Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
Massachusetts Cohort:
The Studios at MASS MoCA is thrilled to host another cohort of Commonwealth artists for our eighth fully funded Massachusetts residency. Since the Studios at MASS MoCA opened in Fall 2015, we’ve hosted over 170 Massachusetts-based artists for residencies. Now we welcome 11 more!
And as a special addition the Massachusetts cohort, three of the selected artists are part of our pilot program, Iris Residency, in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center. The Iris Residency was created to specifically support immigrant, refugee, or first or second generation American artists based in Western Massachusetts.
Funding for the Studios at MASS MoCA Massachusetts Artist Fellowships is provided by the Barr Foundation.
Open Studios: February 23rd 5-7PM
Asma KhoshMehr
Arlington
Asma Khoshmehr is an interdisciplinary artist involved in filmmaking, hybrid documentary, and immersive storytelling to facilitate real-world deep emotional connections leading to a change in society by means of the new media art. Her works largely focus on social issues such as generational trauma, forced displacement, forced marriage, and political sexual violence under the dictatorship with the goal of amplifying marginalized women's voices.
Her projects are inspired and rooted in East African and Middle East cultures, particularly the myths and folklore stories from the "One Thousand and One Nights" book. As a filmmaker and tech enthusiast, she bridges the gap between film and new media by promoting hybrid documentaries while telling the stories of the underrepresented and suffering women and families.
Coming from a multicultural background, raised by an Iranian father and Tanzanian mom- she iscurrently working on a project regarding her maternal background and the community'simmigration from Tanzania to the diaspora. In this project, Asma captured volumetric video andinteractive installation to create an immersive experience (VR, AR, XR) based on the documentscollected from newspapers, archival footage, family pictures, and the family's diary.
Grace Talusan
Medford
Grace Talusan is the author of The Body Papers, which won the Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing and the Massachusetts Book Award in Nonfiction. Her writing has been supported by the NEA, the Fulbright, US Artists, the Brother Thomas Fund, and the Massachusetts Cultural Council. She teaches in the Nonfiction Writing Program at Brown University.
“As a person with direct experiences of dehumanization and silencing, my work as a writer and teacher are attempts to reclaim power through narrative and to encourage others who have been marginalized to use their voice. I focus my attention on the unspeakable and the people who are rarely centered in stories, the ones hiding or being forced to hide. I draw from archival materials, photographs, medical records, interviews, and other research to explore the reverberations of colonization, racism, misogyny, intergenerational trauma, hereditary cancer, "illegal" immigration, and other forces bearing down on human life. As a lonely brown girl in the library, books were my lifeline. Stories offered me hope that there could be a different life from the one I was living. I have devoted my life to reading, thinking, practicing, and teaching writing. My work as both a writing teacher and a writer exists as a virtuous circle, each practice informing and impacting the other. Now that I’ve had this first opportunity to publish a book and hear from readers who feel as strongly about my memoir as I have felt about beloved books, I am greedy to write and give them more books.”
Julio Cesar Diaz
Northampton
Julio Cesar Diaz, a Texas-born Centroamericano, lives in Western Massachusetts. As a bilingual gay poet, their work is an inquiry into aspects of voice-ful/less-ness and a type of communal hosting within frameworks of (queer) family, memory, and hyper realistic dreaming. Diaz was the recipient of the 2022 Daniel and Merrily Glosband MFA Fellowship in Poetry and a finalist for the 2022 James Hearst Poetry Prize. Diaz has received scholarships from the Bread Loaf Conferences as Translator and Writer, Palm Beach Festival, and the Juniper Institute. Their work can be found in Pleiades Magazine, North American Review, Southword Journal, and elsewhere.
“Over the last five years, I've explored my ideas of space and voice-ful/less-ness of family and memory in my artistic practices. What appears most in my writing is a desire to host. I think of a "hosting" body as a pit stop where my queer imagination can co-exist and react to displacements found within family and myself. In hosting, I come across how probable it is for this body to reach daybreak, to reach the next line. I try to broaden what the future can be for the queer body through the space of the printed page; my writing plays with what a border is, expanding or collapsing it for the act of living. As a queer bilingual speaker and poet, I look to translation and archival studies to understand how my motherland's poetry has been reprinted, repackaged, reworded to be consumed by white audiences. I find self-translation a way to accentuate fluidity and jaggedness, often lost in editing. Through the archive, I consider how to ensure an untainted survival in this cross-border lineage. A byproduct of these explorations has been the discovery of tenderness and tenacity in the survivalist modes these poems move through.”
Stone Stewart
Williamstown
Born in 1996 to a Japanese mother and Caribbean-American father, Stone Stewart grew up in Williamstown, Massachusetts. After receiving his BFA from the University of Michigan, studying in a curriculum integrating music, engineering, design, and visual arts, Stone journeyed abroad to live in proximity to his Japanese and Caribbean family. Stopping in Tokyo, Kyoto, and London, his nearly half-decade excursion established new trajectories in his multidisciplinary practice whilst affording the experience to weave together his disparate heritages.
In Kyoto, working for artist Kohei Nawa, Stone cut his teeth as a practitioner and developed a fascination towards the expressive properties of materials. This interest carried over into his studies at the Royal College of Art in London, where he was a student of designer-maker, Alkesh Parmar. Assisting Parmar with their research of repurposing waste orange peel into fabric and paper products, Stone’s fascination for materials established under Nawa, matured into a reverence.
“Investigating the dialectical relationship of art and design, I oscillate between a designer who makes art and an artist who designs. Closing my chapter abroad, I continue this investigation in my hometown’s once familiar now foreign locale. Paralleling my ontological exploration of my ancestry to piece together a sense of self, as an artist and designer I explore how the different facets of my practice may coalesce and bolster one another.”
Juyon Lee
Wellesley
Juyon Lee is a South Korea-born artist based in Boston, Massachusetts. Lee received her MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University (Merit Scholarship) in 2022 and her BA (summa cum laude, honors) in Studio Art from Wellesley College in 2018. With her interest in limits and fluidity in perception of time and space, Lee makes multidimensional works composed of functional and nonfunctional objects with ethereal materials like light and air. Imbuing the concrete objects with a sense of temporality and intangibility, the abstracted situations in Lee’s work invite new meanings through direct experience. She has exhibited nationally, including the Main Section of AREA CODE Art Fair, Vermont Studio Center Gallery, Emerson Contemporary in Boston, MA, and Collar Works in Troy, NY. Lee was a fellow at Pilchuck Glass School and an artist-in-residence at KulttuuriKauppila in Ii, Finland, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, ChaNorth Artist Residency, Chautauqua School of Art Residency (Full Fellowship), and Vermont Studio Center (Artist’s Grant). She is a recipient of Massachusetts Artist Fellowship for the Studios at MASS MoCA, Alice C. Cole ’42 Studio Project Grant from Wellesley College, Horton-Hallowell Graduate Fellowship, and more.
“My work ‘There is mystery in everything' is an ongoing exploration of the notion of transience and ephemerality through material, physical matter (i.e. things perceivable to the human senses) in an attempt to materialize such ungraspable things: time and humans’ relationship to time. Giving form to something that is constantly in flux with the use of light, time-marking objects like a metronome, sound, and movement, my work is scaled for humans to perceive this change in time. I am interested in not only the change itself, but also how humans experience this change. Thus, considering language, whether textual or visual, is important for my work. I am in the process of developing this language I embody, i.e. my art, to describe the puzzling notion of time in relation to the human and beyond. In acknowledging the limits of human perception and exploring the meanings produced in finite life, I hope my work generates an open inviting space where one can meditate on the contextual understanding of oneself and their relation to mysteries around them.”
Sarah Stefana Smith
South Hadley
Dr. Sarah Stefana Smith is an interdisciplinary scholar and visual artist. Their research communicates between the fields of Black art and culture, queer theory and affect studies, visuality and aesthetics. Dr. Smith is currently an Assistant Professor of Gender Studies at Mount Holyoke College. Born to two Brooklyn, New York natives, and growing up in the planned communities of Columbia, Maryland, their creative work explores the intersection of repair and disrepair, aesthetics and visuality in difference (e.g. race, gender, sexuality).
Sarah was a recipient of an Art and Change Grant from the Leeway Foundation, an Ontario Arts Council Grant, and a John Pavlis Fellowship as an artist-in-residence at the Vermont Studio Center. Their artist-in-residences have included the University of Pittsburgh through the Creativities Project, the Merriweather District AIR (Columbia, MD) and 77Arts (Rutland, VT), the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (Amherst, VA), and 40th Street AIR (Philadelphia, PA). In 2013 Smith was the recipient of the Bremen International Student Fellowship at the University of Bremen.
Sarah’s sculptural, installation and photo-based work, most recently appears at Waller Gallery (2020). Dr. Smith has also shown at the Arlington Art Center and DCAC (2019), the Borland Project Space, and Gallery CA (2018), Lab Bodies Performance Art Review (2017), Mambu Badu’s, a Photography Collective of African Diaspora Women, self-titled issue (2013) and in the twenty-year retrospective of Sistagraphy: A Different Eye, Celebrating 20 Years of Photography (2014), an Atlanta based photography collective of African American women.
They hold a PhD in Social Justice Education from the University of Toronto, an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College, and a BA in Sociology and Anthropology from Spelman College. Dr. Smith lectures on gender and visual culture, Black and transnational feminisms, and Black art and culture. Previously Sarah was a Post-doctoral Fellow of Academic Diversity at American University 2018-2020, and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the Africana Research Center at The Pennsylvania State University in 2016.
Dr. Smith has published in The Black Scholar Journal, Women & Performance, Drain Journal of Art and Culture, The Palgrave Handbook of Race and the Arts Education and in Ruptures: Anti-colonial and Anti-Racist Feminist Theorizing and several catalogues for contemporary artists.
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.
Iris Residency Fellows:
Iris Residency is a pilot program in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center. This opportunity was formed to specifically support artists in Western Massachusetts who are foreign-born, or identify as first or second generation American.
The residency includes a funded four-week residency, optional resources and consultations through The Berkshire Immigrant Center, and our regular residency benefits. A culmination community event will take place at the end of the Iris residency. Stay tuned for more information by signing up for the Studios e-newsletter.
We are so excited to announce the three Iris Fellows:
Hanna Sobolieva
North Adams, Massachusetts
Hanna Sobolieva was born in Kharkiv, Ukraine. She studied fashion design in the Institute of Fine Arts and worked in the fashion and interior design industries in Ukraine. One of her most prominent works is the collection of decorative textile sculptures that were featured in art exhibitions both in Ukraine and abroad. After the war started in Ukraine, Hanna Sobolieva was forced to leave everything dear to her behind, including her art works. In the US, she is hoping to create art inspired by Ukrainian culture and explore the intersection of her Ukrainian identity with the new reality of living in the US.
Cima Khademi
Amherst
Cima Khademi is a visual artist currently based in Amherst, MA with a focus in multidisciplinary installation. She has recently obtained an MFA of Studio Arts from UMass Amherst and is currently working as an adjunct professor for UMass Amherst, as well as Greenfield Community college. Khademi’s current work focuses on the unique experience of “identity” as an immigrant. The particular state where identity and homeland are called into question and we find ourselves simultaneously standing on the threshold of two worlds. Her experience of identity comes from two countries that are radically different. Her creative practice is an exploration of balance in a diasporic space regarding class, gender, and ethnicity through materials and metaphors.
Clemente Sajquiy-Ramirez
West Stockbridge
Clemente is a 4 spirited indigenous Mayan artist exploring a lost shamanic tradition in the family through art, and using the knowledge to heal.
Entrepreneur, artist and activist, Ramirez is founder of Green River Property Care and a 40 under Forty awardee for helping create a safer environment for immigrants in the county. Originally from Guatemala, he has lived in the Berkshires for 13 years.