Welcome Massachusetts Grantees!

We are thrilled to welcome twenty-six artists into the 2023 Massachusetts Statewide Capacity Building Grant Program. Representing a diverse array of talent from across the state, these emerging and mid-career artists have been split into two cohorts. Our first cohort starts their program in July and the second, in early October.

Here we highlight the first cohort of thirteen. Stay tuned in the fall, when we welcome and highlight Cohort #2. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow these artists as they progress through our program!

 

alex terrell (GREENFIELD)

alex terrell (she/they) is a Black Southern writer and thingmaker. She graduated from University of Massachusetts Amherst with an MFA in creative writing. alex is a recipient of the 2018 Robert J. Dau/PEN America Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers. Her short fiction has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Offing, Puerto del Sol, Best American Experimental Fiction, Kenyon Review (forthcoming) and elsewhere.

beatriz whitehill (JAmaica plain)

Beatriz Whitehill (she/her) is a visual artist and creator based in Boston. Beatriz's practice encompasses painting, collage, and stop motion animation and is inspired by the intersection of traditional painting and contemporary art forms. Drawing upon her Puerto Rican heritage, she incorporates symbols like the vejigante masked monsters, symbolizing resilience and the inner struggles we all face. Beatriz's art weaves multigenerational narratives influenced by magical realism. By merging diverse artistic traditions and cultural symbolism, her work invites viewers to contemplate their own stories and connections to the world. Beatriz earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts at Massachusetts College of Art and Design in 2022. She is invested in creating collaborative opportunities between different artists and creative industries.

bithiah holton (Medford)

Bithiah Holton (she/they) is a queer, Black and Mexican American, multidisciplinary artist and educator. Their work explores the reimagination of liberation, especially through the embodiment of emotion, vulnerability, and the lenses of wellness. Bithiah's creative process is largely influenced by her interest in emotional growth, and the interplay between color and raw emotions. Drawing inspiration from personal and community histories, these elements converge to inform Bithiah's work, thoughtfully visualizing narratives portraying the emotional truths that often coexist with the various aspects of everyday life within QTBIPOC communities. Bithiah graduated from Boston University with a BFA in Art Education. She has taught visual arts at schools and programs in the greater Boston area for more than 3 years working mostly with PreK-8th grade.

deborah johnson (boston)

Deborah Johnson (she/they) is a queer Indian-American multidisciplinary artist, social worker, and yoga teacher based in Boston, Massachusetts. She works predominantly in digital illustration, gauche, textiles and has an affinity for designing spaces and community rituals. Each of her practices—dance, painting, writing, and music-making—all feed into one another. Deborah utilizes bright and joyful colors and written affirmations to address issues of mental health, the importance of intimate friendship and the beauty of queer relationships. The emotions of pleasure, grief, and love are inherently political and she hopes her art provides a rest stop for individuals to reflect on their own values. Both as an artist and mental health professional, they think it is imperative to be multi-disciplinary and a lifelong student. Deborah believes their work is a vessel for their ancestors, a reflection of their personal connection to nature, and a practice that allows them to strengthen their relationship to their  intuition. Through returning to ancient South Asian iconography, history, symbolism, and ways of being and integrating them into their artistic practice, Deborah seeks to create art that holds something holy and ancient while being firmly rooted in the present needs of the body.

delano mills (springfield)

Delano Mills (he/him) is a digital illustrator, character designer, and comic artist who is primarily focused on bringing black representation and visual aesthetics like Afro-Punk, Afro-fantasy, and Afro-Surrealism into the forefront of sequential art and storytelling. Delano received his BA in Studio Art and minor in Arts Management from Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts and is currently working on completing his first 60+ page comic, "Desert Sunflower".

deyaniera claudio (lawrence)

DeyCloud “Deya” (she/they) is a Latinx artist based in Lawrence, MA. Their multidisciplinary focuses include handmade jewelry, digital and traditional art, using an array of mixed media. By using materials from resin and polymer clay to 2D and 3D painting tools, she works on stylized themes of Mental Health and Identity, connected to her personal journeys. Deya believes in using art as the catalyst for change. Along with this studio practice, she has extended into a social practice, inspiring youth and community voices. Deya currently works as a Teaching Artist Fellow at Elevated Thought, a social justice org based in Lawrence, MA.

dominic quagliozzi (jefferson)

Through various media, with a focus on drawing, painting and performance, Dominic Quagliozzi's (he/him) work deconstructs his lived experience with chronic illness and disability to explore social relationships of the domestication of illness. His work aims to highlight the interdependence needed for healing and notions of longevity within personal and shared experience. Using medicalized materials such as hospital gowns and clinic table tissue paper, Quagliozzi references his de- and re-constructed body, often present through its absence. By repurposing and re-coding these medical materials as art making materials, he explores the emotional and psychological space in those moments of vulnerability, anxiety, fragility and resilience. Parallel to his art practice, Dominic uses art as a method of teaching for medical students and health workers.

geraldine barney (sharon)

Geraldine Barney’s (two-spirited) artwork explores the relationship between the traditional Navajo values and beliefs she grew up with on the Navajo Reservation in Northwest New Mexico with contemporary city life off the reservation. Living in two cultures is a prominent theme in her art and her music.

Geraldine studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM and at the Kansas City Art Institute, Kansas City, MO. A printmaker at heart, Geraldine’s mixed media collages begin with designs on paper created through various print-making techniques such as silk screen, linocut, and mono-print that are then cut or treated with other media such as paint, ink, stitching etc. and collaged together to create complex layered imagery and patterns. Finished works often re-interpret traditional Navajo motifs creating Navajo textiles in paper form. Geraldine is currently working on a series of landscapes (both real and imagined) that invoke her passion for the land of the Southwest and her connection to the Navajo reservation. 

Geraldine is also a singer and song writer whose work is included in two Smithsonian Folkways CD’s; “Music of New Mexico: Native American Traditions” and “Heartbeat: Voices of First Nations Women”. She performs her music to both local and national audiences and is currently a sound scape artist for a local theatre in Cambridge, MA. You can listen to an excerpt of her music here.

kiara brito (worcester)

Kiara Brito (she/her) is a self taught Crochet Designer and Prime Mover of my own business: Made A Manos. Kiara began crocheting back in 2018 as a hobby and eventually transformed it into the growing business it is today. Incorporating a medley of materials from crochet to denim to pieces found in everyday thrifted items, Kiara’s designs are executed through crochet with a modern urban polish that are aesthetically pleasing and on trend with today's fashion.  

martin gonzales (clarksburg)

Martin Gonzales (he/him) is a multi-disciplinary artist who makes drawings, sculptures, videos, installations, paintings, and performance. His practice is rooted in a desire to understand, challenge, and reshape the narratives he occupies in order to find belonging in the world. Though hegemonic narratives of dominance and colonization pervade our thinking and shape our identities, these notions of self are malleable and it is through the creative practice Martin finds the most freedom in being. His work has most recently taken the shape of piano, animations, paintings, and calisthenic exercise, but has looked like steel regalia, land art, and haunted installation spaces. Though his interests and the threads he pursues are constant, Martin’s work changes shape based on the container it is within.

michael talbot (belmont)

Growing up in Jamaica, Michael Talbot (he/him) always had a strong desire to inspire and speak to others through art. In 2012 he left his home country to live in the United States and began pursuing his artistic dreams doing Illustration, Graphic Design, and Animation, and has since been working as a Boston-based Freelance Artist on a wide range of projects, murals, exhibitions, and showcases. Michael believes that all art is inter-connected in some facet; informing, complimenting and/or enhancing each other. And although his passion and interest for storytelling is forefront in his practice and craft, he tends to draw from his knowledge in as many areas of study as possible to help strengthen this process. Whenever possible, he uses his rich cultural background from his early life in Jamaica to infuse, improve, and “season” whatever project he tackles, often mixing both digital and traditional media.

nnenna loveth (dorchester)

Nnenna Loveth Umelo Uzoma Nwafor (they/them) is a queer Igbo poet, dancer, and facilitator, who descends from a powerful ancestry. Nnenna’s matrilineal history has led them into deep inner-healing and ancestral veneration work. This healing journey has been nurtured and catalyzed by Nnenna’s studies of Black Feminist thought and Odinala.

In this process of healing the inherited pains of patriarchal violence within their lineage, Nnenna has been teaching, dancing, and facilitating since 2017 for the ultimate purpose of addressing the disconnect that white-hetero-patriarchal-coloniality has created between us and our sensual nature, and between us and our pleasure-compasses. Nnenna brings these frameworks of Odinala, Black Feminist thought, and Somatic exploration of trauma with them into their daily art-making practices.

Nnenna published their debut chapbook, Already Knew You Were Coming, with Game Over Books in January of 2022. Their work explores Nonbinary Black gr*lhood, Black queerness, Igbo Cosmology and Spirituality, Sensual play and rituals of healing. Nnenna believes in using art as a conduit for healing, that healing is political, and they speak to reconnect to their authenticity and to traditions of Igbo Orature. When they speak, their ancestors are pleased.

y-binh nguyen (lawrence)

Y-Bình Nguyễn (they/she) is a communal mythology storyteller, multi-media artist, budding agriculturalist, and avid eyeliner enthusiast. Y-Bình’s writing focuses on eco-resistance sci-fi, transgenerational trauma & healing, critical compassion, queer coming of age love stories, diaspora hustles and bustles, and visionary fiction by way of recognizing the power of making space for past, present, and future ancestors to heal and build new worlds. Y-Bình likes to find the heroes in the esoteric aunties, shy siblings, and liberated queer cousins–while unearthing stories of resistance and solidarity.

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.

Fall 2023 Open Studios Season

Photo of AIR Gerri Spilka’s work for March 2023 Open Studios. Image by Sofia Taylor

Mark your calendars for this season’s Open Studios at MASS MoCA:

Thursday, November 2nd

Thursday, November 30th

Each event will take place from 5-7PM in Building 13 + Building 34.

AS ALWAYS, FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL.

We are so excited to invite you to meet the artists-in-residence!

Visit the museum and then come over to Building 13 and 34 for drinks, snacks and great conversation. After Open Studios, enjoy a brew at Bright Ideas or food in the courtyard!

Refreshments will be available.

Directions to the Studios:

B.13 When you park in the main visitor lot at MASS MoCA, Building 13 is right in front of you. You’ll see Ferrin Contemporary gallery on the first floor. Enter through the side door (on the end of the building farthest from Rt. 2) and take the stairs or elevator to the second floor.

B.34 Is located across from Bright Ideas Brewery in the front entrance courtyard of MASS MoCA’s campus, next door to Bigg Daddy’s. When looking out from Bright Ideas, just head straight and then to the left up the ramp to the Studios entrance (black door).

Photo of Oolite Arts Miami AIR Joshua Jean-Baptiste for April 2023 Open Studios. Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

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.

Welcome 2023 Summer / Fall Fellows

The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees for 2023 Summer / Fall residency fellowships - our largest fellowship pool yet! Each of these artists will receive a fully funded residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.

Congratulations to this season’s fellows:

GENERAL FELLOWS

OREGON VISUAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

MASSACHUSETTS FAMILY FELLOWSHIP

UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS

General Fellowships:

(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)

Andrea Ferrero

Mexico City, Mexico

“Through the study of monuments and architecture, my work critically considers iconographies of power and our relationship with them. It intends to challenge the way in which ideas of power have been inserted into built space and embedded into collective consciousness, reflecting on dominant political ideologies and fantasizing with fictional scenarios and alternate narratives to official histories. Using archival material, imprints, molds and digital processes such as photogrammetry and 3d models, my work unfolds in sculpture pieces, installations, instagram filters and digital experiences. 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, creating edible pieces that focus on the process of eating, digesting, metabolizing and excreting.”

Andrea is a Peruvian artist who lives and works in Mexico City. She holds a BFA in Sculpture from the Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú. She was awarded the Hopper Prize in 2021, the Virginia A. Groot Foundation Award 2019 and is a finalist in the Taoyuan International Art Award 2023 in Taiwan.

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 is in dedication to the stories of Filipino American people and the questioning that asks which narratives can we monumentalize and which can we eradicate. She received her MFA through Georgia Institute of Technology and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She is the author of the forthcoming chapbook, A Drop of Sun. Her work has been exhibited at Natasha Singapore Biennial, Singapore (2022); SummerWorks Festival, Toronto (2022); The Human Terminal, Anonymous Gallery, NYC (2021); Feminist Media Studio, Montreal (2018). Her animated films have been shown at Diwa Filipino Film Showcase of Seattle (2023) and Cosmic Ray Film Festival (2022). Her work has received support from the Studios at MASS MoCA Residency Fellowship, Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship, Harvestworks Scholar, New Artist Society Fellowship, MAAF NYSCA & Wave Farm. Her work as a collaborator 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, and the 2019 Whitney Biennial.

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.

“I often invoke multivalent signs, such as folklore figures and border saints, in my work. I am invested in how flexible these symbols can be. They function as part of a system by which people orient themselves in a deeply disorienting world through an ongoing process of triangulation between archetypes, individuals and their social context. They endure precisely because they can be molded by groups of people to form the compass points required by a given place and time. Their meaning is fundamentally relational and social. I think of my own work as being norteada. This literally means ‘turned north,’ but implies a state of being disoriented in geographic space or lost within your mind in northern Mexican colloquial Spanish. I feel norteada as a white-passing, mixed-race Mexican American faced with the ongoing marginalization of brown people in the North East, the economic drive for northern migration, assimilation and death. Re-inscribing new meaning into historically potent symbols becomes a mode of cultural survival and a form of orientation.”

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 skeptical in regards to hierarchies of knowledge: my 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 intent on dispersing this hidden spell: unwinding media bias and ritual violence, animating the ever-present specter of institutional violence, or conjuring the contradictions of democratic transition through the voice of a transitional human.”

Erick Hernandez

New Haven, Connecticut

Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Cuba living and working in Miami, FL and Brooklyn, NY. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design (2017) and has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2017), Oxbow School of Art (2018), and The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (2018-19'). In addition, he has received a Scholastics Awards Alumni Micro-grant (2019) and an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant (2019).

"Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, my paintings are orchestrations of memories that have been fractured or reimagined in processes surrounding lived trauma. Rooted in traditional image making, my practice intends to disrupt classical vignettes within the genre of painting by inserting personages and spaces that are in flux. I populate my images with figures and amalgamations of figures from my own experience in order to explore various simultaneous histories of loss and displacement. In collecting from my own life and those around me I am able to emulate the labor of locating these bodies in a realm of physical and allegorical exile from representations of culture and home. As such, I am able to locate my own place amongst them."

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.

Folayemi Wilson

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Folayemi Wilson is an object and image maker who 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.

Francheska Alcántara

Tulsa, Oklahoma

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

Alcántara holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2019), a BFA in Painting from Hunter College (2015), and a BA in Art History from Old Dominion University (2009).

They have participated in various residencies including Recess Art’s Session (2022), Wave Hill Gardens Workspace (2021), Creative Capital Professional Taller (2019), Vermont Studio Center (2019), Shandaken: Storm King (2018), Bronx Museum’s AIM Program (2017), and EMERGENYC (2016).

Francheska has shared their work at Lehmann Maupin Gallery (2022), Chashama Art Space (2021), BronxArtSpace (2020), Queens College Art Center (2019), Brooklyn Museum (2018), Queens Museum (2018), and the Bronx Museum of the Arts (2017). Alcántara is a grantee of the OVAC’s Thrive Grant (2022), City Artist Corps Grant (2021), and Interchange Artist Grant (2021). Currently, they are a fellow at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship.

Funlola Coker

New Paltz, New York

Funlola Coker is a metalsmith 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 and Haystack Mountain School of Crafts.

Funlola’s work has been exhibited at Brooklyn Metalworks, the Fuller Craft Museum, TONE Gallery in Memphis and the National Ornamental Metal Museum. 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 Metal from the State University of New York at New Paltz.

Tununak, Alaska

Yup’ik Artist, Golga Oscar was born and raised in a rural community called Kasigluk, Alaska. His first language is Yup’ik, and he learned English when he proceeded into the third grade. He successfully produced and led many projects with various mediums ranging from skin sewing to basket weaving, and quillwork/beadwork/walrus ivory carving exploring Yup’ik Native jewelry. He also explores digital photography that focuses on the beauty of Native identity. Oscar’s intent is to create and share his techniques within his tribal nation. His plans are to share his skills with his people who want to learn about the culture and revitalize their skills towards specified traditional/contemporary clothing. He graduated from the Institute of American Indian Art and has earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts as well as a Business Entrepreneurship certificate; now he is a secondary cultural instructor at Akula Elitnaruvik. Oscar is going for his Master's degree in education and teaching certificate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.


Oscar’s goals are to pursue cultural awareness teaching and get into the fashion industry. He aims to showcase the Yup’ik cultural art and bring recognition to the “American” mainstream.

Jesus Treviño

Brownsville, Texas

Jesus Treviño (b. 1995, Brownsville, Texas) received a BA in Studio Art from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in 2018, and is currently an MFA candidate in Painting/Drawing at the University of Texas at Austin. His work is rooted from his experience being raised on the U.S./Mexico border and deals with the erasure of history, displacement of people, and its residual personal, emotional and social effects. He had his first solo exhibition at the Presa House Gallery, San Antonio (2019), has been included in group exhibitions at the Carlsbad Museum and Art Center, Carlsbad, New Mexico (2021); Rockport Center for the Arts, Rockport, Texas (2021); K Space Contemporary, Corpus Christi, Texas (2020); Brownsville Museum of Fine Arts (2019), where he was awarded Best in Show; and recently he curated a group exhibition titled, "Between Two Worlds" at the Visual Arts Center in Austin, Texas (2020).

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.

They are currently an adjunct faculty member at MICA in the MFAST program, and the co-founder / curator of SomethingProjects (somethingprojects.net), an artist-run curatorial initiative, and a trustee of the Vermont Studio Center. They were a recipient of MICA's inaugural Leslie King-Hammond Award and the Faculty and Staff Queer Alliance Award. They have served as a volunteer leader with numerous Connecticut-based non-profit organizations, including the Director / Curator of Arts Literature Laboratory.

Kathryn-kay Johnson

Brooklyn, New york

Kathryn-kay Johnson (b. St. Andrew, Jamaica) is an emerging artist working in digital media, painting, and installation, making works that evoke experiences of collective effervescence and ancestral memory. Dance, and the movement of the body are central to her mark-making. Her practice is influenced by histories and mythologies remembered orally, spiritually, and rhythmically, while considering issues around class and autonomy, neocolonialism, and contemporary media practices. 

She is curious about the world-building capabilities of everyday materials. And her visual language is rooted in the intergenerational ingenuity of the self-built. It is an ongoing “present continuous” practice of learning, making, building, and expanding.

Kathryn-kay Johnson was recently commissioned to create a large-scale installation for Marquand Chapel at Yale, installed until January 2023. She received her MFA from Yale University in 2022 where she won the Shickle-Collingwood Prize and the Phelps Berdan Award. She was a 2022 Beinecke Rare Book Library Research Fellow where she researched West African and African-Diasporic design philosophies. She received her BA in Studio Art, Digital Media from Florida State University in 2016.

Larí García

Richmond, Virginia

larí garcía (b. 1994 in Miami, FL) is an artist and writer who combines historical research, personal narratives, and magical realism through a comparative and ethnographic approach. Staging detailed assemblages reveals inherent limits of material meaning while subverting how we see objects and spirituality. garcía completed a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design (2017) and an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University (2021). In 2022, garcía attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Their work has been shown throughout the US, recently in a collaborative exhibition, Snowing, at D.D.D.D. in New York City, NY (2023).

“Growing up in Miami, FL, I learned survival skills from immigration, familial conflict, policing systems, and natural disasters that influenced my interest in material scarcity and tactics. These moments became integral to approaching my creative practice through critical thinking, research, experimentation, and implementation. As a result, my art practice is born out of the assemblage of gathering, tradition, and mutation to see from a different perspective. At the moment, I am driven by concepts of loss, absences, and grief. A recent successful installation called Missing Pass highlights the personal narrative of my mother, Jacqueline Alvarez, who went missing in the summer of 2020. I gather evidence, material, and histories of where she could have gone.”

Laura Sofía Pérez

Bayamon, Puerto Rico

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 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). 

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.

Malaika Temba

Brooklyn, 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.

“Making art is my testament to the efforts of Black womanhood, interpersonal relationships, and undigested reflections; a monument to obligations of emotional labor; a record of vulnerability, sarcasm, and bliss. My art embodies the paradox of the physicality of textile materials: soft and ornate but unbreakable and resilient. The fabrics I make don’t wear under pressure, like the lineage of laborers, care-givers, aunties, femmes and artists of the diaspora honored through this work. I tell stories at scale – taking up space in ways I never saw my communities revere. This is a distillation of global, political and emotional ideas via innovative combinations of media and processes. Textiles, both as a utilitarian good and an artform, function as carrier, metaphor, and marker of time through the care and labor required in their production. My practice reflects the sense of responsibility, attention and patience societally expected of women and caregivers. At the core of my practice is the tension between contemporary, mechanized techniques and more ancestral, tactile methods and small-scale artisanry. I use paint, stamps, silkscreens, drawing media, hand looms, felting and spray paint with industrial methods of Jacquard weaving, Stoll knitting, digital embroidery, laser cutting, quilting, sublimation printing, and sewing.”

Maria Pinto

Quincy, Massachusetts

Maria Pinto is a writer, teaching artist, and mycophile. Her work has appeared in Frigg, Necessary Fiction, Word Riot, The Butter, and Dostoyevsky 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 Roundglass Living, and the Community Programs Teaching Fellow at GrubStreet. She’s currently at work on a book inspired by fungi.

Nadia Taquary

Salvador, Brazil

“My work begins with the investigation of Brazilian Afro Jewelry (18th/19th century) the so-called “Creole Jewelry”, as symbols of identity, religiosity, female empowerment, and freedom. As my work developed, I expanded the materials in my production to include beads, as a resignification of the threads of beads used in religions of African matrices, the so-called “Jewels of axé.” An example of this material employment is the work “Igbawiá”, a large penetrable installation that makes reference to the great womb, the primordial waters, from which the world is born. I live in Salvador Bahia Brazil, one of the main cities of the African diaspora. The presence of black female protagonism in our history allowed us to access important understandings from pre-colonial Africa. Colonization and its Eurocentric thinking, along with patriarchy, violated, demonized, and marginalized this ancestral wisdom and the construction of other possible narratives. In “Ìyámi”, my last solo show, I speak of this driving force that generates everything that lives and that is related to the feminine creative power that is the very power of gestation of the earth.”

Rob Gibbs

Boston, Massachusetts

Rob “ProBlak” Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder who has transformed the cultural landscape of Boston through his powerful art and commitment to youth education.

Born and raised in Roxbury, Massachusetts during the Hip-Hop Golden Era, Gibbs saw the power of graffiti as a form of self-expression. As a teen, graffiti became a tool for him, and others in his community, to chronicle and immortalize their culture and history.  Problak’s vision to beautify the predominantly Black and Brown communities of Boston is a driving force behind his artistic practice.

Gibbs has a strong focus on arts education. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity (AFH), an arts non-profit that hires and teaches creative skills to youth, Gibbs served in numerous leadership roles for 32 years. He has been an adjunct educator for Boston Public Schools, conducting countless workshops and panels at numerous colleges and high schools in Greater Boston. Gibbs also partners with Madison Park Technical Vocational High School’s Art Program to curate a rotating public art campus, offering emerging graffiti writers and muralists real-time opportunities to experience a guided practice.

Sergio Suárez

Atlanta, Georgia

Sergio Suárez (B.1995) is a Mexican-born, Atlanta-based visual artist and printmaker. He graduated the Ernest G. Welch School of Art and Design in 2021 with a B.F.A in Drawing Painting and Printmaking. His practice, prompted by an interest in translation, uses different traditions of making to construct a visual language concerned with syncretism, temporality, and the porosity between objects, images, and structures.

His work has been shown around Atlanta, in spaces like Whitespace Gallery, Day & Night Projects, THE END Project Space, ShowerHaus Gallery, the Consulate General of Mexico in Atlanta, Take it Easy Gallery, and the Atlanta Contemporary. Internationally his work has been included in several group exhibitions such as the Woolwich Contemporary Print Fair in London, the Haugesund Internasjonal Relief Festival in Norway, OPED Space in Tokyo, and the Ionian Arts Center in Greece; where he was an artist in residence in 2017 and 2018.

His work is also included in the SGCI archives of the Zuckerman Museum. He lives and works in Atlanta Georgia where he is part of the Studio Artist Program at the Atlanta Contemporary. He has two cats. 

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 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.

Oregon Visual Arts Fellowship:

(funded by The Ford Family Foundation)

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.

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.

Massachusetts Family Fellowship:

(funded by the Barr Foundation and Sustainable Arts Foundation)

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.

In the Spring of 2020, as Assistant Professor of Emerging and Interactive Media at Emerson College, Fahandej launched a pioneering initiative focused on mass incarceration using Emerging Technology and Community Co-Creation methodologies. This initiative brings together students from three different departments (Journalism, Visual Media Arts, and the Marlboro Institute), formerly incarcerated fathers, probation officers, and their children to co-create personal documentary projects that speak to the social challenge of mass incarceration using AR, VR, Volumetric Filmmaking and 360° technology.

University Fellowships:

(In partnership with the following universities):

Stephen Proski (Boston University)

Brighton, Massachusetts

Stephen Proski (they/them) is a blind/disabled artist, writer, and advocate. Their work addresses their own personal experience of blindness and takes the form of painting, installation, text, and compositional objects that explore themes of precarity, vulnerability, and the blurry territory between legibility and illegibility. Born and raised in the Arizona desert, they received their MFA in Painting at Boston University. Recent projects include a permanent installation for the Kansas City Museum, a commission for the Kansas City International airport, a site-specific mural for Ledger/Cache in Bentonville, AR. Their work has been shown in various venues in Kansas City, Boston, Chicago, and New York.

“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.”

Arnab Gan Choudhury (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

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.

Benjamin Spalding (Maine College of Art & Design)

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.

Bo Kim (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

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.

Elizabeth Burden (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Tucson, Arizona

Elizabeth Burden is a multidisciplinary artist blending studio work with practice. She uses drawing, painting, sculpture, video, coding, mapping, and other media and processes. Her recent work focuses on three interrelated themes: (1) geographies, space, and place; (2) contemporary state and societal violences; and (3) legacies and vestiges of history and historical trauma. Whether created through studio practice or through community-engaged process, the common thread that runs through all her work is to look at old narratives anew, to confront, reflect upon, shape, and transform. 

She has been an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Arts Institute (Revolution Residency, 2022; Truth and Reconciliation Residency, 2019), and the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Trainings for the Not Yet, 2019), and was a  Mellon Projecting All Voices Fellow at  Arizona State University (2020).

Ms. Burden holds bachelor’s degrees in Studio Art and Journalism, and a master’s degree in Geographic Information Science.

Luke Agada (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

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 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 and a DVM in Vet. Medicine at FUNAAB in 2018. In recent years, Agada has participated in several group shows in Lagos, Accra, New York, Abuja, Casablanca, etc. His work has been published in several journals and magazines including The Pinch Journal publication at the University of Memphis, Tennessee. He has also been a recipient of various awards 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, and The Helen Frankenthaler award at SAIC in 2022.

Corrine Yonce (Maryland Institute College of Art)

Winooski, Vermont

Corrine Yonce is an artist, fair & affordable housing advocate, and documentarian. Yonce
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. Corrine Yonce is currently completing her MFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art as a Leslie King
Hammond fellow and Alfred T. Granger scholar. She lives and works in Winooski, Vermont and teaches tenant skills and Fair Housing workshops with the Fair Housing Project of CVOEO.

Corrine founded Voices of Home, a seven-year partnership with the Vermont Affordable Housing Coalition and statewide housing providers where she interviewed residents about “home” and co-created art installations and portraits. Her work has been shown across the East Coast including Gallery 263 (Cambridge, MA) and CollarWorks (Troy NY), and featured in New American Paintings (164). She is currently a Generator Makerspace resident to produce works for the public art series, “Longing is Just Our Word for Knowing,” which has support from Burlington City Arts.

Najee Haynes-Follins (Maryland Institute College of Art)

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.”

David Askew (University of Virginia)

Virginia Beach, Virginia

“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.”

David Peña (University of Oregon)

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.

Madison Donnelly (Yale)

New Haven, Connecticut

Madison Donnelly b.1992 is an American sculptor from Salt Lake City, Utah. Her work utilizes building materials, drawing from her childhood experiences learning from her carpenter mother and her childhood home that was her mother’s ever-evolving art project. Exploring humanity’s emerging relationship to work and materiality in the Capitalocene, Her work treats ‘universal truths’ as bendable. In 2018 she was an artist in residence at the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art where she had a solo exhibition, Bath House. Currently she resides in New Haven, CT and will graduate from Yale University with an MFA in Sculpture in 2023.

”During my childhood in Utah, my mother was a self-employed carpenter. She treated our home like her art project and it was constantly in a state of flux. Our bathroom had green and black porcelain fixtures, and thick striped black and cream wallpaper leading up to an overhang filled with gargoyle sculptures and plastic ivy. One day when I was 12 I came home from school to find she removed all the furniture in my room in order to paint the hardwood floors periwinkle blue. In 2011 we lost our house due to the 2008 recession, housing crisis and predatory mortgage loans.

My work explores humanity’s emerging relationship to work, home, and materiality in the
Capitalocene — a historical era shaped by an endless hoarding of capital despite great human, animal and environmental cost.”

Natalia Mejía Murillo (Virginia Commonwealth University)

Richmond, Virginia

Mejia, a Colombian artist who currently lives in Richmond, VA, holds a BFA and Master in History and Theory of Art from the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has obtained multiple scholarships, residencies and awards, among which the following stand out: Artist residency at the MünchnerKünstlerhaus (2021 - Germany); Artist residency at Fundación Joan Miró and La Casa de Velázquez (2020 - Spain); Artist residency award at the 18th Biennale Internationale de la Gravure of Sarcelles, France (2017) and the Colombia-Mexico Artist Residency (2016). In 2019 she was nominated for the Award Salón de Arte Joven of the Giberto Alzate Foundation. Mejia has exhibited her work in Colombia, Spain, Poland, Mexico and the US. Her publications include: Efemérides cotidianas (2020) and Atlas del centro deBogotá (2019). Her work is in the collections of the Kunstmuseum Reutlingen, Fundació Joan Miró, Spain, and private collections in Colombia and the United States.

“Through media such as printmaking, drawing and installation, my work explores the perception and experience of the territory, as well as the containment and representation systems through cartography. I understand maps as devices through which we can approach unknown territory; a “portable” and simplified image of a complex space that we can cover with our eyes and contain in our hands. I reflect on concepts such as scale, time, distance and the reference systems used by science to describe and understand our place on earth. My recent research deals with the distortion of reality and fiction in cartographic representations and how they are presented to us as useful, reliable and accurate images of a territory. Images that are at the same time instruments of power and domination. One of the questions that has guided my work is: What is our “Terra Incognita” today? Under this concern, I focus my artistic practice as an exercise in cartography, in which fiction dialogues with the representation systems used in astronomy, geography and archaeology.”

Tammie Dupuis (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)

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.

Yana Nosenko (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)

Boston, Massachusetts

Yana Nosenko was born in Aktyubinsk, Kazakhstan in 1991, but was raised in Moscow, Russia. She studied design at Moscow Academy of Design and Applied Arts. After graduating in 2016, she worked for Strelka KB, an urban planning company, as a graphic designer. In 2017, she finished a major project — designing a font family “Mayak”, which is based on Soviet constructivist fonts of 1920s–1930s, which was released by ParaType Company. Throughout these years, starting from 2012, she also freelanced as a photographer, doing studio portraiture. In 2019, she started working as an event photographer for the Russian Jewish Congress, capturing show openings, conferences and concerts. That same year she was awarded a Director’s Fellowship to attend the Creative Practices program in the International Center of Photography in New York City. Yana obtained an MFA in Photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design.

Learn more about how you can support an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA or establish a fellowship in your name.

Welcome Pittsfield Grantees!

A4A is excited to announce our first-ever cohort of Pittsfield artists! We’re partnering with our Berkshire neighbor, the City of Pittsfield, to bring A4A grant-making and professional support to Pittsfield’s creative community. Meet the 10 artists in our first Pittsfield cohort; we’ll be announcing a second cohort in 2024.

 

Andres Ramirez

Andres Ramirez is an award-winning breakdancer and the founder of The Funk Box Dance Studio in downtown Pittsfield, where he teaches breaking to kids and young adults. He also teaches dance in the Pittsfield schools and at Mount Holyoke College. Andres has traveled internationally to compete, and locally has performed at Jacob’s Pillow and community events.

The Funk Box Dance Studio has been named Best Dance Studio in the Berkshires.

Chelsea Gaia

A Pacific Northwest Native recently transplanted to Pittsfield, Chelsea Gaia draws inspiration from natural light, colors, flora, fauna, and the materials of her immediate surroundings. Chelsea is a stained glass artist and patternist, an expressive illustrator, and a practiced botanical and permaculture gardener. Her work often culminates as a statement of the authenticity of one's present experience while honoring heritage of both the land she stands upon currently and the land and roots she has descended from. Chelsea is in the process of opening a stained glass studio in downtown Pittsfield where she will make her own designs & commissions and teach stained glass classes.

Eric Drury

Eric Drury is an artist and designer whose practice is rooted in the cultural interrelation within his mixed, Arab and American New England family and a fascination with the evocative power of objects. His work is an investigation into the points of resonance and discord between these worlds and has included sculpture, functional objects, graphic design, furniture, and painting. Eric holds an MFA in 3D Design from Cranbrook Academy of Art and works at Berkshire Community College as the Instructional Program Manager: Making and Manufacturing.

Huckleberry Elling

Huckleberry (Huck) Elling is a multidisciplinary artist working in textiles, painting, and public art. Huck has spent her entire life observing patterns, and since childhood has been compelled to explore colors, shapes and textures through art-making. Because she was never classically trained, Huck considers herself a folk artist and appreciates using readily available materials and processes, tapping into a shared human experience.

For the first phase of her artistic career, Huck crocheted large, fantastical, wearable masks. (You may have seen them at MASS MoCA’s Kidspace or gift shop.) More recently, she has been working on canvases and is currently painting a mural in downtown Pittsfield.

Laura Cabrera

Laura Cabrera is a Mexican singer who left Veracruz, Mexico at age 18, and now lives in Pittsfield with her two children. Laura aims to strengthen community through diverse and accessible programming in performing, movement and creative arts. She is a founding member of Latina413, co-founder of the Hispanic artist collective Amor A Nuestras Raíces (Love to our Roots), and founder of Yo Soy Arte (I am Art), focusing on increasing representation of local Latinx artists in cultural spaces. Laura is passionate about helping the Latin population in the Berkshires share their cultural background with their community.

Marney Schorr

Marney Schorr is a visual artist, teaching artist, art therapist and author exhibiting in New York and the Berkshires. She is also the founder of an award winning arts-based youth suicide prevention program, Arts in Recovery for Youth (AIRY). Marney’s art studio is part of a collective of 20 artists in downtown Pittsfield known as NUarts.

Marney’s studio practice includes three decades of primarily painting, mixed media, and assemblage. Recently, she has begun to explore more political themes in her creative work, and in early 2023 organized a show in Pittsfield called Art for Social Change that explored themes of bodily autonomy.

Nicole Herasme

Nicole Herasme is a photographer, model, and painter originally from the Dominican Republic. Nicole uses art as an expressive outlet and means of healing, both for herself and others. With photography, she seeks to help her portrait subjects feel comfortable and accept who they are with pride. Modeling allows her to embrace her individuality while encouraging others to do the same.

Nicole is planning a series of healing art events to share with the youth community of Pittsfield.

Nicole Rose

Nicole Rose is a visual artist and lifelong ballet dancer whose paintings investigate the synchronicities between movement and mark-making. Each of her paintings begin with uncontrolled pours of paint which are then danced through, allowing the movement of her feet and body to translate choreographed marks onto canvas. The first layer of sporadic movement marks creates a map that guides the following layers of formalized painting. In a broader sense, her abstract landscapes explore the physical and psychological dichotomy between chaos and control. Nicole received her BA in Studio Art from Mills College in California before returning to her hometown.

Stephen Caranci

Stephen Caranci handcrafts fine wood and resin pens. Stephen has been a lover of all things woodworking since high school shop class, and he explored work in construction and cabinetry before turning to pen-making. Stephen uses over 150 different pigments for resins, 45+ species of woods, and recycled materials such as HDPE and reclaimed woods. During the summers, you can find him selling his beautiful wares at the Pittsfield Farmer’s Market.

Zinc Estime

zinc is an intersectional being committed to the art of connection—through sound and visual art. with the integration of storytelling, poetry, music, interviews and resource sharing, they host a podcast in Berkshire County to gather the fruits of our living and dying during this time.

as a member of the z generation, zinc believes that young people’s stories and gifts are being dis-membered without their consent or acknowledgment. yet they hold the power to write a new story; our story.

with a BA degree in cultural anthropology from Mount Holyoke College, they value the power of collecting stories from living and ancestral, local youth & adult leaders; intergenerational collaboration. with their work at Railroad Street Youth Project as a youth-worker of 10+ years, zinc coordinates the Southern Berkshire Community Health Coalition (SBCHC).

when they are not building bridges, they are resting with the trees, planting seeds, and tending to the flowers and bees.

A4A is grateful to our wonderful partners in this programming: the City of Pittsfield, especially Cultural Development Director Jen Glockner, and the members of our Pittsfield advisory coalition: Abby Powers, Kamaar Taliaferro, Alex Reczkowski, Yvette “Jamuna” Sirker, Jesse Tobin McCauley, Bill Wright, Marina Dominguez, Julie Copoulos, Lucie Castaldo, and Brielle Rizzotti. This work is funded by the American Rescue Plan (ARPA).

The Studios Announces 2023 Summer/Fall Fellowship Awardees

Pictured: Thương Hoài Trần, 2023 Winter Fellow, Picture by Carolina Porras Monroy

The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees for its 40 summer/ fall residency fellowships. Each of these artists will receive a fully funded residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.

Learn more about how you can support an artist-in-residence at the Studios at MASS MoCA or establish a fellowship in your name.

The Studios at MASS MoCA’s next call for applications is now open from May 15th, 2023 - July 8th 2023 for residencies during January - June 2024. Learn more about the Studios’ fellowships and financial aid.

Congratulations to the Summer / Fall 2023 Awardees:

General Fellowships

(funded by the Donald A. Pels Charitable Trust and an anonymous donor)

Andrea Ferrero

Angeline Meitzler

Clara Cruz

Cristobal Cea

Erick Hernandez

Felicia Nez

Folayemi Wilson

Francheska Alcántara

Funlola Coker

Golga Oscar

Jesus Trevino

Howard el-Yasin

Kathryn-Kay Johnson

Lari Garcia

Laura Perez

Lillie Harris

Malaika Temba

Maria Pinto

Nadia Taquary

Rob Gibbs

Sergio Suarez

Sonya Lara

Fellowship for Oregon Visual Artists


(funded by The Ford Family Foundation)

Stephanie Simek

Jessie Rose Vala

Massachusetts Family Fellowship


(funded by the Barr Foundation and Sustainable Arts Foundation)

Rashin Fahandej

University Fellowships


(In partnership with the following universities):

Stephen Proski (Boston University)

Arnab Gan Choudhury (Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts)

Benjamin Spalding (Maine College of Art & Design)

Boram Kim (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Elizabeth Burden (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Luke Agada (School of the Art Institute of Chicago)

Corrine Yonce (Maryland Institute College of Art)

Najee Haynes-Follins (Maryland Institute College of Art)

David Askew (University of Virginia)

David Pena (University of Oregon)

Madison Donnelly (Yale)

Natalia Mejia (Virginia Commonwealth University)

Tammie Dupuis (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)

Yana Nosenko (Massachusetts College of Art & Design)

Pictured: Sonja John, 2022 Winter Fellow, Picture by Carolina Porras Monroy

Summer 2023 Open Studios Season

Photo of Iris Residency Fellowship artist Clemente Sajquiy-Ramirez (February 2023). Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

Mark your calendars for this season’s Open Studios at MASS MoCA:

Thursday, July 6

Thursday, August 3

Thursday, September 14

Each event will take place from 5-7PM in Building 13 + Building 34.

AS ALWAYS, FREE ADMISSION. OPEN TO ALL.

We are so excited to invite you to meet the artists-in-residence!

Visit the museum and then come over to Building 13 and 34 for drinks, snacks and great conversation. After Open Studios, enjoy a cold brew at Bright Ideas and food in the courtyard!

Refreshments will be available.

Directions to the Studios:

B.13 When you park in the main visitor lot at MASS MoCA, Building 13 is right in front of you. You’ll see Ferrin Contemporary and Eckert Fine Art galleries on the first floor. Enter through the side door (on the end of the building farthest from Rt. 2) and take the stairs or elevator to the second floor.

B.34 Is located across from Bright Ideas Brewery in the front entrance courtyard of MASS MoCA’s campus. When looking out from Bright Ideas, just head straight and then to the left up the ramp to the Studios entrance (black door).

Photo of Studios AIR and Fellow Silvia Lopez Chavez (November 2022). Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

Welcome May Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: May 17th - May 30th, 2023

Sung Eun Park

Monmouth, Oregon

Sung Eun Park is an artist working across the mediums of drawing, sculpture, and painting. In her current body of work, Park has been exploring life and death. Her ongoing series of works have been investigations into a “good death”, the reflection on our mortality, and the intensity of this inevitable shadow that forces us to accept the prospect of death—an acceptance that impacts the way we lead our lives.

In each work, Park weaves a narrative that allows the viewers to journey through a surreal world, a trip that will compel them to stay immersed in the present, free themselves from the past and the future, and contemplate the dignity and value of their lives.

Born in Seoul, South Korea, Park migrated to the United States. She received her BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and an MFA from Indiana University, Bloomington. Her work has appeared in print and exhibitions, such as Vox Populi, Wassaic Summer Exhibition, and CICA Museum. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Wassaic Project, Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, the Vermont Studio Center, and others. She is currently living and working in Oregon.

Rae Red

Baltimore, Maryland

Rae Red (they/them) is a multimedia performer living in Baltimore, MD. They imbue their projects with playful sincerity while examining ideas of perception and transformation, often using the color red as a conduit. They are originally from Albuquerque, NM where they developed their love of both DIY culture, and nature with its queer, sexy, and violent rhythms. Rae has performed all over the country, in spaces grungy and chic, from Mana Contemporary Chicago to the barn at Bread and Puppet in Glover, VT. They have been awarded numerous grants and residencies and were recently an artist in residence at MacDowell Colony, and they are currently a Sondheim Prize semifinalist. They hold an MFA from Towson University and a BA from Bard College.

Sarah Aziz

Albuquerque, New mexico

Sarah Aziz is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of New Mexico and an incoming PhD student at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. Her background as a second-generation British Pakistani informs her research practice that maps patterns of migration across multiple scales and geographies, starting with her grandfather’s walk from Delhi to Lahore during the Partition of British India. Currently, she is working with collaborators from across the Great Plains to tag, track, and build with tumbleweeds because they defy human-made borders and ask new questions of indigeneity and invasiveness. Her drawing work has been featured in AD Magazine, PLAT Journal, Architect Magazine, Soiled, and CLOG. Most recently, she was awarded a 2023 Architectural League Prize with Lindsey Krug, and in 2021, the pair received an ACSA Course Development Prize in Architecture, Climate Change, and Society to study the 19,000+ extra-ordinary Dollar General stores in America.

She is a recipient of Art Omi, MacDowell, and UW-Milwaukee Fitzhugh Scott Innovation in Design Fellowships and has held Visiting Professorships at the University of Colorado Denver as the inaugural Visiting Assistant Professor of Architecture with an Emphasis on Issues of Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion, and Texas Tech University.

Chicago, Illinois

Vesna Jovanovic is a Chicago-based artist whose work focuses on embodiment, biopolitics, posthumanism, and related bodily subjects. She has worked in various disciplines throughout her career, currently concentrating on drawing and painting. Jovanovic is a recipient of many residency fellowships including Santa Fe Art Institute; Ucross Foundation; VCCA France; and a two-year studio residency at the International Museum of Surgical Science in Chicago. Her artwork has been exhibited at the Gordon Center for Integrative Science at the University of Chicago; Haggerty Art Gallery at the University of Dallas; Greymatter Gallery in Milwaukee; Delaware Contemporary in Wilmington; OSU Urban Arts Space in Columbus; Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago; and Chashama Gallery in New York, among many other venues, and is included in permanent collections at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center; International Museum of Surgical Science; and the Koehnline Museum of Art.

Clare Hu

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Clare Hu is an artist and weaver currently based in Brooklyn, NY. She completed her BFA with a focus in Fiber and Material Studies at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC).

Haptic skips of woven textiles gone awry, the distortion of image dictated by the hand, and games of hide and seek, inform the use of weaving, mended imagery and installation, to examine false histories and notions of the South. By utilizing slow craft, Clare Hu draws from her own experience living in the Southern United States and her research documenting and archiving how Southern narratives are made and maintained throughout the history of Georgia. By exploring how Southern myths are acted and re-enacted in the stories and objects surrounding them, Hu iteratively pieces, mends and patches as a way to respond and dissect the physical and personal distances between cultural spaces - both set afar and rewritten one on top of the other.

A tarp becomes a boundary, dividing the complete from the unfinished - a blinder, hiding spaces that become momentary place holders. Images taken from Hu’s family photos are printed onto warp to then be distorted by the tension of the hand. Making use of woven offcuts, Southern iconography and collage, prospective patches are both used and exhibited as objects in action. Hu magnifies the blurry edges of vision, piecing together moments of her personal narrative to subvert larger myths of the South. Creating patches for unmaterialized textiles, becomes a guarded optimistic practice used to conserve personal places in memory and allow space to consider something new.

Garvin Sierra Vega

San Juan, Puerto rico

Born in Ponce, Puerto Rico in 1977. Garvin Sierra Vega holds a Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in Sculpture and Graphic Arts from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus. During his formative years he worked as an assistant to prominent sculptors such as Ramón Berríos and Soucy de Perellano. Parallel to his work as a visual artist, Sierra Vega currently works as a freelance graphic designer, exhibition designer and set designer.

“My artistic proposal is transmitted and transcribed, in the situations that we live in as a country, living in a colony and depending on inefficient governments in my inkwell to carry out my work every day, to be able to capture through my art the injustices in which we live and bring the viewer a synthesis that is easy to read and playful. In all my plastic proposals I transmit the representation of the past, present, and future of the imprisoned island of Puerto Rico in addition to our situation of colonial imposition by the United States. The diversity of reading in my plastic proposal is put by each spectator, there are no limits to interpretation. My work is not limited by any specific medium; in the same way, I work with serigraphy, installations, sculptures, encaustics, constructions, and digital graphics, among others, all aiming toward the decolonization process for Puerto Rico.”

Norma Vila Rivero

Caguas, Puerto Rico

Interdisciplinary artist, exhibit coordinator and cultural manager, Norma Vila Rivero received a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from Universidad del Sagrado Corazón (2005) and a master’s degree in Art Administration from Ana G. Mendez Universidad del Turabo (2010).

Vila Rivero employs a broad spectrum of mediums to explore social science, phenomenology, semantics, and the human condition in an artistic practice that weds aesthetics to social engagement. The aim is to subtly address emotional issues or intense social themes from a humanist point of view. Through photography, installation, sculpture and mixed media, Vila Rivero has criticized and offered a comment on the role of religion in wars, the immigrant condition, economic inequality due to gender, and recently the threat/aftereffects of disproportionate development without long-term planning and the privatization and subsequent overexploitation of the natural resources in Puerto Rico. This type of development ("economic growth") usually prioritizes foreigners over residents of the island. Her aim is to subtly create works whose meaning is elaborated and interwoven in a contemplative-collective network instead of being suspended in a space for individual consumption. She often responds to social oriented themes, objects with high significance, or situations in her surroundings. Site specificity is usually the point of departure for her creative process, involving research into the site and its surrounding geographical impacts. Vila Rivero always tries to combine many disciplines that work inclusively and socially.

Anastatia Spicer

South Royalton, vermont

Anastatia Spicer is a writer and weaver. Her work engages philosophies of object network relationships by activating temporal entanglements and questioning narratives of subjecthood. She has assisted weaving courses at Penland School of Craft, worked as an upholsterer's apprentice, and currently helps operate a wool mill in Vermont. Her work has been published by The Barnard College Journal of Art Criticism, Asymptote, The Poetry Foundation, and The Academy of American Poets. She received her BA from Hampshire College, Amherst, MA in 2017 and has been accepted for a MA as a Lois F. McNeil Fellow at the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture, University of Delaware, Class of 2025.

Dahn Gim

Los angeles, california

Dahn Gim is an artist and educator born in South Korea, raised in Canada and currently based in Los Angeles and Minneapolis. Gim’s work stems from personal experiences to reflect the process of adaptation to constant shifts and changes of surroundings. In the studio, she explores hybridity both in concept and materials while translating her personal experiences into questioning the process of adaptation and the nature of human connection in the digital age. Her recent works visualize the ambiguity, hybridity and contradictory elements that comes from cultural globalization in the digital age.

Since completing her M.F.A. from UCLA in Media Art in 2015, Gim has exhibited at international venues such as BASIS in Frankfurt; GAS Gallery; Steve Turner Gallery; Brand Library & Art Center; AA|LA; LAMAG; Human Resources in Los Angeles; Paul W. Zuccaire Gallery, New York; Somerset House in London; and Post Territory Ujoengguk in Seoul.

Welcome Connecticut Grantees!

In partnership with the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Assets for Artists is thrilled to welcome ten talented Connecticut artists into our Capacity-Building Grant Program!

We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow them as they progress through our program!



Amee Hussey & Magaly Del CAstillo(Ahmee Ceramics) (stonington)

Ahmee Ceramics is a creative collaboration between Amee Hussey (she/her) and Magaly Del Castillo (she/her). Their story goes back to their roots. Amee was born in South Korea and Magaly is originally from Peru. They formed a long-standing friendship in the seaside town of Stonington CT, where their studio is currently located. Their diverse cultural backgrounds are ever-present in their artistic process. They specialize in making dinnerware, lighting, and other tactile objects for the home and commercial spaces. Amee is self-taught and continues to learn with every pound of clay that is touched. All of the ceramic pieces are either formed by hand or on the potter’s wheel. They aim to find balance in the overall form and its functionality while maintaining a minimal and harmonious design aesthetic. Magaly is passionate about design. She collaborates with other local artists and businesses to grow Ahmee Ceramics while cultivating a brand that celebrates diversity and supports the community.


thomas carruthers (Bethel)

Thomas Carruthers (he/him) grew up in a household where the virtues of the visual and performing arts were integrated into every aspect of family life, so much so that creativity became part of the family’s DNA. As a young person, Thomas found himself immersed in art projects with his mother while also learning to develop an ear for music and a lifelong love of Jazz, from his father. This led Thomas to an early career as a professional musician and band leader and a subsequent pathway producing and promoting live music and film events. During this time, he never lost sight of his love for printmaking and strong visual messaging and continued to channel his passion and sense of connection to color, composition and imagery to create the graphics for his company’s marketing materials. Now eager to focus that passion into a career in the visual arts, Thomas is honing his printmaking skills and working on a collection of collagraphs, monoprints and etchings.

sophia de jesus-sabella (hartford)

Sophia De Jesus-Sabella (she/her) is an artist, weaver, and educator based in Hartford, CT. Influenced by her blue-collar upbringing, her woven and sculptural works interrogate class, gender, queerness, and utility by combining traditional hand weaving with found construction materials.  Deeply rooted in an appreciation for and curiosity about objects, materiality, and craft, Sophia’s work invites explorations of multiplicity and material lineage, by creating objects with both explicit and ambiguous functionality. Combining handwoven cloth with synthetic construction materials allows Sophia to work in the space between the provisional and the durational; that which is found and assembled out of necessity, and that which is labor intensive and craft-oriented, thus giving validity to many types of making and labor. Sophia’s work celebrates humility and failure as inherent qualities of queerness and reflects her attempts to unlearn shame and embrace the expansiveness of hybridity. Sophia is currently preparing work for several upcoming exhibitions while also expanding her teaching practice at Hartford Artisans Weaving Center.


sandra guze (east hartford)

Sandra Guze (she/her) has been creating mixed media sculpture and sewn paper forms for about three decades. Born of second-generation immigrants whose survival skills shaped her religious reuse and reverence for the discarded, Sandra acquired the passion to make and to remake objects. Alongside her father, she apprenticed in the art of fixing and grew up taking great pride in making something from nothing—or more accurately, from a well-established collection of junk.  Her mother mentored her in sewing and mending, initially learning to guide the sewing machine’s path on a sheet of plain white bond paper.  Thus, stitching paper and the scavenging of detritus became part of the fiber of her being. Her process involves the intuitive exploration of materials and objects, and importantly, their juxtaposition. While raising her family as a single mom, as well as juggling careers in art education and arts administration, she has continued to produce works that are at once tactile, visceral and metaphorical-- often mirroring the relationships and life stages through which she has passed.


dylan healy (West hartford)

Dylan Healy (he/him) is a composer, performer, record producer, curator, entrepreneur and educator from West Hartford, CT. Dylan's work is rooted in connecting people with the resources and opportunities they seek. He is the founder of Funnybone Records, an independent record label representing an international roster of emerging artists. He is also the founder of Import Sky, a community journal that publishes artwork and literature by creatives around the US. Dylan has been booking concerts, festivals and community events around the Northeast for the past decade. He records and performs with his seven-piece band, Stadia, as well as with a multitude of other musical collaborations. He aspires to synthesize his work by opening a production house, which would serve as an innovative artistic hub for his community. Outside of the arts, Dylan's full-time job is modifying and teaching curricula to high-school students with accommodations.

lauren horn (West hartford)

Lauren Horn (she/her) is a movement and text based artist originally from Windsor, CT and now based in West Hartford. She graduated from Amherst College with degrees in Psychology and Theatre and Dance. Lauren’s work explores identity and the ways it can be uncovered, marginalized, highlighted, and erased. By utilizing movement and text as means of fostering a more welcoming form of vulnerability, the work creates a space for self-reflection and conversation for both the performer and viewer. Another aspect of Lauren’s work is entrenched in creating a dialogue around our current society’s relationship to technology. From the Silent Generation to Generation Z, she wants to understand how groups of individuals, in each living generation, feel that technology has affected their expression of their true self. Lauren’s choreographic work has been showcased at The BAM Fisher Theatre in Brooklyn, NYC, The Boston Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, MA, Hibernian Hall in Boston MA, as well as numerous venues across New England and the Pacific Northwest. Lauren studied under several noted dancers, and has performed with numerous esteemed dance companies.

jasmine jones (Hartford)

Jasmine Jones (she/her) is a photographer, filmmaker, curator, and publisher from Hartford, Connecticut. She is the founder and publisher of Aislin Magazine, an arts & culture magazine focused on emerging and underground artists. Her work documents daily life, overlooked moments, and ignored communities. Her goal is to showcase those who should be seen and heard and to use her art as an outlet for them to tell their own stories. Jasmine’s journey as a photographer began at a young age while exploring different art forms and further evolved while studying at UConn where Jasmine’s photography provided a dual purpose, allowing her to create art while documenting and archiving her life and the lives of those around her. This led to Jasmine’s first solo exhibition in 2016 where her first funded, short documentary film, Voices: Volume 1, Ballroom was screened. The film highlighted voices from NYC’s Ballroom scene and explored its history, the appropriation of Ballroom, and whether or not sacred cultures should be shared on a mass level.

keila myles (hartford)

Keila Myles (she/her) is a multi-talented independent artist, band leader, singer, songwriter, rapper, and visual artist hailing from New Haven, Connecticut. She is the frontwoman and band leader of Keila Myles and the Moose Knuckles, a punk soul band that blends elements of punk, soul, and rock into a unique sound. Myles' music is characterized by her powerful vocals and introspective lyrics that explore themes of love, loss, and self-discovery. As a visual artist, she creates bold and colorful paintings and illustrations that reflect her passion for music and hip hop culture. Myles' DIY approach to her art and music has led to the release of several singles, an EP and several collaborations. She has gained a reputation for her unique style and voice and has been featured in several exhibitions and galleries throughout Connecticut. With her talent, dedication, and passion for her craft, Keila Myles is sure to continue making her mark on the music and art world.

línda perla-giron (new haven)

línda perla-giron (they/elle) is a first generation queer American Salvadoran artist currently based in New Haven, CT who aches through the written word, performance, and the visual. they are a dedicated lover seeking to transform the anger that boils their blood into the joy + pleasure that fuels self discovery and community action. Born and raised in the Bible Belt of the United States, they dance alongside marginalized and inherited narratives that care for and contextualize a landless existence: the being ni de aquí, ni de allá. they bilingually (Spanish/English) investigate hunger as the state in which one finds themselves when experiencing spiritual, mental, physical deficit: how/why it drives us towards action or inaction – madness, pleasure, depression, starvation, revolution – ultimately an undeniable need to live, by whatever means. their creative practice is made rich by the practical community work they do by means of dispelling myths surrounding those of us who are and go throughout our lives hungry.

they are the earth that has helped make ends meet by way of farming and grounding in desperate times of questioning.

they are they company they keep.

they are their hands + feet, eyes + nose, tongue + knees, ass + vagina

they are a stranger at coffee shop, a survivor of violence, the splinter in your palm, a shoulder to lean on

maya rogers (mansfield center)

Maya Rogers (she/her) is an award-winning songwriter, vocalist, educator, author, and music therapist who believes deeply in music's power to heal, uplift, and transform. The intention to create inspiring musical experiences lies at the heart of her work. Maya's music is soulful, universal, and timeless. She released her most current solo project in 2019, “The Gathering”, a collection of songs centered around healing and rising above life's challenges. Her songs and voice appear on documentaries, television, feature films, and podcasts. Maya holds a dual bachelor's degree in Songwriting and Film Scoring from Berklee College of Music and a certificate in Music Therapy from Howard University. In 2017, she was given the honor of Formation Scholar by Beyonce Knowles Carter and Howard University for her excellence in her studies. Her path to music therapy began when she experienced a traumatic brain injury and used music to help restore her mind, body, and spirit to a state beyond her wildest expectations.