Nadroj Holmes, 2020 Financial Wellness Residency Fellow
Assets for Artists is pleased to announce the 12 Massachusetts artists who have received fully funded fellowships to attend the Studios at MASS MoCA in 2021.
In addition to a free 2-week residency at MASS MoCA, fellows will have priority access to a variety of Assets for Artists’ business and professional development webinars and cohort-building opportunities. Because of our reduced residency capacity as a result of the pandemic, we are so sad we will not be able to bring all 12 fellows together for a concurrent residency, as we have done in recent years. Instead will endeavor to design online cohort-building opportunities (understanding that nothing replaces the in-person relationships built at an artist residency). We also want to thank the CreateWell Fund for collaborating with us on getting the word out about this opportunity and to supporting $250 travel stipends for BIPOC participants. We hope you will join us in welcoming this year’s fellows!
Financial Wellness Residency fellowships are made possible thanks to the generosity of the Barr Foundation.
Sherell Barbee
Sherell Barbee (Boston) is a language artist who writes creative nonfiction, poetry, fiction, audio stories, and hybrid pieces. Her work explores the Black bildungsroman. Her writing can be found or is forthcoming in The Boston Globe, Passages North, Hippocampus Magazine, Lit Pub, the Missouri Review blog, and more. She is a winner of the 2020 Boston in 100 Words competition, judged by Gish Jen, Callie Crossley, and Porsha Olayiwola, Boston’s Poet Laureate. She also is an honorable mention for Passages North’s Neutrino Short-Short Prize.
Xandra Nur Clark
Credit: David Noles
Xandra Nur Clark (Weston) is a queer, Indian-American playwright, actor, journalist, and all-around storyteller. Their work, which often fuses theater and journalism, is intimate, investigative, and urgent. Xandra believes in openness: asking the tough questions, saying the hard things, and connecting across difference. They aim to reveal what is relatable about the “other” and what is ultimately mysterious about the self. Xandra’s work has been featured at La MaMa, Dixon Place, The Tank, The Flea, Weeksville Heritage Center, Five Myles, Judson Church, and Queer Abstract. Their documentary solo show Polylogues, exploring real people's experiences with nonmonogamy, will have its World Premiere Production through Colt Coeur in NYC (postponed from 2020 due to COVID). Beyond work, Xandra is also an avid volunteer as a certified counselor on a LGBTQ crisis hotline.
Mia Fabrizio
Mia Fabrizio (Jamaica Plain) is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. Consumed with hidden and exposed structure, her work addresses topics at the intersection of sociology, architecture and visual art. In a playful DIY manner, mediums and processes are combined to explore themes such as home, labor, and identity. A native to the Philadelphia area, Mia grew up in a multigenerational, Italian-American home that housed her family and their hair-dressing business. Her work references perceived binaries within her family and home. Mia’s professional experience includes over a dozen years teaching art in classrooms and alternative settings. Recently, her work has been included in juried virtual and storefront exhibitions: Emerge 2020 and in the AREACODE|ARTFAIR, hosted by galleries within the greater Boston area. She is currently a postgraduate teaching fellow at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts.
Naijah Nine
Visual artist Naijah Nine (Jamaica Plain) specializes in portraiture and character design. Subjects of their work range from social justice issues to introspective identity work. Naijah was featured at Raw Artist’s Boston Bold 2015 showcase. Collaborations include works with Origin Nile film studio and House of Blues Boston. Their work has also been published in the first edition of the independent zine, Feminist Frequency. Currently Naijah is working on a series that deals with a variety of subjects ranging from classism to mental health to identity.
Arielle Gray
Arielle Gray (Mattapan) is a writer and multimedia artist. She is the current Arts Engagement Producer for The ARTery, WBUR's Arts and Culture team. Her freelance writing has appeared in VICE, Bustle, Huffington Post, Afropunk and The Black Youth Project. Most of her work focuses on the intersection of being queer and Afro-Caribbean, while living with a mental illness. Her forthcoming exhibit "Dreams and Tings" with VSA Massachusetts explores these intersections in nuanced depth. She is the co-founder of the literary organization Print Ain’t Dead and is on the board of What's On Your Mind Inc., a mental health organization centering the experiences of POC. She is currently writing her first novel, "It All Falls Down."
Diamond Gray
Diamond Gray (Andover) is a visual artist who uses media such as clothing, hair, India ink, paper, collage, drawing, video, sculpture, and audio to tell the narratives of her maternal family’s northern U.S. migration. Encapsulating moments of triumph, displacement, otherness, and trauma surrounding race, class, and gender, Diamond’s acts of story-telling and documentation challenge and reclaim sites in the United States that immortalize the history of White violence against Black femme folx. Recent projects include the Black Lives Matter Banner Project, inspired by the protests that erupted nationally and internationally due to the murder of George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter Banner Project compiles over fifty submissions, from students, staff, and faculty at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA, about their thoughts on the Black Lives Matter protests. The artworks highlight the most vulnerable populations: explicitly queer, femmes, and trans folx such as Nina Pop, Breonna Taylor, and Tony McDade.
Robyn E. Thompson-Duong
A teaching artist for over ten years, Robyn E. Thompson-Duong (Boston) is a contemporary realist painter and teacher who mostly works in acrylics. Her small work still lifes are a glimpse into the beauty and simplicity of everyday life and activities, while her figurative paintings include mysterious landscapes and magical realism. Currently, her work focuses on elevating black femininity and challenging societal ideas of beauty. Robyn has participated in several juried, non-juried, and solo shows in and around the Boston and Worcester area. She has been a participant of Dorchester Open studios for several years, and in 2019 was an Emerging Artist Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston.
Hans Tursack
Hans Tursack (Somerville) is a designer whose work explores color, time-based generative strategies and the design of speculative architecture mined largely from the history of the postwar neo-avant-garde. His recent series of houses (pictured) reads as a digital remastering of postmodern architecture: historical pastiche poised between homage and formal precarity. He received a BFA in studio art and a Masters in Architecture. He recently received the Willard A. Oberdick teaching/design fellowship from the University of Michigan, a MacDowell Colony Research Fellowship, and, with Viola Ago, a University Design Research Fellowship from Exhibit Columbus. He is currently serving as a research fellow at the MIT School of Architecture + Planning.
Dāshaun Washington
Dāshaun Washington (Northampton) is a poet from Western Massachusetts. His poetry is centered around Blackness and queerness and seeks to explore the intersection therein. He is a recipient of the 2018 Robert Bone Memorial Prize in Poetry, finalist for the 2019 Cosmonauts Avenue Poetry Prize and 2019 Palette Poetry Spotlight Award, and semi-finalist for the 2020 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest. Dāshaun is also a recipient of scholarships and fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Kenyon Review, Juniper Institute, and beyond. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Boiler, Tinderbox, and elsewhere. Dāshaun is an MFA candidate at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he is an MFA Fellow and Teaching Associate. He currently serves as Poetry Editor at Cosmonauts Avenue.
Jhona Xaviera
Jhona Xaviera (Boston) is a multimedia artist who weaves together visual and performing arts into stories that embody the transgender spiritual experience. Jhona performs through installations, video, and photography, to create a mythos based on radical self-love and healing with music and poetry. They recently completed their bachelor’s degree at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, where they grounded their work in the research of Afro-Diasporic religion, queer studies, and decolonialism. In addition, they were a Tufts Summer Scholar, where they began the work of centering the trans experience within political and religious history. They are currently navigating using their home and social media platforms to create and share photography, music, and video projects.
Aya Yamasaki & Jason Brown (Opertura)
Working under the name Opertura, Aya Yamasaki and Jason Brown (Greenfield) create hand-drawn animation, illustration, comics, installations and other visual media. Their animations describe the workings of the natural world using playful characters and straightforward stories inspired by personal experience and folk storytelling traditions. Opertura is interested in dream/ subconscious logic, as it informs Aya and Jason’s own practice as collaborators and is reflected in much of the mediums they employ, in the flowing, morphing nature of hand-drawn animation and the blending in watercolor. Opertura’s work has screened and been presented domestically and abroad.