Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: March 1st - 28th, 2023
Open Studios: March 23rd 5-7PM
Photo by Vincent Tullo
sTo Len
Glendale, New york
I am a genre fluid artist working within the field of socially and ecologically engaged art. I create artistic methodologies to research and document place that help establish new public perspectives and encourage dialogue between communities and the unseen urban infrastructure around them. The cross-disciplinary nature of my practice has included printmaking with polluted waterways, public performance events at Superfund sites, field recordings, pirate radio broadcasting, coastal clean ups, virtual 3D scans, book publishing and archival video mash ups. I have collaborated with local historians, citizen groups, environmentalists, activists, municipal agencies and the general public through open call submission projects, co-curatorial actions, interactive workshops, and residencies.
Damon Campagna
Wakefield, Rhode Island
Damon Campagna is a multidisciplinary artist and curator from Rhode Island. Damon’s current work is informed by his work in the museum field, specifically documenting 9/11 World Trade Center-related artifacts for the New York City Fire Department. This experience intensely shapes and affects his practice, which involves the analysis, logging, and curation of self through markmaking, and the ramifications of that pursuit. The possibility that we may form self-image and examine our existence through a self-curated collection of our creations is fascinating to him. Damon’s work bridges the gap between printmaking and immersive installatio
An MFA 2D graduate of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Damon was included in Abigail Ogilvy Gallery’s 2019 Fresh Faces in Boston, multiple Rhode Island-based group exhibitions in 2021 and 2022 and several projects with the Boston-based BOSSCRITT artists group. He was awarded an Assets for Artists Capacity-Building Grant in March of 2021 and recently featured in The Hand, Artscope, Create! and Boston Art Review.
Elsa María Meléndez
Caguas, Puerto Rico
Elsa María Meléndez is a visual artist born in Caguas, Puerto Rico (1974) with 25 years of artistic career. She has exhibited collectively in more than 95 exhibitions in the United States, Uruguay, Cuba, Ireland, Romania, Portugal, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Meléndez uses printmaking techniques, embroidery and large accumulations of textiles and synthetic materials. The iconography in her work draws on characteristics that define the social and cultural idiosyncrasies of her environment. Meléndez's work documents uncertainty, while defending the right to doubt in debates between tragedy, comedy, innocence and malice. Her proposal makes visible cultural contradictions and the lack of public policies that seek the quality of life of Puerto Ricans. Through the representation of women in public and private life, she develops an antithesis of behavioral judgments by denouncing misogyny.
Kate Stone
Brooklyn, New York
Kate Stone is a Brooklyn-based artist working across sculpture, photography and animation. She creates uncanny domestic spaces and liminal environments that are often in the midst of transformation or being overtaken by natural, supernatural or invisible forces. These forces serve as stand-ins for the anxiety that current world events bring into our personal lives and private spaces.
Kate received a BA from Bard College and an MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. She has been awarded the Tierney Fellowship, The Lotos Foundation Prize, an FST StudioProjects Grant and a Kone Foundation Grant. She has attended residencies at NARS Foundation, Artists Alliance LES Studio Program, Kone Foundation and Mudhouse Residency in rural Greece. Her work has been exhibited at 601Artspace, bitforms gallery, Cuchifritos Gallery + Project Space, Dinner Gallery, FiveMyles, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Rubber Factory, Spring Break Art Show, South Bend Museum of Art, The Museum of Broken Relationships and Transmitter Gallery, among others.
Miami, Florida
James Balo is a Haitian-Jamaican multidisciplinary-artist based in Baltimore, Maryland, but originally from Carol City, FL, raised by the vast Caribbean communities in greater Miami.
Balo is a 2018 United States Presidential Scholar in The Arts and National YoungArts Foundation Finalist in Visual Arts will receive his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
James’ work has been experienced throughout and outside of the country, including Miami, Fl, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Virginia, Baltimore, Maryland, Chicago, New York, Atlanta, Georgia, and Haiti. Balo, who has performed and exhibited at John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Miami, Florida’s Adrienne Arsht Center, Sullivan Galleries, and the National YoungArts Foundation Gallery, considers himself to be a Griot or a Banton-- a rakontè istwa or an mc who keeps up the tradition of passing down history. He is in awe of the origin of black love stories.
Balo is creating interdisciplinary collages that take the form of psalm, prose, installation, photo, film, textile, fashion, and performance. His work dances and evolves through medium and presentation. James is archiving an encyclopedia of his family’s history, culture, and tradition.
Gerri Spilka
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
I consider myself an alchemist. I take ordinary pieces of cotton and transform them into large shapes of glorious, luminous colors. I bring together disparate elements of quilting, modern abstraction, human interactions, and the grittiness of urban life to re-imagine the traditional, small and fussy work of sewing into a visual narrative on the collective human experience.
My work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally in the U.S., Canada, and Europe. It is held in private collections and in public collections including the International Quilt Museum and Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska, Park Towne Place Art Collection, and the Fox School of Business at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. I am currently represented by Todd Merrill Studio in NYC and Southampton, NY.
Ada del Pilar Ortiz
Bayamón, Puerto Rico
Ada del Pilar Ortiz is an interdisciplinary sculptor and fine artist born in Barranquitas, Puerto Rico. Her work has been presented at the Arsenal de la Puntilla Museum as part of the 2018 National Exhibition of the Arts dedicated to sculpture, and at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Puerto Rico. She has participated in artist residencies including Área: Lugar de Proyectos Residency Program and the interdisciplinary program “La Práctica” at Beta Local. During her upcoming residency Ada will create cyanotypes and alternative photographic processes of fictional architectural spaces based on a photo essay she made in southern Puerto Rico. This area of the island was severely affected by the January 2020 earthquakes and is still recovering to this day.
Hannah Knight Leighton
Los Angeles, California
Hannah Knight Leighton’s current work focuses on the tension between traditional craft techniques, painting history, the aesthetics of casual consumerism, and the influence of digital technologies on contemporary perception. Beginning with digital drawings, Leighton uses a tufting gun to create large-scale abstract paintings of acrylic yarn on monk’s cloth. Leighton received a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2015 and an MFA from University of New Mexico in 2021. Leighton participated in the Green Olive Arts Residency program in Morocco and her work has been featured in three issues of New American Paintings. Leighton had her first solo exhibition with Ochi Gallery in Sun Valley, ID in August 2021. Her next solo exhibition will debut in Los Angeles at Ochi in the summer of 2023.
Bruno Miguel
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Bruno Miguel (b. 1981) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. An inveterate collector of quotidian objects, Miguel’s practice explores the fluid relationships and personal stories embedded in familiar household items and consumer products to reframe the international dimensions of Pop Art and the avant-garde in Brazil. Miguel’s paintings and installations---which frequently manipulate traditional Carnival techniques in polyurethane foam, resin, and papier mache—convey the layered histories of Rio de Janeiro's landscape from a critical periphery.
He has had individual institutional exhibitions at Largo das Artes (2010), Museum Paço Imperial, Rio de Janeiro (2016), Centro Cultural da Caixa Econômica Federal, and Centro Cultural São Paulo (2016). His work was included in multiple editions of the Biennial of La Paz, Bolivia. In 2007, Miguel received an honorary mention at the V International Biennial of Art SIART in La Paz, Bolivia, followed by a fellowship from the Furnas Social-cultural for Artistic Talents. His work was included in group exhibitions at the Cultural Center Bank of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (2008 and 2009); Museum of Contemporary Art, Santiago, Chile (2010); Caixa Cultural, Rio de Janeiro (2011); Museum of Modern Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAM-RJ, 2012); Hélio Oiticica Art Center, Rio de Janeiro (2012); Museum of the Republic, Rio de Janeiro (2013); and Museum of Art, Rio de Janeiro (MAR-RJ, 2014).
Miguel graduated in Fine Arts and Painting from the the School of Visual Arts, Federal University of Rio de Janeiro. Currently, he teaches art and art theory at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and at the School of Visual Arts, Parque Lage. He also curates Mais Pintura: The Light that Veils the Body is the One that Reveals the Canvas, a project and publication series dedicated to the emerging generation of Brazilian painters.
Cima Khademi
Amherst, Massachusetts
Cima Khademi is a visual artist currently based in Amherst, MA with a focus in multidisciplinary installation. She has recently obtained an MFA of Studio Arts from UMass Amherst and is currently working as an adjunct professor for UMass Amherst, as well as Greenfield Community college. Khademi’s current work focuses on the unique experience of “identity” as an immigrant. The particular state where identity and homeland are called into question and we find ourselves simultaneously standing on the threshold of two worlds. Her experience of identity comes from two countries that are radically different. Her creative practice is an exploration of balance in a diasporic space regarding class, gender, and ethnicity through materials and metaphors.