Welcome 2022 Massachusetts Artist Fellowships

The Studios at MASS MoCA is thrilled to host another cohort of Commonwealth artists for our seventh fully funded Massachusetts residency. Since the Studios at MASS MoCA opened in Fall 2015, we’ve hosted over 150 Massachusetts-based artists for residencies. Now we welcome twelve more!

Due to complications from the pandemic, our 2022 cohort wasn’t all able to attend at the same time. Some enjoyed a residency in February, while some won’t be joining us until later this year. But we’re grateful to each and every one of them for the talent they bring to our museum campus!

Funding for the Studios at MASS MoCA Massachusetts Artist Fellowships is provided by the Barr Foundation.

Livvy Arau Mcsweeney

Northampton

Livvy is a Catalan-American artist and researcher originally from Sitges, Spain working in the fields of printmaking and analog photography. Livvy develops imagery by experimenting with recycled and organic materials, and self-portrait photography.  She currently works at Zea Mays Printmaking in Florence, Massachusetts as the studio technician. 

“I make work that contemplates the emergence of the Anthropocene, responding to the personal and communal grief that comes with facing a world shaped by climate change and capitalism, and the hope sparked by communities actively combating it. I am interested in art practices that center community and am also excited by the materiality of my mediums, working with innovative and experimental print and photo processes that push for non-toxic and sustainable approaches to art-making. “

Feda Eid

Quincy

Feda Eid is a Lebanese-American visual artist. Her work explores the expression of heritage, tradition, culture, identity and the often tense but beautiful space between what is said, what is felt, and and what is lost in translation. She captures these emotions through her bold use of color, textiles, adornment and pop culture linking the past and present. As the daughter of Lebanese immigrants who fled the country's civil war in 1982, Feda is guided by her family's journey and her own childhood growing up as a Muslim in the US. She believes in the telling of personal narratives to broaden our perspectives and to ultimately help us feel the universal emotions that connect us all. 

Luiza Folegatti

North Adams

Luiza is a Brazilian artist based in North Adams (USA). She spent five years in Berlin (Germany) integrating artistic practice, teaching, and social advocacy work around the rights of women immigrants. Luiza’s artistic practice focuses on gender and migration, and she applies photography, video, performance, and visual anthropology methods. She also designs and facilitates photography workshops for youth and women groups and strongly believes in projects that combine photography, education, and community building. Currently she is producing a photo essay about mothers and daughters and their experience with migration, as well as experimenting with photo books formats.

Photo credit: Jennifer Waddell

Danielle Legros Georges

Boston

Danielle Legros Georges is a Professor of Creative Writing at Lesley University. She is also the former Poet Laureate of the City of Boston, where she was tasked with raising the status of poetry in the everyday consciousness of Bostonians, acting as an advocate for poetry, language and the arts, and creating a unique artistic legacy through public readings and civic events.

She notes, "As an educator and practicing artist, I draw on the theoretical frameworks and approaches of the arts traditions: the fine arts, arts and education, and arts integration. I feel that the arts allow us to experience different perspectives in powerful ways, and allow students to appreciate and reconsider boundaries of identity, culture, and perceived or understood ability. I feel art is a powerful tool for inquiry, reflection, and knowing; and that art practice allows for critical engagement and the development of valuable critical skills—in essence they operate as epistemology. I feel that art allows for complexity in the complex world we all inhabit."

Jason Montgomery

Easthampton

Jason R. Montgomery, or JRM, is a Chicano/Indigenous Californian writer, painter, public artist, and playwright from El Centro, California. In 2016, along with Poet Alexandra Woolner, and illustrator Jen Wagner, JRM founded Attack Bear Press in Easthampton, MA. Jason’s work engages the cross-section of Chicano/Indigenous identity, cultural hybridization, post-colonial reconstruction, and political agency. His writing and visual art bridges the aesthetics and feel from the early cubist collage movement and the Russian abstract movement of the 1920s with living and historical Native/Indigenous Californian and Chicano art traditions to explore the Post-colonial narrative through active synthesis and guided (re)construction. He has received grants from Mass Cultural Council, the Community Foundation of Western Mass, and New England Foundation for the Arts. His work has appeared across Massachusetts as well as in Split Lip Magazine, Storm Cellar, Ilanot Review, and other publications. Jason is also the founder of the annual Holyoke Community Ofrenda, the police transformation group A Knee is Not Enough (AKINE), and various public engagement projects.

Ashley Eliza Williams

South Hadley

Ashley Eliza Williams is an interdisciplinary artist exploring new ways of interacting with nature and with each other. She shows her work nationally and internationally and has attended artist residencies in the United States, Germany, Thailand, and China. She has taught at The University of Colorado, Colorado State University, and Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. She currently lives in Western Massachusetts.

“I am driven by a deep sense of wonder and curiosity about the natural world, especially landscapes that feel tentative, vulnerable, and in need of attention. When I walk in nature, I explore the insides of things: the furtive organisms found in the cracks of rocks, the fungi living between tree roots, and the bright patterns of insect eggs within a rotting branch. I’m fascinated by interior stories: the vein of history in a rock that describes an ancient disturbance, or an irregular tree ring that indicates solar activity or human impact.”

Future Frequencies Fellows:

As an extension of CreateWell Fund's 2021 Converging Liberations Residency, the Studios at MASS MoCA partnered once again with CreateWell to select half of this year’s Massachusetts fellows. A core part of CreateWell’s ethos is grounded in practices that support BIPOC artists' overall well-being and creative practice as methods of self-determination, refusal, resistance, and restoration. The artists below were selected and invited to attend the Studios as a CreateWell Future Frequencies Fellow.

Photo credit: Sasha Pedro

Lani Asuncion is a Boston based multimedia artist working within public spaces to create socially engaged art by weaving a visual language guided by historical research, community engagement, and experimental performance in relation to their identity as a queer multiracial Filipinx. They use new media technologies as a tool to encourage conversations to magnify connections that work to facilitate healing in the face of cultural violence, oppression, and ancestral intergenerational trauma narratives.

Black, futurist, poet, dyke, hip-hop feminist, womanist: Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who now resides in Boston. Olayiwola is a writer, performer, educator and curator who uses afro-futurism and surrealism to examine historical and current issues in the Black, woman, and queer diasporas. She is an Individual World Poetry Slam Champion and the artistic director at MassLEAP, a literary youth organization. Olayiwola is an MFA Candidate at Emerson College. Porsha Olayiwola is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too forthcoming with Button Poetry and is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston.

Michelle Falcón Fontánez is an award winning storyteller working in photography, film, theater and installation art. Michelle has witnessed and personally experienced injustices that have shaped her views of the world, motivating her pursuit of making change through art. Her artistry has primarily focused on social issues, where she has created work to illuminate voices that have not been heard. 

Michelle's early work consists of solo producing a women's focused documentary on the impacts of the economic crisis of Puerto Rico before Hurricane María. Since then, Michelle has expanded her work on Puerto Rico, establishing a grassroots group, Reclaim Puerto Rico (RPR), whose mission is to support entrepreneurship efforts on the island through yearly fundraisers. Michelle is currently working on Las 5 Mujeres de Caguax: a multigenerational Boricua herstory of patriarchy and colonization survival. In addition Michelle is actively creating La casa de abuela , an immersive installation piece that examines the longstanding effects of colonialism, that will also serve as this year’s fundraiser.

Vida James

Northampton

Vida James is a Nuyorican social worker from Brooklyn, NY. She is a Delaney Fellow at the University of Massachusetts - Amherst MFA for Poets & Writers, the winner of the 2021 St. Botolph Club Foundation Emerging Artists Award, and a 2021 Cara Parravani Memorial Award in Fiction. Her writing has been supported by a Bread Loaf scholarship and VONA/Voices. She has work appearing or forthcoming in Story, New England Review, Epiphany, and elsewhere. She is working on a collection of short stories and a novel.

Frantz Lexy

Boston

Frantz Lexy is a self-taught Haitian-American artist . He currently lives and works in Boston, Massachusetts.

Frantz’s work consists primarily of acrylic paintings on canvas. He explores themes such as human’s relationship with nature, the immigrant’s experience, and grasping with reality in the face of our increasingly digitalized lifestyle. In the long term, he hopes to investigate people of color’s potential to indulge in life’s simple pleasures and ethereal landscapes in spite of the politicized nature of their condition.

Deborah Obanla

Boston

Deborah Obanla is a multidisciplinary creative and art director. By embracing ambiguity and the process of learning, she is able to experiment and transform concepts through various modes like 3D animation, illustration, graphic design and more. Inspired by her Nigerian upbringing, mythology, spirituality, vibrant colors, and music, she aims to imbue the viewer with a sense of empowerment and softness.