The Studios at MASS MoCA is thrilled to announce a brand new partnership with Oolite Arts Miami. This opportunity is a five-week Oolite Arts takeover of the Studios at MASS MoCA starting March 29, 2023. Through an open call for submissions, ten Miami artists have been chosen by a Miami-based jury to receive a residency at MASS MoCA, which includes studio space, access to international curators and master artists, and programming to enrich their experience.
The five-week residency will take place March 29–May 2, 2023. Congratulations to the ten selected Miami artists:
Amanda Linares
Amanda Linares is a Cuban-born visual artist based in Miami. Her work expands like branches using an immense variety of media from design and illustration to installation and photography. Influenced by literature and spatial awareness, her work contains a poetic language while exploring narration and space using reflection, transparency, revelation, found objects, and typographical solutions. Linares’ work intimately sways between many universal issues, such as identity, displacement, absence, and reconnection. Her work has been exhibited at Oolite Arts, Fredric Snitzer Gallery, and the Bakehouse Art Complex, Miami, Florida. Linares first graduated in printmaking from San Alejandro Academy of Fine Arts in Havana, Cuba. Eager to learn new ways to express herself, she later earned a BFA in graphic design at New World School of the Arts. She’s currently a resident artist at the Bakehouse Art Complex.
Becca McCharen-Tran
“As an artist and designer living and working in Miami – a city in environmental and social crisis – my work responds to our desperate need for climate optimism and the necessity of visualizing abundant and interconnected futures. By layering reclaimed materials and textiles, I interrogate the cultural hegemony around sustainability and identity to create palimpsests of life affirming connectedness.
My social practice work, filtered through mediums including fashion, collage and digital media, is anchored in a process of mutual dreaming and collective reimagining. I thrive in collaborations that center social impact and challenging hegemonic systems.”
Becca McCharen-Tran is a social practice artist and fashion designer trained as an architect. Their work creatively reimagines sustainable futures and celebrates the body as a site for collective social action and personal autonomy. She was born in Burlington, VT, studied at the University of Virginia School of Architecture and is based in Miami, FL.
McCharen-Tran was awarded the Smithsonian National Design Award in 2021 and was recognized by Forbes 30 under 30 “People Who Are Reinventing the World.” Their work has been profiled in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Vogue and Elle. Collaborations include Beyonce, Intel, Disney, Reebok, MAC and MIT.
She gave a TED Talk on inclusive design, and has spoken at SXSW, Harvard, Parsons, MIT, CFDA, Pratt, Fashion Institute of Technology, Tulane and Miami Fashion Institute at Miami-Dade College. McCharen-Tran curated ‘Queer Joy’ at MoMA PS1 and her work is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Charles Humes Jr.
Charles Humes Jr. was born in Miami, of a rich family heritage of Grand Turk, Exuma, and the Eleuthera Islands of the Bahamas. Nationally acclaimed painter, print-maker, draftsman, muralist and educator, Charles E. Humes, Jr. has been a professional fine artist for over forty years. Influenced as a youth by the Civil Rights movements of the 70’s and 80’s in which social perception and status was based on the color of one’s skin or the place one calls home, Humes’ early expressions found a voice championing the plight of the homeless, and investigating urban conditions and stereotypes predicated on socio-political, educational, and economic prejudices and bigotry. Humes has received many national and regional awards for his signature depictions of the African-American condition. Humes’ studies included Florida State University, Florida International University and Miami-Dade College, earning arts degrees in Fine Arts, Printmaking and Arts Education.
Friday is a multi-disciplinary artist who lives and works in Miami.
Her portfolio features works in various mediums, including works on paper, murals, video, projections, sculpture, graphic design and illustration, photography and social practice/activism through commerce and product creation.
Friday received a BFA in Drawing from New World School of the Arts (2015) and an MFA from Florida International University (2020).
Edison Peñafiel
Edison Peñafiel is a South Florida-based artist whose work examines the experiences of those on the underside of the world’s major conflicts: the migrant, the laborer, the surveilled. Clashing ideologies and the repetitive cycles of history produce the human catastrophes that his multimedia installations speak to. He draws the eye to odd angles that our world often intersects at—using sculpture, photography, animation, video, and space to create disturbing reflections of the realities we participate in and witness every day. These unnerving views break us out of the desensitized lull that an ongoing crisis creates.
Through visual references to German Expressionism and the surveillance state, Peñafiel keeps the work inside a long-term discussion about the turning gears of modernity and the alienation it continues to produce. This visual approach brims with anxiety illustrated in crooked lines, all informed by the dismal cruelties of bureaucracy, the policing of human movement, and empty rituals of labor. The hidden peril of these destructive cycles lends urgency to exploring the history of how we got here, how we perceive what is going on, and the hard truths of those who must face the darkest parts of the present.
“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.”
Joshua Jean-Baptiste
Joshua Jean-Baptiste is a filmmaker from Miami, and a proud alumnus of the New World School of the Arts. His recent works, such as the feature film “LUDI” and the short film “HOMEGIRL”, have premiered at prestigious film festivals such as SXSW and Davey Fest. Jean-Baptiste’s work often explores afro-futurism, cultural stories, and the representation of underrepresented communities in historically exclusionary spaces.
Monica Lopez De Victoria (b. 1980, Gainesville, FL) is a multi-disciplinary artist and performer in Artistic Synchronized Swimming. For the past 20 years, Monica has woven these two art forms together. Her colorful geometric aquatic videos, performances, and textiles investigate emotional volume in space and movement in the 4 dimensions.
Monica’s art work has been featured in international exhibitions such as “Uncertain States of America: American Art in the 3rd Millennium” curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Daniel Birnbaum, and Gunnar B. Kvaran, the Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art, and PERFORMA in NYC by Roselee Goldberg. Her work has been seen and written about in L’Officiel magazine, The Guardian, STEP Inside Design, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Vogue Italia, and on the cover of ARTnews magazine.
Monica’s artwork also is a part of the permanent collections of the Van Abbe Museum in the Netherlands and the Perez Art Museum Miami, as well as other public and private collections. Monica has participated in residencies in Canada, New Zealand, Mexico, and the USA and has recently been supported by the Bauhaus Foundation for residency projects in Germany and South Korea.
Rosa Naday Garmendia describes herself as a visual activist. She produces work at the nexus of contemporary art and social action. Her artistic approach is born out of the inner voice of a critical thinker with a desire to bridge art with real life matters. Her work is rooted in contemporary social issues and the intersectionality of her identity as a multi-ethnic Cuban woman and immigrant growing up and working in Miami, a city of extremes, with inequities that are evident in income, education and jobs. Research and investigation are an integral part of her practice exploring critical views of state violence, policing, systematic racism, and how these intersect. She employs a wide range of media, including installations, sculpture, printmaking, collage, digital photography and media, painting, drawing, and mural painting.
She studied at the University of South Florida, Parsons School of Design, University of Miami, Vermont Studio Center, and the Fort Lauderdale Art Institute. She has participated in international cultural exchanges, artist residencies, exhibition programs, workshops and artist panels in the Caribbean (Suriname, Antigua, Guadeloupe, Jamaica, Belize, Cuba) and the United States with Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator.
She is the recipient of several grants and artist residencies; the MIA Stipend Award (2022), Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant (2022, 2019), Artist Access Grant (2021, 2019, 2012), WaveMaker Grant (2020), Direct Support to Artist Grant, Oolite Arts (2019), The Ellies Creator Award (2018), South Florida Cultural Consortium (2018), Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator Catalyst Grant (2017), Home + Away Residency-Oolite Arts, Equal Justice Thematic International Residency, Vermont Studio Center, ProjectArt, and Art Center South Florida.
Rosa Naday speaks English, Spanish and Haitian Kreyol and has been a teaching artist at the Perez Art Museum Miami since 2008, introducing children, youth and adults to the power of art and ideas through contemporary art.
Roscoè B. Thické III (b. 1981) was born and raised in Miami. After graduating high school Thické enlisted in the US Army to embark on a journey of exploration and transformation. The army provided Thické with the opportunity to see the world via his travels, but it would be a volunteer based photography class in South Korea that would take Thické from amateur explorer of culture and customs, to the intentional, stirring, and impressive images we see in his work today. Roscoè pursued his passion for visual arts by studying photography and design at Broward College. Thické’s work is centered around the resilience of spirit, affliction of memory, and the art in “seeing”.
Born and raised in central Florida before moving south to his current residence of Miami, Thomas Bils paints autobiographically in ongoing investigation of the mutability within truth and narrative. Reflecting the absurdities associated with growing up in the suburban south during the beginning of the opioid crisis, Thomas crafts images often drawn from personal experiences, carefully blurring the borders between truth and
fiction. It is in these slippages of recollection that he locates his role as the unreliable narrator, and in this the viewer is engaged to consider where the fabrications occur in an attempt to grasp meaning and order.