembros de nuestro jurado de artistas. Los miembros del jurado asignarán a cada solicitud una puntuación basada en los criterios que se indican a continuación. Utilizando la puntuación de la solicitud como base, se seleccionará un grupo que incluya artistas de diversas disciplinas y procedencias.


*Los miembros del jurado valorarán el grado de acceso a otras oportunidades y recursos que haya recibido el solicitante, y los artistas que hayan enfrentado un número desproporcionado de obstáculos recibirán una puntuación más alta.

DESCARGA UNA VISTA PREVIA DE LA APLICACIÓN AQUÍ.


Programa de Bolsas de Capacitação de Lowell 2024 (PORTUGUÊS)

Assets for Artists está destinando recursos para os artistas da nossa vizinhança na cidade de Lowell através de um grupo de subsídios para o Desenvolvimento de Habilidades dos artistas que moram e trabalham na cidade.


INSCRIÇÕES ABERTAS:
15 DE abril DE 2024 
ENCERRAMENTO DO PERÍODO DE INSCRIÇÕES: 30 DE MAIO DE 2024

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists (A4A) é um programa criado por artistas e para artistas. Oferecemos oficinas de desenvolvimento profissional, treinamentos, subsídios e oportunidades para a construção de comunidades artísticas. Vislumbramos um mundo onde os artistas são pagos de forma justa, valorizados por suas contribuições artísticas, sociais e econômicas, e em que lhes é dado acesso equitativo a recursos para crescerem. Todos os nossos programas são elaborados e julgados por uma ampla coalizão de artistas, ativistas e administradores de artes.

Lowell Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação) combina um micro fundo irrestrito de US$ 3.000, com ferramentas de desenvolvimento profissional para que os artistas planejem e construam seu futuro criativo. 

PERGUNTAS? ASSISTA ÀS NOSSAS PERGUNTAS E RESPOSTAS AO VIVO! (EM INGLÊS)

9 de Maio de 2024 | 12pm | Zoom


DETALHES DO PROGRAMA

Mais do que um subsídio! Nosso Programa de Desenvolvimento de Habilidades oferece desenvolvimento individual e centralizado no artista para auxiliar os artistas a fortalecer sua criatividade, seguir carreiras orientadas por valores, construir redes de apoio mútuo e encontrar recursos para alcançar a longo prazo sustentabilidade e autodeterminação.  

O programa de 6 meses inclui:

  • Um subsídio irrestrito de $2.000 pagos no momento de sua escolha.

  • Uma combinação de desenvolvimento professional autodirigido e em grupo para artistas de todas as disciplinas.

  • Apoio e recursos individualizados dos funcionários e instrutores do A4A a serviço dos seus objetivos profissionais criativos. 

  • Ferramentas de planejamento para ajudá-lo a explorar os próximos passos na sua carreira artística.

  • Eventos de Grupo para conexão e aprendizagem com colegas.

  • Acesso prioritário às oficinas on-line de A4A

  • Até 2 horas de treinamento individual com um instrutor do A4A  para apoiar seus objetivos. 

Importante: para participar da melhor forma possível deste programa, você deve ter um nível de proficiência em inglês de conversação. A equipe do programa fala apenas inglês e a maioria dos nossos materiais também está em inglês (embora seja fácil copiar e colar em um programa de tradução). Com pelo menos duas semanas de antecedência, os workshops online têm a opção de serem traduzidos ao vivo para o idioma de sua escolha.

Mais perguntas? Confira nossas FAQ. 


EXPERIÊNCIA NO DESENVOLVIMENTO DE HABILIDADES 

Ao longo dos seis meses, os participantes do Programa de Desenvolvimento de Habilidades atendem uma série de reuniões e workshops programados com o objetivo de desenvolver simultaneamente habilidades profissionais e uma comunidade criativa.  Veja o cronograma completo abaixo. Paralelo a essas atividades em grupos grandes, os artistas contatam individualmente a equipe do A4A e recebem até duas horas de treinamento com instrutor(es) do A4A de sua escolha. Os artistas também são incentivados a participar de quaisquer workshops adicionais do A4A que sejam do seu interesse e que são oferecidos na sua região durante os seis meses.


CRONOGRAMA 

15 de abril de 2024: Abre a inscrição
30 de maio de 2024: A inscrição termina às 23h59 Leste
Julho: Notificação dos/das selecionados/as
Agosto de 2024: Reuniões de orientação
Agosto 6 @ 18:00: Festa de boas-vindas presencialmente (Lowell - local a ser determinado)
Setembro de 2024: Workshop de planejamento - presencial.
Agosto – janeiro de 2024: Durante os seis meses de programa, os participantes mantêm contato com os treinadores do A4A no seu tempo livre e atendem quaisquer workshops adicionais do A4A do seu interesse. Os artistas são incentivados a aproveitar toda a variedade de workshops e oportunidades de treinamento para o ajudar a se aproximar mais de seus objetivos. 
Octubro de 2024: Apresentação de slides on-line compartilhando seu trabalho com outros colegas.
Novembro de 2024: Ligações intermediárias de verificação com A4A.
Janeiro de 2025: Festa de Formatura

ELIGIBILIDADE

  • Os candidatos para este grupo específico de bolsistas devem ter atualmente um endereço residencial ou estúdio na cidade de Lowell. Favor notar que você não é necessário ser cidadão americano ou a fornecer documentação de residência legal nos EUA.

  • Os candidatos que receberam anteriormente subsídio do Assets for Artists não se qualificam.

  • O Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação está aberto a artistas e criativos de qualquer disciplina. Definimos "artista" de forma muito ampla para incluir artistas visuais, escritores, músicos, dançarinos, artistas teatrais, artesãos, joalheiros, designers de moda, marionetistas, artistas de fibra, drags, fotógrafos, cineastas, marceneiros, artesãos tradicionais, artistas sociais, e muito mais! 

  • A prioridade é dada para artistas emergentes ou que se encontram no meio da carreira, bem como artistas de comunidades e origens com pouco recursos.
    Nosso programa é voltado para artistas que têm acesso limitado a recursos e que buscam desenvolver uma carreira criativa e sustentável e ao mesmo tempo fortalecer sua segurança financeira e social dentro da comunidade de artistas. “Acesso limitado” pode incluir artistas com rendimentos baixos a moderados ou com poucas economias ou acesso a heranças. Isto também pode incluir um artista que vive numa comunidade rural ou outra comunidade com poucos recursos e com menos oportunidades financeiras ou artísticas, ou um artista que porta uma identidade que tem sido historicamente subvalorizada ou marginalizada.

  • O Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação é mais adequado para os artistas que estão entusiasmados em se envolver com as ofertas do programa, prontos para construir uma prática artística mais sustentável e expandir sua rede de colaboradores. 



RÚBRICA DE PONTUAÇÃO

Cada candidato receberá pontuação dos membros do nosso júri artístico. Os jurados atribuirão pontuação a cada inscrição com base nos critérios listados abaixo. Usando a pontuação da inscrição como base, será selecionado um grupo que inclui artistas de diversas disciplinas e origens.

*Os jurados avaliam quanto acesso à outras oportunidades e recursos o candidato já recebeu; os artistas que já enfrentaram um número significativo de barreiras recebem uma pontuação mais alta.

Baixe a prévia da inscrição aqui

Welcome April Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: April 10 - April 22, 2024


She Who Has No Master(s) is a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Through a collaborative writing and art process, SWHNM explores multi-voiced collectivity, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora. SWHNM has a fluid and evolving membership.

In residence:

Hoa Nguyen | Barbara Tran | Lily Hoang | Dao Strom | Vi Khi Nao | Yen Ha


Ido Radon’s practice attempts to make material or give form to the abstractions that structure the social real as a way to make them thinkable. Recent works are thinking about technologies and infrastructures (hard and soft) that mediate contemporary life.

Radon has made solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), Air de Paris (Paris), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Et al. (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods (London), Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Romance (Pittsburgh), and Veronica (Seattle). In 2023, she was a finalist for the Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award. An autodidact, she holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. With family and friends, she makes SOCIETY.


Zainab "Zai'' Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all socio-technological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. She draws upon her body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculpture, video, installation, built virtual environments, printed matter, archives, and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC and a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. Her work has been shown internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto), Film at Lincoln Center (NYC), Museum of Modern Art Library (NYC), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), Aktuelle Architektur der Kulturimages (Murcia, Spain), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico) among others. 


Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary writer/artist who has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit). Her most recent writing has published in Maggot Brain The Recluse, Shock of the Femme, Touch the Donkey and FENCE.
She has presented and performed at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery in Berlin. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu. Her first solo exhibition, SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS, was presented at Tanja Grunert gallery in 2022. She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture and The Flaherty Seminar and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. She teaches writing at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and lives in Hudson, NY.


Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor are artists, curators, and researchers. They reflect on the Art and Nature dyad in projects that focus on rural areas, the land, and the transmission of ancestral knowledge and technologies of popular creators and the Indigenous peoples of Eastern South America. Since August 2020, they have resided in Igatu, Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, where they founded Mirante Xique-Xique, a para-institution that promotes research residencies in different areas: environment, architecture, cuisine, and arts. Through cultural activities, exchanges, and environmental education, the non-governmental, non-profit organization’s mission is to safeguard the region’s architectural and intangible heritage.


Summer 2024 Open Studios Season

Photo of AIR Nadia Taquary’s work for November 2023 Open Studios. Image by Luiza Folegatti.

Mark your calendars for Summer 2024 Open Studios at MASS MoCA:

Saturday, May 25th 1-3 PM

Wednesday, July 3rd, 5-7 pm

Thursday, August 1st, 5-7pm

Each event will take place in Buildings 13 + Building 34.

AS ALWAYS, FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL.

We are so excited to invite you to meet the artists-in-residence!

Visit the museum and then come over to Building 13 and 34 for drinks, snacks and great conversation. After Open Studios, enjoy a brew at Bright Ideas or food in the courtyard!

Refreshments will be available.

Our May Open Studios is presented in conjunction with MASS MoCA’s 25th Anniversary Celebration.

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 Gary Lichtenstein Editions 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, next door to Bigg Daddy’s. When looking out from Bright Ideas, just head straight and then to the left up the ramp to the Studios entrance (black door).

Photo of AIR Gerri Spilka’s work for March 2023 Open Studios. Image by Sofia Taylor.

Welcome 2024 North Berkshire Capacity Building Program Artists!

Assets for Artists is thrilled to welcome our first ever cohort of North Berkshire artists to the Capacity Building Program! We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow them as they progress through our program!

Regan Drouin
North Adams

Regan Drouin approaches art and the creative process as a practical, poetic and philosophical method of engagement-with and inquiry-into Mind.

“Through my image-making processes / ‘Voicings’, I explore aesthetic paradox, rhythmic chaos, and articulate imperfection. ‘Divinatory Poetics’ is my phrase for the way language emerges from these patterns of the sensuous body, meaning-seeking mind and the landscape in which they are embedded – this is the crossroads where divinity sits. Mystical (contemplative) practices and perspectives are the soil for my work; learning to ride the storms of emotional reactivity and environmental turbulence within the holy struggle of an artistic practice is a life-long undertaking.

My current foci: abstract painting (mixed media & oils), photography (analog preferred), somatic movement and ‘Voicings’ (written & voiced lyricisms) iterate the interplay between stillness and gesture, contemplation and utterance. I am interested in the geography of what is built up and worn down organically over time and what moves beneath surfaces. Texture, saturation, subtlety, depth, asymmetry and contrast are critical compositional considerations.

For the purposes of good 'conversation', I curate absurd, atmospheric, loosely-ritualized, non-dogmatic, experimental, improvisatory workshop environments in which people can be alone-together, immersed in imaginative play where the capability to listen and respond to the instinctual body, emotional weathers and natural environment is of central interest.”

 

Golly Annie
North Adams

Golly Annie is a digital collage artist based in North Adams. Annie’s works incorporate stock photos, historic images and her own photography to create mini-narratives laced with autobiography, humor, visual puns, and a self-proclaimed “responsible amount of whimsy.” She discovered collage when laid off during the pandemic, and subsequently taught herself PhotoShop - an unexpected change that developed into a second act in her life.

As both artist, and marketer / merchant behind Golly Willikers, Annie sells art prints, clothing, and household items in the hope that her art could be affordable and giftable to all. Her philosophy is that a collage is finished when it makes her smile - and hopes you will too!

Her work was exhibited in a solo show entitled So This Is What You’ve Been Up To at Images Cinema in Williamstown, MA. Her works were also featured in Smorgasbord at the Lodger gallery, in the Fragmented Collective’s Black & White ebook, and in the Art Vending North Adams machine at MASS MoCA. Annie was Threadless.com’s Artist of the Day in Sept 2023. She participates annually, making a collage a day in a challenge from the Edinburgh Collage Collective’s “Februllage” project.

 

Henry Kunkel
North Adams

Henry Kunkel is a visual artist whose recent paintings examine his relationship to memory by interpreting his own MRI scans, distilling spaces through a colorful expressive lens of mythology, color poetry, and wallpaper. In 2018, he attended the Elsewhere Studios Art Residency in Paonia, Colorado, where he afterward was hired as residency program manager. He relocated to North Adams in 2022, and since has been featured in New Visionary Art Magazine, shown work at Future Labs gallery in North Adams, and begun working at Jenny Holzer Studios. During the pandemic he exhibited work at Straight Line Gallery in Snowmass, CO, in addition to the Madonna building and Blue Sage Arts Center in Paonia, CO. He was awarded the Mass Cultural Council’s LCC grant in 2016 and again in 2019. He has also attended the Drop Forge and Tool residency in Hudson, New York; ArtHub Artist Residency in Kingman Arizona, and the Pilotenkueche residency in Leipzig, Germany. Henry holds a B.F.A from Massachusetts College of Art and Design where he graduated in 2012.

 

Mac MAcdaniel
North Adams

Mac MacDaniel is a high school dropout who grew up going to punk shows in Virginia. He tries to bring the chaotic energy and DIY ethos of the punk scene into his various work with Shakespeare, from writing and teaching, to acting, to photography. Mac is one of the founders of Elsewhere Shakespeare, a punk band masquerading as a theatre company. His first play, The Killer of Camp Arden, was a semifinalist in the Shakespeare's New Contemporaries competition and received its premiere at Atlanta Shakespeare in 2023. Mac is the author of the book The Play's The Thing: A Beginner’s Guide to Seeing and Enjoying Shakespeare. His favorite play is King Lear, and his favorite Avail album is Over the James.

 

Landon A. Marchant
williamstown

Drawing on their experiences as a queer transgender person and disabled veteran, Landon A. Marchant combines ancient pigment and paint-making techniques with repurposed modern materials to provide glimpses of a world where their advocacy is no longer necessary. Landon served as a USAF metals fabricator and trained as a union pipe trades apprentice before attending Williams College, where they earned degrees in philosophy and sociology. Much of their adult life has been dedicated to improving economic outcomes and access to healthcare for underresourced populations.

Landon is a member of Common Folk Artist Collective in North Adams.

 

melissa mendes
adams

Melissa Mendes grew up in Hancock, MA. She has been self-publishing her comics since her senior year at Hampshire College in 2006. After getting her MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies, she moved back to the Berkshires to pursue cartooning full time.

Her first graphic novel, Freddy Stories, received a Xeric self-publishing grant in 2010. Her second book, Lou, was published in monthly issues by Oily Comics, and then collected into a book by Alternative Comics in 2016.

For the past 10 years she has been working on a graphic novel titled The Weight, a family saga that centers around a character named Edie, who is born in the 1930s into a family struggling with rural poverty and generational abuse. The story is inspired by the life of her late grandfather, who grew up in upstate New York. 

The Weight is available to read online and in self-published mini-comics, and it will soon be collected into a book by Drawn and Quarterly. 

 

Aidan Meyer-Golden
North Adams

Aidan is an author and songwriter. His idiosyncratic poetic work draws on themes from linguistics, philosophy, world poetry and religions. Musically, his influences are varied, ranging from Hindustani classical, math rock, jazz, and an adolescence spent entrenched in Boston's DIY music scene.

 

peppa
North Adams

Peppa is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose work joins experimental video, installation, writing, herbalism, pedagogy, and community engagement. Her art offers a psychiatric survivor’s lens on medical history and healing practices. Honoring her multi-cultural heritage, Iranian diasporic experience, and family history, her work activates historical research and personal narrative to challenge frameworks of institutional care and the mental health industry. She is the founder and director of After School Art Space, an after school art program based in relationship building and material experimentation.

 

Benne Perkins
north adams

Benne Perkins is a multidisciplinary artist with strong ties to the Berkshires. As a musician and songwriter, his musical style skirts mainstream genres, and he has enjoyed collaborations with artists from backgrounds in jazz, classical, and theater, as well as outsider artists. His current focus is on production and recording; he plans to release an album in early 2024. Benne also works in sculpture, painting, and graphics. 


 

eva schegulla
North Adams

Eva Schegulla is a full time writer, publishing under multiple names in fiction and nonfiction, often as Devon Ellington. She is an internationally produced playwright and radio writer and was a member of Toronto’s Nightwood Theatre 3.0 Creatryx unit in 2023. She is best known for her comic noir radio plays, but also writes novels, short stories, poems, serials, and articles under her various bylines. She participated in Word X Word’s large collaborative poem in 2022 and 2023, and in their “Poets in Conversation” series. She is part of the Boiler House Poets Collective, and is doing a series of ekphrastic text pieces inspired by visual art. She spent most of her professional life in theatre, film, and television production, including years on Broadway as a dresser. She is a script writer, doctor, and analyst for agencies and independent producers, a freelance copywriter, and sometime ghostwriter. She teaches online and in person all over the world. She plans to expand her storytelling capacity by adding movement, music, fiber arts, and clay to the words, working in more collaborative, activist, and community-centric projects.

Welcome March Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

This month we welcome not one but two cohorts of residents to the Studios at MASS MoCA!

Residency sessions run:
February 28th - March 11, 2024
(meet the cohort)
March 13 - April 8, 2024
(meet the cohort)

Mark your calendars for a free Open Studio event with the second cohort of artists on Thursday April 4, 5-7pm.


In residence February 28 - March 11, 2024:

J. Cottle

Boston, MAssachusetts

J.Cottle B.A, M.Ed, (He, Him, His) is an Educator, Arts Administrator, Musician, Writer, and Host. He is the Founder/Executive Director of Dunamis, The Chief Alchemist of Akeem’s Alchemy, the Creative Director of Petrichor, and a Co-Host of the podcasts Playblack, and Heart Behind the Hustle. J has supported and advanced the work of MassVOTE, Boston Arts Academy, Berklee College of Music and the Community Music Center of Boston. He serves on the boards of Hooplah and The Flavor Continues, is a 2019 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow, a member of the Martin Richard Institute for Social Justice Advisory Board, and the Tisch College Community Partnerships Committee. J's work centers people of color and explores the intersections of art, equity, civic engagement, transformative growth, healing and joy.


Dream The Combine is the collaborative practice of Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers. They produce site-specific installations that explore metaphor, imaginary environments, and perceptual uncertainties at the boundary between real and illusory space. Their critiques often respond to the literal and socio-political dimensions of sites in order to destabilize our known understanding of the world. Dream The Combine were named a 2023 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League, 2022-2023 Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome, 2022 Fellows in Architecture and Design by United States Artists, 2021 Visual Artist Fellows by the McKnight Foundation, 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize winners by Landmark Columbus, 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program winners by The Museum of Modern Art, 2018 Architecture Residents at Art Omi, and 2017 Jerome Foundation/Franconia Sculpture Park Artists-in-Residence.
 
Their work has been exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Lesley Lokko, the Graham Foundation for the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial curated by The Floating Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, MadArt Studio in Seattle WA, and sites in Rome, Lisbon, Vancouver BC, Minneapolis MN, St. Paul MN, and Columbus IN. Their writing and interviews have appeared in Wallpaper, Metropolis, MasContext, Log, Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Design, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. Upcoming exhibitions include work in the Metropolitan Museum exhibition Flight Into Egypt: African-American Artists and Egypt from 1867 to Now opening November 2024.
 
Jennifer and Tom are both faculty at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and graduates of the Yale School of Architecture.


Mara Duvra

St Paul, Minnesota

Mara Duvra is a visual artist and writer. Her research-based practice combines photography, poetry, and video to create installations that explore stillness and interiority as critical modes of self-study. Duvra’s most recent body of work Tending: meditations on interiority and blackness, uses poetic and ephemeral imagery to understand Blackness beyond resistance or public identity. Photographing landscapes, interiors, and the body, Duvra's visual practice explores shifts in proximity through moments laid bare / unfolding the vulnerability of being present / uncovering a shared intimacy.

This work is about the quiet and quotidian, the still and meditative, and considers possibilities for Black subjectivity that center tenderness.

Duvra is originally from Maryland and received a BA in Studio Art and Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Duvra is currently a visiting assistant professor in Photography and Design at Macalester College.


Linda Ganjian

Jackson Heights, New York

Linda Ganjian is a NY-based artist who works in a variety of materials, from clay to cement to paper. She grew up in the Boston area and is a second generation Armenian-American.

Her main pursuit has involved making large “table-top” sculptures comprised of hundreds of miniature forms, that are a reinterpretation of Middle Eastern and American craft traditions (carpets, quilts, calligraphy). Much of her work presents memories and impressions of the urban landscape, the specific history of a site, or more personal narratives.

Her work has been exhibited in New York and abroad. Some exhibition highlights include: Future of Things Passed with Atamian Hovsepian (pop-up @ 138 W 25th) 2022; Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows, JCAL, Jamaica, Queens (2021); Art in Buildings 125 Maiden Lane, NYC (2017-2018); Islip Art Museum, NY (2016); Grandchildren at Depo, Istanbul (2015); Auxiliary Projects (2013); Artspace, New Haven, CT (un(spoken) 2009); National Academy of Design (Invitational 2008); Socrates Sculpture Park (EAF 2007); Queens Museum (Queens International2006); Storefront for Art and Architecture (Portable 3-person show 2006); eyewash@Boreas Gallery (Urban Designs solo show 2006); the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Open House: Working in Brooklyn 2004); and Stedelijk museum de Lakenhal in Leiden, Holland (2001).

She has received grants from: the Queens Council on the Arts (2023, 2021, 2017, 2011); Pollack-Krasner Foundation (2005); Artslink (2001); and fellowships to: MacDowell Colony (2006); and Millay Colony (2004), among others.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, among other publications.

She completed a public art commission for the NYC School Construction Authority in 2014 through the NYC Percent for Art program and the NYC MTA in 2016. In 2019, she was a QCA ArtPort resident at LaGuardia Airport. Her illustrations of Queens landscapes were translated into ceramic tiles for the restrooms of JFK Terminal 8.

She received her B.A. from Bard College and her MFA from Hunter College CUNY.


Ellen Lake

Oakland, California

Ellen Lake is a a multi-media artist, based out of Oakland, California and the co-director of Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, where she began to experiment with printmaking. Recent work explores repeat patterns, print, textiles, patches, repair, camouflage, ceramics, block prints, and iterations. Her practice over time includes a love of cameras, experimenting with technology, archives, and collections. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from Mills College where she focused on film/video, sculpture and installation creating work generating conversations about the rapid evolution of technology, the nostalgia generated by our material world, and it’s inevitable obsolescence. Her work has been supported my awards and grants and time at Vermont Studio Center, Rauschenberg Residency, and Stanford University Experimental Media Arts Lab.


Julia Oldham

Eugene, Oregon

Julia Oldham (b. 1979, Frederick, MD) is an artist living and working in Eugene, OR. Using a range of media, from animation to graphic storytelling, she creates narrative works that explore scientific history and speculative futures.

Oldham's work has been shown widely, including exhibits and screenings at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.


Shailja Patel

Amherst, MAssachusetts

Shailja Patel (she/her) is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide, Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theatre show, which generated standing ovations on four continents.

Patel's poems have been translated into 17 languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Honors include a Global Feminist Spotlight from the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Nordic Africa Institute African Writer Fellowship, the Jozi Book Fair Guest Writer Award, the Voices of Our Nations poetry award, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, and the BrittlePaper Anniversary Award.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking Beyond Bollywood exhibition.

Patel is the Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. From 2019-2022, she was a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in Western Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023


Zella Vanié

NEw york, New york

Zella Vanié is a multidisciplinary artist who splits their time between New York City and Côte d’Ivoire. They paint large-scale ‘scenes of protest’ that center Black Queer identity and a reverence for nature and the immaterial. They draw inspiration from their Kentucky military town upbringing, automatic drawings, and dialogue with friends and contemporaries. Their works are bright with color and transparencies to bring the viewer into dualities of light and dark, nihilism and beauty, captivity and freedom.

Vanié has shown work in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam, where their work was in a group show that marked 150 years since slavery was abolished in Dutch colonies. They have received grants and residencies from Flux Factory, Carrie Able gallery, and The Other Art Fair; and have been mentioned in Untitled Magazine and Hyperallergic Magazine.

Vanié served four years in the US Army as a satellite technician with deployments to Iraq and Haiti; and they are a founding board member of the Black Veterans Project. They hold an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts; and have taught courses at New York University and California College of the Arts.

“My work centers the idea that personal and collective imagination are a powerful tool for liberation here and now. I believe that, in order to feel joy, to love, to forgive, to conceptualize how to be free, I must first imagine that these acts and ways of existing are attainable. My imagination exists beyond the binary. It exists beyond sadness and suffering. Beyond imperial power. Above all, my work aims to ask new questions about what it means to be free, while being a mirror for Black Queer people, visualizing our beauty, divinity, and boundless new worlds that have always been ours to take up spiritual residence in.”

Photo by Khalil Bowens


Jane Wong

Seattle, washington

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She is also the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, UCross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Asian American Literature at Western Washington University.

Headshot by Gritchelle Fallesgon.


In residence March 13 - April 8, 2024

Khaila Batts

Queens, New York

Khaila Batts artistic practice is deeply rooted in the fluidity of memories and the exploration of perception through the combination of digital collage, acetate, and painted surfaces. By manipulating color and emotion, her work delves into the relational nature of color, creating surreal and chaotic scenes that challenge traditional representations. Through tiny organic brushstrokes and cool shades of blue, she transforms violent imagery into calming depictions reminiscent of ocean waves, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex interplay between violence and tranquility.


Epiphany Couch

Portland, oregon

Epiphany Couch is a multidisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, photography, and sculpture, she looks to present new ways through which we can examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes the book not only as a format through which to share these stories but as a precious object — intimate and heirloom-like.

Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington). She earned her BFA in Sculpture with a minor in Asian Studies from The University of Puget Sound in 2010. Her work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary in Portland OR, Gallery Ost in New York City, and Studio Editions Gallery in Seattle WA. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Jurors Choice Award for her work included in the Around Oregon Biennial at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.


Sève Favre

LA CONVERSION, SWITZERLAND

Sève Favres is an interdisciplinary Swiss and Belgian artist working in painting, drawing, installation and digital. Using mixed media technics, she creates interactive artworks on canvas with digital extension, interactive site-specific installations, user engaged and sensitive experiences through colour, materials and focused on landscapes, colour compositions, climate and social change. Passionate about the concept of integration, she concentrates on transcending the classical boundary between the artwork and the viewer. The main feature of her art is interactivity. The key words that support her concept is being in interaction (be together), variation (be different), activity (be active). Since 2017, she has developed her personal practice and has exhibited in Switzerland and abroad in museums, biennials as Bienalsur 2021, galleries, art fairs and during residencies. Her specific artistic research has led her to be a finalist for 14th the Arte Laguna Prize (sculpture/installation section) and longlisted for Aesthetica Art Prize 2024.


Andrea Ferrero

Lima, Peru

Andrea Ferrero (b.Lima 1991) is a visual artist from Peru currently based in Mexico City. Her work critically considers iconographies of power and our relationship with them, playfully encouraging new ways in which symbols of domination inserted into built space and embedded into collective consciousness can be reappropriated and resignified. Recently focused on researching food as spectacle, eating rituals as stagings of power and their relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics, it seeks to challenge colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction. Using archival material, photogrammetry and 3d prints as raw material, her recent work unfolds in edible pieces that focus on the process of eating, digesting, metabolizing and excreting, often involving the audience in ephemeral sweet bacchanalia.

Andrea was part of the SOMA Academic Program in Mexico City 2019-2021 and has been part of artist residencies at Pivô arte e pesquisa, Sao Paulo; HANGAR, Lisbon and FLORA ars+natura, Bogotá, among others. She is currently participating in the the Malta Biennale “Decolonizing Malta” and her work has been shown in spaces such as Museo Jumex (Mexico City), TMOFA (Taoyuan), Swivell Gallery (New York) and Gallery Shilla (Seoul).


Amanda Machado

Oakland, California

Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, and many others. In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations including Patagonia, The Aspen Institute, HipCamp, and many others. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

Amanda has a degree in English Literature and Nonfiction Writing from Brown University, and currently lives on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland.


Murjoni Merriweather

Baltimore, Maryland

Sculptor, Murjoni Merriweather grew up in Temple Hills, Maryland. During her time there, she fell in love with art at the age of 8 learning how to draw from trial and error and art kits her parents would give her. After dabbling in photography, drawing, painting and graphic design, Murjoni tried out ceramics by the time she was in 8th grade where her heart grew whole. While feeling so connected to clay, she started making work that reflected the black experience. In 2018 Murjoni graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art with her BFA in Ceramics and concentration in Film/video. During this time, she explored celebrating blackness through figurative forms. Murjoni has been able to expand her knowledge and experiment at places like Creative Alliance (Baltimore, 2019-2022), Fountainhead Residency (Miami, 2021) and The Alma | Lewis Residency (PA, 2022) in ways that talk about emotion through the clay itself.
Murjoni currently resides in Baltimore Maryland with her cat, Kiva, where she continues to aim towards inspiring and celebrating black culture in ways that make us feel seen.


Ruth Owens

Metairie, Louisiana

Ruth Owens graduated in 2018 with an MFA from the University of New Orleans after leaving her medical practice of 25 years. She is represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery, and belongs to the artist collective, “The Front,” both in New Orleans. Owens’ work is concerned with contributing to and preserving the Black archive, and she uses personal super-8 film references in her painting and video art. Artist residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in NY. Her work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museums, Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Fidelity Investments Corporate Collection, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Headshot by Colin Roberson


Amber Helene Müller St. Thomas (she/they) is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto. Their artistic practice is based on developing performative actions that include elements of touch and queer gestures. They primarily work in lens-based media, textiles and performance. They are interested in communal interaction, materiality, and the potential for objects to function as both symbols of self and surrogates for intimacy.

Müller St. Thomas completed their MFA at York University (2017). They were a beneficiary of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2016). They participated in the 2018 Hamilton Supercrawl Arts Festival and the 2020 Venice International Performance Art Week. In 2021, they attended the Cleaning the House Workshop by the Marina Abramović Institute in Greece. In 2022, they participated in the NARS Artist Residency in Brooklyn, New York, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. They completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, supported by the Liz Crockford Artists Fund Award (2023). In 2024, they will be an artist in residence at Mass MoCA, and in 2025, they have a solo show at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York.


Mike Vos

Portland, Oregon

Mike Vos (b. 1986) is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR.

Drawing inspiration from various literary movements and themes, Vos uses traditional and experimental 4x5 film techniques, field recordings and instrumentation to craft complex narratives that advocate for the preservation of wild spaces. Constantly pushing the capabilities of film photography and sound, Vos creates immersive experiences to draw viewers into surreal representations of physical places.

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 interprets landscapes into ethereal and otherworldly dreamscapes to capture the awe and wonder that exists in nature.

2024 Capacity Building Grants for Pittsfield (MA) Artists!

Artist Christine Brown (Studios at MASS MoCA and Capacity-Building Program alum).
Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA EN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

Assets for Artists is focusing resources on our artist neighbors in the City of Pittsfield. This year we will welcome the second of two Capacity-Building Grant Cohorts for artists who live or work in the city.

2024 Application opens: February 1, 2024

2024 Application Closes: march 14, 2024

Funding for this initiative is provided by the City of Pittsfield’s American Rescue Program Act Community Partnership Initiative

program overview

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists (A4A) provides professional development workshops, coaching, working capital grants, and creative community building for artists of all sorts. We envision a world where artists are paid fairly, valued for their artistic, social, and economic contributions, and given equitable access to resources to thrive. All of our programs are designed with and juried by a broad coalition of artists, activists and arts administrators.

This special Capacity-Building Program for Pittsfield artists pairs an unrestricted micro-grant of $2,000 with professional development tools for artists to design and build their creative future. 

 
 


PROGRAM
details

More than a grant! Our Capacity-Building Program provides individualized, artist-centered professional development to help artists strengthen their creative practice, pursue values-driven careers, build mutually-supportive networks and find resources to achieve long term sustainability and self-determination.

The 6-month program includes:

  • An unrestricted grant of $2,000 paid upon completion of a written plan.

  • A combination of self-directed and group professional development for artists of all disciplines.

  • Individualized support and resources from A4A staff and trainers in service of your creative professional goals. 

  • Planning tools to help you explore what’s next in your artistic career.

  • Cohort events for connection and peer learning.

  • Priority access to A4A’s professional development workshops.

  • Up to 3 hours of one-on-one coaching sessions with an A4A trainer in support of your goals.


10 artists will be awarded grants in 2024. Meet our 2023 Pittsfield Artist Cohort.

More questions? Check out our FAQ.


The Capacity-Building Experience

Over the course of six months, Capacity-Building Program artists attend a series of scheduled cohort gatherings and workshops aimed at simultaneously building professional skills and a creative community. See full timeline below. Parallel to these larger group activities, artists connect 1-on-1 with A4A staff and receive up to three hours of coaching with an A4A trainer(s) of their choice. Artists are also encouraged to attend any additional A4A workshops offered over the six months that interest them.


PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS

In addition to the programming in the timeline below, before receiving their grant funds, artists will need to complete a simple written plan that outlines a few goals for the coming year(s)–we have plenty of support available to help you with this!


program timeline
(subject to change)

February 1, 2024: Application Opens
March 14, 2024: Application Deadline
Early May 2024: Grantees Announced
May 2024: Onboarding Call with A4A staff
June 7, 2024: Welcome party and First Friday walk
June 15, 2024: In-person planning workshop at the Lichtenstein Center
June - October, 2024: Throughout the six-month program, participants engage in their own time with A4A coaches and any additional A4A workshops they are interested in. Artists are encouraged to take advantage of the full range of workshops and coaching opportunities to help move them closer to their goals.  
July and August 2024: In person slide presentations sharing your work with your fellow cohort
Late August 2024: Midway check-in calls with A4A
September 2024: Personal Finances Workshop (online)
Late October 2024: Field trip to MASS MoCA / Graduation celebration
October 31, 2024: Written plans due.


ELIGIBILITY

  • Applicants for this opportunity must be at least 18 years of age

  • Applicants are NOT a full time student.

  • Applicants must live or have a studio in the City of Pittsfield.
    Yes, we really mean Pittsfield-based artists only. (The federal funding source for this grant requires it.) You must also maintain a Pittsfield residency or studio address throughout the duration of the program. All Pittsfield artists can apply, regardless of US citizenship or immigration status.

  • Open to artists and creatives of any discipline at any career stage.
    We define “artist” very broadly to include visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater practitioners, craftspeople, jewelers, fashion designers, puppeteers, fiber artists, drag performers, social practice and public artists, photographers, filmmakers, woodworkers, traditional artisans, and more. We strive for each cohort to contain a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

  • Priority to emerging or mid-career artists as well as artists from under-resourced communities and backgrounds.
    Our program is geared toward artists who have limited access to resources and who are looking to build a sustainable creative practice while strengthening their financial and social safety net within a community of peers. “Limited access” might mean artists who are low-to-moderate income or have little savings or access to generational wealth. This might also mean an artist who lives in a rural or other under-resourced community with fewer financial or artistic opportunities, or an artist who holds an identity that has been historically undervalued or marginalized.

  • 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.

  • Extra Grant Priorities
    At least half of grants will go to federally determined “low-income” artists or artists who live or work in Census Tract 9001, 9002, 9006 (find your census tract here). Please note that artists who are not low-income and/or located in these census tracts will still be eligible for the grant.


scoring rubric

Each applicant will be scored by members of our artist jury. Jurors will assign each application scores based on the criteria below. Using the application score as a basis, a cohort will be selected that includes artists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

*Jurors assess how much access to other opportunities and resources the applicant has received, with artists who have faced a disproportionate number of barriers receiving a higher score.

DOWNLOAD A PREVIEW OF THE APPLICATION HERE.

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


2024 Programa de Subvenciones de Pittsfield Capacity-Building (Español)

Assets for Artists está enfocando sus recursos en nuestros residentes en la ciudad de Pittsfield con un Grupo de Subvenciones para el Desarrollo de Capacidades para artistas que viven o trabajan en la ciudad.

Fecha inicial para aplicar: 1 de febrero, 2024
Último día para aplicar: 14 de marzo, 2024

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA

Assets for Artists (Recursos para artistas) (A4A, por sus siglas en inglés) es un programa de MASS MoCA por artistas para artistas.  Ofrecemos talleres de desarrollo profesional, coaching, subvenciones de capital de trabajo y desarrollo de comunidad creativa para artistas.  Nos imaginamos un mundo en el que a los artistas se les paga justamente, son valorados por sus contribuciones artísticas, sociales y económicas, y se les da acceso equitativo a recursos para prosperar.  Todos nuestros programas están diseñados con una amplia coalición de artistas, activistas y administradores artísticos, quienes forman parte del jurado.

El Pittsfield Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Subvenciones de Capacity Building) proporciona una micro-subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que acompaña herramientas de desarrollo profesional para artistas para que diseñen y construyan su futuro creativo.

 

¿PREGUNTAS? ASISTA A NUESTRA SESIÓN DE PREGUNTAS Y RESPUESTAS EN DIRECTO (EN INGLÉS)

13 de Febrero, 2024 | 5pm | en Zoom
Regístrese a través de Zoom.

 

DETALLES DEL PROGRAMA

¡Más que una subvención! Nuestro Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades proporciona un desarrollo profesional individualizado, centrado en el artista, para ayudarles a fortalecer su práctica creativa, seguir carreras impulsadas por valores, construir redes de apoyo mutuo y encontrar recursos para lograr la sostenibilidad a largo plazo y la autodeterminación.

El programa de 6 meses incluye:

  • Una subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que se pagará cuando tú escojas. 

  • Una combinación de desarrollo profesional autodirigido y en grupo para artistas de todas las disciplinas.

  • Recursos y apoyo individualizados por parte del personal y los capacitadores del A4A a su servicio para ayudarle a alcanzar sus objetivos profesionales creativos. 

  • Herramientas de planificación que le permitirán explorar el futuro de su carrera artística.

  • Eventos de grupo para la conexión y el aprendizaje entre colegas.

  • Hasta 2 horas de coaching (orientación) individual con un capacitador de A4A para apoyarle con sus objetivos.

  • Acceso prioritario a los talleres en línea de A4A.

¿Más preguntas? Encuentra aquí las preguntas más frecuentes (FAQ ENGLISH ONLY).


LA EXPERIENCIA DEL PROGRAMA DE DESARROLLO DE CAPACIDADES

A lo largo de seis meses, los participantes del Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades asistirán a una serie de reuniones y talleres programados con el fin de desarrollar simultáneamente sus capacidades profesionales y crear una comunidad creativa. Consulte el calendario completo a continuación. Paralelamente a estas actividades en grupos con un mayor número de participantes, los artistas se ponen en contacto individualmente con el personal de A4A y reciben hasta dos horas de asesoramiento con uno o varios capacitadores de A4A de su elección. También se anima a los artistas a asistir a cualquier taller adicional de A4A que se ofrezca en su región a lo largo de los seis meses y que sea de su interés.


REQUISITOS DEL PROGRAMA

¡Además de la programación en el calendario a continuación, antes de recibir sus fondos de subvención, los artistas tendrán que completar un sencillo plan escrito que describa algunos objetivos para el/los próximo/s año/s - tenemos una gran cantidad de apoyo disponible para ayudarle en este proceso!   


FECHAS LÍMITES PARA EL PROGRAMA

1 de febrero , 2024: Fecha inicial para aplicar
14 de marzo, 2024: Último día para aplicar
Principios de mayo 2024: Notificación a los becarios
Mayo 2024: Llamadas informativas
7 de junio, 2024: Fiesta de bienvenida en persona.
15 de junio, 2024: Taller de planificación presencial.
Junio - Octubre 2024: A lo largo del programa de seis meses, los participantes dedicarán su propio tiempo a los capacitadores de A4A y a cualquier otro taller de A4A en el que estén interesados. Se anima a los artistas a aprovechar toda la gama de talleres y oportunidades de capacitación para ayudarles a alcanzar sus objetivos.  
Julio 2024: Presentación de diapositivas en línea, compartiendo su trabajo con sus compañeros de grupo.
Finales de agosto 2024: Llamadas de seguimiento a mitad del programa con A4A.
Finales de octubre 2024: Fiesta de graduación en Fall River (lugar por confirmar)
31 de octubre 2024: Entrega de los proyectos por escrito.


ELEGIBILIDAD

  • Los solicitantes de esta oportunidad deben tener al menos 18 años de edad. Los estudiantes actuales a tiempo completo no son elegibles.

  • Tengo actualmente una dirección en la ciudad de Pittsfield para mi domicilio o estudio (y seguiré teniéndola durante el próximo año).

  • Nuestro Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building es para artistas y creativos de cualquier disciplina.  Definimos “artista” muy ampliamente para incluir artistas visuales, escritores, músicos, bailarines, artistas de teatro, artesanos, joyeros, diseñadores de moda, titiriteros, artistas de las fibras, artistas de drag, fotógrafos, cineastas, trabajadores de la madera, artesanos tradicionales, artistas de gestión cultural y más.

  • Se dará prioridad a artistas emergentes o que se encuentren en la mitad de su carrera, así como a artistas procedentes de comunidades y entornos con bajos recursos. Nuestro programa está dirigido a artistas que tienen un acceso limitado de recursos y que buscan construir una práctica creativa sostenible al tiempo que fortalecen su red de seguridad financiera y social dentro de una comunidad de colegas. "Acceso limitado" puede significar artistas con ingresos bajos o moderados o con pocos ahorros o acceso a la riqueza generacional. También puede referirse a un artista que vive en una comunidad rural o con menos recursos, oportunidades financieras o artísticas, o a un artista con una identidad que ha sido históricamente subvalorada o marginada.

  • El Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building resulta más apropiado para creativos entusiasmados por involucrarse en los programas ofrecidos, listos para crear una práctica más sostenible, y aumentar su red de contactos con compañeros creativos. 

  •  Mensaje para becarios anteriores de A4A. Mientras que en la mayoría de los casos puedes volver a solicitar, a los becarios anteriores se les dará menos prioridad comparado a aquellos que no han participado en nuestro programa todavía.  Aquellos becarios anteriores que sí reciban una segunda subvención pueden demostrar que están tomando una dirección nueva y significativa en su carrera y que requieren planificación nueva y coaching de apoyo. 


CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN

Cada solicitud será evaluada por los miembros de nuestro jurado de artistas. Los miembros del jurado asignarán a cada solicitud una puntuación basada en los criterios que se indican a continuación. Utilizando la puntuación de la solicitud como base, se seleccionará un grupo que incluya artistas de diversas disciplinas y procedencias.


*Los miembros del jurado valorarán el grado de acceso a otras oportunidades y recursos que haya recibido el solicitante, y los artistas que hayan enfrentado un número desproporcionado de obstáculos recibirán una puntuación más alta.

DESCARGA UNA VISTA PREVIA DE LA APLICACIÓN AQUÍ.

Welcome 2024 Connecticut Grantees!

Department of Economic and Community Development, Office of the Arts

In partnership with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Assets for Artists is thrilled to welcome this group of talented Connecticut artists into our Capacity-Building Program! We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow them as they progress through our program!




Alibaba Awrang
(New milford)

Calligraphic practice can be defined as the art of giving form to signs and sounds in an expressive, harmonious, and balanced manner. For centuries, Persian calligraphy served as a mirror for mystical and literary teachings. In his work, Alibaba Awrang (he/him) presents a new artistic reality – by crossing the border of the long-standing tradition of calligraphy, linking calligraphy with painting, he reconstructs the past and brings it into the present.

While Awrang has a deep understanding of traditional calligraphy and how it was done in the past, he takes a bold new approach with the aim of enriching the art to make it more contemporary. His works reflect both a continuation of and a transition from a long-standing calligraphic tradition. In other words, his calligraphic works are rooted in the past while opening the window to future horizons.

The graphic and aesthetic aspects of calligraphy are hugely important for Awrang. His calligraphy works are important not because of their linkage to religious teachings and Islamic literature, nor because of their belonging to Islamic mysticism. Their uniqueness is derived from the attempt to cross the boundaries of tradition by the combination of script and painting.

 

Desiré Graham
(New Haven)

Desiré Graham (she/her) is a performer, director, dramaturg, and arts administrator. She sings to connect to a past that is not just hers, but a history of many. She writes to reconcile the shade and the sun. She collaborates, in a constant search for those who also feel the tug to be elsewhere. From 2019-2022, Desiré was based in Tuscany, Italy as a company member at the Workcenter of Jerzy Grotowski and Thomas Richards. Currently based in the U.S., Graham is committed  to the cultivation of artistic spaces that foster transparency, active listening and anti-oppressive practices as a requirement. In alignment with these values, Desiré works with Double Edge Theatre and VLA Dance as a recurring artistic collaborator. Additionally, she curates residency spaces such as The Black Residency and On the Table. Graham also hosts a workshop series entitled, Somewhere in Between, an invitation for BIPOC and ALAANA New Haven residents to discover the use of communal singing, give weight to their vibrational soul, activate, and call on others to join in. She is freely in-process, if you have any questions about what she’s done or where she’s been, please ask about it.

 

Emma Palzere-Rae
(New London)

Emma Palzere-Rae (she/her) is a playwright, actor, director, and producer whose work focuses on the healing power of theater and storytelling. Emma spent 15 years as part of the NYC theater community, where she began producing one-woman plays and founded Be Well Productions. Emma’s solo plays include “Aunt Hattie’s House”, about what compelled Harriet Beecher Stowe to pen “Uncle Tom’s Cabin;” “Live from the Milky Way… It’s Gilda Radner!”; “The Woodhull Project,” about 1872 Presidential candidate Victoria Woodhull; and “Breaking Glass,” inspired by the life of Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron. Emma serves on the steering committee of the League of Professional Theatre Women (CT Chapter), the board of Mystic Film Institute, and co-chairs the New London (CT) Arts Council. She is a member of Actors Equity Association and the Dramatists Guild, where she serves as the regional representative for New England-West. Emma holds a B.F.A in Acting with minors in Creative Writing and Speech from Emerson College, Boston. In 2021, Emma was awarded an Artist Fellowship from the CT Office of the Arts.

 

Joel Melendez
(harwinton)

Joel Melendez (he/him), co-Founder of the touring duo Matica Arts and Thrive Movement Studio, is a “Physical Artist,” musician, and Capoerista who loves exploring the vast capabilities of the human body. A gifted performer known for his unicycling, clowning, juggling, improvisational and acrobatic skills, he has traveled the Americas performing and learning. Joel is on the Hartford Performs artist roster with his innovative Capoeira program, serves as  Capoeira director at Plus One Defense in West Hartford, and is a teaching artist for Oddfellow's Playhouse in Middletown. Joel sees the arts as a vehicle to inspire, connect and transport the audience to a mystical world free of inhibitions where all is possible

 

Kay douglas
(Watertown)

As an interdisciplinary portrait artist and educator Kay Douglas (she/her) uses her work to engage individuals in conversations rooted in race, history and privilege. Emory Douglas’ and his work for the Black Panther Party for Self Defense as the Minister of Culture is what inspires her artistic style and her desire to use her art as a vehicle to curate brave conversations.

Douglas uses patterns with hidden narratives about the African Diaspora to engage individuals visually with portraiture, while centering stories of liberation, pride and resistance. She creates intentional spaces for her portraits to provoke conversations and it is Douglas’s desire is that people will engage in important dialogue that bridges the gap between historic and current day narratives.

As a mother, artist and educator it is important for Douglas to make work centered around the black experience and how it is influenced by current and past events involving race, history and privilege.

 

Keith Anthony Verdini Jr. (he/him) a.k.a. AV the Artist is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and entrepreneur born and raised in New London, CT. His art and music explore themes such as social justice, mental health, self-love and his personal experiences with people, love, society and finding purpose. He has been writing and recording music for over a decade and has recently begun to reintroduce drawing and painting back into his life while also exploring new forms of art such as fashion, graphic design and sculpting. His love for art has led him to pursue a career where he can encourage and inspire others through different mediums while also being able to grow as an individual. He currently works as a mentor and Behavior Motivator at New London High School and in his community. His art and clothing has been featured at several in-person events and can be found on his website (www.avtheartist.com).

 

DJ Michelle Bee (she/her), an open-format DJ & visionary, transcends boundaries. Balancing motherhood with exploring her crafts in songwriting, singing, production, education, event curation, and mentorship, she reshapes traditional roles. Her multifaceted and innovative style defies limitations, showcasing versatility and fearlessness in artistic expression.

Beyond DJing, Michelle Bee founded Afro Hrs, celebrating vibrant Afrobeats music without commercial restraints. The initiative, now including an online radio segment called The Afrobeats Hub, provides a dynamic platform for local Afrobeats and Afro-fusion artists of all disciplines. Michelle also hosts weekly karaoke and consistent open mics throughout CT, offering diverse talents opportunities to elevate, showcase, and connect. Through collaborations, she actively shapes authentic cultural spaces, uplifting artists, and creating meaningful experiences.

Her 'From Start to Spin: A DJ Essentials Workshop' empowers diverse communities through transformative music and entrepreneurship education, emphasizing the importance of representation. Michelle Bee's dedication breaks barriers, cultivates inclusivity, and makes a distinctive mark on diverse musical landscapes.

 

Rya GreenE
(Torrington)

Rya Greene (she/they) is a Connecticut-based queer and nonbinary choreographer, performer, teacher, and dance administrator working on the land of the Mohican people. They graduated Magna Cum Laude from Grand Valley State University, studying Dance and Public & Nonprofit Administration. At Grand Valley, Rya worked with Helanius Wilkins, Stacy Reischman Fletcher, Rachel Abrahams, and Leslie Scott. Working with Abrahams and Scott, they performed in the 2019 GVSU Fall Arts Celebration alongside BODYART Dance. While at Grand Valley she was awarded the Alexander Calder Honors Dance Scholarship, the Upper Division Dance Scholarship, and the Excellence-in-a-Discipline award for dance. Choreographing for studios and colleges, Rya has also presented work at numerous regional dance and choreographic festivals in Michigan and Connecticut. She was the guest choreographer for Garte&Co’s second annual ECLIPSE performance and was awarded a grant from the New England Foundation for the Arts’s New England Dance Fund to go towards the creation of a new work. They also sit on the Connecticut Office of the Arts inaugural READI Council.

 

Sarah Ghonaim
(Manchester)

Sarah Ghonaim (she/they) is a Muslim-American actor and playwright whose work focuses on social equity through an Arab/North African lense. As an actor, Sarah has played multiple roles in productions by Hartbeat Ensemble, Escapism Productions and Faultline Ensemble. As a playwright, she is currently working with Playhouse on Park for a developmental production of her play “Genies in a Bottle”, a fantastical drama based on Arab and Islamic folklore focused on revealing domestic abuse towards femme presenting characters.

2024 Capacity Building Grants for Fall River (MA) Artists!

Artist Jason Montgomery (Studios at MASS MoCA and Capacity-Building Program alum).
Photo by Carolina Porras Monroy.

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA EN EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

DESCRIÇÃO DO PROGRAMA EM PORTUGUÊS AQUI

Assets for Artists is focusing resources on our artists neighbors in the City of Fall River with a Capacity-Building Grant Cohort for artists who live or work in the city.

2024 Application opens: February 1, 2024

2024 Application Closes: march 14, 2024

The program is a collaboration between Assets for Artists and the Fall River Arts & Culture Coalition, through county-level appropriations of the American Rescue Plan Act.

program overview

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists (A4A) provides professional development workshops, coaching, working capital grants, and creative community building for artists of all sorts. We envision a world where artists are paid fairly, valued for their artistic, social, and economic contributions, and given equitable access to resources to thrive. All of our programs are designed with and juried by a broad coalition of artists, activists and arts administrators.

This special Capacity-Building Program for Fall River artists pairs an unrestricted micro-grant of $3,000 with professional development tools for artists to design and build their creative future. 

 
 


PROGRAM
details

More than a grant! Our Capacity-Building Program provides individualized, artist-centered professional development to help artists strengthen their creative practice, pursue values-driven careers, build mutually-supportive networks and find resources to achieve long term sustainability and self-determination.

The 6-month program includes:

  • An unrestricted grant of $3,000 paid upon completion of a written plan.

  • A combination of self-directed and group professional development for artists of all disciplines.

  • Individualized support and resources from A4A staff and trainers in service of your creative professional goals. 

  • Planning tools to help you explore what’s next in your artistic career.

  • Cohort events for connection and peer learning.

  • Priority access to A4A’s professional development workshops.

  • Up to 2 hours of one-on-one coaching sessions with an A4A trainer in support of your goals.

More questions? Check out our FAQ.


The Capacity-Building Experience

Over the course of six months, Capacity-Building Program artists attend a series of scheduled cohort gatherings and workshops aimed at simultaneously building professional skills and a creative community. See full timeline below. Parallel to these larger group activities, artists connect 1-on-1 with A4A staff and receive up to two hours of coaching with an A4A trainer(s) of their choice. Artists are also encouraged to attend any additional A4A workshops offered to their region over the six months that are of interest to them.


PROGRAM REQUIREMENTS

In addition to the programming in the timeline below, before receiving their grant funds, artists will need to complete a simple written plan that outlines a few goals for the coming year(s)–we have plenty of support available to help you with this!


program timeline
(Subject to change)

February 1, 2024: Application Opens
March 14, 2024: Application Closes at 11:59 PM Eastern
Early May 2024: Grantees Announced
May 2024: Onboarding Calls
May 22, 2024: In-person cohort welcome party at The Ignition Space: 44 Troy Street, Fall River
June 2024: In-person planning workshop.
June - October 2024: Throughout the six-month program, fellows engage in their own time with A4A coaches and any additional A4A workshops they are interested in. Artists are encouraged to take advantage of the full range of workshops and coaching opportunities to help move them closer to their goals.  
July 2024: Online slide presentations, sharing your work with your fellow cohort
Late August 2024: Midway check-in calls with A4A
Late October 2024: Graduation party in Fall River (location TBD)
October 31, 2024: Written plans due.


ELIGIBILITY

  • Applicants for this opportunity must be at least 18 years of age.
    Current, full time students are not eligible.

  • Applicants must be year-round residents of City of Fall River.
    Yes, we really mean Fall River-based artists only. (The federal funding source for this grant requires it.) In addition, you must have either been a Fall River artist since before January 1, 2020, or currently live or have studio space in one of the following Fall River census tracts: 6402, 6403, 6409, 6410, 6411, 6412, 6413, 6414, or 6420. Find your census tract here. Please note that you are not required to be a US citizen or to provide documentation of legal residence in the US.

  • Applicants who have received a previous Assets for Artist grant are not eligible.

  • Applicants who have received a previous F.R.A.C.C. grant are eligible.

  • Open to artists and creatives of any discipline at any career stage.
    We define “artist” very broadly to include visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater practitioners, craftspeople, jewelers, fashion designers, puppeteers, fiber artists, drag performers, social practice and public artists, photographers, filmmakers, woodworkers, traditional artisans, and more. We strive for each cohort to contain a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

  • Priority to emerging or mid-career artists as well as artists from under-resourced communities and backgrounds.
    Our program is geared toward artists who have limited access to resources and who are looking to build a sustainable creative practice while strengthening their financial and social safety net within a community of peers. “Limited access” might mean artists who are low-to-moderate income or have little savings or access to generational wealth. This might also mean an artist who lives in a rural or other under-resourced community with fewer financial or artistic opportunities, or an artist who holds an identity that has been historically undervalued or marginalized.

  • 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.


scoring rubric

Each applicant will be scored by members of our artist jury. Jurors will assign each application scores based on the criteria below. Using the application score as a basis, a cohort will be selected that includes artists from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds.

*Jurors assess how much access to other opportunities and resources the applicant has received, with artists who have faced a disproportionate number of barriers receiving a higher score.

DOWNLOAD A PREVIEW OF THE APPLICATION HERE.


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


2024 Programa de Subvenciones de Fall River Capacity-Building (Español)

Assets for Artists está enfocando sus recursos en nuestros residentes en la ciudad de Fall River con un Grupo de Subvenciones para el Desarrollo de Capacidades para artistas que viven o trabajan en la ciudad.

Fecha inicial para aplicar: 1 de febrero, 2024
Último día para aplicar: 14 de marzo, 2024

El programa es una colaboración entre Assets for Artists y Fall River Arts & Culture Coalition, a través de asignaciones a nivel de condado de la Ley del Plan de Rescate Estadounidense.

Assets for Artists (Recursos para artistas) (A4A, por sus siglas en inglés) es un programa de MASS MoCA por artistas para artistas.  Ofrecemos talleres de desarrollo profesional, coaching, subvenciones de capital de trabajo y desarrollo de comunidad creativa para artistas.  Nos imaginamos un mundo en el que a los artistas se les paga justamente, son valorados por sus contribuciones artísticas, sociales y económicas, y se les da acceso equitativo a recursos para prosperar.  Todos nuestros programas están diseñados con una amplia coalición de artistas, activistas y administradores artísticos, quienes forman parte del jurado.

El Fall River Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Subvenciones de Capacity Building) proporciona una micro-subvención sin restricciones de $3,000 que acompaña herramientas de desarrollo profesional para artistas para que diseñen y construyan su futuro creativo.

¿PREGUNTAS? ASISTA A NUESTRA SESIÓN DE PREGUNTAS Y RESPUESTAS EN DIRECTO (EN INGLÉS)

13 de Febrero, 2024 | 5PM | en Zoom
Regístrese a través de Zoom.




DETALLES DEL PROGRAMA

¡Más que una subvención! Nuestro Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades proporciona un desarrollo profesional individualizado, centrado en el artista, para ayudarles a fortalecer su práctica creativa, seguir carreras impulsadas por valores, construir redes de apoyo mutuo y encontrar recursos para lograr la sostenibilidad a largo plazo y la autodeterminación.

El programa de 6 meses incluye:

  • Una subvención sin restricciones de $3,000 que se pagará cuando tú escojas. 

  • Una combinación de desarrollo profesional autodirigido y en grupo para artistas de todas las disciplinas.

  • Recursos y apoyo individualizados por parte del personal y los capacitadores del A4A a su servicio para ayudarle a alcanzar sus objetivos profesionales creativos. 

  • Herramientas de planificación que le permitirán explorar el futuro de su carrera artística.

  • Eventos de grupo para la conexión y el aprendizaje entre colegas.

  • Hasta 2 horas de coaching (orientación) individual con un capacitador de A4A para apoyarle con sus objetivos.

  • Acceso prioritario a los talleres en línea de A4A.

¿Más preguntas? Encuentra aquí las preguntas más frecuentes (FAQ ENGLISH ONLY).




LA EXPERIENCIA DEL PROGRAMA DE DESARROLLO DE CAPACIDADES

A lo largo de seis meses, los participantes del Programa de Desarrollo de Capacidades asistirán a una serie de reuniones y talleres programados con el fin de desarrollar simultáneamente sus capacidades profesionales y crear una comunidad creativa. Consulte el calendario completo a continuación. Paralelamente a estas actividades en grupos con un mayor número de participantes, los artistas se ponen en contacto individualmente con el personal de A4A y reciben hasta dos horas de asesoramiento con uno o varios capacitadores de A4A de su elección. También se anima a los artistas a asistir a cualquier taller adicional de A4A que se ofrezca en su región a lo largo de los seis meses y que sea de su interés.


REQUISITOS DEL PROGRAMA

¡Además de la programación en el calendario a continuación, antes de recibir sus fondos de subvención, los artistas tendrán que completar un sencillo plan escrito que describa algunos objetivos para el/los próximo/s año/s - tenemos una gran cantidad de apoyo disponible para ayudarle en este proceso!   




FECHAS LÍMITES PARA EL PROGRAMA

1 de Febrero, 2024: Fecha inicial para aplicar:
14 de Marzo 2024: Último día para aplicar a 11:59 PM Eastern
Principios May 2024:  Notificación a los becarios
Mayo 2024: Llamadas informativas
22 de Mayo, 2024: Fiesta de bienvenida en persona en The Ignition Space: 44 Troy Street, Fall River
Junio 2024: Taller de planificación presencial
Junio - Octubre 2024: A lo largo del programa de seis meses, los participantes dedicarán su propio tiempo a los capacitadores de A4A y a cualquier otro taller de A4A en el que estén interesados. Se anima a los artistas a aprovechar toda la gama de talleres y oportunidades de capacitación para ayudarles a alcanzar sus objetivos. 
Julio 2024: Presentación de diapositivas en línea, compartiendo su trabajo con sus compañeros de grupo.
Finales de Agosto 2024: Llamadas de seguimiento a mitad del programa con A4A.
Finales de Octubre 2024: Fiesta de graduación en Fall River (lugar por confirmar)
31 de Octubre 2024: Entrega de los proyectos por escrito.




ELEGIBILIDAD

  • Los solicitantes de esta oportunidad deben tener al menos 18 años de edad. Los estudiantes actuales a tiempo completo no son elegibles.

  • Los solicitantes deben residir todo el año en la ciudad de Fall River. Sí, nos referimos únicamente a artistas residentes en Fall River. (La fuente de financiación federal para esta subvención así lo requiere.) Adicionalmente, debe haber sido un artista de Fall River desde antes del 1 de enero de 2020, o vivir actualmente o tener un estudio en una de las siguientes áreas de censo de Fall River: 6402, 6403, 6409, 6410, 6411, 6412, 6413, 6414 o 6420. Encuentre su área de censo aquí.Tenga en cuenta que no es necesario ser ciudadano estadounidense ni presentar documentación que acredite la residencia legal en los Estados Unidos.

  • Los solicitantes que hayan recibido una subvención Assets for Artist anteriormente no son elegibles. Nuestro Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building es para artistas y creativos de cualquier disciplina.  Definimos “artista” muy ampliamente para incluir artistas visuales, escritores, músicos, bailarines, artistas de teatro, artesanos, joyeros, diseñadores de moda, titiriteros, artistas de las fibras, artistas de drag, fotógrafos, cineastas, trabajadores de la madera, artesanos tradicionales, artistas de gestión cultural y más.

  • Se dará prioridad a artistas emergentes o que se encuentren en la mitad de su carrera, así como a artistas procedentes de comunidades y entornos con bajos recursos. Nuestro programa está dirigido a artistas que tienen un acceso limitado de recursos y que buscan construir una práctica creativa sostenible al tiempo que fortalecen su red de seguridad financiera y social dentro de una comunidad de colegas. "Acceso limitado" puede significar artistas con ingresos bajos o moderados o con pocos ahorros o acceso a la riqueza generacional. También puede referirse a un artista que vive en una comunidad rural o con menos recursos, oportunidades financieras o artísticas, o a un artista con una identidad que ha sido históricamente subvalorada o marginada.

  • El Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building resulta más apropiado para creativos entusiasmados por involucrarse en los programas ofrecidos, listos para crear una práctica más sostenible, y aumentar su red de contactos con compañeros creativos. 




CRITERIOS DE EVALUACIÓN

Cada solicitud será evaluada por los miembros de nuestro jurado de artistas. Los miembros del jurado asignarán a cada solicitud una puntuación basada en los criterios que se indican a continuación. Utilizando la puntuación de la solicitud como base, se seleccionará un grupo que incluya artistas de diversas disciplinas y procedencias.

*Los miembros del jurado valorarán el grado de acceso a otras oportunidades y recursos que haya recibido el solicitante, y los artistas que hayan enfrentado un número desproporcionado de obstáculos recibirán una puntuación más alta.

DESCARGA UNA VISTA PREVIA DE LA APLICACIÓN AQUÍ.


Programa de Bolsas de Capacitação de Fall River 2024 (PORTUGUÊS)

Assets for Artists está destinando recursos para os artistas da nossa vizinhança na cidade de Fall River através de um grupo de subsídios para o Desenvolvimento de Habilidades dos artistas que moram e trabalham na cidade.

Inscrições abertas: 1 de fevereiro de 2024 
Encerramento do período de inscrições: 14 de março de 2024

O programa é uma colaboração entre Assets for Artists (Recursos para Artistas) e a Fall River Arts & Culture Coalition (Coalizão de Arte e Cultura de Fall River), através de apropriações municipais da Lei do Plano de Resgate Americano.

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists (A4A) é um programa criado por artistas e para artistas. Oferecemos oficinas de desenvolvimento profissional, treinamentos, subsídios e oportunidades para a construção de comunidades artísticas. Vislumbramos um mundo onde os artistas são pagos de forma justa, valorizados por suas contribuições artísticas, sociais e econômicas, e em que lhes é dado acesso equitativo a recursos para crescerem. Todos os nossos programas são elaborados e julgados por uma ampla coalizão de artistas, ativistas e administradores de artes.

Fall River Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação) combina um micro fundo irrestrito de US$ 3.000, com ferramentas de desenvolvimento profissional para que os artistas planejem e construam seu futuro criativo. 

PERGUNTAS? ASSISTA ÀS NOSSAS PERGUNTAS E RESPOSTAS AO VIVO! (EM INGLÊS)

13 de fevereiro de 2024 | 5pm | Zoom




DETALHES DO PROGRAMA

Mais do que um subsídio! Nosso Programa de Desenvolvimento de Habilidades oferece desenvolvimento individual e centralizado no artista para auxiliar os artistas a fortalecer sua criatividade, seguir carreiras orientadas por valores, construir redes de apoio mútuo e encontrar recursos para alcançar a longo prazo sustentabilidade e autodeterminação.  

O programa de 6 meses inclui:

  • Um subsídio irrestrito de $3.000 pagos no momento de sua escolha.

  • Uma combinação de desenvolvimento professional autodirigido e em grupo para artistas de todas as disciplinas.

  • Apoio e recursos individualizados dos funcionários e instrutores do A4A a serviço dos seus objetivos profissionais criativos. 

  • Ferramentas de planejamento para ajudá-lo a explorar os próximos passos na sua carreira artística.

  • Eventos de Grupo para conexão e aprendizagem com colegas.

  • Acesso prioritário às oficinas on-line de A4A

  • Até 2 horas de treinamento individual com um instrutor do A4A  para apoiar seus objetivos. 

Mais perguntas? Confira nossas FAQ. 




EXPERIÊNCIA NO DESENVOLVIMENTO DE HABILIDADES 

Ao longo dos seis meses, os participantes do Programa de Desenvolvimento de Habilidades atendem uma série de reuniões e workshops programados com o objetivo de desenvolver simultaneamente habilidades profissionais e uma comunidade criativa.  Veja o cronograma completo abaixo. Paralelo a essas atividades em grupos grandes, os artistas contatam individualmente a equipe do A4A e recebem até duas horas de treinamento com instrutor(es) do A4A de sua escolha. Os artistas também são incentivados a participar de quaisquer workshops adicionais do A4A que sejam do seu interesse e que são oferecidos na sua região durante os seis meses.




REQUISITOS DO PROGRAMA

Além da programação no cronograma abaixo, antes de receberem os fundos do subsídio, os artistas precisarão completar por escrito um plano simples que descreve algumas metas para o(s) próximo(s) ano(s) – temos bastante apoio disponível para ajudá-lo com isso!



CRONOGRAMA 

1 de fevereiro de 2024: O aplicativo é aberto

14 de março de 2024: A inscrição termina às 23h59 Leste
Início de maio: Notificação dos/das selecionados/as
Maio de 2024: Reuniões de orientação
Maio de 2024: Festa de boas-vindas presencialmente no Ignition Space: 44 Troy Street, Fall River
Junho de 2024: Workshop de planejamento - presencial.
Junho – outubro de 2024: Durante os seis meses de programa, os participantes mantêm contato com os treinadores do A4A no seu tempo livre e atendem quaisquer workshops adicionais do A4A do seu interesse. Os artistas são incentivados a aproveitar toda a variedade de workshops e oportunidades de treinamento para o ajudar a se aproximar mais de seus objetivos. 
Julho de 2024: Apresentação de slides on-line compartilhando seu trabalho com outros colegas.
Final de agosto de 2024: Ligações intermediárias de verificação com A4A.
Final de outubro de 2024: Festa de Formatura em Fall River (local a ser determinado)
31 de outubro de 2024: Data de entrega dos planos escritos.




ELIGIBILIDADE

  • Os candidatos para esta oportunidade devem ter pelo menos 18 anos de idade.
    No momento, estudantes de tempo integral não se qualificam.

  • Os candidatos devem residir o ano todo na cidade de Fall River. 
    Sim, desejamos enfatizar que é apenas para os artistas que moram em Fall River. (A fonte de financiamento federal deste subsídio exige isso.) Além disso, você precisa ter sido um artista em Fall River antes de 1 de Janeiro de 2020, ou atualmente morar ou ter um estúdio em um dos seguintes setores censitários de Fall River: 6402, 6403, 6409, 6410, 6411, 6412, 6413, 6414, or 6420. Encontre seu setor censitário aqui. Observe que você não precisa ser cidadão dos Estados Unidos ou fornecer documentação de residência legal nos Estados Unidos.

  • Os candidatos que receberam anteriormente subsídio do Assets for Artists não se qualificam.

  • O Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação está aberto a artistas e criativos de qualquer disciplina. Definimos "artista" de forma muito ampla para incluir artistas visuais, escritores, músicos, dançarinos, artistas teatrais, artesãos, joalheiros, designers de moda, marionetistas, artistas de fibra, drags, fotógrafos, cineastas, marceneiros, artesãos tradicionais, artistas sociais, e muito mais! 

  • A prioridade é dada para artistas emergentes ou que se encontram no meio da carreira, bem como artistas de comunidades e origens com pouco recursos.
    Nosso programa é voltado para artistas que têm acesso limitado a recursos e que buscam desenvolver uma carreira criativa e sustentável e ao mesmo tempo fortalecer sua segurança financeira e social dentro da comunidade de artistas. “Acesso limitado” pode incluir artistas com rendimentos baixos a moderados ou com poucas economias ou acesso a heranças. Isto também pode incluir um artista que vive numa comunidade rural ou outra comunidade com poucos recursos e com menos oportunidades financeiras ou artísticas, ou um artista que porta uma identidade que tem sido historicamente subvalorizada ou marginalizada.

  • O Programa de Bolsas para Capacitação é mais adequado para os artistas que estão entusiasmados em se envolver com as ofertas do programa, prontos para construir uma prática artística mais sustentável e expandir sua rede de colaboradores. 




RÚBRICA DE PONTUAÇÃO

Cada candidato receberá pontuação dos membros do nosso júri artístico. Os jurados atribuirão pontuação a cada inscrição com base nos critérios listados abaixo. Usando a pontuação da inscrição como base, será selecionado um grupo que inclui artistas de diversas disciplinas e origens.

*Os jurados avaliam quanto acesso a outras oportunidades e recursos o candidato já recebeu; os artistas que enfrentaram um número desproporcional de barreiras recebem uma pontuação mais alta.

BAIXE A PRÉVIA DO APLICATIVO AQUI.

Welcome February Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: January 31st - February 26, 2024

this month we welcome a cohort of all massachusetts-based artists.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR this session’s open studios:

THURSDAY, february 22nd FROM 5-7PM


Rob "ProBlak" Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder from Roxbury, MA. He has transformed Boston's cultural landscape, focusing on beautifying Black and Brown communities and a commitment to youth education. Gibbs’ recent 5-part Breathe Life mural series received national acclaim, most recently as the first local and Black artist to paint the coveted Dewey Square Mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity, he devoted over 30 years to teaching creative skills to youth and partnering with institutions to offer real-time opportunities for emerging artists. He envisions graffiti and hip-hop as ways to educate young people. Gibbs has been recognized as one of Boston's most influential people and has received numerous awards, including the Boston Celtics' Hero Among Us Award and the MLK Drum Major Award. In 2021, the City of Boston proclaimed February 1 to be Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs day. He has been an artist-in-residence with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and MassArt. In 2023, Gibbs was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. While grateful for the recognition of his work, it is Gibbs’ role as father to his daughter, and mentor to future generations, that drives his passion for creating images of beauty and resilience through murals and contemporary fine art. 


Shailja Patel

Amherst

Shailja Patel (she/her) is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide, Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theatre show, which generated standing ovations on four continents.

Patel's poems have been translated into 17 languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Honors include a Global Feminist Spotlight from the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Nordic Africa Institute African Writer Fellowship, the Jozi Book Fair Guest Writer Award, the Voices of Our Nations poetry award, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, and the BrittlePaper Anniversary Award.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking Beyond Bollywood exhibition.

Patel is the Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. From 2019-2022, she was a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in Western Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023


Marina Dominguez

pittsfield

Marina Dominguez, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her journey to the United States began seven years ago, when she arrived in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. Having spent her early career in the corporate world in Argentina, she acknowledged and felt deep gratitude that the minute she set foot in the Berkshires, a profound connection with art was sparked and an awakening and journey of self-discovery began.

During this time of solitude as an immigrant, she unearthed her deep love for music and embarked on a journey as a drummer in a Brazilian music group called Berkshire Batería. She also discovered her passion for dance, diving into classes and performances. Since childhood, photography had always held a special place in her heart. She seized the opportunity to work diligently, save money, and six years ago, she was able to own her very first camera.

Over time, she came to recognize both her personal need as an immigrant and the shared need of other immigrants also living in the Berkshires, to create a place of community where - as immigrants - could cultivate a place and sense of belonging. This community would serve as a platform for open discussions about experiences, emotions, and requirements to freely express themselves. Marina became determined to find this space of community; where she could express herself authentically, and she started to realize the possibility of amalgamating all her knowledge and insights into creating a collective space for mutual sharing.

She has experienced incredible personal and artistic growth through her affiliation with this creative community called Katunemo. They have helped Marina to explore different avenues and mediums. Although she primarily identifies as a photographer, she has ventured into a fusion of photography and painting. This fusion allows her to encapsulate intangible emotions and thoughts, translating them into tangible visual representations. Through her body of work, Marina strives to convey the energies, connections, and knowledge exchanges among people, as well as the unique vitality we infuse into the spaces we inhabit.


Calvin Gimpelevich is an NEA Fellow, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, and the author of Invasions (Instar 2018). His work has been recognized by Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, CODEX/Writer’s Block and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; it has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Essays 2022. He is at work on several novels.

Headshot by Cameron Day O'Connell


DaNice is a Boston high school graduate. In 2023, she became a Mass Cultural Council Visual Arts Award recipient. She lives with her husband of 33 years, Ben and their dog Tigger, outside of Boston.

“I am an artist who believes that people are more alike than we are different. My name is DaNice D Marshall (pronounced Duh-NYSE) I’m a born writer, who became a visual artist in 2016, after being stricken with Granulomatosis with Polyiingitis, a serious and rare disease. After 28 days in the hospital, I was sent home, unable to walk without a cane, unable to concentrate to write, and partially deaf.
Doctors told me to do nothing, which I translated to mean paint. I started to paint abstracts, mostly to watch the paint dry. Eventually my work evolved to the portraiture art that I make today.

I paint portraiture art as much to record ordinary activities of life, as much to show the viewer that we all laugh and have moments of joy. These moments are a source of light, a familiar thread, a human story that acts as a reminder that we are more alike than we are different. I hope my art makes the viewer smile just a little, at least on the inside.”


Tammi Jean Fedestin (she/her) is a visual artist based in Massachusetts whose practice includes printmaking, collage, and mixed media work. Her surreal and vibrant pieces explore the beauty and humor found in what's strange, grotesque, frightful, and sometimes downright traumatic. She holds a BA in Arts Management from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). While in school, Tammi studied under the letterpress artist  Melanie Mowinski and gained a love of bookmaking and printmaking.

As a queer Haitian woman, many expectations were thrust upon Tammi by loved ones, the education system, and society as a whole. As she shifted and changed to become the “perfect, dependable, strong black woman,” she lost her sense of self and discarded her own thoughts and feelings as incorrect. Through her work, Tammi is unveiling and becoming re-acquainted with the hidden aspects of her identity.

Tammi hopes her work will make others feel seen and understood, especially other Haitian girls who may find themselves shifting and changing for the world. She hopes that others will see her work and take on the challenge to find beauty in what they have hidden within themselves.

Headshot by Jen Vesp


Felipe Shibuya

Brookline

Felipe Shibuya is a Brazilian ecologist and visual artist. His journey began when he completed his PhD in Ecology and Nature Conservation at the Federal University of Paraná. Subsequently, he chose to delve deeper into the visual aspects of his research, moving beyond just the scientific perspective. He also holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he worked with pigmented bacteria, intending to understand how the colors they synthesize could be communication signals for humans. Being a scientist-artist enables Shibuya to explore different forms of life, from bacteria to trees, using various methods, from microbiological culture to videos. However, all of his work involves aspects of his own identity, and he always emphasizes the visuality of nature. Shibuya's unique blend of art and science has gained international recognition, exhibiting his work around the world. He also has had citations published in magazines and journals such as National Geographic, Citylab, and Ecology.

“As a visual artist and scientist, I delve into the enthralling nexus of art and science, focusing particularly on biology and ecology. My work aims to reveal nature's visuality in its colors, shapes, and patterns. By converting intricate scientific data into digestible content, I aim to democratize knowledge and pique curiosity, thereby encouraging a more enlightened, engaged and just society. In my work, I harmoniously blend different forms of media with scientific methods, which includes elements like sculptures, videos, bacterial cultures, and biomaterials. This fusion of art and science, made possible by my wide-ranging background, encourages a holistic approach that transcends "traditional" disciplinary boundaries.”


Lily Xie

boston

Lily Xie (she/they) is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially-engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-actualization for communities of color. In collaboration with local residents and grassroots organizers, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The work they create together often takes shape in illustration, print media, video, and installation. Lily is a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence and she holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT.


Karmimadeebora McMillan is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, animation, installation, and public art. McMillan has an AFA from Peace College, received her MFA and Post Baccalaureate Certificate from SMFA at Tufts and received her BA from her hometown in Fayetteville, NC, at HBCU, Fayetteville State University.

After graduate school McMillan worked with street artist Swoon as her business manager and helped start her non-profit Heliotrope Foundation.

McMillan has shown extensively on the east coast and in 2021 received the Now + There public artists grant and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. She has performed with her mentor Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Queens Museum in New York, and the Havana, Cuba Biennale 15.

Karmimadeebora is a working artist in Cambridge, MA and the Director of the Post Baccalaureate Program with SMFA at Tufts University. She is currently pursuing an Interdisciplinary PhD through Tufts University focusing on Black Women of Power.

Headshot by Melissa Blackall.


Sharon Amuguni

worcester

Sharon Amuguni is a poet and creator whose practice includes papier mache, fiber arts, craft, and paper arts. Her artmaking is an extension of her poetry and is often fueled by play, experimentation, and flights of fancy. She was featured in Mass Poetry’s Raining Poetry project and was an Assets for Artist Worcester Business of Art 2023 cohort member. She has an MA in Civic Media Art and Practice (Media Design) from Emerson and has worked as an arts administrator for several years. In addition to working on her own practice, she also offers grant application support and other creative practice support services to fellow artists, community organizations, and nonprofits through her sister site, sharonmakes.work.

Welcome January Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: January 3rd - January 29th, 2024

AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THe First OPEN STUDIO of 2024: 

THURSDAY, January 25th FROM 5-7PM


Stephen Proski

brighton, massachusetts

My name is Stephen Proski. I’m interested in communicating an awareness of something that happens in the world that affects all of us and that no one is separate from: ​​the prioritizing of vision has made us blind to our surroundings. The ideology of ableism, specifically what is commonly considered normal or not normal, keeps us from creating meaningful changes that would be necessary for all of us to thrive as a society. I want to make art that addresses my own personal experience of blindness, while questioning and interrogating the imposing hierarchical structures that continue to shape, oppress, and favor the ocularcentric.

My work is physical to make and although visually seductive, tactility ultimately prevails. I use blindness as a cipher to articulate my own predisposition to the world. The constant misuse of materials and processes aggressively seep, soak, and spill into one another – resin, concrete, ceramics, acrylic, and text, complicating the distinction between image and language. As an artist, I am guided by the metamorphoses that take place through translation – language to shape, shape to form, form to language, and so on – to offer the experience of sensation without distinction, pleasurable surfaces coercively molded for the touch of the eye in collaboration with the other senses.


Corinne Yonce

Winooski, vermont

Corrine Yonce is an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. Yonce often combines visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, household objects, and photographs. Her story-centered figurative paintings and installations dig into the concepts of home and housing from a community and personal perspective. She is the founder of the Voices of Home project, a seven year partnership with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and housing providers across the state where she interviewed residents about “home” and co-created art installations and portraits. Corrine Yonce is currently completing her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Arts as a Leslie King Hammond fellow and Alfred T Granger scholar. Yonce is currently a Generator Makerspace resident to produce works for the public art series, “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing.” She lives and works in Winooski, Vermont and teaches tenant skills and Fair Housing workshops with the Fair Housing Project of CVOEO.

“I combine visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, physical household objects, and digitally printed photographs. My paintings depict my recollections of the leaking container of home. I am interested in the signifiers of home as they relate to the body, comfort, touch, play and movement. The works are de and reconstructed, recalibrated, conjoined, and installed in ways that are incongruous. The paintings upend themselves.”


Natalia Mejía Murillo

richmond, virginia

Natalia Mejía is a Colombian artist who explores notions of territory, repetition, trace, and time through correspondences between astronomy, cartography, and archaeology. She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, MA in Art History and Theory, and BFA from National University of Colombia.

She has been the recipient of awards and residencies, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), Curatorial Program for Research (New York, 2023), Tajo Taller and Saenger Galería, Mexico City (2023), Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. ME (2022), Fundació Miró Mallorca and Casa de Velázquez, Spain (2021), Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany (2020), Ministry of Culture of Colombia - Mexico (FONCA) (2017), Fundación CIEC - Centro Internacional de la Estampa Contemporánea (Betanzos, Spain, 2014), The Strzemioski Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Łódz, Poland, 2014) among others.

She has taught at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. She is currently Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar.

Headshot by Dana Clark.


Madison Donnelly

new haven, connecticut

Madison Donnelly (b. 1992) is a sculpture and installation artist. Her practice examines the psychological impact of neglect under Late Capitalism- ranging from the unkempt body and rented apartments to animal and planetary neglect.

She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale ’23 where she received the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, and was awarded a Design Fellowship at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design.  She holds a BFA from the University of Utah ’18 and has participated in residencies at SOMA in Tlaxcala, Mexico, UMOCA in Salt Lake City, and Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.


Hans Kuzmich

Santa cruz, california

Hans Kuzmich is an interdisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work is concerned with developing abolitionist representational strategies that address gender normativity as a product and producer of the prison industrial complex, and racialized anti-trans/queer violence as its expression. Kuzmich received a BFA in Art from the Cooper Union in 2005 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program in 2009–10. Since completing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013, Kuzmich has lectured at the California Institute of the Arts and worked in the film industry as a member of the International Cinematographers Guild. His work has been exhibited in art spaces, film festivals, and community centers internationally, and his writing has been published in: Art Journal; Theory, Culture & Society; the Abolitionist; and Native Strategies.

“My practice investigates gender as an interface between subjects and the state—a focus informed by my position as a trans person and Russian immigrant. Using photography, film, video, and sound—including nontraditional recording techniques, such as infrared photography and electromagnetic field recording—I consider how audiovisual technologies inflect questions of gender and state violence.”


T.J. Dedeaux-Norris

Iowa city, iowa

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris is a mixed-media artist who employs painting, fiber, performance, video, and music to explore the somatic impacts of racial, gender, and class socialization. In form and content, their work poses a philosophical inquiry into the distinction between Self and Other, with the body as a social microcosm of distinct yet discursive dynamics to observe and question. Everything is both permeable and fractile.

Dedeaux-Norris completed their BA at University of California at Los Angeles and their MFA at Yale University. Their work has been presented internationally at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Mission Creek Festival, Nasher Museum of Art, Performa, Prospect New Orleans, Rotterdam Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Sundance Film Festival, and The Walker Art Center - among other institutions. Dedeaux-Norris has participated in residencies at Grant Wood Colony, MacDowell, Skowhegan, and Yaddo. They are a 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee, a 2022 Iowa Artist Fellow, and a tenured Associate Professor at University of Iowa.


Alexander Davis

boston, massachusetts

Alexander Davis is a Boston based performer, choreographer, fiber artist, and homosexual. Alex believes that movement, comedy, and fibers are connected through their unifying power to create empathetic and dramatic responses from diverse audiences. Drawing from pop culture and the pedestrian he facilitates experiences that display the innate theatricality (and absurdity) of everyday life.


Kelley-Ann Lindo

providence, rhode island

Kelley-Ann Lindo (Jamaica,1991) holds a BFA in Painting from The Edna College of the Visual and Performing Arts and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited at Wassaic Projects, Wassaic, NY, The Trout Museum of Art in Wisconsin, The Anderson Gallery in Richmond, VA, and The National Gallery of Jamaica. Lindo was a recipient of the 2021 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture. She was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 2019. She has been artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Centre, California, Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad, and New Local Space (NLS), Kingston, Jamaica. Lindo is currently an artist in residence at California State University, Fullerton Grand Central Art Centre, California, and an Assistant Professor in Residence at Rhode Island School of Design.


Victor MARKA27 Quinonez

brooklyn, new york

My name is Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez and I am an artist with a rich history in graffiti, street culture, design, and activism through art. I firmly believe that design is a creative expression that is powerful, impactful, and progressive if guided by genuine purpose. For me, the "purpose" is what's most important, which is to engage with an audience in order to achieve a dialogue.

In today's climate, it is crucial to control our narratives as BIPOC by empowering each other through our respective creative process. My approach to design, whether product or graphic-driven, is similar to my process for creating art. Both start with passion, discovery, and building a narrative. My passion comes from the streets, not merely studying it but living it as well. It's a way of life.

Creating street murals, paintings, and products reflects my purpose for engaging an audience in a dialogue on cultural authenticity and awareness driven by self-expression. Through my art, I strive to bring attention to the importance of cultural identity and to promote positive societal change.


Alida Rodrigues

london, united kingdom

Alida Rodrigues (b.1983) is a visual artist from Angola currently based in London(UK). Rodrigues studied at The Slade School of Fine Art where she received a BA in Fine Art. Since her first solo exhibition in 2014 at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway, she has exhibited widely within the UK, Europe and Africa and participated in artists residencies in the UK, Mexico and will be undertaking a residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA(USA) in 2024.

Rodrigues, stared in the film Relic 3 in (2019) forms part of Relic Traveller: Phase 2, a multi-disciplinary project produced by the British-Ghanian artist Larry Achiampong. The fashion label Winnie New York who was the recipient of the Karl Lagerfeld Prize 2022, was inspired by her work to make a collection for his Men’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection which was shown during Paris fashion week 2022.

”My artistic practise is a rich tapestry of collage, textile and installation woven together by using 19th century black and white portrait photographs and botanical illustrations from the same period. At the heart of my work lies the intricate exploration of the multifaceted concept of identity, entailing a profound investigation into notions of belonging and un-belonging. I am deeply committed to unravelling the historical threads of colonialism and the enduring echoes of this complex and problematic past which still influences our way of life affecting various aspects of race, culture, politics, economics, and society across the globe.”