Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!
January 4th - January 17th
January 18th-31st (below)
Jenine Shereos
New Marlborough, Massachusetts
Photo by John Hughes
Jenine Shereos is an American artist who uses textile techniques alongside natural and organic materials to explore the complex and tenuous relationship between humans and the natural world. While her oeuvre includes installation, fibers, photography and sculptural works, she is best known for her intricately crafted leaves stitched entirely with human hair. The work of Jenine Shereos has been exhibited widely both nationally and internationally and has been featured in numerous publications including The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, and Frame Magazine. Shereos is a recipient of the Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellowship in Crafts, and The Rogers Fellowship for Textile Arts at The Hambidge Center in Rabun Gap, Georgia. She is currently a Visiting Lecturer in the Fibers Department at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, Massachusetts.
Leslie Fandrich
Warwick, New York
Leslie Fandrich is a visual artist. Her feminist practice explores how intimate long term relationships negotiate dependency (attachment) and agency (separation) and how dualities, when treated equally, can create a third, paradoxical space where multiple things can be true at the same time. Leslie collects discarded furniture, clothing and domestic items, transforming them into parts that become raw materials to create abstract compositions and anthropomorphized objects that are both familiar and strange. She wants to connect the parts and create a sense of wholeness, but allow for space. Abstraction is a potent tool of the unfamiliar, humor is deployed to surprise and delight and she is interested in confusing what is a subject or object to delve into the abject where meaning breaks down. Leslie received a Master of Fine Arts from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in Boston, MA and lives in the Hudson Valley of New York State.
Claude Eshun
Worcester, Massachusetts
Claude is a teacher assistant at Harvard University and co-owner of Don Claude LLC. His work has been shown at the Beacon Street Gallery, the White Room, The Nave Gallery and MassArt x SoWa graduate gallery.
“I reflect on and reimagine scenes from my own personal history: I see images from Ghana and Italy and more recently from America. I incorporate all these visual languages into the images I create. As a once-stateless person who had to learn how to navigate institutions, cultures and languages, my work merges my distinct identities as an African, black, hypervisible, and invisible man in America. Performance, gesture and costume allow me to conjure the people and places of my life. The tableaux I create provide a stage to elicit emotional registers of individual experience and the specific concerns of black individuals from a multiplicity of backgrounds. I am in conversation with my family and friends – I listen closely to stories about their experiences and lives that both overlap with and differ from my own – I am asked to challenge, yet be sensitive to, the stereotypes in Western, African and afro-descendant portraiture. By assembling photographs of family and friends — found, collected, and made — I explore my multiple pasts and possibilities for the future.”
Ruth Margraff
Baltimore, Maryland
Ruth Margraff’s writing sits in the edges of opera, music and poetry. She places pressure on language to resist corporate clarity and cultures of fear. Her lyrics disrupt the comforts of evangelical prosperity and anti-artifice currently in vogue. Margraff’s long-term goal has been to push the form of American opera into a more working-class direction that furthers its distance from Eurocentrism.
Margraff has been called a leader in the American avant garde with productions in more than 30 countries, translated into 20+ languages. She is critically acclaimed for her six martial arts operas with Fred Ho for the Apollo, Guggenheim Museum, LaMama, Brooklyn Academy of Music and CAMI. Margraff’s writing for SEVEN began touring the world in 2008 introduced by Diane von Furstenberg, featured in 2010 by Hillary Clinton and Meryl Streep at the Broadway Hudson Theater. She has received awards from Rockefeller, McKnight, Jerome, NEA, TCG, TMUNY, NYSCA, IAC, Fulbright foundations; published by Innova Records, Dramatists Play Service, American Theatre, Theater Forum, Performing Arts Journal, Playscripts, Inc., Backstage Books, Autonomedia, New Village Press, Lexington Books, among others. She is an alumna of Theater Without Borders, New Dramatists, Playwrights’ Center and Chicago Dramatists.
Keith Wilson
Chicago Illinois
Keith S. Wilson is a game designer, an Affrilachian Poet, and a Cave Canem fellow. He is a recipient of an NEA Fellowship, an Elizabeth George Foundation Grant, and an Illinois Arts Council Agency Award, and has received both a Kenyon Review Fellowship and a Stegner Fellowship. Additionally, he has received fellowships or grants from Bread Loaf, Tin House, the MacDowell Colony, Vermont Studio Center, UCross, the Millay Colony, and James Merrill House, among others. Keith was a Gregory Djanikian Scholar, and his poetry has won the Rumi Prize and been anthologized in Best New Poets and Best of the Net. His book, Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love (Copper Canyon), was recognized by the New York Times as a best new book of poetry.
Keith’s nonfiction has won an Indiana Review Nonfiction Prize and the Redivider Blurred Line Prize, and has been anthologized in the award-winning collection Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy. His poetry and prose have appeared in Elle, Poetry, The Kenyon Review, and Crab Orchard Review, among others.
Keith’s work in game design includes “Once Upon a Tale,” a storytelling card game designed for Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago in collaboration with The Field Museum of Chicago, and alternate reality games (ARGs) for the University of Chicago. He has worked with or taught new media with Kenyon College, the Field Museum, the Adler Planetarium, and the University of Chicago.
Lynn Yarne
Portland Oregon
Lynn Yarne is an artist and educator from Portland, Oregon. She works within animation and collage to address collective memory, generational narratives, histories and space. A fourth generation Chinese and Japanese American, her current work explores themes of displacement and loss, resilience and community, particularly within Old Town Portland.
She is curious about participatory works, magic, and rejuvenation.
As a teacher in a public high school she facilitates a teen digital media think tank and skill building program with an emphasis on equipping young people with media skills to create positive change and participate in visual culture. Yarne and her students began building a screen printing studio in a classroom closet in 2015, it is now a printmaking studio that trains over 120 youth printers a year.
Vessna Scheff
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Vessna Scheff is a visual album maker from the San Francisco Bay Area, whose works center on articulations of Black liberation and the nuances of moving towards equity. She creates performances, portraits, and installations that use movement, vocals, and projection as mediums of inquiry. Grounded in watercolors, her work reclaims a medium often described as “difficult” or solely “sketch” for its uncontrollable qualities, and rather conceptualizes the freedom of watercolors as an expression of Black liberation- always being, responding, and adapting despite the confines of oppression. Scheff’s visual albums situate the listener/ viewer inside the work to experience the scents, sounds, emotions and sensations of the journey towards self-learning and social love. Her mesmerizing works dance with time and fall to gravity; they blend, bleed, and bloom. They stretch, they resist, they flood, they drip- potent in texture, heavy in meaning, and rich in nuance.
Porsha Olayiwola
Boston, Massachusetts
Porsha Olayiwola is a native of Chicago who writes, lives and loves 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 founder of the Roxbury Poetry Festival. Olayiwola is Brown University's 2019 Heimark Artist -In -Residence as well as the 2021 Artist-in-Residence at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. She is a 2020 poet laureate fellow with the Academy of American poets. Olayiwola earned her MFA in poetry from Emerson College and is the author of i shimmer sometimes, too. Olayiwola is the current poet laureate for the city of Boston. Her work can be found in or forthcoming from with TriQuarterly Magazine, Black Warrior Review, The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, Redivider, The Academy of American Poets, Netflix, Wildness Press, The Museum of Fine Arts and elsewhere.
Jingqi Steinhiser
JBMDL, NEW Jersey
Jingqi Steinhiser is a multi-media painter born in China and raised in Mongolia.
Her paintings prioritize asian immigrants who have trouble identifying their communities and belongings. Her research project seeks to go beyond the painting surface, building on her current practice to discover new existences. Jingqi’s goal is to disrupt cultural boundaries and embody the liminal spaces between Asian and American identities, and to ultimately imagine a new kind of inclusivity that embodies the transnational, the multiracial, the non-binary, and ultimately, the undefinable.
Depicting the mythical and chaotic, her work revisits traditional and pop-cultural icons. She borrows her framing of absurdity and detachment from Camus’s The Myth of Sisyphus, “In a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. [...]This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
She grew up as the only child in a family of diplomats, a learning journey that mutated across geographies. Born in China, she lived in Russia, Mongolia and Korea before coming to the USA. Her world is an aesthetic amalgamation of dissonant cultures. Constant moving bred insecurity: the feeling of detachment surrounded her tightly. Having been an alien her whole life, she has been struggling with and also interested in community-building as an ‘alien’.” This feeling of being an ‘alien' is literal and abstract. It’s a feeling of detachment, a search for belonging, a step further than nostalgia. Currently she is interested in the in-betweenness and absurdity that resonates with the feelings of not being part of something to get detached from, not having a home or community to be nostalgic about.
Jingqi received her MFA in painting at Rhode Island School of Design and BFA in painting at School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2022, she received the Emerging Artist Grant (Nellie Taft Award for Painting) from St.Botolph Club Foundation.
Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
January 2023 Artists-in-Residence!
January 18th - January 31st
Heather Flor Cron
Portland, Maine
Flor (she/they) is a queer Peruvian-American farmer, performer & transdisciplinary artist who works with intuitive movement, dirt, installation, printmaking, fiber, and food. From a young age Flor frequently travelled to Peru to visit her maternal family. There, her passion for movement, food and textiles was ignited. Flor lives in Portland, Maine, which is settled on stolen and occupied territory of the Wabanaki Confederacy.
Through performance and making with available materials, Flor locates the present moment and the relationship between her two cultures. She explores the defeat and transformation of trauma through the twin powers of vulnerability and forgiveness, and how exposing pain can transcend trauma.
”My practice is rooted deeply in healing from generational trauma, making something pleasurable from the crumbs and seeing beauty in the flower that grows from the cracks. I use food, textiles, found objects and dirt to connect with ideas of home, the domestic sphere, family and community, and the invisible labor of women of color. The objects and performances I make are hybridizations of traditional craft and what it is to relate to our bodies. I use what is found in the pantry to share moments of vulnerability and give voice to identities often overlooked or silenced, this practice is a meditation of my experiences. By exposing pain, I am reminded I am alive and the gift it is to be alive. I want to celebrate life and plant seeds for futures where Black and Indigenous people are centered.”
Kamari Carter
Providence, Rhode Island
Kamari Carter is a sound designer, and installation artist primarily working with sound and found objects. Carter's practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance. Driven by the probative nature of perception and the concept of conversation and social science, he seeks to expand narrative structures through sonic stillness. Carter’s work has been exhibited at such venues as Automata Arts, MoMA, Mana Contemporary, RISD Museum, Microscope Gallery, Lenfest Center for the Arts, WaveHill and has been featured in a range of major publications including ArtNet, Precog Magazine, LevelGround and WhiteWall. Carter holds a BFA in Music Technology from California Institute of the Arts and an MFA in Sound Art from Columbia University.
I enjoy erecting work(s) with an opaque approach to overt issues, with the goal to uproot conversations on topics that are sometimes difficult to discuss. Subjects such as perception, surveillance, structure, participation, parallelisms and memory are all common motifs in my body of work. There’s a phenomenology in both the audible and oral histories of these themes that I’m always encapsulated by. Often my work interrogates and investigates who is viewing, why they are viewing, and what exactly are they viewing? The work itself tends to take up many forms, be it sculpture, sound, mixed-media, or moving image with an aim to spark dialogue in critical thought; and perhaps, tell a familiar story with a medium much less familiar.
Nia O. Witherspoon
Brooklyn, New York
Nia O. Witherspoon(Smith BA/Stanford PhD) is a Black queer multidisciplinary artist + healing justice practitioner investigating the metaphysics of black liberation, desire, and diaspora, as they track across the space-time continuum. Combining Black feminism, indigenous epistemologies, eco-feminism, and auto-critogrophy with mediums in writing, performance, sound, and installation, Witherspoon creates portals for communion, witnessing, and healing. Current and recent works include: Priestess of Twerk: A Black Femme Temple to Pleasure (HERE Art Center/Musical Theatre Factory, 2024), Chronicle X: The Dark Girl Chronicles (The Shed, 2021), and MESSIAH (La Mama, 2019). She is a NEFA/NTP recipient, a Creative Capital Awardee, an NPN and APAP awardee, a Jerome New Artist Fellow, a current artist in residence at HERE Art Center and Musical Theatre Factory, and former resident at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange and New York Theatre Workshop. Her work has been or will be featured by The Shed, BRIC, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Joe’s Pub, HERE, JACK, La Mama ETC, Playwright’s Realm, Links Hall, National Black Theatre, Brava Theatre, BAAD, Movement Research, BAX, Dixon Place, Painted Bride, 651 Arts, and elsewhere. Her writing is published in the Journal of Popular Culture; Imagined Theatres; Women and Collective Creation; and IMANIMAN: Poets Writing in the Anzaldúan Borderlands. Follow her @niasoli on Instagram to stay up to date on all the happenings!
”I am a concept-driven artist invested in creating spaces where Black/Queer/Femme folks, and, more largely BIPOC are placed in the expansive realm of the sacred. This means that while contemporary tragedy and inter-generational trauma often trigger a project’s inception, ultimately, I aim for my works to place my communities in a context that far exceeds the 500-years of colonial time, and places us in close communion with expanse, imagination, futurity--distant galaxies, and the deep sea. Freedom is not something I have achieved yet, but it is something I feel pulled uncontrollably toward. I am working to cultivate freedom in myself, in my works, and in my collaborators, by any means necessary. I am also learning that freedom is very much about surrendering to what Audre Lorde in “Uses of the Erotic” calls “feeling,” so I try to create spaces (from plays to rituals to rehearsal rooms) where vulnerability is the most valuable currency, continuing and building on the legacy of my Black feminist elders.”
Thương Hoài Trần
Chicago, Illinois
Thương Hoài Trần is an interdisciplinary artist who was born in Tây Ninh, Vietnam, and raised in Kansas. Being a Vietnamese immigrant, this part of their identity informs and influences a large part of their artwork. Art has become a method of self-discovery, learning, and healing. Most of their artwork features a level of distortion or fragmentation. In their recent works, they have been examining the process of weaving, disassembling clothes made in Vietnam, and recreating family photographs to learn more about their origin. This process becomes an approach of connecting to their heritage, paying homage, and filling in the gaps created through various barriers such as language, displacement, generational disconnect, and cultural complexities.
Tran received their MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago for her MFA in Printmedia and a BFA in Painting and Printmedia at Emporia State University. Their work has been exhibited in The Research House for Asian Art, Janet Turner Print Museum, Megalo Print Studio, The Fiber Artists of San Antonio, and Artists Image Resource. Most recently, their work was published in The Mid America Print Council Journal, Volume 34/35: “Repair.”
Sonja John
Bronx, New York
Sonja John is a queer, first generation, Bronx-based artist, educator, and curator. She received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Rhode Island School of Design in 2017. Her contributions to museum education have been featured at the RISD Museum, The New Yorker, and Hyperallergic. She is curator-in-residence for The Yard, Greenpoint. Her poetry has been featured at Jazz At Lincoln Center and The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, and her work has been featured on I Like Your Work Podcast, n+1 magazine and Seeing Color Podcast with Zhiwan Cheung.
An avid collector of animal bones, she is probably best friends with the skeletons in your closet.
Mikayla Patton
Roswell, New Mexico
Mikayla Patton (she/her) is a visual artist born and raised on the Pine Ridge Reservation of so-called South Dakota. Patton is a dual citizen of the United States and an enrolled member of the Oglala Lakota Nation. In 2019, Patton obtained a Bachelors of Fine Arts with a focus in Printmaking from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Patton is represented by the Chiaroscuro Contemporary Gallery in Santa Fe. She has exhibited at the Texas Tech School of Art (Lubbock); All My Relations Gallery (Minneapolis); and the Contemporary Arts Center, New Orleans. Her work is included in private and public collections including the Denver Art Museum, Tia Collection, and Atka Lakota Museum. As of 2022, Patton has received the Artist in Business Leadership from First Peoples Fund; and LIFT: Early Career Support for Native Artists from Native Arts and Culture Foundation.
“Currently papermaking is a prominent part of my practice as I am curious about the texture of the paper's surface and what it might provide in terms of its physicality as well as its symbolism. There are traces of its history, but mostly it has been washed out. I pulp the paper until it no longer resembles a document. I rarely make marks on the paper, but sometimes erase residue from burning or other treatments. The clean surface provides me with a sense of peace, a place to hide, a safe place for me. There is a sense of self embodiment in much of my works. When I use the paper to make other forms, such as boxes, they feel as though they were made from a handmade membrane. This version of skin is made from the seemingly endless stream of paper products flooding the landscape.”
Christina Martin
Portland, Oregon
“I am a Mexican-American, queer, experimental printmaker. Originally from Texas, I moved to Portland, OR where I received an MFA in Print Media from the Pacific Northwest College of Art. I am a printmaker who enjoys challenging traditional printmaking as well as traditional ideas. My material exploration transforms the print past paper, introducing and interlacing new forms of media with various printmaking techniques. This includes sculptural works like molds and casts, liquid latex, textiles, ceramics, and even the body. I am an explorer of material and identity.
Within my artistic practice, I often engage in the conversation of identity and expression. My work is rooted within my own intersectional identity and alternative embodied experience. This often includes speaking about my own feminine, queer, kinky, and cultural expressions. Overall, my work evokes space for self-exploration, self-love, and pleasure.
I am an activist and participant in my community, working and making art toward forging connections and speaking on.”
Kindall Gant
New York, New York
I am a poet and creative nonfiction writer from New Orleans currently based in New York City. I find myself in evolution through lyrical storytelling. My main inspirations are rooted in relationships, home, heritage, and erased histories. I have won the Lucy Grealy Prize for poetry from Sarah Lawrence College. My debut poem Elegy for [Redacted] was published online in TORCH. I have received scholarships for residencies and fellowships from The Writer's Colony at Dairy Hollow, Brooklyn Poets, and more. In my free time, I currently serve as founder and EIC for Arcanum Magazine, a newly established online literary magazine for Black creatives, and volunteer reading poetry manuscripts for the Tenth Gate Prize, an imprint for mid-career poets. While my poetry can feel individual during the process, I volunteer my time to make opportunities for historically disenfranchised folks like myself accessible. In my professional life, I work in publishing as a book publicist and believe the narratives shared widely and commercially are disproportionate and don't represent our diverse everyday lives.
Fabiana Comas
Mexico City, Mexico
Through drawings and strokes, Fabiana Comas (Caracas, Venezuela) gaze goes to the essentials of objects, nature, and the human body. Her marks are gestures that respond to the physical impulse to draw, turn over, and evoke what is recycled in her memory to represent or transform experiences. The artist experiments with the shape of the human body to explore femininity, queerness, and the power structures that act on bodies. Likewise, she is interested in the contemplation of lines, studies on nature, and the abstractions of popular culture.
The artist has nine years of experience in graphic production and reproduction, which has allowed her to use photography and engraving as study tools for drawing. Between 2019 and 2022, she was in the Yirrkala community in East Arnhem Land (Australia), where she worked for the Buku Larrnggay Mulka Art Center. There, from the immersive experience and the practice of Deep Listening (process of listening to learn), she was able to observe, work and collaborate with the community of indigenous artists of Yirrkala; thus becoming involved with their different daily and professional activities, such as the mixing of pigments and the production of the graphic arts archive. Unassuming and full of curiosity, the Yirrkala community left a relevant mark on her exploration as an artist. In addition, Fabiana has studied Visual Arts and graduated from the National Experimental University of Arts (Caracas, Venezuela). Her work has been exhibited in Venezuela, Mexico, Australia, and Japan. She currently continues to develop her art practice in Mexico City.
Christina P. Day
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Christina P. Day is a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Her artwork has been exhibited nationally and internationally since 1999. She is an alumna of the University of the Arts (Crafts/Fiber) and Cranbrook Academy of Art (Fiber). She has held residencies at Sculpture Space, the Vermont Studio Center, the Haystack Open Studio Residency, RAIR, and The Studios at MASS MoCA. In 2016 she was a Finalist in the Open Call for Cue Art Foundation (New York, NY). She is an alumna of Pink Noise Projects artist collective, formerly NAPOLEON, (2012-2016) and has written articles both on her own work and in critique of others for Architecture and Ideas (Canada) and Textile: Journal of Cloth and Culture (Oxford, UK). She is a full-time faculty member, and served as Chair from 2021-2022, of the Fiber Department at Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, MD.
“My collaged constructions and installations are guided by traces of past and person that lie deep within used objects and spaces. Though my work shifts in scale from the handheld to life size, my pursuit of a fragment of person and place remains. My background in Fiber influences how I arrive at my work and keeps me thinking about how to communicate with material. I use good craft to amplify the uncanny and mix metaphors between unlikely surfaces and materials. “