Shen Xin practices empowering alternative histories, relations, and potentials between individuals and nation-states. Their interests lie in understanding culture on its own terms. Seeing it as an active commitment to the learning, teaching and engaging with relating to places as land, their work opens up to inhabiting the multitudes of the selves through the lens of time. Engaged with moving image, video installation, public event and collective process, Shen Xin imagines and creates affirmative spaces of belonging that embrace polyphonic narratives and identities.

Xin’s solo presentations include ས་གཞི་སྔོན་པོ་འགྱུར། (The Earth Turned Green) (Swiss Institute, New York, 2022), Brine Lake (A New Body) (Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 2021), Double Feature (Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2019), Synthetic Types (Stedelijk Museum, 2019), To Satiate (MadeIn Gallery, Shanghai, 2019), Warm Spell (ICA, London, 2018), and half-sung, half-spoken (Serpentine Galleries, London, 2017). Their group exhibitions include Language is a River (MUMA, Melbourne, 2021), Minds Rising, Spirits Tuning (Gwangju Biennale, 2021), Sigg Prize (M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 2019), Afterimage (Lisson Gallery, London, 2019), and Songs for Sabotage (New Museum Triennial, New York, 2018). They received the BALTIC Artists’ Award (2017) and held the Rijksakademie residency in Amsterdam (2018-19).

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I seek to create works that inherit and speak to values concerning culture and ecology. I’d like to develop a body of works that are connected to the role of being a student towards restorative relationship with the land. In these upcoming years, I’d like to learn how to better listen to the unknown and known spaces of one’s multitude, and to become familiar with ways of being accountable to language, image, sound and space. I’d like to affirm both through context of what is spoken and how it is spoken, that the human speech is but a part of what the earth speaks. Through learning and embodying the sensorial affinity within and between languages, I imagine encounters with ways back to the coherence of relations, between human language and ecology. Having worked with translations of many different languages, it is of interest to me to understand the inter-lingual world, where translations between one and others activate the resources of various languages with respect to one another. I’d like to hold languages as soil, and as soil, languages inscribe us into various depths in relation to their expressive vitality through time, to facilitate the relinquishment of language’s human exclusivity.

Kiyan Williams is a visual artist based in New York City. Working fluidly across sculpture, performance, public art, video, and installation, they create art works that redefine fixed notions of history and the body. They are attracted to quotidian, unconventional materials and methods that evoke the historical, political, and ecological forces that shape individual and collective identities. Williams earned a BA with honors from Stanford University and an MFA in Visual Art from Columbia University. Their work has been exhibited at The Hirshhorn, the Hammer Museum, SculptureCenter, Brooklyn Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, The Shed, and more. Williams’ exhibitions have been reviewed in Artforum, Art in America, ArtNews, BOMB Magazine, and Hyperallergic. They were recently featured in Cultured Magazines’ “2023 Young Artist List.”

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My work unearths obscured histories deeply embedded in the landscape. My forthcoming projects reimagine nationalist symbols and neoclassical architecture to investigate power, sovereignty, and the ideals at the core of the American project.

Photo by Tomás Stockton.

Charisse Pearlina Weston (born 1988, Houston, TX) is a conceptual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, NY. She received her M.F.A. in Studio Art from the University of California-Irvine and is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program. She has recently participated in group and solo exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College of Art, Smack Mellon, and the Queens Museum. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Artadia, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and Bard Graduate Center. In 2021, she received the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artsy, Art Review, and Art in America. Currently, Weston is artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I understand the expansion of my current work to include an exploration of the importance of glass in carceral architecture, as well as the ways in which inmates use glass and mirrors to subvert the panoptic lens of these disciplinary spaces which rely heavily on glass, one-way film, windowless spaces, and regimented access to both natural and artificial light to exert power and dominance. I am interested in how juridical policies and procedures reinforce these protocols. Furthermore, I would like to explore the possibilities of pushing the scale of my work to explore these ideas to consider the complex problematics of contemporary installation and sculpture.

Brooks Turner is an artist, writer, and educator based in Minneapolis. Through diverse methodologies that include archival research, collage, digital drawing, film, and installation, Turner engages the history of fascism in Minnesota as a synecdoche for understanding and challenging the aesthetics of US History. Recent solo exhibitions include Legends and Myths of Ancient Minnesota at the Weisman Art Museum, Uncanny Familiarities of Scenes and People at St. Cloud State University, and Order and Discipline at Ridgewater College. His work has been supported by the Minnesota State Arts Board, the Minnesota Humanities Center, Rimon: The Minnesota Jewish Federation, the Minnesota State Inter-Faculty Organization, and the Jerome Foundation. Turner received a BA from Amherst College and MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. He is currently Chair of Visual Art at St. Paul Conservatory for Performing Artists and a lecturer at both St. Cloud State University and the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I use digital processes to recontextualize text and images extracted from physical archives as a means of identifying American Fascism and exposing its aesthetic continuity from past to present. Recently, I have shifted to consider the aesthetics of anti-fascist resistance by examining a moment in 1938 when Minnesota union organizers traveled to Mexico to study with Leon Trotsky, then living with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. At Trotsky’s advice, the organizers created the militant Union Defense Guard, which was successfully deployed to intimidate a mob of fascists and their leader. I am fascinated by this confluence of revolutionaries. How would their conversation flow between politics, place, art, and labor? Can we trace an aesthetic language through these individuals? What can we learn of anti-fascist resistance (and fascism’s response) from this meeting? I am currently materializing my digital and archival processes as a series of woven tapestries and an experimental documentary.

Photo by Rik Sferra.

The multimedia works of Maggie Thompson (Ojibwe) expand various textile traditions’ inherited ways of being and becoming. Thompson skillfully and intuitively works with both natural and synthetic materials to address personal and universal experiences of loss, grief, and love.

Selected for the 2023 Renwick Invitational at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Thompson has recently had solo exhibitions that include Just Friends at Bockley Gallery (2022) and Dakobijige / She Ties Things Together at the Watermark Center in Bemidji, Minnesota (2021). She has been awarded grants from the Jerome Foundation, the Minnesota State Arts Board, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, and her work is collected by the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Minnesota Museum of American Art, and the Minnesota Historical Society, among other public institutions.

Thompson holds a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design (2013) and is based in Minneapolis, MN.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

I want to begin researching my Mom's side of the family more in depth in order to create new photographic, textile-based work using weaving and industrial knitting techniques. As I have created so much work based on the loss of my Dad, I want to create new work based on the joy of my Mother. Having the ability to reflect on the relationship of mother and daughter will also be important on a personal level, as she is growing older.

I have begun this body of work through a single commissioned piece for the Hood Museum of Art. The work is a self portrait photograph that is cut down in to strips that are being woven through with blue 1/8" pieces of ribbon. The overall pattern created with the ribbon is based on my mom’s blue and white dishes with an Ojibwe floral flare.

I want to continue exploring this new technique of weaving photography and ribbon, along with refining my programming skills on the industrial Stoll knitting machine to continue to challenge preconceived ideas of what Native art should and can be.

Lela Pierce grew up in rural MniSota Makoce, the ancestral and current homeland of the Dakota and Anishinaabe people. She maintains artistic practices in painting, performance and installation work. Pierce has danced extensively with Ananya Dance Theatre as a founding member (2004-2016) as well as Rosy Simas Danse and Pramila Vasudevan of Anichha Arts (both 2015-present). Her work has been presented internationally in both Sweden and India as well as in the Twin Cities at venues including Bockley Gallery, SOOVAC, Franconia Sculpture Park, Walker Art Center, and the Soap Factory. Pierce holds a BA in Studio Art with Honors from Macalester College in St. Paul, MN—where she currently teaches sculpture—and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art and Social Practice from the University of Minnesota.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

The persistent practice of imagining transformation is vital for seekers of freedom.

Oscillating between 2D, 3D, and 4D (sonic/performance/film), I currently create spaces, images and situations that expand “inbetweenness,” borders and places of transition. Through a mapping of internal and external experiences of sensation of the corporeal body, I attempt to map vehicles of life force and interconnected processes of transformation. My current body of work is deeply influenced by the concept of “Sankofa,” moving forward with knowledge of the past.

Through practice and attention, I speak a personal decolonized aesthetic language—centering ancestral connections, the 5 elements of nature and feminist sentiments.

Self portrait by Lela Pierce.

Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, Phingbodhipakkiya is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and activist based in Brooklyn, NY. She has explored microscopic universes, familial memories, and the power of collective action, revealing the often unseen depth, resilience and beauty of marginalized communities. Her work has reclaimed space in museums and galleries, at protests and rallies, on buildings, highway tunnels, subway corridors, and on the cover of TIME magazine. In 2020-2021, she was artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals. Her work has been recognized by The New York Times, Harpers Bazaar, and the Guardian and is held in permanent collections at the Goldwell Open Air Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Museum of Chinese in America (MOCA), Museum of the City of New York, and the Library of Congress.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

My artistic practice is about finding joy and belonging even in the face of grief and injustice, and rallying communities to imagine a shared future we can’t yet see. Through defiant storytelling, my work brings forth colors, patterns, textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices that need to be heard. Through listening and partnership, I seek to expand the narrative around the AAPI community and other communities of color and fighting to reveal the unseen labor of women.

As a Jerome Hill Artist Fellow, I will continue creating participatory works that invite audiences to commune, connect and lay down their burdens—spaces of healing and wonder that allow us to tell our stories and imagine new pathways forward.

Upcoming projects include a civic practice residency with the San Francisco Asian Art Museum and a public art series focused on the prevention of domestic violence with the Asian Women’s Shelter.

Photo by Deb Fong.

Tali Keren is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn. Her videos, installations, and performances center on the formation of political ideology, historical mythologies, and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism. Through poetic intervention into archival sources and legal documents, her work seeks to unsettle foundational national myths. Her practice is grounded in collaboration, and cross-disciplinary dialogue, as a way to forge new forms of collectivity and political imaginaries.

Keren’s work has been shown at the Queens Museum, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; Museum of Contemporary Art, Detroit; Eyebeam, New York; The James Gallery, New York (forthcoming); The Center for Contemporary Art, Tel-Aviv; Goethe Institute, New York, and Socrates Sculpture Park among others. Her projects received support through fellowships and awards from Artadia, Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Artis, Socrates Sculpture Park, A-Z West, ISCP, and the Wexner Center for the Arts.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

In this ongoing moment of crisis, I ask myself what it means to be a cultural producer? How can re-telling of history and collaborative artmaking counter hegemonic narratives while having a transformative potential?

I often think about these questions from a comparative, transnational lens. I moved to New York from Jerusalem in 2014 at moment of rising populism and ethnonationalism in the world. This geographical shift allowed me to look at the overlapping messianic political power structures and settler-colonial imaginaries which connect Israel and the United States. Through immersive and participatory environments, I try to render how state-violence is often disguised under a veil of beauty and mythology. Each project sends me on years of archival research and filming, resulting in an exhibition that becomes a space of collective inquiry, counter-narratives, resistance, and an investigation of political imagination.

Thailand-born, NYC-based composer Tidtaya Sinutoke (ฑิตยา สินุธก) and Filipina-American librettist Isabella Dawis are the co-recipients of the Fred Ebb Award for musical theatre songwriting and the Weston-Ghostlight New Musical Award. Their other awards include the Jonathan Larson Grant, the Billie Burke Ziegfield Award, the Playwrights Realm International Theatremakers Award, and the Kleban Prize for Librettists. Their musicals and operas include HALF THE SKY (The 5th Avenue Theatre’s First Draft Commission and Radio Play, Rhinebeck Writers Retreat, Theater Mu, Theater Latté Da, the O’Neill Center), SUNWATCHER (Weston Theater Company, Ancram Opera House, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, The Civilians, Goodspeed Musicals, Tofte Lake Center), and LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG (American Opera Project).

Isabella and Tidtaya’s work has been supported by the American Theatre Wing, Musical Theatre Factory, the Kurt Weill Foundation, the Coalition of Asian American Leaders, and many more. More at tidtayasinutoke.com and isabelladawis.com.

FELLOWSHIP STATEMENT

As a team of two Asian female writers, we create new music-theatrical narratives with bold, unconventional Asian women at the center. We blend musical idioms and storytelling traditions from around the globe, bringing together performers, creatives, and audiences from underrepresented communities. By uplifting Asian, female, and immigrant voices, we work to reinvent the American musical theater and opera landscape.

We look forward to spending our fellowship developing the following pieces, in collaboration with the Twin Cities and NYC theatermaking communities. HALF THE SKY tells the story of an Asian American woman climbing Mount Everest – a contemporary American musical on a global scale, infused with Thai and Himalayan folk music. Our chamber musical SUNWATCHER brings to light the story of Japanese female astronomer and “hidden figure” Hisako Koyama – by mixing elements of Noh theater, electronic live looping, and taiko drumming. LITTLE DUGONG AND HER SEAGRASS SONG is an opera for kids about sea creatures – using Southern Thai folk music and shadow puppetry to educate about climate change.

Photo on left by Wanwanat Saengthong. Photo on right by Sarah Morreim.