artists-in-residence

Welcome April Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: April 10 - April 22, 2024

She Who Has No Master(s) is a collective of womxn and nonbinary writers of the Vietnamese diaspora who engage in collaborative, polyvocal, and hybrid-poetic works to enact a politics of connection across diasporic boundaries. Through a collaborative writing and art process, SWHNM explores multi-voiced collectivity, encounters, in-between spaces and (dis)places of the Vietnamese and Southeast Asian diaspora. SWHNM has a fluid and evolving membership.

In residence:

Hoa Nguyen | Barbara Tran | Lily Hoang | Dao Strom | Vi Khi Nao | Yen Ha

Ido Radon’s practice attempts to make material or give form to the abstractions that structure the social real as a way to make them thinkable. Recent works are thinking about technologies and infrastructures (hard and soft) that mediate contemporary life.

Radon has made solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), Air de Paris (Paris), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Et al. (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods (London), Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Romance (Pittsburgh), and Veronica (Seattle). In 2023, she was a finalist for the Seattle Art Museum Betty Bowen Award. An autodidact, she holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. With family and friends, she makes SOCIETY.

Zainab "Zai'' Aliyu is a Nigerian-American artist and cultural worker living in Lenapehoking (Brooklyn, NY). Her work contextualizes the cybernetic and temporal entanglement embedded within societal dynamics to understand how all socio-technological systems of control are interconnected, and how we are all materially implicated through time. She draws upon her body as a corporeal archive and site of ancestral memory to craft counter-narratives through sculpture, video, installation, built virtual environments, printed matter, archives, and community-participatory (un)learning. Zai is currently a co-director of the School for Poetic Computation, design director for the African Film Festival at the Film at Lincoln Center in NYC and a 2023-24 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow. Her work has been shown internationally at Gardiner Museum (Toronto), Film at Lincoln Center (NYC), Museum of Modern Art Library (NYC), Miller ICA (Pittsburgh), Centre for Heritage, Arts and Textile (Hong Kong), Casa do Povo (São Paulo, Brazil), Aktuelle Architektur der Kulturimages (Murcia, Spain), Pocoapoco (Oaxaca, Mexico) among others. 

Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary writer/artist who has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit). Her most recent writing has published in Maggot Brain The Recluse, Shock of the Femme, Touch the Donkey and FENCE.
She has presented and performed at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery in Berlin. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu. Her first solo exhibition, SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS, was presented at Tanja Grunert gallery in 2022. She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture and The Flaherty Seminar and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. She teaches writing at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and lives in Hudson, NY.

Denis Rodriguez and Leonardo Remor are artists, curators, and researchers. They reflect on the Art and Nature dyad in projects that focus on rural areas, the land, and the transmission of ancestral knowledge and technologies of popular creators and the Indigenous peoples of Eastern South America. Since August 2020, they have resided in Igatu, Chapada Diamantina, Bahia, where they founded Mirante Xique-Xique, a para-institution that promotes research residencies in different areas: environment, architecture, cuisine, and arts. Through cultural activities, exchanges, and environmental education, the non-governmental, non-profit organization’s mission is to safeguard the region’s architectural and intangible heritage.

Welcome March Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

This month we welcome not one but two cohorts of residents to the Studios at MASS MoCA!

Residency sessions run:
February 28th - March 11, 2024 (meet the cohort)
March 13 - April 8, 2024 (meet the cohort)

Mark your calendars for a free Open Studio event with the second cohort of artists on Thursday April 4, 5-7pm.

In residence February 28 - March 11, 2024:

J. Cottle

Boston, MAssachusetts

J.Cottle B.A, M.Ed, (He, Him, His) is an Educator, Arts Administrator, Musician, Writer, and Host. He is the Founder/Executive Director of Dunamis, The Chief Alchemist of Akeem’s Alchemy, the Creative Director of Petrichor, and a Co-Host of the podcasts Playblack, and Heart Behind the Hustle. J has supported and advanced the work of MassVOTE, Boston Arts Academy, Berklee College of Music and the Community Music Center of Boston. He serves on the boards of Hooplah and The Flavor Continues, is a 2019 National Arts Strategies Creative Community Fellow, a member of the Martin Richard Institute for Social Justice Advisory Board, and the Tisch College Community Partnerships Committee. J's work centers people of color and explores the intersections of art, equity, civic engagement, transformative growth, healing and joy.

Dream The Combine is the collaborative practice of Jennifer Newsom and Tom Carruthers. They produce site-specific installations that explore metaphor, imaginary environments, and perceptual uncertainties at the boundary between real and illusory space. Their critiques often respond to the literal and socio-political dimensions of sites in order to destabilize our known understanding of the world. Dream The Combine were named a 2023 Emerging Voice by The Architectural League, 2022-2023 Rome Prize Fellows in Architecture by the American Academy in Rome, 2022 Fellows in Architecture and Design by United States Artists, 2021 Visual Artist Fellows by the McKnight Foundation, 2020-2021 J. Irwin and Xenia S. Miller Prize winners by Landmark Columbus, 2018 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program winners by The Museum of Modern Art, 2018 Architecture Residents at Art Omi, and 2017 Jerome Foundation/Franconia Sculpture Park Artists-in-Residence.
 
Their work has been exhibited at the 2023 Venice Biennale Architettura curated by Lesley Lokko, the Graham Foundation for the 2023 Chicago Architecture Biennial curated by The Floating Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, MoMA PS1, MadArt Studio in Seattle WA, and sites in Rome, Lisbon, Vancouver BC, Minneapolis MN, St. Paul MN, and Columbus IN. Their writing and interviews have appeared in Wallpaper, Metropolis, MasContext, Log, Architectural Design, the Journal of Architectural Education, Architectural Design, and Reconstructions: Architecture and Blackness in America. Upcoming exhibitions include work in the Metropolitan Museum exhibition Flight Into Egypt: African-American Artists and Egypt from 1867 to Now opening November 2024.
 
Jennifer and Tom are both faculty at Cornell University’s College of Architecture, Art, and Planning and graduates of the Yale School of Architecture.

Mara Duvra

St Paul, Minnesota

Mara Duvra is a visual artist and writer. Her research-based practice combines photography, poetry, and video to create installations that explore stillness and interiority as critical modes of self-study. Duvra’s most recent body of work Tending: meditations on interiority and blackness, uses poetic and ephemeral imagery to understand Blackness beyond resistance or public identity. Photographing landscapes, interiors, and the body, Duvra's visual practice explores shifts in proximity through moments laid bare / unfolding the vulnerability of being present / uncovering a shared intimacy.

This work is about the quiet and quotidian, the still and meditative, and considers possibilities for Black subjectivity that center tenderness.

Duvra is originally from Maryland and received a BA in Studio Art and Psychology from the University of Maryland, College Park, and an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Duvra is currently a visiting assistant professor in Photography and Design at Macalester College.

Linda Ganjian

Jackson Heights, New York

Linda Ganjian is a NY-based artist who works in a variety of materials, from clay to cement to paper. She grew up in the Boston area and is a second generation Armenian-American.

Her main pursuit has involved making large “table-top” sculptures comprised of hundreds of miniature forms, that are a reinterpretation of Middle Eastern and American craft traditions (carpets, quilts, calligraphy). Much of her work presents memories and impressions of the urban landscape, the specific history of a site, or more personal narratives.

Her work has been exhibited in New York and abroad. Some exhibition highlights include: Future of Things Passed with Atamian Hovsepian (pop-up @ 138 W 25th) 2022; Jamaica Flux: Workspaces and Windows, JCAL, Jamaica, Queens (2021); Art in Buildings 125 Maiden Lane, NYC (2017-2018); Islip Art Museum, NY (2016); Grandchildren at Depo, Istanbul (2015); Auxiliary Projects (2013); Artspace, New Haven, CT (un(spoken) 2009); National Academy of Design (Invitational 2008); Socrates Sculpture Park (EAF 2007); Queens Museum (Queens International2006); Storefront for Art and Architecture (Portable 3-person show 2006); eyewash@Boreas Gallery (Urban Designs solo show 2006); the Brooklyn Museum of Art (Open House: Working in Brooklyn 2004); and Stedelijk museum de Lakenhal in Leiden, Holland (2001).

She has received grants from: the Queens Council on the Arts (2023, 2021, 2017, 2011); Pollack-Krasner Foundation (2005); Artslink (2001); and fellowships to: MacDowell Colony (2006); and Millay Colony (2004), among others.

Her work has been reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, among other publications.

She completed a public art commission for the NYC School Construction Authority in 2014 through the NYC Percent for Art program and the NYC MTA in 2016. In 2019, she was a QCA ArtPort resident at LaGuardia Airport. Her illustrations of Queens landscapes were translated into ceramic tiles for the restrooms of JFK Terminal 8.

She received her B.A. from Bard College and her MFA from Hunter College CUNY.

Ellen Lake

Oakland, California

Ellen Lake is a a multi-media artist, based out of Oakland, California and the co-director of Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California, where she began to experiment with printmaking. Recent work explores repeat patterns, print, textiles, patches, repair, camouflage, ceramics, block prints, and iterations. Her practice over time includes a love of cameras, experimenting with technology, archives, and collections. She has a BA from Amherst College and an MFA from Mills College where she focused on film/video, sculpture and installation creating work generating conversations about the rapid evolution of technology, the nostalgia generated by our material world, and it’s inevitable obsolescence. Her work has been supported my awards and grants and time at Vermont Studio Center, Rauschenberg Residency, and Stanford University Experimental Media Arts Lab.

Julia Oldham

Eugene, Oregon

Julia Oldham (b. 1979, Frederick, MD) is an artist living and working in Eugene, OR. Using a range of media, from animation to graphic storytelling, she creates narrative works that explore scientific history and speculative futures.

Oldham's work has been shown widely, including exhibits and screenings at the Queens Museum, Queens, NY; Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY; MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, NY; the Northwest Film Center at the Portland Art Museum, Portland, OR; the San Diego Art Institute, San Diego, CA; The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, IL; Oregon Contemporary, Portland, OR; and the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, MA.

Shailja Patel

Amherst, MAssachusetts

Shailja Patel (she/her) is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide, Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theatre show, which generated standing ovations on four continents.

Patel's poems have been translated into 17 languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Honors include a Global Feminist Spotlight from the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Nordic Africa Institute African Writer Fellowship, the Jozi Book Fair Guest Writer Award, the Voices of Our Nations poetry award, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, and the BrittlePaper Anniversary Award.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking Beyond Bollywood exhibition.

Patel is the Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. From 2019-2022, she was a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in Western Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023

Zella Vanié

NEw york, New york

Zella Vanié is a multidisciplinary artist who splits their time between New York City and Côte d’Ivoire. They paint large-scale ‘scenes of protest’ that center Black Queer identity and a reverence for nature and the immaterial. They draw inspiration from their Kentucky military town upbringing, automatic drawings, and dialogue with friends and contemporaries. Their works are bright with color and transparencies to bring the viewer into dualities of light and dark, nihilism and beauty, captivity and freedom.

Vanié has shown work in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Philadelphia, and Amsterdam, where their work was in a group show that marked 150 years since slavery was abolished in Dutch colonies. They have received grants and residencies from Flux Factory, Carrie Able gallery, and The Other Art Fair; and have been mentioned in Untitled Magazine and Hyperallergic Magazine.

Vanié served four years in the US Army as a satellite technician with deployments to Iraq and Haiti; and they are a founding board member of the Black Veterans Project. They hold an MFA in Interaction Design from the School of Visual Arts; and have taught courses at New York University and California College of the Arts.

“My work centers the idea that personal and collective imagination are a powerful tool for liberation here and now. I believe that, in order to feel joy, to love, to forgive, to conceptualize how to be free, I must first imagine that these acts and ways of existing are attainable. My imagination exists beyond the binary. It exists beyond sadness and suffering. Beyond imperial power. Above all, my work aims to ask new questions about what it means to be free, while being a mirror for Black Queer people, visualizing our beauty, divinity, and boundless new worlds that have always been ours to take up spiritual residence in.”

Photo by Khalil Bowens

Jane Wong

Seattle, washington

Jane Wong is the author of the memoir Meet Me Tonight in Atlantic City (Tin House, 2023). She is also the author of two poetry collections: How to Not Be Afraid of Everything (Alice James, 2021) and Overpour (Action Books, 2016). A Kundiman fellow, she is the recipient of a Pushcart Prize and fellowships and residencies from the U.S. Fulbright Program, Harvard's Woodberry Poetry Room, Artist Trust, Hedgebrook, UCross, Loghaven, the Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, and others. An interdisciplinary artist as well, she has exhibited her poetry installations and performances at the Frye Art Museum, Richmond Art Gallery, and the Asian Art Museum. She grew up in a take-out restaurant on the Jersey shore and is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Asian American Literature at Western Washington University.

Headshot by Gritchelle Fallesgon.

In residence March 13 - April 8, 2024

Khaila Batts

Queens, New York

Khaila Batts artistic practice is deeply rooted in the fluidity of memories and the exploration of perception through the combination of digital collage, acetate, and painted surfaces. By manipulating color and emotion, her work delves into the relational nature of color, creating surreal and chaotic scenes that challenge traditional representations. Through tiny organic brushstrokes and cool shades of blue, she transforms violent imagery into calming depictions reminiscent of ocean waves, inviting viewers to contemplate the complex interplay between violence and tranquility.

Epiphany Couch

Portland, oregon

Epiphany Couch is a multidisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, photography, and sculpture, she looks to present new ways through which we can examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes the book not only as a format through which to share these stories but as a precious object — intimate and heirloom-like.
​
Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington). She earned her BFA in Sculpture with a minor in Asian Studies from The University of Puget Sound in 2010. Her work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary in Portland OR, Gallery Ost in New York City, and Studio Editions Gallery in Seattle WA. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Jurors Choice Award for her work included in the Around Oregon Biennial at The Arts Center in Corvallis, Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.

Sève Favre

LA CONVERSION, SWITZERLAND

Sève Favres is an interdisciplinary Swiss and Belgian artist working in painting, drawing, installation and digital. Using mixed media technics, she creates interactive artworks on canvas with digital extension, interactive site-specific installations, user engaged and sensitive experiences through colour, materials and focused on landscapes, colour compositions, climate and social change. Passionate about the concept of integration, she concentrates on transcending the classical boundary between the artwork and the viewer. The main feature of her art is interactivity. The key words that support her concept is being in interaction (be together), variation (be different), activity (be active). Since 2017, she has developed her personal practice and has exhibited in Switzerland and abroad in museums, biennials as Bienalsur 2021, galleries, art fairs and during residencies. Her specific artistic research has led her to be a finalist for 14th the Arte Laguna Prize (sculpture/installation section) and longlisted for Aesthetica Art Prize 2024.

Andrea Ferrero

Lima, Peru

Andrea Ferrero (b.Lima 1991) is a visual artist from Peru currently based in Mexico City. Her work critically considers iconographies of power and our relationship with them, playfully encouraging new ways in which symbols of domination inserted into built space and embedded into collective consciousness can be reappropriated and resignified. Recently focused on researching food as spectacle, eating rituals as stagings of power and their relation to architecture and ceremonial aesthetics, it seeks to challenge colonial legacies through strategies of humor and fiction. Using archival material, photogrammetry and 3d prints as raw material, her recent work unfolds in edible pieces that focus on the process of eating, digesting, metabolizing and excreting, often involving the audience in ephemeral sweet bacchanalia.

Andrea was part of the SOMA Academic Program in Mexico City 2019-2021 and has been part of artist residencies at Pivô arte e pesquisa, Sao Paulo; HANGAR, Lisbon and FLORA ars+natura, Bogotá, among others. She is currently participating in the the Malta Biennale “Decolonizing Malta” and her work has been shown in spaces such as Museo Jumex (Mexico City), TMOFA (Taoyuan), Swivell Gallery (New York) and Gallery Shilla (Seoul).

Amanda Machado

Oakland, California

Amanda E. Machado (she/they) is a writer, public speaker and facilitator whose work has been published in The Atlantic, Guernica, The Washington Post, Adroit Journal, Slate, The Guardian, and many others. In addition to their essay writing, Amanda also is a public speaker and workshop facilitator on issues of justice and anti-oppression for organizations including Patagonia, The Aspen Institute, HipCamp, and many others. She is also the founder of Reclaiming Nature Writing, a multi-week online workshop that centers the experiences of people of color in how we tell stories about the outdoors.

Amanda has a degree in English Literature and Nonfiction Writing from Brown University, and currently lives on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland.

Murjoni Merriweather

Baltimore, Maryland

Sculptor, Murjoni Merriweather grew up in Temple Hills, Maryland. During her time there, she fell in love with art at the age of 8 learning how to draw from trial and error and art kits her parents would give her. After dabbling in photography, drawing, painting and graphic design, Murjoni tried out ceramics by the time she was in 8th grade where her heart grew whole. While feeling so connected to clay, she started making work that reflected the black experience. In 2018 Murjoni graduated from The Maryland Institute College of Art with her BFA in Ceramics and concentration in Film/video. During this time, she explored celebrating blackness through figurative forms. Murjoni has been able to expand her knowledge and experiment at places like Creative Alliance (Baltimore, 2019-2022), Fountainhead Residency (Miami, 2021) and The Alma | Lewis Residency (PA, 2022) in ways that talk about emotion through the clay itself.
Murjoni currently resides in Baltimore Maryland with her cat, Kiva, where she continues to aim towards inspiring and celebrating black culture in ways that make us feel seen.

Ruth Owens

Metairie, Louisiana

Ruth Owens graduated in 2018 with an MFA from the University of New Orleans after leaving her medical practice of 25 years. She is represented by the Ferrara Showman Gallery, and belongs to the artist collective, “The Front,” both in New Orleans. Owens’ work is concerned with contributing to and preserving the Black archive, and she uses personal super-8 film references in her painting and video art. Artist residencies include the Joan Mitchell Center, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Vermont Studio Center, the Studios at MASS MoCA and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in NY. Her work is in the permanent collections of the 21c Museums, Ackland Art Museum at UNC-Chapel Hill, the Addison Gallery of American Art, the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Fidelity Investments Corporate Collection, and the Ogden Museum of Southern Art.

Headshot by Colin Roberson

Amber Helene Müller St. Thomas (she/they) is a Canadian artist who lives and works in Toronto. Their artistic practice is based on developing performative actions that include elements of touch and queer gestures. They primarily work in lens-based media, textiles and performance. They are interested in communal interaction, materiality, and the potential for objects to function as both symbols of self and surrogates for intimacy.

Müller St. Thomas completed their MFA at York University (2017). They were a beneficiary of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Graduate Master’s Scholarship (2016). They participated in the 2018 Hamilton Supercrawl Arts Festival and the 2020 Venice International Performance Art Week. In 2021, they attended the Cleaning the House Workshop by the Marina Abramović Institute in Greece. In 2022, they participated in the NARS Artist Residency in Brooklyn, New York, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. They completed a residency at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, supported by the Liz Crockford Artists Fund Award (2023). In 2024, they will be an artist in residence at Mass MoCA, and in 2025, they have a solo show at the NARS Foundation in Brooklyn, New York.

Mike Vos

Portland, Oregon

Mike Vos (b. 1986) is a photographer, visual artist and musician from Portland, OR.

Drawing inspiration from various literary movements and themes, Vos uses traditional and experimental 4x5 film techniques, field recordings and instrumentation to craft complex narratives that advocate for the preservation of wild spaces. Constantly pushing the capabilities of film photography and sound, Vos creates immersive experiences to draw viewers into surreal representations of physical places.

Traditional landscape photography lacks the ability to fully translate the complex emotions that come when viewing places firsthand that are ancient, beautiful, and strange. Much like variant adaptations of the same subject matter, Vos interprets landscapes into ethereal and otherworldly dreamscapes to capture the awe and wonder that exists in nature.

Welcome February Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: January 31st - February 26, 2024

this month we welcome a cohort of all massachusetts-based artists.

MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR this session’s open studios:

THURSDAY, february 22nd FROM 5-7PM

Rob "ProBlak" Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder from Roxbury, MA. He has transformed Boston's cultural landscape, focusing on beautifying Black and Brown communities and a commitment to youth education. Gibbs’ recent 5-part Breathe Life mural series received national acclaim, most recently as the first local and Black artist to paint the coveted Dewey Square Mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity, he devoted over 30 years to teaching creative skills to youth and partnering with institutions to offer real-time opportunities for emerging artists. He envisions graffiti and hip-hop as ways to educate young people. Gibbs has been recognized as one of Boston's most influential people and has received numerous awards, including the Boston Celtics' Hero Among Us Award and the MLK Drum Major Award. In 2021, the City of Boston proclaimed February 1 to be Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs day. He has been an artist-in-residence with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and MassArt. In 2023, Gibbs was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. While grateful for the recognition of his work, it is Gibbs’ role as father to his daughter, and mentor to future generations, that drives his passion for creating images of beauty and resilience through murals and contemporary fine art. 

Shailja Patel

Amherst

Shailja Patel (she/her) is the author of Migritude, which was a #1 Amazon poetry bestseller, Seattle Times bestseller, and shortlisted for Italy's Camaiore Prize. Taught in over 150 colleges and universities worldwide, Migritude is based on Patel's highly-acclaimed one-woman theatre show, which generated standing ovations on four continents.

Patel's poems have been translated into 17 languages. Her essays and commentaries appear in the Guardian, Le Monde Diplomatique, and Internazionale, among others. She has appeared on BBC, Al-Jazeera, and NPR. Honors include a Global Feminist Spotlight from the Nobel Women’s Initiative, a Civitella Ranieri Fellowship, a Sundance Theatre Fellowship, the Nordic Africa Institute African Writer Fellowship, the Jozi Book Fair Guest Writer Award, the Voices of Our Nations poetry award, the Fanny-Ann Eddy Poetry Award, and the BrittlePaper Anniversary Award.

Patel is a founding member of Kenyans For Peace, Truth and Justice, a civil society coalition which works for equitable democracy in Kenya. The African Women's Development Fund named her one of Fifty Inspirational African Feminists, ELLE India Magazine selected her as one of its 25 New Guard Influencers, and Poetry Africa honored her as Letters To Dennis Poet, continuing the legacy of renowned anti-apartheid activist poet Dennis Brutus. She represented Kenya at the London Cultural Olympiad's Poetry Parnassus. Her work features in the Smithsonian Museum's groundbreaking Beyond Bollywood exhibition.

Patel is the Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. From 2019-2022, she was a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in Western Massachusetts.

Photo courtesy of © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023

Marina Dominguez

pittsfield

Marina Dominguez, from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her journey to the United States began seven years ago, when she arrived in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. Having spent her early career in the corporate world in Argentina, she acknowledged and felt deep gratitude that the minute she set foot in the Berkshires, a profound connection with art was sparked and an awakening and journey of self-discovery began.

During this time of solitude as an immigrant, she unearthed her deep love for music and embarked on a journey as a drummer in a Brazilian music group called Berkshire Batería. She also discovered her passion for dance, diving into classes and performances. Since childhood, photography had always held a special place in her heart. She seized the opportunity to work diligently, save money, and six years ago, she was able to own her very first camera.

Over time, she came to recognize both her personal need as an immigrant and the shared need of other immigrants also living in the Berkshires, to create a place of community where - as immigrants - could cultivate a place and sense of belonging. This community would serve as a platform for open discussions about experiences, emotions, and requirements to freely express themselves. Marina became determined to find this space of community; where she could express herself authentically, and she started to realize the possibility of amalgamating all her knowledge and insights into creating a collective space for mutual sharing.

She has experienced incredible personal and artistic growth through her affiliation with this creative community called Katunemo. They have helped Marina to explore different avenues and mediums. Although she primarily identifies as a photographer, she has ventured into a fusion of photography and painting. This fusion allows her to encapsulate intangible emotions and thoughts, translating them into tangible visual representations. Through her body of work, Marina strives to convey the energies, connections, and knowledge exchanges among people, as well as the unique vitality we infuse into the spaces we inhabit.

Calvin Gimpelevich is an NEA Fellow, the recipient of a Lambda Literary Award, and the author of Invasions (Instar 2018). His work has been recognized by Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, CODEX/Writer’s Block and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; it has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Essays 2022. He is at work on several novels.

Headshot by Cameron Day O'Connell

DaNice is a Boston high school graduate. In 2023, she became a Mass Cultural Council Visual Arts Award recipient. She lives with her husband of 33 years, Ben and their dog Tigger, outside of Boston.

“I am an artist who believes that people are more alike than we are different. My name is DaNice D Marshall (pronounced Duh-NYSE) I’m a born writer, who became a visual artist in 2016, after being stricken with Granulomatosis with Polyiingitis, a serious and rare disease. After 28 days in the hospital, I was sent home, unable to walk without a cane, unable to concentrate to write, and partially deaf.
Doctors told me to do nothing, which I translated to mean paint. I started to paint abstracts, mostly to watch the paint dry. Eventually my work evolved to the portraiture art that I make today.

I paint portraiture art as much to record ordinary activities of life, as much to show the viewer that we all laugh and have moments of joy. These moments are a source of light, a familiar thread, a human story that acts as a reminder that we are more alike than we are different. I hope my art makes the viewer smile just a little, at least on the inside.”

Tammi Jean Fedestin (she/her) is a visual artist based in Massachusetts whose practice includes printmaking, collage, and mixed media work. Her surreal and vibrant pieces explore the beauty and humor found in what's strange, grotesque, frightful, and sometimes downright traumatic. She holds a BA in Arts Management from the Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts (MCLA). While in school, Tammi studied under the letterpress artist  Melanie Mowinski and gained a love of bookmaking and printmaking.

As a queer Haitian woman, many expectations were thrust upon Tammi by loved ones, the education system, and society as a whole. As she shifted and changed to become the “perfect, dependable, strong black woman,” she lost her sense of self and discarded her own thoughts and feelings as incorrect. Through her work, Tammi is unveiling and becoming re-acquainted with the hidden aspects of her identity.

Tammi hopes her work will make others feel seen and understood, especially other Haitian girls who may find themselves shifting and changing for the world. She hopes that others will see her work and take on the challenge to find beauty in what they have hidden within themselves.

Headshot by Jen Vesp

Felipe Shibuya

Brookline

Felipe Shibuya is a Brazilian ecologist and visual artist. His journey began when he completed his PhD in Ecology and Nature Conservation at the Federal University of Paraná. Subsequently, he chose to delve deeper into the visual aspects of his research, moving beyond just the scientific perspective. He also holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he worked with pigmented bacteria, intending to understand how the colors they synthesize could be communication signals for humans. Being a scientist-artist enables Shibuya to explore different forms of life, from bacteria to trees, using various methods, from microbiological culture to videos. However, all of his work involves aspects of his own identity, and he always emphasizes the visuality of nature. Shibuya's unique blend of art and science has gained international recognition, exhibiting his work around the world. He also has had citations published in magazines and journals such as National Geographic, Citylab, and Ecology.

“As a visual artist and scientist, I delve into the enthralling nexus of art and science, focusing particularly on biology and ecology. My work aims to reveal nature's visuality in its colors, shapes, and patterns. By converting intricate scientific data into digestible content, I aim to democratize knowledge and pique curiosity, thereby encouraging a more enlightened, engaged and just society. In my work, I harmoniously blend different forms of media with scientific methods, which includes elements like sculptures, videos, bacterial cultures, and biomaterials. This fusion of art and science, made possible by my wide-ranging background, encourages a holistic approach that transcends "traditional" disciplinary boundaries.”

Lily Xie

boston

Lily Xie (she/they) is a Chinese-American artist and educator whose socially-engaged work explores desire, memory, and self-actualization for communities of color. In collaboration with local residents and grassroots organizers, she facilitates creative projects with a focus on public space, housing, and racial justice. The work they create together often takes shape in illustration, print media, video, and installation. Lily is a City of Boston Artist-in-Residence and she holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT.

Karmimadeebora McMillan is an interdisciplinary artist working in painting, printmaking, sculpture, animation, installation, and public art. McMillan has an AFA from Peace College, received her MFA and Post Baccalaureate Certificate from SMFA at Tufts and received her BA from her hometown in Fayetteville, NC, at HBCU, Fayetteville State University.

After graduate school McMillan worked with street artist Swoon as her business manager and helped start her non-profit Heliotrope Foundation.

McMillan has shown extensively on the east coast and in 2021 received the Now + There public artists grant and is currently an Artist-in-Residence at the Boston Center for the Arts. She has performed with her mentor Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Queens Museum in New York, and the Havana, Cuba Biennale 15.

Karmimadeebora is a working artist in Cambridge, MA and the Director of the Post Baccalaureate Program with SMFA at Tufts University. She is currently pursuing an Interdisciplinary PhD through Tufts University focusing on Black Women of Power.

Headshot by Melissa Blackall.

Sharon Amuguni

worcester

Sharon Amuguni is a poet and creator whose practice includes papier mache, fiber arts, craft, and paper arts. Her artmaking is an extension of her poetry and is often fueled by play, experimentation, and flights of fancy. She was featured in Mass Poetry’s Raining Poetry project and was an Assets for Artist Worcester Business of Art 2023 cohort member. She has an MA in Civic Media Art and Practice (Media Design) from Emerson and has worked as an arts administrator for several years. In addition to working on her own practice, she also offers grant application support and other creative practice support services to fellow artists, community organizations, and nonprofits through her sister site, sharonmakes.work.

Welcome January Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: January 3rd - January 29th, 2024

AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THe First OPEN STUDIO of 2024: 

THURSDAY, January 25th FROM 5-7PM

Stephen Proski

brighton, massachusetts

My name is Stephen Proski. I’m interested in communicating an awareness of something that happens in the world that affects all of us and that no one is separate from: ​​the prioritizing of vision has made us blind to our surroundings. The ideology of ableism, specifically what is commonly considered normal or not normal, keeps us from creating meaningful changes that would be necessary for all of us to thrive as a society. I want to make art that addresses my own personal experience of blindness, while questioning and interrogating the imposing hierarchical structures that continue to shape, oppress, and favor the ocularcentric.

My work is physical to make and although visually seductive, tactility ultimately prevails. I use blindness as a cipher to articulate my own predisposition to the world. The constant misuse of materials and processes aggressively seep, soak, and spill into one another – resin, concrete, ceramics, acrylic, and text, complicating the distinction between image and language. As an artist, I am guided by the metamorphoses that take place through translation – language to shape, shape to form, form to language, and so on – to offer the experience of sensation without distinction, pleasurable surfaces coercively molded for the touch of the eye in collaboration with the other senses.

Corinne Yonce

Winooski, vermont

Corrine Yonce is an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. Yonce often combines visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, household objects, and photographs. Her story-centered figurative paintings and installations dig into the concepts of home and housing from a community and personal perspective. She is the founder of the Voices of Home project, a seven year partnership with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and housing providers across the state where she interviewed residents about “home” and co-created art installations and portraits. Corrine Yonce is currently completing her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Arts as a Leslie King Hammond fellow and Alfred T Granger scholar. Yonce is currently a Generator Makerspace resident to produce works for the public art series, “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing.” She lives and works in Winooski, Vermont and teaches tenant skills and Fair Housing workshops with the Fair Housing Project of CVOEO.

“I combine visual art with ethnographic media, including audio interviews, physical household objects, and digitally printed photographs. My paintings depict my recollections of the leaking container of home. I am interested in the signifiers of home as they relate to the body, comfort, touch, play and movement. The works are de and reconstructed, recalibrated, conjoined, and installed in ways that are incongruous. The paintings upend themselves.”

Natalia Mejía Murillo

richmond, virginia

Natalia Mejía is a Colombian artist who explores notions of territory, repetition, trace, and time through correspondences between astronomy, cartography, and archaeology. She holds an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University, MA in Art History and Theory, and BFA from National University of Colombia.

She has been the recipient of awards and residencies, including MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), Curatorial Program for Research (New York, 2023), Tajo Taller and Saenger Galería, Mexico City (2023), Ellis-Beauregard Foundation. ME (2022), Fundació Miró Mallorca and Casa de Velázquez, Spain (2021), Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Germany (2020), Ministry of Culture of Colombia - Mexico (FONCA) (2017), Fundación CIEC - Centro Internacional de la Estampa Contemporánea (Betanzos, Spain, 2014), The Strzemioski Academy of Fine Arts and Design (Łódz, Poland, 2014) among others.

She has taught at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota. She is currently Assistant Professor of Printmaking at Virginia Commonwealth University Qatar.

Headshot by Dana Clark.

Madison Donnelly

new haven, connecticut

Madison Donnelly (b. 1992) is a sculpture and installation artist. Her practice examines the psychological impact of neglect under Late Capitalism- ranging from the unkempt body and rented apartments to animal and planetary neglect.

She holds an MFA in Sculpture from Yale ’23 where she received the Blair Dickinson Memorial Prize, and was awarded a Design Fellowship at the Center for Engineering, Innovation and Design.  She holds a BFA from the University of Utah ’18 and has participated in residencies at SOMA in Tlaxcala, Mexico, UMOCA in Salt Lake City, and Mass MOCA in North Adams, Massachusetts.

Hans Kuzmich

Santa cruz, california

Hans Kuzmich is an interdisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate in the Film and Digital Media Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work is concerned with developing abolitionist representational strategies that address gender normativity as a product and producer of the prison industrial complex, and racialized anti-trans/queer violence as its expression. Kuzmich received a BFA in Art from the Cooper Union in 2005 and participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study program in 2009–10. Since completing an MFA in Interdisciplinary Studio at the University of California, Los Angeles in 2013, Kuzmich has lectured at the California Institute of the Arts and worked in the film industry as a member of the International Cinematographers Guild. His work has been exhibited in art spaces, film festivals, and community centers internationally, and his writing has been published in: Art Journal; Theory, Culture & Society; the Abolitionist; and Native Strategies.

“My practice investigates gender as an interface between subjects and the state—a focus informed by my position as a trans person and Russian immigrant. Using photography, film, video, and sound—including nontraditional recording techniques, such as infrared photography and electromagnetic field recording—I consider how audiovisual technologies inflect questions of gender and state violence.”

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris

Iowa city, iowa

T.J. Dedeaux-Norris is a mixed-media artist who employs painting, fiber, performance, video, and music to explore the somatic impacts of racial, gender, and class socialization. In form and content, their work poses a philosophical inquiry into the distinction between Self and Other, with the body as a social microcosm of distinct yet discursive dynamics to observe and question. Everything is both permeable and fractile.

Dedeaux-Norris completed their BA at University of California at Los Angeles and their MFA at Yale University. Their work has been presented internationally at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Mission Creek Festival, Nasher Museum of Art, Performa, Prospect New Orleans, Rotterdam Film Festival, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Sundance Film Festival, and The Walker Art Center - among other institutions. Dedeaux-Norris has participated in residencies at Grant Wood Colony, MacDowell, Skowhegan, and Yaddo. They are a 2019-2020 Pollock-Krasner Foundation grantee, a 2022 Iowa Artist Fellow, and a tenured Associate Professor at University of Iowa.

Alexander Davis

boston, massachusetts

Alexander Davis is a Boston based performer, choreographer, fiber artist, and homosexual. Alex believes that movement, comedy, and fibers are connected through their unifying power to create empathetic and dramatic responses from diverse audiences. Drawing from pop culture and the pedestrian he facilitates experiences that display the innate theatricality (and absurdity) of everyday life.

Kelley-Ann Lindo

providence, rhode island

Kelley-Ann Lindo (Jamaica,1991) holds a BFA in Painting from The Edna College of the Visual and Performing Arts and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University. She has exhibited at Wassaic Projects, Wassaic, NY, The Trout Museum of Art in Wisconsin, The Anderson Gallery in Richmond, VA, and The National Gallery of Jamaica. Lindo was a recipient of the 2021 Dedalus Foundation Master of Fine Arts Fellowship in Painting & Sculpture. She was also a recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in 2019. She has been artist-in-residence at Grand Central Art Centre, California, Alice Yard, Port of Spain, Trinidad, and New Local Space (NLS), Kingston, Jamaica. Lindo is currently an artist in residence at California State University, Fullerton Grand Central Art Centre, California, and an Assistant Professor in Residence at Rhode Island School of Design.

Victor MARKA27 Quinonez

brooklyn, new york

My name is Victor "Marka27" Quiñonez and I am an artist with a rich history in graffiti, street culture, design, and activism through art. I firmly believe that design is a creative expression that is powerful, impactful, and progressive if guided by genuine purpose. For me, the "purpose" is what's most important, which is to engage with an audience in order to achieve a dialogue.

In today's climate, it is crucial to control our narratives as BIPOC by empowering each other through our respective creative process. My approach to design, whether product or graphic-driven, is similar to my process for creating art. Both start with passion, discovery, and building a narrative. My passion comes from the streets, not merely studying it but living it as well. It's a way of life.

Creating street murals, paintings, and products reflects my purpose for engaging an audience in a dialogue on cultural authenticity and awareness driven by self-expression. Through my art, I strive to bring attention to the importance of cultural identity and to promote positive societal change.

Alida Rodrigues

london, united kingdom

Alida Rodrigues (b.1983) is a visual artist from Angola currently based in London(UK). Rodrigues studied at The Slade School of Fine Art where she received a BA in Fine Art. Since her first solo exhibition in 2014 at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway, she has exhibited widely within the UK, Europe and Africa and participated in artists residencies in the UK, Mexico and will be undertaking a residency at the Studios at MASS MoCA(USA) in 2024.

Rodrigues, stared in the film Relic 3 in (2019) forms part of Relic Traveller: Phase 2, a multi-disciplinary project produced by the British-Ghanian artist Larry Achiampong. The fashion label Winnie New York who was the recipient of the Karl Lagerfeld Prize 2022, was inspired by her work to make a collection for his Men’s Spring/Summer 2023 collection which was shown during Paris fashion week 2022.

”My artistic practise is a rich tapestry of collage, textile and installation woven together by using 19th century black and white portrait photographs and botanical illustrations from the same period. At the heart of my work lies the intricate exploration of the multifaceted concept of identity, entailing a profound investigation into notions of belonging and un-belonging. I am deeply committed to unravelling the historical threads of colonialism and the enduring echoes of this complex and problematic past which still influences our way of life affecting various aspects of race, culture, politics, economics, and society across the globe.”

Welcome December Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: December 6th - December 19th, 2023 

Angeline Meitzler

Brooklyn, New York

Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a writer and animator based in Brooklyn, NY. The 2nd daughter of a German scientist and a Filipino nurse. Her work and research utilize fiction and myth to deconstruct how power, race and colonialism are entangled in political and personal narratives of worth and value. She is the author of the lyrical collection of prose, A Drop of Sun (Fauxmoir Lit Press, 2023). Her poetry and hybrid writing was nominated as a finalist for the 2023 Newfound Prose Prize. Her animated films and multimedia work has exhibited and screened internationally at the 46th Asian American International Film Festival, NYC (2023); San Diego Filipino Film Festival (2023); Tacoma Film Festivial, WA (2023); The Wrong Biennale (2023); Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Her work has been awarded fellowships and supported by MASS MoCA Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Harvestworks and New York State Council of the Arts. Her collaborative work as an software and environment artist has been exhibited at MUDAM Musee d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean, Ogden Contemporary Arts, Carnegie Mellon University, the New Museum, Rhizome, de Young Museum, Istanbul Biennial 2019, Koenig & Clinton, Ringling Museum of Art, Kunsthalle Basel, Rubin Museum, Sadie Coles HQ, the 2019 Whitney Biennial. She received her MFA through Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of the Arts Institute of Chicago as a New Artists Society Scholar.

Felicia Nez

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Felicia Nez is a Navajo multi-disciplinary artist with a strong emphasis on writing. Through the honesty of her writing, she processes words into the medium they want to be. She parallels writing with working with clay­­ — harvested from her homeland in the southwest.  The clay tells her what it wants to be, and she never plans her pots or sculptures. These two disciplines helped her form her spring 2021 MFA thesis show Transference. This exhibition showcases Nez’s ability to tell her story in her own form of tangible/intangible communication.  Within the layers of her complex narrative, she makes historical references to how Pueblo Potters and other Native artists coded their pot designs and art to preserve their traditions from colonists.

Nez graduated with her MFA at the University of New Mexico in spring of 2021.

David Askew

Virginia Beach, Virginia

David Alston Askew is a Black, Queer painter currently residing in Brooklyn, New York and is recent Aunspaugh fellow from the University of Virginia's art department. Their work is an exploration of self identity through abstract world building portraiture and is used as a tool for self reflection of how they perceive their sense of self and place in society.

“On a broad scale, my work is representational; it surveys and analyzes the idea of the human figure, with added elements of decoration through “destruction.” Portraiture considers the person, first; they are the forefront. My art is striving to claim my status as an artist and not jus a replicator of the human image. Ultimately, my goal is to diverge from this sense of iconography and ego that portraiture enforces, and I strive to destroy that in search of ownership of my own art and the adoption of the figure as my own. Ownership is the most prominent objective in my work, because without claiming myself in my work, there would be no reason to create. Leaving the existence of every piece an embodiment of self, no matter who I am painting whether a friend, a celebrity, or a self portrait, I am always reflecting on my own identity and existence making self-portraiture the true identity of my work. I paint to understand myself.”

Najee Haynes-Follins

Baltimore, Maryland

“In my current work I am experimenting with the concept of spirits/entities that are created out of combined human energy and imagining anti-black racism as such an entity. These ‘Haints’ get between the viewer and the subject and distort the subject. The Black body is a fetish, a fantasy and a nightmare. I’m examining the layered perspectives, misreadings and misconceptions of Blackness. I am attempting to externalize what it can feel like to be interacted with as a Black body; living with the constant possibility for both psychic and physical violence because of the impossibility of being fully seen. I am currently working through several sets of ideas around this but planning to narrow my focus during this residency period to continue my experimentations with encaustic, photo and found object collage using photos from my youth growing up in Northampton Massachusetts. I am materializing and hopefully exorcizing the psychic material of otherness and monstrosity that was imposed on me as a child being black and isolated from other black people. The memories captured in these photos are joyful but tainted with the damage done from never fully belonging in these spaces. I am also currently pursuing an M.F.A. at MICA.”

grace (ge) gilbert

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

grace (ge) gilbert is a poet, writer, and collagist based in Pittsburgh. they received their MFA in poetry from the University of Pittsburgh in 2022, where they now teach. they are the author of 3 chapbooks: the closeted diaries: essays (Porkbelly Press 2022), NOTIFICATIONS IN THE DARK (Antenna Books 2023), and today is an unholy suite (forthcoming; Barrelhouse 2023). their work can be found in 2023's Best of the Net Anthology, the Indiana Review, Ninth Letter, the Adroit Journal, and elsewhere. They teach hybrid collage and poetics courses at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts, and they are a 2023 Visiting Teaching Artist at the Poetry Foundation. they are passionate about making the hybrid arts accessible to all. find course offerings and more at gracegegilbert.com.

Derek G. Larson

Brooklyn, New York

Derek G. Larson is an accomplished artist and animator with an MFA degree from the Yale School of Art. Larson has a background in media, having previously worked at PBS, and is the creator of the highly regarded animated documentary series, Très Mall. This unique series revolves around in-depth interviews with prominent academics, exploring a wide range of topics including philosophy, the environment, and the Anthropocene. Très Mall has featured esteemed guests such as Noam Chomsky, Michael Hardt, Graham Harman, McKenzie Wark, and Priyamvada Gopal. The series has garnered significant acclaim and has been screened at venues including Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, Tranen, Times Square in New York City, MoCA Atlanta, and the Yale School of Architecture.

Stevie Imua’Kalani Cisneros Hanley

Chicago, Illinois

Stevie Cisneros Hanley has been anchored in Chicago for 11yrs where they work as an artist, curator, educator, and member of the Bargaining Committee of the newly unionized School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They teach Queer Color, a Research Studio class awarded the Pulitzer Campus Visit and a Course Enrichment Grant to work with Indigenous cultural preservationists and producers, such as Hinaleimoana Kwai Kong Wong-Kalu and Kwasi Gyamfi Asiedu. Hanley is Co-Chair of the 2023 Terrain Biennia: Mycelium Connection. They have had solo shows at the International Museum of Surgical Science, University Club of Chicago, M LeBanc, and Center of Endless Progress Berlin. Hanley has participated in numerous international exhibitions including Tüyup, Istanbul; Artist House Jerusalem, Jerusalem; La Mama Galeria, New York City; Lodos Contemporary, Mexico City; Julius Caesar Chicago; September, Berlin; NADA Miami; Iceberg Projects, Chicago; and CANARY, Los Angeles, Twins Gallery Laundry, and the Poetry Foundation. Hanley is currently exhibiting in NO BIOS, for Visual AIDS in New York City. As a multiracial person of Mexican (Zacatecas), Irish, indigenous Hawaiian (Kanaka Maoli), and Punjabi ancestry, I seek to uplift marginalized voices and cooperate in post-colonial community building.

Tammie Dupuis

Bremerton, Washington

Tammie was born and raised in Northwestern Montana, on the Flathead Reservation. Her father was Qlispe' (Upper Pend d'Oreille) and Seli’š (Bitterroot Salish) and her mother was the daughter of non-Indigenous settlers who moved to the reservation in the 1920s. Her aesthetic is situated between these two cultural heritages and explores their complicated history as well as her own identity as a mixed blood person.

Using both Indigenous and non-Indigenous ways of making and seeing, her work ranges across several different processes and materials including but not limited to paint, wood, fabric, resin, hair, bone, paper, and beads.

Tammie earned her MFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, located in Boston, MA, in 2022 and her BFA from Cornish College of the arts located in Seattle, WA in 2019. Additionally, she holds a BS in Anthropology/Archaeology from Montana State University, located in Bozeman, MT. She and her art practice are located in Bremerton, WA.

Arnab Gan Choudhury

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Arnab Gan Choudhury (b. 1994, Kolkata, India) is an Indian interdisciplinary artist. He held his first solo art exhibition in 1999 at the age of four at the Nehru Children’s Museum, Kolkata. Arnab has had solo exhibitions in Birla Academy of Fine Art, Kolkata, Gaganendra Shilpa Pradarshashala, Kolkata and Gateway 1 Gallery, Maryland. He has been featured in group exhibitions at Birla Academy of Art & Culture, Kolkata, Karnataka Chitrakala Parisath, Bengaluru, Abanindranath Tagore Gallery of the Indian Council for Cultural Relations, Kolkata, Eastern Zonal Cultural Center, Kolkata, Monmouth Museum, New Jersey, Area 405, Maryland, Ann Bryan Gallery, Philadelphia, Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy, Dhaka and La Galleria Pall Mall, London among others. Arnab executed his first public sculpture commissioned by Satyajit Ray Film & Television Institute, Ministry of Broadcasting, Government of India in 2022 and in 2023, he was awarded the Edmund Stewardson Prize in Figure Sculpture. He completed his BFA in Interdisciplinary Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art, USA in 2021 and is currently pursuing his MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, USA.

Welcome November Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: November 8th - December 5th, 2023 

AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THe last OPEN STUDIO of 2023: 

THURSDAY, November 30th FROM 5-7PM

Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Chicago, Illinois

Sandra Jackson-Opoku is an accomplished novelist, journalist, and academic. Her published novels include The River Where Blood is Born, winner of American Library  Association Black Caucus Award for Best Fiction and Hot Johnny (and the Women Whom Loved  Him), an Essence Magazine bestseller in hardcover fiction. Her stories, poetry, articles, essays, and scripts are widely published and produced, with work appearing in Islands Magazine, Los Angeles Times, Ms. Magazine, The Literary Traveler, and elsewhere.

“My body of literary work is informed by themes of culture, identity, hybridity, and migration in the African Diaspora. My first novel charts the journeys of a family of African women over multiple time periods, places, and realms. My second follows the travels of an enigmatic man, as told by the women in his life. Other works explore the world wanderings of Black women, centuries-long connections between China and people of African descent, and more.”

Clara Cruz

Richmond, Virginia

Clara Cruz is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans painting, installation and performance
to explore memory, memorials and the relational nature of meaning. She received a BFA in
Painting from Hunter College. She lives and works in Richmond where she is an MFA candidate
at Virginia Commonwealth University.

“During the MASS MoCA residency I intend to create a body of work consisting of paintings and assemblages that explore the spectacle of harvest(tourist) season in New England, Dia de los Muertos traditions from Northern Mexico, and folklore surrounding death in both these regions. In doing so, I will examine how these spectacles and traditions reflect/refract contested ideas about the nature of death. And how these ideas relate to race, migration and mestizaje in New England.”

Nadia Taquary

Salvador, Brazil

My name is Nádia Taquary, and I am an artist from Brazil. I was born in 1967 to a multiracial family with an Afro-indigenous father and a white mother. Growing up in Bahia, I have been immersed in the vast and rich heritage of my homeland's people and culture, shaped by the African diaspora.

As an artist, my work centers on exploring questions related to the history of black people in Brazil, with a focus on "black female protagonism" and identity. I seek to create art that challenges the eugenic, Eurocentric, and patriarchal narratives that have long suppressed our voices and prevented us from accessing important knowledge and understandings African civilizations.

At the beginning of my work, I delved into these issues through the Afro-Brazilian jewelry – a type of jewelry unique in its history - used by enslaved or freed African women in colonial Bahia. These jewels, made up of amulets and talismans, express identity, aesthetics, religiosity, and, above all, were a practice of wealth accumulation as a tactic for conquering freedom in a slave-owning and sexist society. By using Afro-Brazilian jewelry in my works, I aim to resituate it as an object that translates much of what we are: a symbol of resistance, overcoming, empowerment, and freedom.

Sergio Suarez

Atlanta, Georgia

Sergio Suárez (B.1995) is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. He graduated from Ernest G Welch School of Art and Design in 2021, and he attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. His practice, prompted by an interest in translation, engages with different traditions of making, to construct a visual language concerned with syncretism, temporality, and porosity. Mixing seemingly contradictory past and present codes of visual representation such as baroque painting, Mesoamerican material culture, and contemporary telescope imagery, his work looks at the porous boundary between images, objects, and spaces. Meditating over the filtration, preservation, and organization of memory, the work is suspicious of narratives that make time and entropy implicit agents in the destruction of alternative cosmologies and histories, reducing and essentializing them. It proposes instead that the present is a metaphysical surface where entities float, emerge, sink, and possess a buoyancy linked to attention/care.

Quki

Kasigluk, Alaska

Golga Oscar, a Yup’ik artist from Southwest, Alaska. Oscar is a self-taught artist who pursues modern textiles that reflect his cultural identity. He seeks to revitalize his ancestral work with a mix of contemporary materials and design. Oscar has been exploring different mediums ranging from leather/skin sewing to grass weaving and walrus ivory/wood carving. A strong cultural identity is evident in his work. Through his knowledge of traditional art forms and sewing skills, he creates cultural attire that becomes a vital visual element in his photographic imagery. Some of Oscar’s work is permanently in collections in a few museums: Anchorage Museum, Anchorage: Burke Museum, Washington: and International Folk Art Museum, New Mexico.
His images portray portraits of Indigenous people to show the world the importance of Native heritage and the validity of their existence. He is striving towards Indigenizing spaces in this Western environment.

Elizabeth Burden

Tucson, Arizona

Elizabeth Burden is a multidisciplinary artist blending studio work with social practice. She uses drawing, painting, video, sound, and other media in a process of artistic archivy to reflect on geographies, imaginaries, and vestiges of the past/present/future. She is intrigued by the pull of archives, the construction of histories, ephemeral inheritances, the role of memory and narrative, and the ways we make sense of it all.

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, and was a 2020 Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellow

Ms. Burden holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MS in Geographic Information Science from the University of Arizona.

David Peña

Chula vista, california

David Peña is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural organizer from the border region between Tijuana and San Diego. He is co-founder and organizer of Tijuana Zine Fest, a large scale zine festival which celebrates self-publishing and independent art. He seeks to connect his visual practice with his commitment to people and place, exploring ways to bridge community and understand organizing as an art practice in itself. He investigates the many ways we enter into and through in-between spaces and the ways we are confronted with borders, geographical, internal, tangible and abstract.

His projects have been featured in Juxtapoz, LA Times, KCET and he has shown work at Centro Cultural Tijuana, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, Northwestern University, University of California San Diego, University of Oregon, Universidad Autónoma de Baja California Ensenada, among others.

Funlola Coker

Beverly, Massachusetts

Funlola Coker is a metalsmith and sculptor from Lagos, Nigeria. In 2007 Coker moved to Memphis, TN to pursue a BFA in Sculpture from Memphis College of Art. Funlola is fascinated by history, the evolution of culture and storytelling. Funlola creates narrative sculptures that call on nostalgic memories and moments of the mundane that are held dear. Coker has taught at notable craft institutions such as Snow Farm: The New England Craft Program, Penland School of Craft and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Funlola’s work has been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum, TONE Gallery in Memphis, the National Ornamental Metal Museum, and a solo exhibition at Brooklyn Metalworks. In 2020, Coker received the Arts Memphis Arts Accelerator grant, and was a 2022 Thayer Fellowship recipient from the SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government. Funlola holds an MFA in Studio Art from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Jesus Trevino

Brownsville, Texas

Jesus Treviño (b. 1995, Brownsville, Texas) received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley (2018) and his MFA in Painting/Drawing at the University of Texas at Austin (2022). His work is rooted from his experience being raised on the U.S./Mexico border and deals with the history of movement in the region and its residual personal, emotional, and social effects.

“I’m interested in land’s capacity to hold traces of unresolved tensions when thinking about histories of erasure, movement, displacement of people, and how that shapes my identity which continues to shift, fade, and reassemble. Using disruption, concealment and layering, my practice allows for an unfolding and discovery of stories that resist being buried beneath the surface of unstable and agitated paintings. Working from a bank of collected images found in family photo albums, social media profiles, personal archives, and articles about the border, landscapes often act like a witness to these moments with figures caught in-between dematerializing and in a state of becoming, seeking to claim identity and autonomy.”

Lillie J. Harris

Clinton, Maryland

Lillie J. Harris is a cartoonist, writer and illustrator from Clinton, Maryland. Tension and empathy are notable themes throughout Lillie’s artwork, as well as theology, horror, and not “punching down". Their self-published graphic novel, Wilderness, debuted in 2021 and is currently circulating in bookshops and through online distributors.

They are interested in exploring stories that balance the mundanity of everyday life with a sprinkle of the supernatural unknown. Depth of character is of the utmost importance in Lillie’s work, with specificity given to idiosyncratic dialogue and accentuating features that are often stigmatized. Lillie shows a playful intentionality in flipping expectations within a story. Humor comes across in their energetic, gestural lines, just as much as a sense of foreboding does in quieter moments.

Most recently, Lillie has worked as a narrative designer for Yazeba’s Bed & Breakfast (2023), a Tabletop role-playing game published by Possum Creek Games. They were also an essayist for Black Josei Press’ Gladiolus Magazine (2023), and a comics contributor to the online literary magazine smoke and mold (2023). Their comics and illustrations have been published in The New Yorker, Burlington City Arts Gallery, and The Vermont Folklife Center's graphic novel Turner Family Stories.

Welcome October Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: October 11th - November 7th, 2023 

AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THIS Session’s OPEN STUDIO: 

THURSDAY, November 2nd FROM 5-7PM

Grimaldi Baez

Yabucoa, Puerto rico

Grimaldi Baez is a multidisciplinary artist exploring the intersections of printmaking, drawing, and performance. His machines, drawings and collages are the result of reclaimed and recombined materials sourced from print shops, flea markets, scrap yards, comic books, classic cartoons and common vandalism. He explores questions and concerns pertaining to labor, technological deviance, and utopian historical narratives.

Solo exhibitions include Galeria Guatibiri in San Juan, PR; Indiciplinadas in Madrid, Spain; and Napoleon in Philadelphia, PA. Group exhibitions include Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña in San Juan, PR; La ENE in Buenos Aires, AR; and Iceberger Gallery in San Francisco, amongst others. Recent awards include the Scholarship for the Diversification of the Professorship at Tyler School of Art in 2015 and residencies at the Village for Art and Humanities and School of the Future, both in Philadelphia. Recent projects include Green Sun: Solar Literacy Program; Extension or Communication: Puerto Rico; and the Reform Project with Pepon Osorio; projects which explore the intersection of art and environmental/racial justice community organizing.

Howard el-Yasin

New Haven, connecticut

Howard el-Yasin is a New Haven, Connecticut-based interdisciplinary (sculpture/installation/performance) artist/curator/educator holding degrees from Maryland Institute College of Art '16, Wesleyan University, and New England College. el-Yasin's interests include feminist and queer theory, decolonization and performative practices.

Previous exhibitions featuring their work include A-Space Gallery, Asnuntuck Community College, ALL Gallery, Artspace New Haven, ArtWell, ATOM space at Chinatown, Campbellsville University, City Gallery, Concord Art Association, Creative Arts Workshop, Crit Haven, Eli Center of Contemporary Art, Five Points Annex, Guilford Art Center, Hans Weiss NewSpace Gallery, Hygenic Art, Kehler Liddel Gallery, Lotta Studio, Maryland Institute College of Art, Mill Street Project, Norwalk Community College, Real Art Ways, The Institute Library, Washington Art Association & Gallery, and Wesleyan University.

Aparna Sarkar

Brooklyn, NY

Aparna Sarkar (b. 1992) is an Indian-American painter living and working in Brooklyn, NY. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design (2021) and a BA in Mathematics from Pomona College (2014). Awards include selection for the 2022 Saatchi Art Rising Stars Report, a 2022 residency at the Jentel Foundation, inclusion in the 2019 editorial selection of Art Maze Magazine, and the 2018 Meredith Morabito and Henrietta Mantooth Full Fellowship to attend Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild. Aparna has shown across the US, recently at spaces such as Peep Projects in Philadelphia, The Pit L.A., and 1969 Gallery in New York.

Winnie van der Rijn

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Winnie van der Rijn is a multi-disciplinary artist of opportunity– collecting materials, experimenting with techniques and pursuing her curiosities. Her art practice includes textiles, sculpture, collage and collaboration (which she considers its own art form). She plays well with others. Winnie actively exhibits her work throughout the United States and internationally.

”My most recent body of work ‘How to Dismantle the Patriarchy’ is an examination & deconstruction of the power in menswear. Motivated by the increase in false news, a daughter graduating college & menopausal rage, I decided to conduct an artistic but completely junk science examination of the power in menswear. I pushed forward my narrative that the power was in the clothes. Then I stripped the power away through an iterative intervention, thereby dismantling the patriarchy one shirt at a time. To do this I leaned on my traditionally female, very domestic skills of sewing, weaving & embroidery. Subversive stitching as an act of rebellion. I’ve created an army of 100 shirts. In August 2022, I created a pop up museum - The Museum of Natural Consequences - to exhibit this project in NYC. It seems I am constantly trying to reconcile my leftist Berkeley education and deeply feminist core with my military upbringing.”

Malaika Temba

New york, New york

Malaika Temba is a textile artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Washington D.C. of Tanzanian and American heritage, Temba grew up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the U.S (MD, RI, NY). Temba’s lens and creative process are global, nourished by these experiences. Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018 and is currently an adjunct professor there in the Textiles Department.

“In the realm of seeing and feeling, there exist intricate layers, profound connections, and enduring paradoxes. My chosen medium is textile art, encompassing woven, knit, and silk-screened fabrics, harmoniously merged into textile collages. My artistic perspective is shaped by a global upbringing across Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States. I layer paints, stamps, stencils, and embroidery on innovative fabrics to distill emotional ideas and convey historical truths. The scale of my work invites viewers into immersive experiences, evoking contemplation of broader cultural systems. It explores the tension between contemporary graphic design, fast advertising, and machinery, and the historic, tactile ancestral techniques. Textiles naturally express the beauty of human labor, shedding light on gendered notions of softness in relation to textiles, domesticity, and physical labor. My work reflects the responsibility, time, and patience in labor and care traditionally expected of women in nurturing roles.”

Aida Lizalde

MExico City, mexico

Aida Lizalde is a Mexican artist whose practice is deeply rooted in their cultural background, immigration experience, and upbringing in a multi-faceted agricultural family project that included raising goats and honeybees, and harvesting pecans. Their work explores themes of metabolization, the inner workings of the body, and the ways in which it struggles to metabolize the vast array of data that it processes in relation to post-colonization, generational memory, identity, disease, and trauma. Through systems that drip, rot, and dissolve, Lizalde investigates the complex interplay between the physical and the psychological, and the natural and the artificial, alongside the potential for harmony and failure in these relationships.

Lizalde's use of materials arises from sensorial memories of their upbringing, such as digging her hand into a bucket of raw beans, scraping the yellowing crust of handmade cheese, or kicking the red clumps of dirt off her shoes in their grandfather’s ranch. Lizalde's sculptures and installations are created using ceramics, found objects, and biomatter like milk, pinto beans, hair, bacterial cultures, and guajillo peppers. They are hybrids that exist in spaces of transformation like a stomach becoming a tree trunk, an intestine becoming a territorial marker, or a pot becoming an anthropomorphic machine.

Luke Agada

Chicago, Illinois

Luke Agada, (b. 1992, Lagos) is a Nigerian artist living and working in Chicago. His practice examines themes of globalization, migration and cultural dislocation within the framework of a postcolonial world, as he reflects on the African diaspora and its impact on neo-cultural evolution. He obtained an MFA in Painting and Drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2023. In recent years, Agada has participated in shows in Lagos, New York, Accra, Berlin, Casablanca, etc. His work has been published in several journals and magazines including The Pinch Journal publication at the University of Memphis, Tennessee and Nigerian Art archives. He has also been a recipient of various awards and fellowships including the global warming international art prize, AII, New York in 2020, Janet and Russell Doubleday Award at The Art Students League of New York in 2022, The Helen Frankenthaler Award at SAIC in 2022, and The James Nelson Raymond Fellowship Award in 2023.

Mokha Laget

Santa fe, New mexico

Mokha Laget is a New Mexico-based painter known for her geometric abstractions on shaped canvas. A passionate colorist, Mokha was born in North Africa, a region of radiant light and dramatic geographical contrasts. Inspired by her Berber roots as well as vernacular architecture encountered in her studies and travel, her work explores the “gentle chaos” of perceptual and spatial ambiguity.


Initially trained in old master’s techniques in the south of France, she then studied Fine Arts at the Corcoran College of Art and Design in Washington DC. During her years in DC, she worked as a professional artist and studio assistant to painter Gene Davis, a prominent member of the Washington Color School (WCS). She holds a degree from Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service in simultaneous interpreting and has spent much of the past 25 years traveling parts of Africa, Latin America, and Asia.

Julius Cavira

Pawtucket, Rhode island

Julius Cavira is an American multidisciplinary conceptual (painting, drawing, sculpture, design, etc.) artist/ writer/comedian who has earned degrees from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA) and the Rhode Island School of Design (MFA), and is going for his second masters in Art Education. He is a two-tour O.I.F. war veteran and served in AmeriCorps, Camphill, YMCA, and Little Sisters of the Poor. Cavira performs his self-deprecating standup and improv locally in Providence, Rhode Island. He has been featured in magazines, published as a guest columnist in various papers, and currently blogs on Medium.com. Cavira was awarded artist residencies at Haystack, Anderson Ranch, Bunker Projects, etc. Cavira’s conceptual work is cathartic as well as ubiquitous in society. His pieces delve into various experiences with the military, social services, the developmentally disabled, the elderly, the youth, etc. Current topics include his perspectives on war, religion, therapy, stock exchange, suicide, in-patient wards, BIPOC, and Asian Male Hate issues. Exhibits featuring Cavira’s work have been shown at The United States Capitol, Museum of Contemporary Arts of Chicago, School of Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design Museum, St. Botolph Art Club, Providence Art Club, The Figge Museum, University of Chicago, University of Alaska in Anchorage, Veterans Memorial Commission, Quad City International Airport, etc.

Welcome September Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: August 23rd - September 19th, 2023 

AND MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR THIS MONTH’S OPEN STUDIO: 

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14TH FROM 5-7PM

Natalia Sánchez Cruz

Arecibo, Puerto rico

Natalia Sánchez was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico in 1992. She received her BFA at Columbus College of Art and Design in 2015 and based herself in Columbus, OH for seven years. During this time , she had her studio at Blockfort Columbus, participated in organizing artistic and cultural events, exhibited in group shows, and grew a network of colleges, patrons and collectors. After Hurricane Maria, she returns to Puerto Rico re-rooting herself in the town of Arecibo where she continues to develop her painting, multimedia and community engagement practices. These expressions are influenced by architecture and urban planning in her immediate landscape and by the psychological implications of the built environment and the human psyche.

Sánchez received the NALAC Fund for the Arts Grant in 2019 and with it developed an audiovisual documentary titled “País Espejo” about Arecibo’s history focused in its urban planning or lack thereof. It integrates the narratives of elders in the community, as well as historians and other community leaders. She had a solo show in Arecibo’s Casa Ulanga were together with a body of paintings showcased “Pais Espejo” back to her community. In 2021 she exhibited in the group show “ A Diasporic State of Mind" at Praxis Gallery in Chelsea, New York. In 2022 she had a solo show at Kilometro 0.2 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Shortly after exhibiting in the Kilometro 0.2 group show “Once Upon a Time” In 2023. She is currently exhibiting two pieces in Mexico City at Adhesivo Contemporary in a group show titled "Servicio a Domicilio".

Camile Sproesser

Sao Paolo, Brazil

Camile Sproesser’s paintings cross personal and fantastic narratives simultaneously. In compositions that stands out for their colours, the artist invokes the symbolic potential of animals, women and other creatures of nature and culture to create an unique imaginary world. Among portraits, visions and tarot arcana, Sproesser’s poetic universe is mysterious, satirical, playful and fearless. In drawing references from a vast literary and mythological source, the artist blends stories from the past with a feminist gaze in the present day. In this sense, the images conjured on her canvases do not establish objective judgements on the subjects they address, preferring to reverberate humours closer to instinct and opening possibilities for the spectator to unravel the narratives.

Cristobal Cea

somerville, Massachusetts

“I work with different mediums: from 3D animation to oil painting: probably because I don’t believe in disciplinary boundaries, and also because I am particularly skeptic in regards to hierarchies of knowledge: artmaking is a materially and conceptually diverse practice, and navigating the commons between digital and analogue practices is something that I appreciate immensely.

Perhaps that is why my work is rooted within the historical ambiguities and fluid boundaries that characterize my personal story and the history of Chile: abundant in myths, unspoken grievances and habits that seem really hard to break.

As if we were haunted.

My artworks are an intent on dispersing this hidden spell: unwinding media bias and ritual violence in Glorias, animating the ever-present specter of institutional violence in Hawker Haunted, or conjuring the contradictions of democratic transition through the voice of a transitional human.

Currently working on America Imaginaria: an encounter of undead and broken characters from American History -human and nonhuman- that might make some sense out of this situation…. Or not.”

Quincy, massachusetts

Maria Pinto is a writer, teaching artist, and mycophile. Her work has appeared in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Butter, and Dostoevsky Wannabe Cities: Boston, among other publications. She has been awarded fellowships and residencies by the Mass Cultural Council, The Writers' Room of Boston, The Mastheads, The Garrett on the Green, and Vermont Studio Center. She's a fiction editor at the multimedia journal Peripheries, a contributor to Rounglass Living, and the Community Programs Teaching Fellow at GrubStreet. She’s currently at work on a book inspired by fungi. Find her on Instagram @aravensgrace

Jamie Lehrhoff Levine

South Orange, New Jersey

The classical greek image of the mythological chimera was that of a monstrous, female, fire-breathing creature: an incongruous mixture of the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a dragon. Humankind has imagined and portrayed fantastical creatures since the beginning of time. But today this ancient myth exists in biotechnologically engineered forms. The current scientific definition of ‘chimera’ is any organism composed of cells derived from at least two genetically different zygotes. Translation: featherless chickens (bred for ease of production); mice with human brain cells; hybridized creatures like the geep (sheep+goat), liger (lion+tiger), beefalo (buffalo+cow), and donkra (donkey+zebra). Most recently, the world’s first primate chimeras have emerged, created from several different species of monkey embryos. Human/animal chimeras are next.

My current body of work is inspired by these modern-day chimeras, however I pick up where science leaves off, fusing the animal with the human. Details and craftsmanship are key elements in my work, as I seek to create seamless, lifelike forms. I have cast, for example, the bodies of a raw chicken and a human doll baby in resin, taking pains to unify the seemingly ‘separate’ elements into plausible whole. Often, my creatures sport weird, disturbing, or unexpectedly sexy body parts. I have mixed the body of a giraffe with the cast head of a female mannequin, her face “made up” with false eyelashes and her mouth filled with acrylic casts of my own teeth. If viewers look into the mirrored tiles that cover the plinth on which she stands, they will see a reflection of the human vagina I placed on her underbelly. Overall, my hybrid creatures are vulnerable, whimsical, and can act as lighting rods for the viewer’s catharsis. Although grotesque, they appear utterly real. Questions seem to issue from their parted lips: “if I could talk, what would I say?” “Are you, as humans, ready to listen?”

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.

Jessie Rose Vala

Cheshire, Oregon

Jessie Rose Vala (born 1977, Madison, Wisconsin) is an artist working in drawing, ceramic, and video. She received an MFA from University of Oregon and a BFA in ceramic sculpture and painting from California College of the Arts in Oakland, California. Her work explores non-linear narratives and environments through an ongoing investigation of the shifting relationships to ourselves and our surroundings. Installation and multi-channel video allows Vala’s work to negate hierarchy, allowing for multiplicity of connections and realities.

Vala’s work has been exhibited nationally and internationally. She is currently a member of Well Well Projects in Portland Oregon and is a career faculty at University of Oregon.

Anthony DiPietro

Worcester, Massachusetts

Anthony DiPietro is a gay Rhode Island (USA) native whose career has been in community-based social justice organizations and arts administration. He earned a creative writing MFA at Stony Brook University, where he also taught courses and planned and diversified arts programming. He now serves as deputy director of Rose Art Museum in Waltham, Massachusetts. A graduate of Brown University with honors in creative writing, his poems and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies, reviews, and journals including Notre Dame Review, GUESTHOUSE, Scoundrel Time, and The Washington Square Review. His first chapbook, And Walk Through, a series of poems composed on a typewriter during the pandemic lockdowns, is now available from Seven Kitchens Press, and his full-length debut poetry collection, kiss & release, will appear from Unsolicited Press in February 2024. His website is www.AnthonyWriter.com.

”My debut poetry collection, kiss & release, like all my poetry, explores Eros, memory, queer identity, and social politics. Pulitzer Poetry Prize winner Diane Seuss, an early reader of the work, writes that the collection is driven by its intense voice. This voice is agitated, insistent, emotional; the persona questions everything it observes, and often has conversations with itself or an imagined other.

Anchored by the long poem, “Love Is Finished Again,” which revealed in seven “movements,” I think of kiss & release as a meditation on the way things happen over and over again: history repeats; politicians lie; lovers kiss goodnight each time they part. At the same time, it is a meditation on how forms decay: we break up and find new lovers; systems become corrupt; modern life is an allegory in which we replace everything with a newer, faster model.”

Grace Lynne Haynes

Brooklyn, New york

Grace Lynne Haynes is a Brooklyn based artist born in California. Her paintings examine the sacred lives and practices of Black women rooted in a mythology of her own making. Intricate moments are juxtaposed against flat, black swaths of paint shaped to represent female bodies. These paintings are situated from her own imagined world used to conjure an alternate universe. She explores ways in which women come together and in some cases fall apart through dance and acts of intimacy. These women are in close proximity to one another, however there is distance between them creating tension within their interaction. What happens when two bodies enter one space? Do they come together in the midst of an embrace or act out of inner turmoil? Through these invented and mythological beings Grace explores the complicated emotions that take place when women come together or embrace solitude. Grace values the tradition of African-American collage artists who’ve reclaimed figurative languages through found materials. Fabric, wallpaper, and photographs are collaged into her paintings with precision honoring this rich legacy. She then flattens the space within her paintings and reconfigures traditional formal systems through color, pattern and texture creating my own visual language.

Grace is an inaugural member of Kehinde Wiley's Black Rock Senegal residency, and has received a residency fellowship from the Vermont Studio Center, Virginia Center for the Arts, and MASS MoCA. She has had her work published on the cover of The New Yorker, and has been featured in WhiteWall Magazine, CNN Art & Style, Vogue, New American Paintings, the LA Times, and was featured in Daily Collector's "20 Painters Who Are Shaping the Next Decade." Grace has exhibited her work internationally in Africa and Europe, and will be having her first international solo exhibition in Italy fall of 2024.

Francheska Alcantara

Tulsa, Oklahoma

Francheska Alcántara is a queer Afro-Caribbean interdisciplinary artist based in Tulsa, OK. Their work explores material textures, detritus accumulations, and slippages between memories, and histories.

My work plays at the intersection of gesture, ritual, and myth within the Black diasporic imagination. I rework, repurpose, and transform artifacts such as brown paper bags, Hispano cuaba soap, dominoes, and organic residues through actions like sewing, folding, cutting, burning, and layering. 

I use the subjective experiences of these artifacts or actions to interrogate how they create social meaning and cultural norms. These explorations point to slippages of self and tensions around colonial relations to exoticization while expanding our capacity for pleasure, refusal, and liberation. 

Welcome August Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: August 9th - 22nd, 2023

Rowan Renee

Brooklyn, NY

Rowan Renee (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a genderqueer artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. Their work addresses intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence and the impact of the criminal legal system through image, text and installation. They have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at Smack Mellon (2021), Five Myles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015), with reviews in publications including VICE, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic, and The New York Times. They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation and the Jerome Hill Foundation, and have been an Artist-in-Residence at the Center for Book Arts, NARS Foundation, Red Bull Arts and the Textile Arts Center. In 2022, they will be the second Artist-in-Residence at Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, NY. Currently, their project Between the Lines, supported by We, Women Photo, runs art workshops by correspondence with LGBTQ+ people currently incarcerated in Florida. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood at MoMA PS1.

Rashin Fahandej

Framingham, Massachusetts

Rashin Fahandej is an Iranian-American immersive storyteller, futurist, and cultural activist. Fahandej's projects center on marginalized voices and the role of media, technology, and public collaboration in generating social change. A proponent of “Art as Ecosystem,” she defines her projects as a “Poetic Cyber Movement for Social Justice,” where art mobilizes a plethora of voices by creating connections between public places and virtual spaces. Fahandej is an assistant professor of emerging and interactive media at Emerson College and a Senior Co-Creation Research-Practitioner at MIT Open Documentary Lab.


Fahandej is the founder of “A Father’s Lullaby, “ a multi-platform, co-creative project that highlights the role of men in raising children and their absence due to racial disparities in the criminal justice system. This work was incubated as part of the Boston Mayor’s Office Artist-In-Residence (2017) and a multi-year research fellowship with the MIT Open Documentary Lab. It won the 2021 Prix Ars Electronica Festival Award of Distinction in Digital Musics & Sound Ars and the Institute of Contemporary Arts’ James and Audrey Foster Prize (2019), Mass Cultural Council Artist Fellowship (2019), and was further supported by residencies and fellowships with ThoughtWorks Arts and Scatter VR Volumetric Filmmaking (2019), Framingham Cultural Council (2019), and Boston Center for the Arts Public Art Residency (2018).

Beth Livensperger

Ridgewood, New York

Originally from the Midwest, Beth Livensperger holds a B.F.A. from The Cooper Union, and an M.F.A. in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. She has exhibited at venues in NYC, widely throughout the U.S., and in Seoul, Korea. Her solo projects have been hosted by The Abrons Arts Center and Chashama, and she has participated in group exhibitions at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, RISD Memorial Hall Gallery, The Painting Center, and Essex Flowers, among many others. Her work has been reviewed in Politico, Two Coats of Paint blog, and WNYC’s Culture Datebook. Residency and grant support has been received by the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Lower East Side Printshop, Sam and Adele Golden Foundation, Virginia Center for Creative Arts, The Abrons Arts Center, and the Saltonstall Foundation, among others.

“My practice responds to forces shaping our collective experience, like social hierarchies, class, and technology. Installations I’ve made over the last several years meditate on everything from women navigating the contemporary workplace, to the omnipresence of surveillance technology and the warping effect of the digital on our perceptions and relationships. Public architecture, be it corporate office or government building, serves as a lynchpin in my work: public space sits at the convergence of public control and individual agency. My ink on paper pieces are cut and collaged into room-sized installations which respond to the particulars of a given space.:”

Kate Conlon

medford, massachusetts

Kate Conlon is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work draws inspiration from the history of scientific thought. Conlon’s sculpture, print, and book works have been exhibited at venues including 68 Projects Berlin; OC OSAKA; Julius Caesar, Chicago; Goldfinch, Chicago; MANA Contemporary; and The Grand Rapids Art Museum. She has received grants and residencies from MASS MoCA, Kala Art Institute, Vermont Studio Center, ACRE, and the Chicago Artists Coalition. She was named the Chicago Public Library Foundation’s Artist in Residence for the 2020-2021 year.

Conlon is co-director of Limited Time Engagement Press and served as a founding director of Fernwey Gallery and Editions from 2014 to 2018. Conlon received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BA from Smith College. She is currently a Professor of the Practice in Print at SMFA @ Tufts University.

Taipei, Taiwan

Rexy Tseng (b. 1986) is a visual artist who works primarily in painting and installation. His art practice derives from the dark humor and unrequited desires found within contemporary living conditions. Blurring bodily forms and objects, Tseng’s works press sensations against logic. By expanding on intimate observations, Tseng stages the unresolved past with possible futures, where he addresses personal politics, technological flaws, and hurt moments. Born and raised in Taipei until the age of thirteen, Tseng relocated to upstate New York to further his education. He received a BFA from Carnegie Mellon University in 2009, he withdrew from MFA at UCLA in 2012, and he withdrew from MFA at University of Oxford in 2017. Between degrees, Tseng worked as a software engineer in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York.

Tseng has exhibited in Armenia, China, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, Japan, Lithuania, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, the U.K., and the U.S.. He has received awards and recognition from Allegro Prize, Charlottenborg Foundation, Li Chun-Shan Foundation Visual Art Awards, Taipei Art Awards, Tomorrow Sculpture Awards, and others. Tseng has participated in artist residencies internationally, including Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Cite internationale des arts, National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Korea), Sichuan Fine Arts Institute, and more.

Christine Brown

Worcester, Massachusetts

“I am a quilter. With fabric, I connect the little pieces in all of us that are better together. Quilts hold our intimate secrets and silent expectations. They keep us warm and comfort us. Utilitarian and functional, they are often overlooked as objects with little value. Yet, throughout time, they are ever present, ever faithful. I am inspired by the connection, and importance of textiles commonly referred to as “woman’s work. Often considered the hobbies of idle hands, these pieces are historical documents as important and valid as treaties, statues, and maps. They hold our collective values as silent observers, and they are representational of the time period they were constructed in. By refocusing quilts as art, I hope to illuminate, and elevate them to the visual technically intricate and important masterpieces that they are.”

Ara Koh

Washington, DC

Ara Koh was born in Seoul, South Korea from a fashion designer mother, and an industrial designer father. She received her BFA in Ceramics and Glass from Hongik University, Seoul, South Korea in 2018, and was an exchange student at California State University, Long Beach in 2016. Ara graduated with an MFA in Ceramic Art at New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2020. Her works are installations claiming space. The intensity of the labor, repetitiveness, and palliative obsessiveness manifested in her sculpture brings a fresh reveal to the ageless themes of body, architecture-shelter and landscape.

​Her works have been exhibited in South Korea and in the United States. Ara has received numerous awards including the Minister of Foreign Affairs Honor by the Korean government. Her works are collected by Alfred Ceramic Art Museum, Daekyo Culture Foundation, Winell Corporation in Korea, and many personal collectors. Ara Koh currently lives and works in Washington DC.

Meghan O’Hara

Santa Cruz, California

Meghan O’Hara is a documentary filmmaker and Associate Professor of Documentary Film at California State University Monterey Bay. Her short film “The Field Trip”, co-directed with Mike Attie and Rodrigo Ojeda-Beck, premiered at the 2021 Sundance Film Festival, was featured in the New York Times ‘Op-Docs’ series and selected as a Vimeo ‘Staff Pick.’ She co-directed the feature documentary, “In Country” with Mike Attie in 2014, which screened at Full Frame, Hot Docs, and CPH:DOX, among others. She was a Sundance Documentary Film Program Fellow in 2014 and received an award for Excellence in Cinematography from Eastman/Kodak. O’Hara’s work has received support from The NEH, The Sundance Institute, HotDocs Forum, Gotham, and DOK.Incubator. O'Hara is currently in production on a feature documentary about the long-forgotten Tektite Program with art historian/curator/musician James Merle Thomas. O’Hara holds an MFA in Documentary from Stanford University and a BA in nonfiction from Hampshire College. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA with her partner Mikko and her son, Oskar.

James Merle Thomas

Philadelphia, pennsylvania

James Merle Thomas is a writer, curator, and creative arts executive based in New York. For two decades, Thomas has worked at the intersection of contemporary art, visual culture, higher education, and arts administration in various museums, universities, and nonprofit arts institutions. His editorial and curatorial work has largely focused on modern and global contemporary art and visual culture; major projects include leadership roles in organizing the 2nd Seville Biennial, the 7th Gwangju Biennale, and the Third Paris Triennale with artistic director Okwui Enwezor. He is currently Deputy Director at the Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, where he shapes strategic partnerships with various museums and universities, including the Frankenthaler Climate Initiative. Thomas holds a doctorate in art history from Stanford University, and has held faculty positions at Temple University, the University of Delaware, and the University of Southern California.

Welcome July Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: July 12th - August 8th, 2023

And mark your calendars for this month’s Open Studios on Thursday, August 3rd from 5-7pm!

Laura Sofía Pérez

Brooklyn, NY

Laura Sofía Pérez is an interdisciplinary artist who works in video, film, sound, and installation. She received her MFA in Film/Video from California Institute of the Arts. Her work draws from feminist and avant-garde cinema, phenomenological philosophy, Caribbean Postcolonial theory, and ancestral knowledge. She often works in collaborative settings of experimentation and improvisation with artists of varying disciplines and backgrounds to voice common perspectives on political, cultural, and social issues. Recent artist residencies include The Studios at MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2023), BAiR Emerging at Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, Banff, Canada (2020), the AfA Masterclass: Radical Care with Terike Haapoja (2020), and La Práctica at Beta-Local, San Juan, Puerto Rico (2019).

Dylan DeWitt

West Hartford, Connecticut

Dylan DeWitt investigates the unusual, the everyday, and the puzzling territories in between. His experiential works aim to provoke heightened perceptual states in viewers, posing questions about perception and attention, how we decide which parts of the world are significant, and what counts as an image. Dylan holds a BFA in Illustration from the Rhode Island School of Design, and an MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. His work has appeared in New American Paintings, Floorr Magazine, and Art Maze Mag. He has been a resident at the Jentel Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, Hambidge Center, and Yale/Norfolk. Dylan teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design, and lives and works in Hartford, Connecticut.

“I create situations that encourage people to enter states of art-like heightened awareness. Often this entails finding ways of pointing out the latent image-ness within what already exists around us—coaxing viewers to respond to their mundane surroundings with the same attention and sensitivity we ordinarily reserve for works of art.

Using a variety of techniques, I quietly make alterations to everyday spaces such as hallways, bathrooms and elevators, playfully folding anomalies into the environment for viewers to discover. The physical pieces are not precious in themselves; instead I consider the experiences they engender the primary works of art. I expect viewers to overlook my interventions, discover them, second- guess them, wonder where they are or are not. In this way, my artworks are as much about what happens when someone looks away from them as when he or she looks directly at them. As the Buddhist proverb cautions: Do not mistake the finger pointing at the moon for the moon.”

Batoul Ballout

Dearborn, Michigan

Originally from Beirut, Lebanon, Batoul Ballout immigrated to the United States in 2014. Ballout’s studio practice uses painting, drawing, and installation to explore what it means to be— an immigrant, a person with PTSD, an Artist etc.— in an unstable world. In her work, she explores memory and the constant desire to hold on to fleeting experiences. She paints to maintain an archive, to understand her struggles and heal. Ultimately, Ballout’s art is a way for her to connect with herself and others, explore the complexities of the human experience, and work towards a more compassionate reality.

“I engage in forms of storytelling that contend with trauma, belonging, and identity. Growing up in Lebanon and later immigrating to the USA triggered my work to act as a form of resistance and rebuilding. I consider each painting to be a repository of life as I experience it in the present, live with its past remnants, and long for its future. I explore memory and the constant desire to hold on to fleeting experiences. Through my work, I aim to give space to the pain and anxiety that so often accompany these experiences, as well as to the hope and resilience that can be found through the act of making. My work also examines the fragile nature of the human body and the ways in which it can be both a source of strength and a site of vulnerability. I explore the poetic potentialities and mutual existence of oil paint, construction materials, personal clothing items, et cetera. My work encompasses states of being— like fear, hiding, comfort, gentleness, and sometimes childlike innocence. I am particularly interested in exploring the theme of transparency and concealment, both in terms of the ways in which we reveal ourselves to others and hide or protect ourselves. I paint as a process to understand my struggle, to heal, and to question where and when, if ever, the tether of home can be reattached.”

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Folayemi Wilson is as an object and image maker that celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. She explores the Black Atlantic experience though sculptural and multimedia installations presenting speculative fictions that reference history, integrating inspiration from American vernacular architecture, literature, and science fiction. Using original sculpture, found objects, archival media, sound and video, her process utilizes training in art history and critical theory employing the archive and other research methodologies to mine history for use as material in her creative practice.

Wilson earned a MFA in Furniture Design from the Rhode Island School of Design with a concentration in Art History, Theory & Criticism and holds a MBA from New York University’s Stern School of Business. She is a co-founder and principal of blkHaUS studios, a socially-focused design studio founded in Chicago, now based in Philadelphia. Earlier in her career she worked as a graphic designer and art director in New York founding Studio W, Inc., working for clients such as Condé Nast Publications, Time Warner, The New York Times, Black Entertainment Television (BET), and Williams Sonoma. She has been a grant recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts, the Propeller Fund, and a two-time recipient of an individual artist grant from the Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies of the Fine Arts. Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, among other publications. Wilson has been awarded residencies or fellowships at ACRE, Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Djerassi Artist Residency, Kohler Arts/Industry program, Haystack, MacDowell, and Purchase College/SUNY Purchase, New York.

Bo Kim

Vienna, Virginia

Bo Kim is an artist-researcher, and educator who is based in both Chicago, IL and Northern Virginia. She was born in Busan, South Korea and holds an MA in Art Therapy and Counseling from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), as well as an MFA in Oriental Painting from Hongik University in South Korea. In 2009, she completed her BFA in Paintings from Dongduk Women's University.

Kim's work is deeply influenced by natural science research, ecology, and biology, and she has been producing a unique body of work that explores the intersection of her being for over a decade. Her art is notable for its combination of Western painting techniques with traditional Korean materials, such as natural stone-crushed pigments, animal skin glue, and Hanji [mulberry tree paper]. Kim's work showcases her unique perspective and the ways in which she incorporates diverse cultural and scientific influences into her artistic practice.

Kim's work has been featured in several national exhibitions, including those held at the Consulate General of the Republic of Korea in Washington, D.C., the Asian Arts & Culture Center at Towson University in Towson, MD, the Korean Cultural Center in New York, NY, the Sejong Center in Seoul, South Korea, and the CAFA Art Museum in Beijing, China.

Stephanie Simek

Portland, Oregon

Stephanie Simek has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 2007. At that time, she began making and performing with instruments she built from deconstructed obsolete devices. She continued on the path of researching the inner workings of materials and systems with unique and exceptional properties, becoming an artist in residence at the Museum of Contemporary Craft in Portland. This engagement was dedicated to an inquiry titled "Jewels/Joules", and led to a research residency at Signal Culture in New York, where she studied the magnetic recording potential of minerals. Looking further into visualizing what is happening under the surface, Simek worked as a physicist’s apprentice making ultrasonic sensors in Oregon’s Silicon Forest. This two-year partnership allowed her to incorporate specialized skills into her practice and further develop her perspective on material relationships and how they can be used to resist or work around preconceived limitations. Using a wide array of materials, she makes works in two dimensions, three dimensions, sound, and performance.

Benjamin Spalding

Portland, Maine

Benjamin Spalding is an interdisciplinary artist, and DJ based in Portland, Maine. Taking inspiration from his Puerto Rican grandfather’s profession as a big band leader, Spalding’s practice is preoccupied with movement and the pageantry of the body, weaving together elements of club culture, sports, and nature with narrative. After living in New York for college, Spalding relocated to Berlin, Germany for 8 years to define his studio practice. It is in Berlin where he found a love for queer club culture and ecstatic dance. This has found its way into his practice, where each project is loosely viewed as if it were a nightclub, with a focus on tension and material embodiment. In this sense, Spalding remixes disparate personal narratives through material into visuals that celebrate and share his experience in the margin. The dance floor is a crucial social tool for both physical release and group experience and for Spalding, it provides a conceptual space for radical, figurative storytelling.

Yana Nosenko

Boston, Massachusetts

Yana Nosenko obtained a Graphic Design degree and worked for an urban planning company before turning to photography and video. She explores immigration, displacement, nomadism, and familial separation, reflecting on her own experiences growing up in Moscow, Russia. Her work was recently exhibited at the International Center of Photography Museum in New York City, Black Box Gallery, and Abigail Ogilvy Gallery. Yana currently obtains an MFA in Photography at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design and resides in Boston, MA.

Gina Gwen Palacios

Brownsville, Texas

Gina Gwen Palacios was born in Taft, Texas. She earned an MFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Studio Art at Brandeis University, an MA from The University of Texas at Austin in Instructional Technology, a BA from Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi in TV/Film and an AA from Del Mar College in Radio/Television. Gina is currently an Assistant Professor of Painting/Drawing and the Associate Director for the School of Art & Design at The University of Texas at Rio Grande Valley.
Gina has exhibited in the US and abroad, including the Arlington Art Center (Arlington, VA), Carlsbad Museum (Carlsbad, NM), Asya Geisberg Gallery (New York, NY), Villa Victoria Center for the Arts (Boston, MA), List Art Center, Brown University (Providence, RI), BAIT15 (Abu Dhabi, UAE), Anteism Gallery (Montreal, Canada) and the Newport Art Museum (Newport, RI).

”Drawing on my family history and Mexican American identity, I use traditional and non-traditional materials, including paint, cardboard, cotton, and sandpaper, to highlight an often underrepresented geographic and cultural narrative. Growing up in South Texas, I absorbed my parents’ stories about migrant farm work, cotton picking, and the discrimination they experienced in the region, including being punished for speaking Spanish, having their first names anglicized, and being forced out of school. Although vast expanses of the southwestern United States were once part of Mexico, Mexican American families who have deep roots in the area are treated as outsiders, as usurpers of the land and resources their families have occupied, in many cases, for generations. I create portraits of my family’s history, using colors and materials that emphasize their connection to their surroundings and the long cultural lineage of which I am a part of.”

Emily Velez Nelms

New Haven, Connecticut

Emily Velez Nelms (she/her) was born and raised in southern Florida. She studied painting at Savannah College of Art and Design (BFA 2013) and sculpture at the University of California Los Angeles (MFA 2019). Her work takes various forms from compact objects to video, writing, and installation. Velez Nelms’ work engages with Histories in the Southern United States, affect, and Indigenous Methodology.

Velez Nelms’ studio practice extends to the archive, revisiting non-ceremonial objects of Native American communities of the Southeast and Southwest. She is currently investigating an accession of 200 objects collected during fieldwork to the Everglades wetlands, by anthropologists from the Yale Peabody Museum.

She is also engaged in a long-term project titled, Sheba, part costume, performance, and moving image which documents her grandmother’s labor as an exotic dancer on Miami Beach during the 1980s. This work is an extension of a body of research on cultural tourist attractions within Florida from 1904 to the present day.

Velez Nelms is developing a text titled Domestic Exotic which documents this early form of economy in the State, centered on perceived racial difference as entertainment. Velez Nelms was awarded the International Sculpture Residency, as well as a residency at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Velez Nelms has also engaged in the study of architecture and spatial theory at the University of Miami and Yale University. This fall she will participate as a studio fellow at the Whitney ISP.