Welcome December Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

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


Angeline Meitzler

Brooklyn, New York

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


Felicia Nez

Albuquerque, New Mexico

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  Within the layers of her complex narrative, she makes historical references to how Pueblo Potters and other Native artists coded their pot designs and art to preserve their traditions from colonists.

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


David Askew

Virginia Beach, Virginia

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

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


Najee Haynes-Follins

Baltimore, Maryland

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


grace (ge) gilbert

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

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


Derek G. Larson

Brooklyn, New York

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


Stevie Imua’Kalani Cisneros Hanley

Chicago, Illinois

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


Tammie Dupuis

Bremerton, Washington

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

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

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


Arnab Gan Choudhury

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

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


2024 Capacity Building Grants for Northern Berkshire Artists

Artist Molly Hess (Florida, MA).

This year, A4A is offering our first-ever Capacity-Building Grant program for ALL of the Northern Berkshires, with the aim of recognizing the interconnection of the vibrant creative communities that surround our museum.

Application opens: Nov 1, 2023

Application Closes: Dec 15, 2023

program overview

MASS MoCA’s Assets for Artists Capacity Building Grant Program pairs an unrestricted micro-grant of $2,000 with professional development tools for artists to design and build their creative future. In this program, each artist determines what they need from a broad array of professional development and network-building opportunities, which means that each artist's path through the program will look a little different.

Note: This program is replacing our North Adams Project, which restricted capacity-building grants and resources to artists based in North Adams.

details

Each grantee will have access to:

  • An unrestricted grant of $2,000 paid out at a time of your choosing.


Questions? Watch the Q&A!

We recorded a live Q&A about this program on November 20. You can watch it here.


ELIGIBILITY

This Capacity Building Grant is designed to support Northern Berkshire based creatives who have had limited access to resources and/or faced significant barriers to pursue artistic opportunities. Because of these hurdles, this grant is intended to provide tools, strategies and community that will put artists on a pathway to a more sustainable, creative future.

Applicants to this program should:

  • Have a home or studio address in the Northern Berkshires, MA. 

    The Northern Berkshires include 10 towns: Adams, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Florida, Hancock, Lanesborough, New Ashford, North Adams, Savoy & Williamstown. (We will have a separate grant opportunity available for Pittsfield artists in early 2024.)

    Please note that applicants are not required to be a US citizen or to provide documentation of legal residence in the US.

  • Be an artist or creative of any discipline.

We define “artist” broadly to include visual artists, writers, musicians, dancers, theater practitioners, craftspeople, jewelers, fashion designers, puppeteers, fiber artists, drag performers, social practice and public artists, photographers, filmmakers, woodworkers, traditional artisans, and more!

  • NOT live in a high-income household.

    We wish to give preference to artists with financial need. Applicants must have a household income that does not exceed the area median income for Berkshire County: $75,250 for a 1-person household; $86,000 for a 2-person household; $96,750 for a 3-person household; $107,500 for a 4-person household; and $116,100 for a 5-person household, and $124,700 for a 6-person household. If your household income is higher than these limits, please do not apply.

  • Be at least 18 years of age and not enrolled as a full-time high school or undergraduate student.

  • Be ready to take their practice to the next level.

    The Capacity-Building Grant is best suited for creatives who are excited to engage with program offerings, ready to build a more sustainable practice and expand their network of creative peers.

Applicants must also be over the age of 18, and must not be a previous A4A grant recipient. We strongly encourage artists from under-resourced communities and backgrounds to apply.

Program timeline

Nov 1 - Dec 15, 2023: Applications accepted
Feb 2024: Cohort announced and onboarded
Feb - July 2024: Cohort active, workshops, coaching, group events
July 31, 2024: Program completes

Questions? Read our FAQ. Then contact: assetsforartists@massmoca.org


2023 Programa de Subvenciones de Berkshires del Norte Capacity-Building (Español)

DESCRIPCIÓN DEL PROGRAMA

Assets for Artists (Recursos para artistas) (A4A, por sus siglas en inglés) es un programa de MASS MoCA por artistas para artistas. Ofrecemos talleres de desarrollo profesional, coaching, subvenciones de capital de trabajo y desarrollo de comunidad creativa para artistas en CT, MA y RI. Nos imaginamos un mundo en el que a los artistas se les paga justamente, son valorados por sus contribuciones artísticas, sociales y económicas, y se les da acceso equitativo a recursos para prosperar. El Capacity Building Grant Program (Programa de Subvenciones de Capacity Building) de Assets for Artists proporciona una micro-subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que acompaña herramientas de desarrollo profesional para artistas para que diseñen y construyan su futuro creativo.

DETALLES DEL PROGRAMA

En este programa, cada artista determina lo que necesita de una amplia variedad de oportunidades, lo cual quiere decir que la trayectoria de cada artista a lo largo del programa será un poco diferente. Después de ser aceptados en el programa, los becarios serán contactados por teléfono por uno de los Administradores del Programa (Program Managers) de A4A para completar un breve proceso de integración y ofrecer información de los recursos que tendrán disponibles. Esta llamada también le dará a nuestro equipo la oportunidad de aprender más sobre ti y tus objetivos creativos.

Cada becario tendrá acceso a:

  • Una subvención sin restricciones de $2,000 que se pagará cuando tú escojas.

  • Acceso prioritario a los talleres en línea de Assets for Artists por el año (algunos diseñados específicamente con tu cohorte en mente).

  • Por lo menos una sesión individual de coaching con un instructor A4A de tu preferencia.

  • Apoyo para formular objetivos y preparar un plan de acción enfocado en lograrlos.

  • Oportunidades para crear una red de contactos entre los de tu cohorte de compañeros becarios.

¿Más preguntas? Encuentra aquí las preguntas más frecuentes (FAQ ENGLISH ONLY).

ELEGIBILIDAD Para participar, debe...

  • Tener una dirección para su domicilio actual o su estudio actual en las comunidades de Adams, Cheshire, Clarksburg, Florida, Hancock, Lanesborough, New Ashford, North Adams, Savoy y Williamstown.

  • Tener por lo menos 18 años de edad.

  • Ser artista o creativo en cualquier disciplina.

  • Tener un ingreso familiar que no supere el ingreso promedio del área para el condado de Berkshire: $75,250 para un hogar de 1 persona; $86,000 para un hogar de 2 personas; $96,750 para un hogar de 3 personas; $107,500 para un hogar de 4 personas; y $116,100 para un hogar de 5 personas. Si los ingresos de su hogar superan estos límites, por favor, no presente su solicitud.

  • No haber recibido anteriormente una subvención por parte de Assets for Artists.

  • Por favor, ten en cuenta que NO SE REQUIERE que seas ciudadano de los EE.UU. ni que presentes documentación de residencia legal en los EE.UU.

Nuestro Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building es para artistas y creativos de cualquier disciplina. Definimos “artista” muy ampliamente para incluir artistas visuales, escritores, músicos, bailarines, artistas de teatro, artesanos, joyeros, diseñadores de moda, titiriteros, artistas de las fibras, artistas de drag, fotógrafos, cineastas, trabajadores de la madera, artesanos tradicionales, artistas de gestión cultural y más.

Aunque le damos la bienvenida a la solicitud de artistas en cualquier etapa de su carrera, la mayoría de los artistas que hemos servido se identifican como emergentes o a mediados de su carrera. Algunos de nuestros artistas son autodidactas, mientras que otros tienen su Maestría en Bellas Artes; algunos son relativamente nuevos en el arte mientras que otros han estado haciéndolo por décadas. Muchos de los artistas con los que trabajamos nunca han recibido una subvención. Instamos encarecidamente a artistas de comunidades y antecedentes de recursos limitados a que soliciten. Aprende cómo es que Assets for Artists procura trabajar dentro de un marco contra la opresión.

Se dará preferencia a los solicitantes con mayor necesidad económica y a aquellos que enfrentan obstáculos significativos en su práctica creativa.

El Programa de Subvenciones Capacity-Building resulta más apropiado para creativos entusiasmados por involucrarse en los programas ofrecidos, listos para crear una práctica más sostenible, y aumentar su red de contactos con compañeros creativos.

FECHAS LÍMITES PARA EL PROGRAMA

Fecha inicial para aplicar: 1 de noviembre 2023
Último día para aplicar: 15 de diciembre 2023
Notificación a los becarios: enero 2024
Llamadas informativas: enero-febrero 2024
Comienzan los talleres: febrero 2024

Welcome November Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

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

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

THURSDAY, November 30th FROM 5-7PM


Sandra Jackson-Opoku

Chicago, Illinois

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

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


Clara Cruz

Richmond, Virginia

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

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


Nadia Taquary

Salvador, Brazil

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

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

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


Sergio Suarez

Atlanta, Georgia

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


Quki

Kasigluk, Alaska

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


Elizabeth Burden

Tucson, Arizona

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

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

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


David Peña

Chula vista, california

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

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


Funlola Coker

Beverly, Massachusetts

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

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


Jesus Trevino

Brownsville, Texas

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

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


Lillie J. Harris

Clinton, Maryland

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

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

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

Welcome 2024 Residency Fellows: Part I

The Studios at MASS MoCA is pleased to announce the awardees of 2024’s first batch of residency fellowships! Each of these artists will receive a free residency at the Studios, thanks to our many generous partners and funders.

Congratulations to this season’s fellows:

GENERAL FELLOWSHIPS

OREGON VISUAL ARTIST FELLOWSHIPS

MASSACHUSETTS FELLOWSHIPS

IRIS FELLOWSHIPS

PUERTO RICO ARTIST FELLOWSHIPS

LA NUEVA FÁBRICA GUATEMALA ARTIST FELLOWSHIP

UNIVERSITY FELLOWSHIPS


General Fellowships:

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

Photo by: Patricia Sales

Rodriguez Remor

Igatu, Chapada Diamantina, brazil

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


Photo by: Thuóng Hoài Trân

Janhavi Khemka

Chicago, Illinois

Born in 1993 in Varanasi, India, Janhavi Khemka is an interdisciplinary artist based in Chicago. She completed her Master of Studio Art degree in print media from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2022. She received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting and Printmaking from the Faculty of Visual Art, Banaras Hindu University in Varanasi, India (2015) and a Master of Fine Art in Printmaking from Graphics Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati University in Santiniketan (2017).

Her current artistic research has an intersection of traditional printmaking, animation, fiber arts, and performance. She has exhibited her artwork in regional, national, and international galleries and institutions throughout the United States, India, Norway, Korea, and the United Kingdom.

Recently she received the 63rd National Award 2023, Lalit Kala Academi, in printmaking for "Sapna" and a Printmaking Today Graduate Award for Winter Issues Magazine in December 2022 from Cello Press Limited, Witney, UK. In 2023, she was selected to present a solo exhibition at Comfort Station in Logan Square, Chicago. She has recently been invited to attend a residency at Kala’s Artist in Residence Program in Berkeley, California, and will begin a three-month 3Arts/Bodies of Work residency in Fall 2023.


Photo by: Carolina Xia

Antonius-Tin Bui

New Haven, Connecticut

Antonius Bui is a poly-disciplinary artist and shapeshifter invested in the transformative potential of ritual, portraiture, craft, and performance. Their ever-glitching identity as a queer, nonbinary, Vietnamese-American significantly informs the way they visualize hybrid identities and histories.

They are the child of Paul and Van Bui, two Vietnamese refugees who sacrificed everything to provide a future for their four kids and extended family. Born and raised in Bronx, NY, Antonius eventually moved to Houston before pursuing a BFA at the Maryland Institute College of Art (MIC/A).

Since graduating in 2016, Antonius has been fortunate to receive fellowships from the Vermont Studio Center, Kala Art Institute, Tulsa Artists Fellowship, Halcyon Arts Lab, Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, Yaddo, Anderson Center at Tower View, The Growlery, Jentel, and Fine Arts Work Center.

Antonius has exhibited at various institutional, private, public, and underground venues, including the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, IA&A at Hillyer, Lawndale Art Center, Pennsylvania College of Art & Design, Artscape, Satellite Art Fair Austin, Blaffer Art Museum, Laband Art Gallery, USC’s Pacific Asia Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, and Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building.


Murjoni Merriweather

Baltimore, Maryland

As a black woman artist from Maryland, Murjoni Merriweather has found that the best way to create and talk about black culture is through art, especially claywork. As a student from the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), Murjoni creates sculpted beings that are based around real people and real experiences. Her work addresses and eliminates stereotypes through clay portraits and video work. With this, she enjoys going against the European standards of “beauty” that are placed upon people of color (light skin, petite figure, etc.), and normalizing what is natural about black bodies, loving and accepting them as they come.

Murjoni makes artwork, connections and reflections with herself and others based on shared experiences. As she deepens her craft, she plans to continue eliminating stereotypes and prejudices while uplifting the black community.


Zella Vanié

New York, New York

Photo by: Khalil Bowens

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

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

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

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


Zainab Aliyu

Brooklyn, New York

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


Mariah Rigg

Weaverville, North Carolina

Mariah Rigg is a third-generation Samoan-Haole settler who grew up on the illegally-occupied island of Oʻahu. Her work has been published in Oxford American, The Cincinnati Review, Joyland, etc., and has been supported by VCCA, MASS MoCA, the Carolyn Moore Writers’ House, and Oregon Literary Arts. In 2023, Mariah's chapbook, All Hat, No Cattle, was published as part of the Inch series at Bull City Press. She holds an MFA from the University of Oregon and is a PhD candidate at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Along with being a fiction editor for TriQuarterly and a senior creative nonfiction editor for Grist, A Journal of the Arts, she is currently an editorial intern at Tin House.


Victor MARKA27 Quinonez

Brooklyn, New York

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

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

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


Alida Rodrigues

London, United Kingdom

Alida Rodrigues (b.1983) is an Angolan born visual artist currently based in London. Rodrigues studied at The Slade School of Fine Art in 2007, where she received a BA in Fine Art. Since her first solo exhibition in 2014 at Trondheim Kunstmuseum in Norway, she has exhibited widely within the UK, Europe and Africa and participated in artists residencies in the UK, Mexico and the US.   

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


Brooklyn, New York

Born in Ecuador and based in New York, painter Mar Figueroa’s work interweaves personal memories with historical references to engage in a dialogue about the layered Latin American identities in the diaspora and to celebrate her Indigenous heritage. She received her education at the Rhode Island School of Design and, shortly after graduating, launched her art and design studio. In 2020, she was recognized by Forbes in their 30 Under 30 list in Art & Style. Most recently, she taught at RISD and is currently a faculty member at the School of Visual Arts in New York.


Cat Tyc

Hudson, New York

Cat Tyc is an interdisciplinary writer/artist who has three chapbooks, An Architectural Seance (dancing girl press & studio), CONSUMES ME (Belladonna* Collaborative) and I AM BECAUSE MY LITTLE DOG KNOWS ME (Blush Lit).


Her most recent writing has been published in Maggot Brain The Recluse, Shock of the Femme, Touch the Donkey and FENCE.
She has presented and performed at the Microscope Gallery, Anthology Film Archives, Brooklyn Museum, Hauser & Wirth, Kassel Fest and the synthesis gallery in Berlin. She has directed music videos that have been added to the rotation on LOGO’s NewNowNext and MTVu. Her first solo exhibition, SIGNIFICANT OTHERNESS, was presented at Tanja Grunert gallery in 2022.


She has been granted residencies and fellowships at Signal Culture and The Flaherty Seminar and has received support from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. She teaches writing at the School of the Visual Arts in New York City and lives in Hudson, NY.


Oregon Visual Arts Fellowship:

(funded by The Ford Family Foundation)

Jessica Doe

Hillsboro, Oregon

Jessica Doe, PhD is a multi-award winning Aniyunwiya interdisciplinary poet and artist. As a native of the occupied land of what is often referred to today as “Oregon” and a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, space, place, and de-colonization are the driving forces behind her work, which includes 15 books and several solo exhibitions. Her doctoral work addressed the meeting point of eating disorders and female poetics with an emphasis on Indigenous literature and medicine. She recently returned from India where she was a Fulbright Senior Scholar in Bengaluru and curated a poetry anthology in the colonizer’s tongue.

Her installation “The Red C[h]airn Project,” is currently on display at the Ucross Gallery in Wyoming and was one of four pieces to reopen the renovated gallery. She has upcoming exhibitions at the Walters Cultural Center (Hillsboro, Oregon) and Kala Art Gallery (Berkeley). Her poetry collection that Indigenizes the tarot deck, [sp]RED, is slated to release in 2024 by Red Planet Books.


Epiphany Couch

Portland, Oregon

Photo by: Holli Margell/Native Light Photography

Epiphany Couch is an interdisciplinary artist exploring generational knowledge, storytelling, and our connection to the metaphysical. By re-contextualizing classic mediums such as bookmaking, beadwork, photography, and collage, she presents new ways to examine our pasts, the natural world, and our ancestors. Couch’s work is unapologetically personal, drawing from family stories, her childhood experience, archival research, and her own dreams. She utilizes a multidisciplinary approach to create images and sculptural works that hold space for reflection, transforming from mere things into precious objects — intimate and heirloom-like.

Couch is spuyaləpabš (Puyallup), Yakama, and Scandinavian and grew up in caləłali (Tacoma, Washington). Her work has been shown at Carnation Contemporary in Portland OR, Gallery Ost in New York City, and Yuan Ru Gallery in Bellevue WA. In 2022 and 2023 she received the Jurors Choice Award for her work included in the Around Oregon Biennial at The Arts Center in Corvallis Oregon. She lives and works in Portland, Oregon, and is a member of Carnation Contemporary Gallery.


Ido Radon

Portland, Oregon

Ido Radon is an artist and writer whose work is fed by long-term interests in pervasive and diffuse modes of control, enclosures, the social production of reality as conditioned by the abstractions of advanced capitalism, and revolutionary or utopian impulses (experiments in living), all as mediated by various technologies. She’s made solo exhibitions at Artspeak (Vancouver, B.C), Air de Paris (Paris), Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Et al. (San Francisco), Jupiter Woods (London), Pied-à-terre (San Francisco), Romance (Pittsburgh), and Veronica (Seattle) and shown work at Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, RONGWRONG, the Belkin Art Gallery, and the Henry Art Gallery. She holds an MFA from the University of British Columbia. With family and friends, she makes SOCIETY.


Julia Oldham

Eugene, Oregon

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

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


Massachusetts Fellowship:

(funded by the Barr Foundation)

Felipe Shibuya

Brookline, Massachusetts

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


Calvin Gimpelevich

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Calvin Gimpelevich is an essayist and fiction writer. He was a 2022 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in Literature, the recipient of Lambda Literary's Markowitz Award, and the author of Invasions (Instar 2018), and a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in Transgender Fiction. His work has been recognized by Artist Trust, Jack Straw Cultural Center, 4Culture, CODEX/Writer’s Block and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts; it has appeared or is forthcoming in A Public Space, Ploughshares, Kenyon Review, and The Best American Essays 2022. 

In addition to writing, Calvin has long been active in queer/trans arts and community organizing. He is currently the director and host of T4T Readings, an open mic and reading series in Boston.


Rob Gibbs

Boston, Massachusetts

Photo by: G.Ortiz photography

Rob "ProBlak" Gibbs is a visual artist, organizer, and community builder from Roxbury, MA. He transforms Boston's cultural landscape, focusing on beautifying Black and Brown communities. Gibbs’ recent 5-part Breathe Life mural series has received national acclaim, most recently as the first local and Black artist to paint the coveted Dewey Square Mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway. As co-founder of Artists for Humanity, he devoted over 30 years to teaching creative skills to youth and partnering with institutions to offer real-time opportunities for emerging artists. Gibbs has been recognized as one of Boston's most influential people and has received numerous awards, including the Boston Celtics' Hero Among Us Award and the MLK Drum Major Award. He was the first local and Black artist to paint the coveted Dewey Square Mural on the Rose Kennedy Greenway and has been an artist-in-residence with Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and MassArt. In 2023, Gibbs was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Fine Arts from Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Gibbs’ continuing practice is expansive and prolific. He envisions graffiti and hip-hop as ways to educate young people and create images of beauty and resilience through murals and contemporary fine art.


Lily Xie

Boston, Massachusetts

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


Karmimadeebora McMillan

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Karmimadeebora “Mima” McMillan was born in Fayetteville, North Carolina and is based in Cambridge, MA. She has a MFA (2013) and Post Baccalaureate certificate (2011) from The School of the Museum of Arts at Tufts, Boston. McMillan’s paintings are influenced by her southern childhood. Characters from racist’s propaganda and black dolls wander through brightly colored and fragmented landscapes.

After graduate school McMillan worked for the well-known street artist Swoon for five years as her business manager and helped start her non-profit organization Heliotrope Foundation.

McMillan has also performed with her mentor Magdalena Campos-Pons at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Queens Museum in New York, and Havana, Cuba Biennale 15. Karmimadeebora is currently the Director of the Post Baccalaureate Program and part time lecturer at SMFA at Tufts, Boston.


DaNice D. Marshall

Braintree, Massachusetts

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

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


Tammi Jean Fedestin

Malden, Massachusetts

Photo Credit: Jen Vesp

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

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

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


Sharon Amuguni

Worcester, Massachusetts

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


Iris Residency Fellowship

(in partnership with the Berkshire Immigrant Center)

Marina Dominguez

Pittsfield, Massachusetts

Photo Credit: Shaw Israel Izikson, Berkshire Edge

Marina Dominguez is a photographer and art facilitator from Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her journey to the United States began seven years ago, when she arrived in the Berkshires in Western Massachusetts. Having spent her early career in the corporate world in Argentina, she acknowledged and felt deep gratitude for the Berkshire Community, a profound connection with art was sparked and an awakening and journey of self-discovery began. Being an immigrant in this country often means creating a relationship with solitude. However, embracing solitude turned out to be one of the most transformative experiences of her life. She accepted it and harnessed its power to truly delve into self-discovery. She rebuilt herself to help and encourage others to heal through art, coaching and psychology”

Marina Dominguez is founder of Katunemo Artist Collective, a group focused on arts, healing and community resources for immigrant artists.


Shailja Patel

Amherst, Massachusetts

Credit: © Marco Giugliarelli for the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2023

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

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

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

Patel is the Public Affairs Editor for the Massachusetts Review. From 2020-2022, she was a Research Associate at Five College Women’s Studies Research Center, in Western Massachusetts.


Originally from Arecibo, Puerto Rico, Marta Pérez García was trained as a printmaker at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, Philadelphia, where she recieved an MFA. Her artworks are in the collections of The Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico,The Library of Congress, Washington, DC and The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC, among others. Pérez García has been a yearly recipient of artist fellowships from the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities since 2010. She was awarded a Public Art Building Communities Grant in 2018 for I'm Gonna Get You, a large mixed-media installation on gender violence exhibited at the Reeves Center. Recently, Pérez García started to experiment with structural papermaking and was awarded the 2021 Vita Paper Arts Residency at Pyramid Atlantic Art Center in Hyattsville, Maryland. Her artwork Your Hand (2020), which was featured in the Phillips's juried invitational Inside Outside, Upside Down, in 2021, was acquired by The Phillips Collection.


Carolina Mercado Vargas

Isabela, Puerto Rico

Carolina Mercado Vargas (also Nadirr) is a Puerto Rican photographer, writer and graphic designer, currently based in Isabela, Puerto Rico.

Her work is an exploration of the intricacies of daily life, emphasizing urban experiences and the solitude that accompanies them, occasionally infused with surreal elements, Her focus revolves around crafting memory spaces and interlacing narratives. Her current interests include textile work and documenting the ongoing changes in her home island of Puerto Rico, particularly in the context of the prevailing gentrification. She has had her work exhibited in Puerto Rico, Japan and Spain.


Steve Maldonado Silvestrini

Toa Alta, Puerto Rico

Steve Maldonado Silvestrini is an artist and designer, as well as a self-taught botanist and plant taxonomist, from and based in Puerto Rico. Although his academic background is in architecture and design, he currently works on several projects and explorations that intersect the practices of art and science. He actively collaborates and supports several environmental activists & organizations, grassroots movements, and self-organized communities. Many of these collaborations have resulted in the protection of endangered species and unique natural sites in Puerto Rico. His scientific research currently focuses on agrostology, naturally occurring hybrids, phenology, and the indexing and monitoring of introduced plant species to the Caribbean. His artistic oeuvre centers on future Caribbean narratives, etymology, living systems, mutualism, natural history collections, and site-specific/time-specific explorations. His design and architectural works propose post-anthropocentric habitation, environments not centered solely on human needs, considering all living beings in an ecologically inclusive approach. He has published in Acta Científica, Forgotten Lands, Phytoneuron, and the River Rail. He has exhibited his artistic oeuvre in Hidrante (Santurce, PR), Bronx Art Space (NYC), TEA Tenerife Espacio de las Artes (Tenerife, Spain), and Casa Manatuabón (Manatí, PR).


Elizabeth Robles

San Juan, Puerto Rico

Photo by: Máximo Colón

Elizabeth Robles practices across media, working with sculpture, installation and performance; all within walking distance from her home.

The intimacy of her relationship with her surroundings leads her to produce an art of connections and coexistence between objects found or created, materialities, architecture and the urban and rural fabric. Her work dilates the boundaries that separate art and life, such as pulverizing stone pigments and fermenting foods, or walking and performance.

The impositions of the Board of Fiscal Control to the economic crisis in Puerto Rico and migratory movements are themes that are addressed in her current production.


Natalia Bosques Chico

Seattle, Washington

“I’m a 29 years old queer woman born & raised in Puerto Rico. Acrylic painting is my main artistic practice but I’ve also played around with different mediums, such as digital illustration, linocut printmaking, ballpoint pen drawing, among others. In 2015 I obtained a Bachelor’s Degree in Painting from my hometown’s Universidad Interamericana de Puerto Rico, San German Campus. Moving back home is my main goal so I like to stay current with Puerto Rico’s art scene and participate in as many exhibitions as I can there and locally. This year (2023), some of my paintings were a part of Hayden's Ferry Review (AZ), Chichaítos 4, Barrioization (PR) and Sortaria, Fuerza Fest (NY). My illustrations are featured in Gacela del Ático, Pulpo Editorial and La Impresora's books.


Diana Dávila Casasnovas

Guaynabo, Puerto Rico

Sculptor, ceramicist, jewelry designer, draftswoman, painter and teacher. Dávila earned her BFA at The University of the Arts and a certificate in fine arts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (1985). In Puerto Rico, she continued her studies in Education at the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras Campus and took workshops in drawing, painting and ceramics with artists Bernardo Hogan, Jerry Bennett, Luis Ivorra, Ricardo Tena, Joe Carolffi, Gerda Gruber, John Balossi, Loraine de Castro, Frank Cervoni and Raúl Zayas. In 2019 she received an award to intern at the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, Vermont, USA. She has taught at the Art Students League of San Juan, Universidad del Sagrado Corazón and at Museo de Arte de Puerto Rico. In 2017, she was accepted as a member of the International Academy of Ceramics, AIC-IAC located in Switzerland. She has shown her work in several solo and group exhibitions in Puerto Rico, United States the Dominican Republic and Spain, including the International Festival of Postmodern Ceramics of the Croatian Ceramic Association (2005). Dávila’s sculptural work is characterized by the use of ceramics, the predominance of blue and green hues and by the configuration of interconnected forms in her compositions.


Guatemala Artist Fellowship

(In partnership with La Nueva Fábrica)

Josue Castro

Guatemala City, Guatemala

During his residency at MASS MoCA, Josue will work on developing a performance that "originates from everyday circumstances and moments, which are permeated by systematic and structural violence by the process of masculinity. The main theme of the research and performance addresses the icon of the Devil as a subject of study from historical, ethical/philosophical and social contexts. The Devil catalyzes a system of questioning, reflection, rethinking, as well as expresses the conflict of the fullness of masculinity especially in an intrapersonal way from the Guatemalan context as a gay man with K'iche' Mayan roots."


University Fellowships:

(In partnership with the following universities):

Ariana Gomez (University of Texas - Austin)

Buda, Texas

Photo by: Seth Personett

Ariana Gomez is a visual artist working between image and text. Originally from Austin, Texas, she has spent the last 12 years in New York City working commercially. Recently she returned home to pursue a graduate degree from the University of Texas at Austin. This transition has become a catalyst for her most recent ruminations on the concepts of home, family, and identity.

Ariana was honored to be mentioned in Glass Tire’s Best of 2022 as a photographer to watch and has exhibited in group shows both in the US and internationally, most recently showing at the McLennon Pen Co gallery in Austin, TX as well as showing a selection of works from her series ‘Sunset Park’ at sTudio 7 in Fort Tilden for the Rockaway Artists’ Alliance. Currently she is exploring the idea of ‘home as myth’ through reflections on her parent’s relationship to land.


Leah Horowitz (Brooklyn College)

Ridgewood, New York

“My work invites viewers to engage with them and consider what is typically overlooked or rendered invisible. As a “learning disabled” young girl I would spend long periods of time in empty rooms to complete schoolwork. During this time I would fantasize about alternative realities and lives away from the present. I am no longer imagining a future outside of society; I work to depict our collective present landscapes. While making work that presents both artificial and natural qualities, my attention slips into abstract spaces in order to process emerging ecologies. As a queer artist with ADD and dyslexia, I attempt to make an alternative translation of reality that exists outside of accepted linguistic, social, and cultural norms into an empowering space.”


Tina Villadolid (Corcoran School of the Arts and Design)

Washington, D.C.

Tina Villadolid is a second-generation Filipina American. She was a museum teaching artist for 23 years, bringing the art museum into neighborhoods guerrilla style. Eventually teaching the children of former students, her work with the marginalized generations of a wealthy community threw into question her own life's relationships to predominantly white spaces. Knowing her practice had to change, she returned to graduate school to unlearn ideologies of systemic power hierarchies. Her creative practice has become a reclamation of her inheritances as a Filipina American.

Researching trails of current US policy that began with the violent conquest of the Philippines 125 years ago begs a very personal reckoning with the duality of Tina’s identity. Reclamation takes form through temporal, site-specific, installation and action-based work that she calls “ritual interventions.” As markers of resilience to generational trauma caused by Spanish, then American colonialism, they invite collective healing in public spaces. The materiality of her work includes banana leaves, rice, and cordage in reclamation of her ancestral connection to the land, while challenging imperialist regimes of value. Illumination is a key component of her regeneration of a matriarchal lineage of Filipina shamans, whether it be through natural sunlight, projection, or reflective surfaces.

Tina’s work is relevant for many who are questioning the way the United States teaches and remembers its own history. It resists systemic erasure and creates entry points for unwinding the anti-indigenous narratives we are taught. It embodies the ferocity and healing power of the fierce feminine that is her legacy.

In 2023 Tina graduated with a Master of Fine Arts in Social Practice degree from the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design, George Washington University. She is the recipient of the Nashman Center Prize for Community Engagement in the Arts and Design for her ongoing project, Tracing Manila House. She also received the award for Outstanding Work in Social Practice.

Instagram


Khaila Batts (City College of New York)

Arverne, New York

Khaila Batts’ work is influenced by the fluidity of memories, she blends digital collage, acetate, and painted surfaces. She creates surrealistic and chaotic scenes through color manipulation. She explores how perception pieces together incomplete and altered images. Color and emotion inform her artistic practice; together, they enable her paintings to examine the relational nature of color. Using tiny organic brushstrokes and cool shades of blue, she recontextualizes violence scenes as calming and comforting as ocean waves. Batts’s large-scale paintings are ambiguous representation of her conflicting feelings, struggles and relationships between her and her surroundings; created as a reflection of mundane, everyday life. Her interrogation of these relationships during Covid has birthed a duality, that presents the holistic experience, engulfed in both the cruelty and kindness that we all experience. Batts often draws inspiration from familiarity; she often incorporates photographs of family and her neighbor into her work, serving as vessels for connection and a recollection of the past.


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 Massachusetts Grantees!

This past summer we welcomed the first thirteen artists representing our 2023 Massachusetts Statewide Capacity Building Grant Program which includes, in total, twenty-six artists.

We are thrilled to now welcome and highlight the second half of this cohort, thirteen emerging and mid-career artists representing a diverse array of talent from across the state. We hope you’ll take a few minutes to read, meet and follow these artists as they progress through our program!

 

Amaryllis lopez (lawrence)

Amaryllis Lopez (she/her) is a Puerto Rican arts educator and cultural worker based in Lawrence, Massachusetts. Her work is fueled by her afrofeminist imagination, love of words, and desire to preserve joy. Lopez is an experienced teaching artist with a decade of social justice curriculum building and facilitation, non-profit leadership, and graphic design experience. Her work with communities and schools is grounded in asset-based orientations and a demonstrated commitment to educational equity and social justice. She earned her B.A. in English with minors in Latin American & Caribbean Studies and African American Studies from Bridgewater State University in 2020.


amya meshelle (brockton)

A 22 year old LGBTQ Visual Artist, born and raised in Brockton MA, Amya Meshelle (she/her) is looking to break boundaries with her work, and showcase her talents and strengths as a self taught artist. Amya’s main mediums are watercolor, oil and acrylic paint, but she often utilizes mixed media techniques in her artwork that express the voice, thoughts, and feelings of her inner child. Growing up disabled, biracial, queer, and a woman - Amya often struggled with mental health, identity, and expressing herself. Art has been a way for Amya to communicate and connect with not only herself but with others.


borirock (fitchburg)

BoriRock (he/him) is a Puerto Rican and Dominican artist from Dorchester, Massachusetts, fresh off the release of his 15th full-length project in two years. Also known as El Hooto, The Puerto Rican Jay-Z, Hootie Hustle, Pastor Hoot, and Teflon Hoot, Bori has steadily grown his fan base across Boston and the underground of NYC over the last two years. Through a combination of comedy, braggadocio, and disarming vulnerability, Bori has captured the hearts of anyone who spends time getting to know him and his brand. As someone who truly cares about his community and the younger artists that will follow him, he has quickly become a vanguard and a leader in a city that has historically had little infrastructure or desire to boost artists towards a career of global recognition and financial success. Bori continues to use art to change the circumstances of his life, and he is an inspiration to others to do the same.


dimitri suriel (worcester)

Frankie, a name given by my Dominican father, serves as a shield, concealing inner pain. It's the name I use in most aspects of life, projecting confidence. However, few are familiar with my middle name, Dimitri, given by my Puerto Rican mother and known only within my family. Dimitri carries our family's trauma, often overlooked and misunderstood.

Through poetry and photography, Dimitri finds a voice to articulate our shared experiences, uncovering memories intertwined with both pain and beauty. Drawing inspiration from poet Martín Espada, I aim to explore our family's trauma more deeply, providing a language for collective healing and unearthing hidden stories.

Dimitri is no longer hidden, which is why I write under the pen name Dimitri Suriel. Poetry feels like a comforting visit to my grandmother's embrace, a safe haven. Photography, initially meant to complement poetry, has grown into a passionate pursuit, capturing the beauty of everyday life and family moments. In my journey, my goal is to evolve into a captivating storyteller, fostering healing for myself, my family, and my community, all while embracing Dimitri.


kei (BOSTON)

After releasing her 2021 debut EP, “baby steps”, kei (she/her) was quickly embraced by the New England music scene where she continues to thrive. Her follow up second EP “terrible twos” (May 2022) paid homage to her influences, Rico Nasty and Bktherula and cemented kei’s status as one of Boston’s most promising emerging artists. Following her ‘terrible tour’ leg spanning Boston-New York-Los Angeles, and the success of her breakout single “berserk”, kei was not only crowned Jack Daniel’s Best New Artist of the Year at the 2022 Boston Music Awards, but also admitted to the 2023 cohort of Harvard University’s No Label Academy where she garnered co-signs from the likes of BIA and IDK. She has also garnered a reputation for energetic live shows; from gracing the stage at Future Forward Festival to opening for Asian Doll, Lola Brooke, BKTHERULA, IDK, Grandmaster Flash, Blvck Svm and Van Buren Records, kei is quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with.


laila franklin (boston)

Laila J. Franklin (she/her) is a dance maker, performer, teacher, administrator, archivist, and writer based in Boston, MA, by way of Washington, DC. Her work explores kinetic imagination through the rigor of juxtaposing virtuosic and intimate performances. Laila’s choreography has been presented through Public Space One (IA), Loculus Sideways Door Festival (MA), Bates Dance Festival Works In Progress Showing (ME), Lion’s Jaw Dance and Performance Festival’s The Thing (MA), the Boston Conservatory, and the University of Iowa. She is a recipient of a Boston Center for the Arts Dancemakers Residency (2023/2024), Dancemakers Lab Residency (2022/2023), and Run of the Mills Residency (2022); and a Boston Conservatory at Berklee Alumni Choreographic Commission (2022). She was the recipient of an Iowa Arts Fellowship (2019-2021) and a Dance/USA Archiving and Preservation Fellowship (2023). Her performance and collaboration credits include projects with Miguel Gutierrez, Michael Figueroa, Melinda Jean Myers, Dr. Christopher-Rasheem McMillan, and Stephanie Miracle. Laila has been working as a teaching artist since 2018, and also serves as a consultant and collaborator for social justice education projects and programming. She holds a BFA in Contemporary Dance Performance from The Boston Conservatory and a MFA in Dance from the University of Iowa.


lilah boyd (brockton)

Lilah! (she/her) is a musician whose talent knows no bounds. Raised in Brockton, her latest single, "Brolic Freestyle," showcases her captivating cadences and unique rhyme patterns, setting her apart from the crowd. Her music delves into personal experiences, shedding light on important issues and celebrating individuality. Beyond her solo work, Lilah's contributions as a writer and producer have been recognized on various projects such as BLK ODYSSY's "Diamonds & Freaks", GRIP's "Five & A F*** You", Khary's "THIS IS WEIRD", and many more. With Lilah's infectious energy, undeniable talent, and commitment to authenticity, she is undoubtedly an artist to watch. She continues to make waves in the music scene, spreading joy and creativity to her audience. 


michael tejada (lawrence)

Michael Tejada’s (he/him) love of filmmaking started around 2016, when he began documenting his friends creating art around his hometown of Lawrence, Massachusetts. Michael made his first narrative short film in 2019, titled “BOYS WILL BE BOYS” which was nominated for multiple film festivals across the world. In 2020, he made his second short film titled “ERIKA”, which was also nominated and selected to be featured on the popular filmmaking hub No Budge. ​He recently released his third short film titled “JUNE 22ND”. Michael continues to navigate the film industry as he takes jobs working on various productions. He's currently in post-production for his next blockbuster short showcasing bachata and Dominican culture titled, "BAILANDO".


naledi masilo (cambridge)

South African vocalist, composer, and teaching artist Naledi Masilo (she/her) captivates audiences with spirited and deeply rooted encounters. Her music immerses listeners in a fusion of jazz tradition, storytelling, and her African heritage. Naledi's talents extend beyond singing, as she effortlessly communicates in over 7 languages, incorporating dance and spoken word into her artistic expression.

Mentored by esteemed figures like Dee Dee Bridgewater, Dominique Eade, and Jason Moran, Naledi is an alumni of the New England Conservatory and has been artistically recognized with residencies at the Kennedy Center and the Banff International Jazz and Creative Music workshop. Through her art, Naledi strives to inspire action and touch lives.

Collaborating with young virtuosic musicians from around the globe, Naledi's band creates an immersive sonic journey, blending original compositions and storied covers influenced by South African Jazz and Black American Music. Anticipation mounts for her forthcoming debut EP, scheduled for release in Spring/Summer '24. Naledi Masilo is a rising star with a compelling story that will leave a lasting impression. 


qudrat wasefi (cambridge)

A visionary young Afghan composer and Trumpeter, Qudrat Wasefi (he/him)  harnesses the power of music to defy adversity and advocate for positive change.  Born into a conservative family, where music was considered sinful, Qudrat’s journey to become a renowned trumpeter, composer, and poet was transformative. At eight years old, he joined an AFCECO orphanage in Kabul, where his love for music flourished. He studied music at the Afghanistan National Institute of Music and founded a choir for children from AFCECO orphanages, composing patriotic songs that embodied Afghan resilience.  

Qudrat channeled his emotions into impactful compositions that resonated globally. He released the moving music video “The Children of War,” capturing the resilience and innocence prevailing amidst adversity. His composition “A Candle of Hope in the Darkness” united Italian musicians, and performances with the “Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra” and a string quartet in Melbourne showcased the fusion of music’s universal language with Afghanistan’s cultural tapestry.  

This year, Qudrat’s musical contributions expanded further. He represented Afghan music at a prestigious Boston concert, honoring his homeland’s artistic heritage. Notably, he orchestrated Afghan song “Ay Shakh-e Gul” for the “American Festival Chorus,” at Utah State University.  In early 2023, he founded the “Afghanistan Freeharmonic Orchestra”, aiming to reunite Afghan musicians who have lost connection or hope amidst their homeland’s challenges. His music serves as a catalyst for peace and freedom.


thanh “nu” mai (worcester)

Thanh “Nu” Mai (they/he/Nu) is an artist/art organizer/social activist. Their works are a way for them to connect with their roots and help empower others. Nu co-founded Vănguard  - a zine for LGBTQ+ in Vietnam to engage and promote awareness of this community. The zine volumes are displayed and researched in various journal libraries around the world. In 2019, Vanguard was archived by the Library of Congress. Nu has been invited to speak at the Địa Project, the US Embassy, ​​Northeastern University and M.I.T University. Nu is also the co-founder of the first art hostel in Ho Chi Minh City called Cháosdowntown, which hosts performances, exhibitions, talks and collaborations for local and international artists. Nu’s works focused on various ways to heal the Vietnamese diaspora from oppression.


tyler rai (holyoke)

Tyler Rai (she/they) is a dance artist, writer, ritualist, and producer who works across live performance, narrative essays, and experimental sound works. She draws connections between grief and mourning practices, biological and cultural inheritances, geologic time, and ecological change to reveal the poetic entanglements between spirituality, mythology, embodied experience, and earth’s ecological systems. Her work has been presented at The Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Governors Island, The Jewish Museum of Maryland, ARC Pasadena, Judson Church, SPACE Gallery, and The School for Contemporary Dance and Thought. She received a Massachusetts Cultural Council Artist Fellowship Finalist Award and is a graduate of Beth Morrison Project's Producer Academy. She has been an artist-in-residence at the Santa Fe Art Institute, Bennington College, UMass Amherst, Earthdance, The Sable Project, and Works on Water. She is constantly surprised by the power of wonder and is invested in care-across-species as a survival strategy through the Anthropocene.


xray aims (boston)

Xray Aims (they/them) is a multidisciplinary performance artist, a queer and disabled person, who works with collaborators in long durational pieces. These intersect art and kink in an effort to connect humans to one another, and beyond. Their work engages with beauty, pain, the built environment and the body. Movement, communication and the audience are key. In 2020, as the pandemic took over, and collaborating with others became too fraught, Aims followed a dream and went to work on a solo installation called BasketArt Court. Using deconstructed bike tubes, they wove them into a long rope-like structure, from the backboards to the middle square knot, in the court near their home. This then evolved into a 2021 film that screened at several festivals. Recently, they have gotten back to the practice they love, with collaborators, and completed two performances, one at nighttime and one at daytime, both outside for the first time, in NYC at Le Petit Versailles. As an artist their work has been performed/installed in solo and group shows in the U.S., Canada and Europe. In this year alone, they have been awarded the Collective Futures Fund and the Mass Cultural Council: Cultural Sector Recovery Grant, along with Boston Center for the Arts: Studio Residency Program 2023-2026. Xray Aims was born, and lives, in Boston and earned two Bachelor Degrees, in Fine Arts and Architecture, from Rhode Island School of Design.

Winter / Spring 2024 Open Studios Season

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

Mark your calendars for Winter / Spring 2024 Open Studios at MASS MoCA:

Thursday, January 25th

Thursday, February 22nd

Thursday, April 4th

Each event will take place from 5 - 7 PM 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 Gary Lichtenstein Editions 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 AIR Boram Kim’s work for August 2023 Open Studios. Image by Carolina Porras Monroy

Welcome October Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

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

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

THURSDAY, November 2nd FROM 5-7PM


Grimaldi Baez

Yabucoa, Puerto rico

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

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


Howard el-Yasin

New Haven, connecticut

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

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


Aparna Sarkar

Brooklyn, NY

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


Winnie van der Rijn

Cambridge, Massachusetts

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

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


Malaika Temba

New york, New york

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

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


Aida Lizalde

MExico City, mexico

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

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


Luke Agada

Chicago, Illinois

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


Mokha Laget

Santa fe, New mexico

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


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


Julius Cavira

Pawtucket, Rhode island

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

Welcome September Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

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

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

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 14TH FROM 5-7PM


Natalia Sánchez Cruz

Arecibo, Puerto rico

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

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


Camile Sproesser

Sao Paolo, Brazil

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


Cristobal Cea

somerville, Massachusetts

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

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

As if we were haunted.

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

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


Quincy, massachusetts

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


Jamie Lehrhoff Levine

South Orange, New Jersey

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

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


Ak Jansen

Brooklyn, New york

Born in the Netherlands, based in Brooklyn - Ak Jansen’s ceramics, soft sculptures, and sewn drawings occupy queerness on poetic and political terms, and honor queer community’s ethic of creative self-making. Care and intimate relation are at the center of Jansen’s works; how does care manifest between subjects and objects? How does care create subjectivity? How does an artwork it/themselves acquire perspective, life, and history? Clay and fiber are materials with a rich history in art, craft and design, Ak’s practice is focussed on the in-between spaces of those disciplines, and how those spaces can be brought together through material by the human-hand.
Recent exhibitions include a solo show, WE’RE HERE, at Ivy Brown Gallery (NY); group shows at 601 Artspace (NY), South Etna (Montauk, NY), and Tchotchke Gallery (NY). He is a BFA graduate of the Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands and a MFA graduate of Brooklyn College NY, and a Wolff Ravenal Fellowship recipient, and the inaugural recipient of the Corrine Holiber Szabo '54 Art Residency fellowship at Studios at MASS MoCA.


Jessie Rose Vala

Cheshire, Oregon

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

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


Anthony DiPietro

Worcester, Massachusetts

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

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

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


Grace Lynne Haynes

Brooklyn, New york

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

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


Francheska Alcantara

Tulsa, Oklahoma

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

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

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

Welcome August Artists-in-Residence!

Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!

Residency session: August 9th - 22nd, 2023


Rowan Renee

Brooklyn, NY

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


Rashin Fahandej

Framingham, Massachusetts

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


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


Beth Livensperger

Ridgewood, New York

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

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


Kate Conlon

medford, massachusetts

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

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


Taipei, Taiwan

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

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


Christine Brown

Worcester, Massachusetts

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


Ara Koh

Washington, DC

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

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


Meghan O’Hara

Santa Cruz, California

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


James Merle Thomas

Philadelphia, pennsylvania

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


Welcome ValleyCreates Grantees!

A4A is delighted to introduce our 2023 cohort of ValleyCreates capacity-building grantees. This impressive group of twenty includes visual artists, musicians, filmmakers, writers, craft artists, curators, theater-makers, community organizers, and so much more.

This is our fourth year of partnership with the ValleyCreates program of the Community Foundation of Western MA, a collaboration that has allowed us to connect with and support more than 100 artists in the Valley region of Massachusetts.


Aisha Burns (South Hadley)

Born and raised in San Antonio, Texas, violinist and singer-songwriter Aisha Burns began playing violin when she was 10 years old. Soon after moving to Austin, she gained her start with a Texas folk-rock band, began touring and recording, and later joined the instrumental ensemble Balmorhea on violin. After years of secret singing, she released her solo indie folk debut "Life in the Midwater" in 2013. Called "twisting, ethereal...arresting" by Dazed Magazine, and praised for its "delicate intimacy" by NPR, "Life in the Midwater" explored mortality and relationships with candor and wisdom.

Aisha’s newest album, "Argonauta," is a collection of songs about her struggle with the grief of losing her mother, while also navigating a new relationship, and ultimately trying to discern the new normal for her life. "Argonauta takes her vocal prowess to a new level—more confident and operatic,” Bandcamp wrote. Called “A poignant album” by Pitchfork, Aisha wrote "Argonauta" to quiet a weary mind. Aisha has performed at the SXSW festival in Austin, NXNE festival in Toronto, as well as the Reeperbahn festival in Hamburg, Germany, among others.


Aliana de la Guardia (Springfield)

Aliana de la Guardia is a Cuban-American artist with a multifaceted career as a soprano vocalist, actor, producer, and arts leader specializing in new music and opera. She has enjoyed collaborations with opera companies, ensembles, and artists creating genre-bending multidisciplinary works nationwide. She is half of the voice and percussion duo, Bahué, generating a repertoire of new music from Latinx composers, and a co-founding artist and Artistic Director of Guerilla Opera, with which she has produced and performed in many newly commissioned operas over 16 years of programming. She is a PARMA Recordings Artist and is also featured on BMOP Sound and independent labels.

She has participated in arts and nonprofit leadership programs from Philanthropy Massachusetts, OPERA America, and Double Edge Theatre, with awards from Essex County Community Foundation, Community Foundation of Western Mass and the New England Foundation for the Arts.

Aliana is voice faculty at the Community Music School of Springfield, the owner and head instructor of the award-winning Dirty Paloma Voice Studio, with two degrees in vocal performance from the Boston Conservatory [at Berklee] and professional development in vocal pedagogy from Shenandoah University and the Boston Conservatory at Berklee.


Amalia FourHawks (Florence)

“I grew up in a family that supported art and creativity. From my father's Native American side, I learned beadwork and a love for the cultural art of Indigenous people. From my mother's Lithuanian/Russian side, I learned about the importance of color and detail.

As an adult, my focus has been on Native American art, always based on traditional crafts and techniques, but also incorporating modern materials demonstrating that Native American art, like Native culture is still active, and evolving and growing into the modern world.

My husband and I spent many years traveling on the Native American art show circuit, displaying our work, and meeting and learning from other Native Nations.

I work with many mediums from pottery to leather to beads and jewelry. I was taught to always think of my art supplies as my partners in creating beauty, letting them speak through my hands, becoming what they want to be. My workbench is my favorite place, surrounded by raw materials that inspire new creations.”


Cima Khademi (Amherst)

Cima Khademi is a visual artist with a focus in sculpture and installation. She recently obtained an MFA of Studio Arts from UMass Amherst and has been working in the area as an adjunct professor/lecturer. Khademi’s current work focuses on the unique experience of “identity” as an immigrant — the particular state where identity and homeland are called into question and we find ourselves simultaneously standing on the threshold of two worlds. Her experience of identity comes from two countries that are radically different. Cima’s creative practice is an exploration of balance in a diasporic space regarding class, gender, and ethnicity through materials and metaphors.


Elias Neijens (Amherst)

Elias Neijens is a filmmaker. He was born in Amsterdam, the Netherlands in 1995 to a Dutch father and Colombian Mother. They relocated to the United States when he was just two years old. He graduated with a Political Science degree from UMASS Amherst in 2018. He then went on to pursue filmmaking by writing, directing, shooting and editing his award-winning debut short film, BLIND SPOT, shot in Medellín, Colombia in 2022. He currently works as a freelance videographer, and is currently producing a grant-funded documentary. His previous film, PUNTO CIEGO, was named Best Short Film at the Pure Magic International Film Festival (Amsterdam) in 2022.


Erica Russo (Conway)

Erica Russo is an interdisciplinary artist, songwriter, singer, and multi instrumentalist. She is also a queer, disabled, quiet porch-dweller. Her songwriting has been inspired by the expansiveness of travel and complexities of relating, and is her way of attending to deep loss, the fragility of life, and of course, love. Erica’s creative practice is continually evolving, as she navigates life with chronic illness. She has lived, recorded, and toured extensively across the country and internationally. Erica has recorded several albums, collaborating with a diverse group of artists, recording engineers, and labels. She studied at Massachusetts College of Art & Design and Berklee College of Music.


Eva Lin Fahey (Chicopee)

Eva Lin Fahey is a painter and writer. Eva primarily works in water-based media to create abstracted, dream-like spaces. These spaces explore the interconnections between family, cultural hybridity, loss, and longing.

As one of over a quarter of a million children adopted internationally from China, her work exists within the context of this shared experience — of cultural loss, personal migration, and separation. It is often centered around themes of motherhood, intergenerational ties, and the East Asian diaspora.


Indë (Westhampton)

Indë (he/they) is a prolific multidisciplinary artist with a BFA through the Studio for Interrelated Media department at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. They have also studied harmony, music production, and songwriting at the Berklee College of Music.

Their current art practice consists of an ambitious catalogue of disciplines, but the constants are illustration and songwriting. Their work can be described as a synthesis of socio-political thinking, drawing, and creative problem-solving. More specifically, Indë’s work frequently references their experience as a queer, mixed-race individual and how that intersectional identity is [mis]represented or omitted in American media.


Iyawna Burnett (Springfield)

Iyawna Burnett is a writer, performing artist, activist, and mother of two who started writing poetry and performing on stage at 15yrs old. She joined a performing arts physical theater ensemble The Performance Project (Frist Generation) at 15 and was active in the program for seven years. Within this time she co-authored and performed in the ensemble pieces “Ripple Effect” and “Fo n’ ale (we must go),” and she co-authored and co-directed the subsequent piece, “Tenderness. She has been a powerful role model to First Generation members and has experience as a peer counselor for members struggling with family addiction and incarceration. She has also co-facilitated First Generation workshops in DYS facilities. Iyawna is a lover of PURE HUMAN CONNECTION! and self-published her first book titled My Mother's Garden in 2021.


LESN101 (Springfield)

LESN101 is a Lao-American Artist born in Nashville, TN. His mother fled from Laos in 1976 and was a refuge in Thailand following the country's communist takeover as the result of the Laotian Civil War and conflict of the Vietnam War during the 1970’s.

He grew up in Columbus, OH throughout the 80's and later relocated to Springfield, MA where he discovered hip hop music and the graffiti culture.

LESN’s current work converges abstract expressionism, graffiti and portraiture to communicate journeys of self liberation.


Meegan Schreiber (Sunderland)

Meegan Schreiber is a primarily self-taught metalsmith who creates objects of adornment. Through traditional metalsmithing techniques and experimental processes she resists and challenges the culture of fast fashion and mass production. She is interested in exploring how the intimacy of objects can intersect with larger universal themes of identity, embodiment, bodily autonomy, and connection to the natural world. Meegan has worked in the fields of reproductive health & justice, youth development, and social work and holds a B.A. from Hampshire College with a concentration in photography and writing. She is a late-discovery anonymous donor-conceived person and is currently exploring themes of identity, familial dis/connection, and corporeal agency through metalwork, visual art, and writing.


Michael Medeiros (South Hadley)

“I work at the intersection of words and artistic imagery, with a deep questioning of perceptive and conceptual experience driving my work. Primarily a poet and ceramist, I also connect photography, printmaking, fiction and narrative non-fiction into multidisciplinary personal work and community collaborations. Mindfulness and the exploration of varied methods of creative understanding and implementation are essential aspects of my practice and teaching.”


Nago (Agawam)

Nago makes music for ghosts. Originally trained in classical piano, he left the instrument in favor of Ableton Live in an effort to become more expansive. Self-taught in the software, he now specializes in sample-based music production. Though his work varies from project to project, Nago's production consistently carries with it a deep love for hip-hop, voices, and the ephemeral. He wishes to bring sample-based music into places and genres it has been historically excluded from. Nago looks to release his music under his independent label Backstitch Records.


Pamela Acosta (Northampton)

Pamela Acosta is a Mexican painter, illustrator, and occasional animator from the borderlands along the Rio Grande Valley, living and working in Northampton, Massachusetts. She often finds inspiration in literature and nature. She draws on dreams of flourishing inner lives and creates visual narratives about a myriad of beings, quests and the symbiotic relationships formed between beings and their environments, exploring how we construct, transform and are transmuted by our surroundings. Her work is characterized by figurative narratives explored through visual poetry and magical realism.


Pampi (Holyoke)

A 20+year newcomer-settler of Turtle Island, Pampi is a nonbinary second-genx casteD-Bengali culture worker who plays at the intersection of healing and popular education. In community they develop community-centered art that releases creative potential and drives collective change-making. Currently they are developing anti-Capitalist popular pedagogy that encourages community and self-determinism through a re-connection with land, food growing and saviour-less wealth redistribution. Founding choreographer and dance researcher at In Divine Company, an experimental dance theater collective, they are beginning work on their second full-length musical dance drama. 


Photo credit Isabella Dellolio Photography

Sharona Color (Easthampton)

Sharona Color is an artist and community activator. She uses mesmerizing colors to capture fleeting moments of awe from life. Sharon’s work begins with a process of deep listening, both to herself and her community. She dives into the confluence of our innermost thoughts and the playful nuances of our shared experiences in a way that challenges societal norms and makes way for healing. Sharon’s work draws from the spontaneity and improvisation of abstract expressionism. Like a symphony of poetic phrases and words, curved forms, and bold colors, Sharona’s work evokes a sense of ever-present movement and a joyful acceptance of change for the viewer. Her paintings encourage a surrender to reverence and whimsy. Sharona runs a collective studio space in Easthampton called The Color Collaborative.


Taylor Rose Mickens (Springfield)

Taylor Rose Mickens is a multi-hyphenate artist- singer, songwriter, and actor.

Taylor's background in many musical genres such as jazz, indie, musical theater, and folk come together to inform their unique sound in their original music and their approach to songwriting. They recently played with their band at Rockwood Music Hall and Boston Pride.


Taylor also just finished the NYC Broadway-bound workshop of the new Duncan Sheik musical NOIR. 

Their debut studio EP Precarious Aquarius and debut music video for their song Opaque is out everywhere now!


Tomantha Sylvester (Ashfield)

Tomantha is an Anishinaabe actor, musician and playwright. She holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lake Superior State University where she was also the recipient of the 2018 Female Leader in the Arts award. Her plays Now You See Me and Something Else have had readings through the Anishinaabe Theater Exchange and the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. She is a Lin Manuel Miranda Family Fellow through the National Theater Institute and an Art and Survival Fellow through the Double Edge Theatre and Betty’s Daughter Arts Collective. Tomantha is an ensemble member through Double Edge Theater and Emerging Native Artist through the Ohketeau Cultural Center where she also works in community advocacy.. Tomantha believes that storytelling is a practical component to healing, joy, and knowledge. She says that for millennia, her ancestors were among the first storytellers on Turtle Island. “We are constantly surrounded by images and language. The type of language we’re using, the stories we are being told, and who they are being told by are critical when shaping a world of truth and connection.” She enjoys storytelling that captivates the mind and cultivates connection. She delves into a multitude of subjects for inspiration in an attempt to illuminate the past, present, and future from the perspective of an Ojibwe woman.


Yaya Mzuri (Springfield)

“I’m Meztiza, Taíno, Africana and Gitana.

I'm a singer, drummer and dancer. I sing Bomba from Puerto Rico, my culture, but I bring to it the profoundness of what it means to be part of this powerful ancestry.

I see drums as part of the communication between this realm and the spiritual one, I see singing as being the voice of my ancestors, the ones who couldn't speak, I see revolution in the dance, freedom.

I'm going through the path of liberation, that we all see with the same eyes how powerful we are.”


Vick Quezada (Easthampton)

Vick Quezada grew up in El Paso, Texas, right where the United States and Juarez, Mexico borders converge. Quezada's mixed media work is an invitation to explore the spiritual and cultural landscape of the borderlands in a post-colonial and post human context. Quezada is an Assistant Professor of Studio Practice at Hampshire College. Most recently Quezada served as a Yale Mellon Arts & Practitioner Fellow. Additionally, in 2023 their works will be shown at Des Moines Art Center, Grand Rapids Art Museum, Atlantic Wharf Gallery in Boston, American Museum of Ceramic Art -California, and Presa House Gallery in San Antonio, TX. In 2021, they were a select recipient of the Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship co-sponsored by the Ford Foundation in Latinx art. In 2020 Quezada was hand selected from a "large-scale survey" of 40 emerging artists from the US and Puerto Rico to be featured in El Museo del Barrio's groundbreaking, La Trienal. From 2019-20 Quezada was the artist-in-residence at the Latinx Project at NYU where they gave public talks, and workshops. In 2018, Quezada was selected as the University Massachusetts Contemporary Arts - University Massachusetts at Amherst Curatorial Fellow. Their work has been featured in Hyperallergic, BOMB Magazine, The Boston Globe, The New York Times, Art News, Trans Studies Quarterly, and Remezcla. Quezada holds a BA from the University of Texas at El Paso and an MFA from UMASS Amherst.