Welcome June Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: June 14th - july 11th, 2023

And mark your calendars for this month’s Open Studios on Thursday, July 6th from 5-7pm!

Sandy Williams IV

Richmond, Virginia

Sandy Williams IV is an artist and educator whose work generates moments of communal catharsis. Their conceptual and research-based practice uses time itself as a material and aims to unfold the hidden legacies of public spaces. Through ephemeral, malleable, and collaborative public memorials, Williams’ work unsettles popular colonial logics of permanence, uniformity, and displacement. This work creates participatory paths for communal engagement informed by targeted research and site-specificity: holding space for disenfranchised public memories and visualizing frameworks of emancipation and shared agency.

While aesthetically Williams’ work flirts with minimalism, the practice is deeply interdisciplinary, and carefully layers contextual research, communal activity, collaboration, civic action, and performance. Their projects expand the limits of the gallery toward public space: places of education and worship, fashion, virtual portals, and even upward to the sky. This work is made in solidarity with the generations of freedom fighters who have dared to unsettle global colonial practices and the visible and invisible structures that sustain them.

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.”

Awilda Sterling

San Juan, pUerto rico

My work develops in Puerto Rico, a Caribbean island where black women’s art is silenced, especially in the context of abstraction in visual art and dance. My practice is an extension of my daily life. Uncertainty, the underlying condition of life in Puerto Rico, is a consistent platform for my work, which sustains itself from precariousness, debris, and the
ephemeral. Being an active senior female contemporary Black artist, my installations and performances intertwine marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibility of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinary, and feeding from Yoruba Caribbean traditions, I transgress the boundaries between drawing, painting, and performance, through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts traditions. Abstract expressionism is at the core of my practice. Through it I found a means to objectify concerns about color, shadow, light, and contrast as equivalents to particular states of being, which I then translate to the three-dimensionality of performative actions. Led by curiosity, the aesthetic structure of my work is both fixed and improvised, nourished by elements and materials found, uprooted, or decadent. I am strongly driven to gesture. Trained as a painter, I seek parallels in performative action. I like to think of my performing body as the moving element in space, using three-dimensional space as an imaginary canvas. The plasticity of my movements aligns ancestral embodiment with contemporary aesthetic values.

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

Erin Fostel (b.1981) is a visual artist who creates representational drawings with charcoal. Her work often depicts the everyday moments of life, from images of intimate home interiors to the shared public space. She holds a BFA in Drawing and Art History from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her drawings have been featured in group and solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art and the Virginia Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work has been included in local and international publications, as well as private and institutional collections. Her studio is based in Baltimore, MD.

“My drawings invite viewers to consider connections to physical spaces they inhabit. Whether the urban landscape of a city or the private interior of a home, I choose not to draw the occupants, and with their absence I hope to encourage the viewer to not only imagine those not shown, but also to ruminate on correlations to their own personal environments. In my shadow drawings I draw particular attention to the malleability of our relationship to space, through even the continuously variable influence of light.”

Michelle Yanís Rodríguez-Olivero (Carolina, Puerto Rico 1989) Writer and Cultural Manager. She has a bachelor's degree in Comparative Literature and Audiovisual Communication from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. She gave a poetry writing workshop in the Municipality of San Juan during 2022 and 2023. She is the author of ''Ataque de risa / Ataque de llanto'' (2012) and "Creatura" (2018) both of poetry and ''Medidas a ojo'' (2014) of short stories, the radio novel "Avistamientos en Kanabin" (2020) and the travel memoir Milagros del Asombro (2022). Her texts have been published in Chile, Mexico, Spain and Uruguay. She won first place in the international contest of the Spanish magazine La Oca Loca (2017), the Literary Contest of the Polytechnic University of Puerto Rico (2008) and in the poetry contest of the American University (2010).

Together with writer Magaly Quiñones she was dedicated the 1st National Meeting of Women Poets of the Atlantic (2016) in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico. Since 2008 R.O. also expresses herself artistically through performance, highlighted with "Cuerpo de tierra" (2011), "MujerSuela" (2015), "Vestiduras duras"(2017), "Torturas pasivas" (2019) and "Rompecuna" (2023). Currently, she is Coordinator at the Centro de Economía Creativa and is studying for an interuniversity master's degree in Cultural Management at the University of Valencia, Spain.

Hogan Seidel

Seattle, WAshington

Hogan Seidel is a moving image artist currently living and working in Seattle, WA. They have taught experimental film, photography, interactive media, and art history as affiliated faculty at The Seattle Film Institute, Emerson College, and the University of Massachusetts Lowell. As of 2021, they are a co-editor for Analog Cookbook, a UNC press biannual journal about analog film and art.

Hogan works in the traditions of experimental film, photochemical abstraction, new media, and collage. They examine queer theories, myths, and histories through the hybrid practice of analog and digital media making.

Hogan’s approach is informed by the integrity of the filmic and digital medium. Focusing on what truths lie in the cracks between emulsion and pixels, what awareness comes from chemical and glitch abstractions, and what hope is birthed from the digital and analog materiality collaged together.

Sonya Lara

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Sonya Lara is a biracial Mexican American writer. She received her BA in Creative Writing from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her MFA in Poetry from Virginia Tech. She was accepted for the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop with Leila Chatti, the Juniper Summer Writing Institute, the Hambidge Creative Residency Program, the Peter Bullough Foundation Residency, the Blue Mountain Center Residency, the Good Hart Artist Residency, and the Shenandoah National Park Artist-in-Residence Residency.


She was a finalist for the Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship and the Outpost Residency Fellowship, and was shortlisted for The Eavan Boland Emerging Poet Award and runner-up in Shenandoah’s Graybeal-Gowen Prize for Virginia Poets. Her work appeared or is forthcoming in Frontier, The Pinch, X-R-A-Y Lit, Shenandoah, Ninth Letter, AGNI, The Los Angeles Review, The Acentos Review, and elsewhere. For more information, please visit sonyalara.com.

Ana Portnoy Brimmer

Mayagüez, Puerto Rico

Ana Portnoy Brimmer is a poet, freelance translator and organizer from Puerto Rico. She holds a BA and an MA in English Literature from the University of Puerto Rico, and is an alumna of the MFA program in Creative Writing at Rutgers University-Newark. To Love an Island, her debut poetry collection, was originally the winner of YesYes Books’ 2019 Vinyl 45 Chapbook Contest. Que tiemble, a derivative work in Spanish, was published with La Impresora in April 2023. Ana is the winner of the 92Y Discovery Poetry Contest 2020, and was named one of Poets & Writers 2021 Debut Poets. Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Prairie Schooner, Southeast Review, Gulf Coast, Society and Space, Sixth Finch, Periódico de Poesía-UNAM, Foundry Journal, Sx Salon, The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT, Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, Centro Journal, among others. Ana is the daughter of Mexican-Jewish immigrants, resides in Puerto Rico and finds hope in the poetics of dance parties and revolution.

Natalie Shapero

Los Angeles, California

Natalie Shapero is an associate professor of English at UC Irvine and the author of the poetry collections POPULAR LONGING, HARD CHILD, and NO OBJECT. Her writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Granta, The Paris Review, The London Review of Books, and elsewhere. She lives in Los Angeles.

Rolando André López Torres

San juan, Puerto rico + Boston, Massachusetts

Rolando André López Torres is a writer based between Boston and San Juan, Puerto Rico. In 2010, he was a recipient of the Writing Fellowship at Loyola University New Orleans. In 2020, his poem "wealth" was selected by Porsha Olayiwola for a special Afrofuturist reading at City Hall (due to the pandemic, the reading was virtual). In 2021, he was the 1st Place Winner of the Voices of Color Fellowship at Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. Currently, Rolando-André is collaborating with Puerto Rican author Francisco Félix on a translation of his book, "Sobre los domingos," a chronicle about life in urban Puerto Rico post-María, originally published in 2019 by La Impresora, a homegrown, communally driven press. He is currently at work on "Yemenja's Dream" and "A Name is an Unquiet City," respectively fiction and nonfiction works which deploy hybrid uses of genre.