Meet the Studios at MASS MoCA’s
October + November 2022 Artists-in-Residence!
October 19th - November 15th
OPEN STUDIOS: November 10th 5-7PM
Ella Jacobson
Fairbanks, Alaska
Ella Jacobson is a cultural critic and writer originally from interior Alaska. Her writing has appeared in Slate, The Drift, The Guardian, The Los Angeles Review of Books blog, High Country News, and Real Life, among other publications. Much of her work explores how people metabolize their exposures to violence and death. She holds a masters in Cultural Reporting and Criticism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University, and she is the recipient of residencies and support from Edith Wharton House, Straw Dog Writers Guild, Monson Arts, I-Park Foundation, Good Hart, and the Ora Lerman Charitable Trust Foundation. She is a former New York University Abu Dhabi Fellow in Writing. You can find her on Twitter @_ellajacobson.
Ana Rosa Rivera-Morrero
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Sculptor, photographer, video artist and creator of installations and performances. She graduated from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas de Puerto Rico with a concentration in sculpture in 1992, and took graduate courses in sculpture and art criticism at the Yale School of Art in Connecticut. Since the 1990s, she has been involved in countless collective and individual projects, including public art, and her work has been shown in twenty collective exhibitions, as well as several individual ones, in and outside of Puerto Rico. She did an artistic residency at the Fabric Workhouse and Museum in 2006. She is interested in exploring the political reality of the island through pieces and events in which she uses symbols such as the transvestite, the conch shell, and everyday objects of traditional life. It also examines historic architecture from its associations with patriarchal power in mixed media pieces that expose and disrupt such associations, inviting reflection. He stands out for the multiplicity of materials that he skillfully handles, from raw materials to found objects, photography, video and mixed media, whose combinations add meaning to his proposals.
Maren Jensen
Portland, Oregon
Weaving is a ruminating act, hours spent laboring in repetitive motion. Weaving an image, and even text, demands a deep deliberation of that image as it is frozen, built permanently into the textile over many days and weeks. Originally inspired by the landscapes of Joshua Tree, CA, where she studied weaving with Andrea Zittel at her experimental living site, A-Z West, she noticed the roads and property lines could easily be seen scratched into the dirt over the wide and flat expanses of land. Maren began to create work using grid imagery to work with ideas around these borders and what they perceived to be contrived permanence, exposing these lines as truly fluid; imperceptible to certain eyes. More recently, she began incorporating text and poetry into her tapestry weavings. Playing with impermanence by working with loose and indirect phrasing, by way of a belabored and confined medium, she continues to demand fluidity within infrastructure and systems we deem concrete. In the place of limitation, of lines drawn in sand, what can be dreamt up?Maren is the recipient of a Make|Learn|Build grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Coalition and has recently shown work with Noon Projects in Los Angeles, CA, Lowell in Portland, OR and was selected as a featured artist for Portland Textile Month 2022. She is currently living and working in Portland, Oregon.
Silvia Lopez Chavez
Chelsea, Massachusetts
Silvia Lopez Chavez is a Dominican-American artist whose community-centered murals form connections across disciplines and cultural boundaries. She uses joy as an act of resistance and celebration through her vibrant murals, and her work transforms urban spaces by honoring the identity of a place and its people. Silvia is a Neighborhood Salon Luminary at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and was awarded the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) Leadership in Public Art award (2021). Commissions include the U.S. Chinese Embassy in Beijing, Google HQ in California, SeaWalls Boston, MIT, Harvard University, Twitter, and Northeastern University.
I am a visual artist working in painting, mural-making, and illustration. Much of my work is framed by my experience as an Afro-Caribbean woman living and working in Boston. Growing up in the Dominican Republic fed my appetite for bold color palettes and my interest in how our environment influences who we become. At the core of my practice is a desire to bring joy, connection, and agency to the places where my work lives.
As a muralist, my process is fueled by understanding a site's context and its relationship to how the public engages with that space. I strive for my work to be approachable and easily understood. My style is energetic, layering bright colors and graphic elements with realistically rendered focal areas. Content is often determined through a collective, neighborhood-based co-designing and re-envisioning space, which I consider part of my social practice.
My studio work provides a space for play and experimentation, allowing me to look inward to bring balance and create personal work.
Jingjing Lin
New York, New York
Jingjing Lin is a conceptual artist whose work deals primarily with social-political themes.
Lin explores the depths of social and personal identity in the context of modern society, often examining themes such as confusion and quest, existence and absence, constraint and resistance through a lens of paradox. Of particular focus is how individuals define themselves amongst the effects of the outside world,vis-à-vis culture, politics, history and the economy.
Her artwork spans painting, drawing, performance, installation, mixed media, sound, light, photography, and video.
She is also well known for layering thread over painting, installation, and other mixed media to create dazzling worlds. The surreal effect created via this method immerses the viewers into another consciousness.
Jingjing was profiled by TATE research Center: Asia, as part of their ongoing study of “ Women Artist in Contemporary China”.
Jingjing ’s works have been exhibited in major public museums including Neues Kunstforum in Cologne(Germany), the National Art Museum of Chile in Santiago, the Long Museum in Shanghai, the Ivam in Valencia(Spain), the Kunstraum in Vienna, Galeria Herold in Bremen, Saint Mary’s University Art Museum in Halifax(Canada), the Leonard Pearlstein Gallery in Philadelphia, the Tikanoja Art Museum in Vaasa (Finland), the Nanjing Museum, Guangzhou Art museum, the Du Land Modern Art Museum (Shanghai) and Song Zhuang Art Museum(Beijing) in China, Ljubljana Castle in Slovenia, etc.
Jingjing's work has been reviewed in major publications such as Asia Art Pacific, Artforum, Artnet News, AsiaArt, Southern Weekly, Kolaj magazine, Randian, China Daily, Luxuo, Hong Kong Economic Journal, South China Morning Post, etc.
Jamie Denburg Habie
Antigua, Guatemala
Jamie Denburg Habie is a Guatemalan artist and cultural practitioner living and working in Antigua, Guatemala. Jamie is interested in intermeshing earth, mind and body as an exercise in decentralizing consciousness, particularly through the lens of neuroscience and materiality.
Jamie is the Co-founder and Director of La Nueva Fábrica, a contemporary art space in Antigua, Guatemala that promotes creative experimentation through exhibitions, public programs and education, residencies, and multidisciplinary workshops.
Jamie holds a BA from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University, where she focused her research on the role of art in conflictive cultures, and the effects of violence on art-making.
Kerri Scharlin
New York, New York
Kerri Scharlin is an American artist who has shown nationally and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Postmasters, Wooster Gardens, Jose Freire, Kustera Tilton Gallery, and New Release in New York, as well as Schaper Sundberg Galleri, Stockholm. She was included in a three-person exhibition at David Zwirner, New York and other group shows at The Aldrich Museum of Art, Connecticut; The Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Galerie Herve Mikaeloff, Paris; and Momenta, 303 Gallery, and American Fine Arts, Co. in New York. She also curated the exhibition “The Big Nothing or Le Presque Rien,” at The New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York. Scharlin's work has appeared in numerous international publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Frieze, Art in America, Vogue, Artnet, New York Magazine, The Village Voice, Flash Art, and Purple.
Ak Jansen
Brooklyn, New York
Born in the Netherlands, based in Brooklyn - Ak Jansen’s ceramics, soft sculptures, and sewn drawings occupy queerness on poetic and political terms, and honor queer community’s ethic of creative self-making. Care and intimate relation are at the center of Jansen’s works; how does care manifest between subjects and objects? How does care create subjectivity? How does an artwork it/themselves acquire perspective, life, and history? Clay and fiber are materials with a rich history in art, craft and design, Ak’s practice is focussed on the in-between spaces of those disciplines, and how those spaces can be brought together through material by the human-hand.
Recent exhibitions include a solo show, WE’RE HERE, at Ivy Brown Gallery (NY); group shows at 601 Artspace (NY), South Etna (Montauk, NY), and Tchotchke Gallery (NY). He is a BFA graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands and a MFA graduate of Brooklyn College NY, and a Wolff Ravenal Fellowship recipient, and the inaugural recipient of the Corrine Holiber Szabo '54 Art Residency fellowship at Studios at MASS MoCA.
Sheri Wills
New York, New York
Sheri Wills an artist who works with film, video, and sound to make single-channel videos, installations, sound works, and live video performances. She explores the material, physical, and philosophical potentials of cinema to reveal small moments that often go unseen and pull forward the emotional content of abstract imagery.
She has participated recently at residencies including the Narva Art Residency in Estonia and At Home Gallery in Slovakia. She has had one-person shows at venues including the Director’s Lounge in Berlin, the Robert Beck Memorial Cinema in NYC, and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. Her films have been screened at venues including the Edinburgh International Film Festival, the Festival des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux de Paris, the International Film Festival in Rotterdam, and the Museum of Modern Art in NY. Her films are distributed by Light Cone in Paris.
“I am attracted to half-seen imagery that disappears just before you might affix a firm meaning. While I work with contemporary technologies, I see my work in the tradition of women’s lap craft. I am drawn to that which is intimate, everyday and personal. Small stories, soon to be placed in a crowded shelf, impossible to find again. I hope when people experience my work, they will engage differently with the acts of seeing and hearing, and afterwards perhaps they will be open experiencing that which has always been a part of their environment but they had not previously noticed.”
Nancy Edelstein is now working on an installation project in B6.1A, a raw space with notable 12 foot tall windows on both sides and original concrete and brick supports.
Nancy writes: “I explore the experience of light, in response to space and time, through installation and technology.”
Nancy came to MASS MoCA this autumn specifically to work in this space. Her focus is a response to the light streaming inside, and its changing properties throughout the course of her 6 weeks in residence. She begins with marking light’s patterns, bringing awareness to the continuously moving light around us. During this time she will be assembling a site specific installation in three dimensions. Her goal is to create an engaging experience. Nancy's work is temporary, as are her materials: artists tape, vellum, mylar, and of course light.