Past
Grantees

Joseph Buckley (he/him) is a Black British Sculptor living and working in New York City. Recent solo shows include Letter from the Home Office at Lock Up International in London; Cousin Table at Cuchifritos, NYC; Traitor Muscle at Art in General, NYC; and Brotherhood Tapestry at The Tetley in Leeds, England. Recent group projects include I don't Know Whether The Earth is Spinning or Not... at the Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (for the VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art); and Cellular World: Cyborg-Human-Avatar-Horror, at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2018).

Fellowship Statement

I have found myself preoccupied with the mechanics of objectification and dehumanization, and with a continuum I perceive that goes ‘corpse—slave—human—statue—sculpture’ and back again.

I am interested in the way that systems of abuse replicate themselves, at different scales, across our society. On the topic of replication, I am heavily invested in mold-making and plastic casting: I am interested in the connotations of industrial production, and the violence such industry implies.

Of late, I have been trying to work towards the topics of fascism and its contemporary manifestations. Some of my sculptures are of fascists and are ‘about’ fascism but, gendered as they are, they have also served as a way to focus my thinking surrounding the eternal font from which fascism metastasizes: a swollen, toxified, and entitled masculinity... a boil on my soul’s ass I must continuously lance and drain.

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist, designer, and curator interested in how migration affects ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has had her work supported through Create Change fellow at the Laundromat Project (2018-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), and Center for Books Arts (2020-2021).

Fellowship Statement

For the past two years, I’ve been conceptualizing a piece titled Citizen Clock that looks at the path to citizenship, as well as, work around the legal process of migration. The Jerome Foundation fellowship will provide the support to develop this work and to collaborate with fabricators to bring this idea to life. It will also provide a space to expand my participatory practice into more conceptual objects that archive these processes. I’m excited to be part of this community and learn from all the different fellows.

Ayana Evans is a New York City-based visual performance artist. All of her video, lithography, screen-printing, watercolor mono-prints, installations, and projection extends from her performance work. She received her MFA in painting from Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. Evans has performed at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Newark Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the Queens Museum and countless public locations for her guerilla-style performances. Her international work includes shows at FIAP performance festival in Martinique, Tiwani Contemporary in London, and Ghana’a Chale Wote festival. Evans was a 2018 Fellow at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art, 2018 NYFA Fellow, and 2019 Savage Lewis Fellow with Art on the Vine. Her recent press includes The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Hyperallergic, and CNN. Evans is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University.

Fellowship Statement

I am a NYC-based performance artist, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The sensibilities of both locations heavily influence my work with the body, race relations, and gender bias. My on-going performances/public interventions include: Operation Catsuit, I Just Came Here to Find a Husband, and a new series of collaborative works with artists of diverse backgrounds. These performances map how my body is perceived and treated as it operates in artistic and social spheres. Roberta Fallon, co-founder of Artblog, describes me as, “One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur.” And writer Seph Rodney of Hyperallergic and The New York Times wrote: “I have seen [this] artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor-length lace gown, a dollar-store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips — risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement.” During this residency I will continue the Operation Catsuit series via experimental film and costuming.

Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator of Liberian and Kenyan heritage. Raised in the southern U.S.A. and based in New York City, her work engages themes of hybridity, diaspora, and belonging. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. Her work has been presented in spaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem, BRIC, MoMA PopRally, the Museum of the Moving Image, and IFC Center. Past residencies include POV Spark in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture (NYC, DC, and Venice, Italy), Red Bull Arts Detroit (Detroit, MI), the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa), and the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE). She received the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant administered by Queer|Art.

Fellowship Statement

Born in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, I grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces, which informs my interest in hybridity and layered imagery and content. I work with still and moving images, the voice and body, language, objects, space and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Recent work traces a performative and experimental impulse through sculptural sound and video installation.

During the Fellowship, I will expand my ongoing research and creative production though historical, contemporary, and speculative relationships between the U.S. and Liberia - the West African republic founded in the 1800s with formerly enslaved Black people returning to the continent from the Americas and newly occupying positions of power. This project explores questions around hierarchy, Indigeneity, multiplicities and complexities of Blackness, cultural fragmentation, and the deep and steady yearning for the reparative.

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City, who focuses on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop and Art Omi. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Centro León Jiménes in the Dominican Republic.

Fellowship Statement

My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.

It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S.A. and the global North, using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a gaze thrust upon me which “others” me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency.

Through various visual disciplines, my work questions historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical nature, questioning ideas projected onto these identities and spaces from a feminist and decolonial position. I’m interested in the body, landscape, discourse, framing, (in)visibility, opacity, hybridity.

Golnar Adili is a mixed media artist with a focus on diasporic identity. She holds a Master's degree in architecture from the University of Michigan and has attended residencies at the RockefellerFoundation for the Arts in Bellagio, Italy, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the MacDowell Colony, Ucross Foundation for the Arts, Lower East Side Printshop, Women’s Studio Workshop, and Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace among others.

Some of the venues Adili has shown her work include, Nurture Art, Craft and Folk Art Museum LA, Cue Art Foundation, International Print Center NY, and the Lower East Side Printshop. Some of the grants she has received include the Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, the NYFA Fellowship in Printmaking/Drawing/Artists Books and the Brooklyn Arts Council Brooklyn Arts Fund grant. Adili is currently a Scholarship recipient at Manhattan Graphics Center in New York City.

Onyedika Chuke is an artist and archivist living and working in New York. His largest body of work titled The Forever Museum Archive (2011-present), is a disquieting collection of sculptures, text and images in which Chuke analyzes social, cultural and political structures. His practice has been supported by venues such as The Drawing Center, SCAD Museum, The Shed, Sculpture Center and The American Academy in Rome.

From January 2018-2019, Chuke served as New York City Public Artist in Residence (P.A.I.R). The position placed him in the offices of Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) and Department of Corrections (DOC) Rikers Island.

His work as a P.A.I.R artist entailed collaboration with individuals on Rikers Island facing extreme challenges, create access to art and open dialogue between New York City policymakers and those in their custody. In addition, he utilized DOC’s archives to research architecture and historical landscape that have shaped New York City's penological system. His ongoing research was covered by various publications including Bomb Magazine.

With a focus on social theory, drawing, painting and photography as well as sculptural mold-making, Chuke is equally invested in the processes of production techniques and research.

He is a graduate of The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2011).

Pamela Council is a New York based interdisciplinary artist creating fountains for Black joy. Guided by material, cultural, and metaphysical quests, Council’s practice embodies a darkly humorous and inventive Afro-Americana camp aesthetic, BLAXIDERMY. Through this lens, Council uses sculpture, architecture, writing, and performance to shed light on under-examined and under-valued narratives.

Council has created commissions, exhibitions, performances or presentations for: New Museum for Contemporary Art, United States Library of Congress, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Studio Museum in Harlem, and MoCADA. Council has been Artist-in-Residence at MacDowell, Red Bull Arts, Bemis, Rush Arts, MANA, Signal Culture, Mass MoCA, and Wassaic Project. A recipient of the 2017 Joan Mitchell Grant, Council holds a BA from Williams College and an MFA from Columbia University and is currently artist in residence at ISCP.

Moko Fukuyama is a Japanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Her work is driven by the art of storytelling and personal narratives. Through art, she creates open and sympathetic spaces to explore the socioeconomic realities and psychology of everyday life. Fukuyama has received grants, fellowships and commissions from notable art institutions such as Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Foundation For Contemporary Arts, SOHO20, MacDowell, Yaddo, Recess, The Shed, and more. She is a current resident at ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program, Brooklyn, New York), and is a 2021 Fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, Minnesota. Her current project will be presented at The Kitchen, New York in spring 2021.

Gordon Hall is an artist based in New York who makes sculptures and performances. Hall has had solo presentations at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, The Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, The Renaissance Society, EMPAC, and Temple Contemporary, and has been in group exhibitions at The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Brooklyn Museum, The Hessel Museum, Art in General, White Columns, Socrates Sculpture Park, among many other venues.

Hall’s writing and interviews have been published widely including in Art Journal, Artforum, Art in America, and Bomb, as well as in Walker Art Center's Artist Op-Ed Series, What About Power? Inquiries Into Contemporary Sculpture (published by SculptureCenter), Documents of Contemporary Art: Queer (published by Whitechapel and MIT Press,), and Theorizing Visual Studies (Routledge). A volume of Hall’s collected essays, interviews, and performance scripts was published by Portland Institute for Contemporary Art in 2019. Gordon Hall will be 2021 resident faculty at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Tommy Kha (b. 1988, Memphis, Tennessee) received his Photography MFA from Yale University. He is a Foam Talent, a finalist for the Jerome Hill Fellowship, the Hopper Prize, Artadia Award, and Hyères Photography Grand Prix, a recipient of CR Magazine’s Photography Annual, and En Foco Photography Fellowship, and a former artist-in-residence at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, Light Work, Fountainhead, and the Camera Club of New York. He is currently a Celebrate the Studio resident at International Studios and Curatorial Program.

His work has been published in Creative Review, Dazed, Interview, McSweeney’s, Hyperallergic, Vice, Slate, BUTT, Buzzfeed, and Miranda July’s We Think Alone, and has collaborated with the Billboard Creative in Los Angeles, and exhibited at Launch F18, PS122 Gallery, Brooks Museum, Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, Teen Party, Yongkang Lu Art, Hyères Festival, and Kunstverein Wolfsburg.

Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, TED speaker, and STEM advocate. As artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights, Amanda’s art series I Still Believe in Our City reached hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers through her Atlantic Terminal billboard and subway domination as well as on digital MTA liveboards and bus shelters. From large-scale murals, augmented reality (AR) experiences, 3D printed sculptures, and interactive installations, Amanda makes the invisible, visible. She has explored microscopic universes, familial memories, and the power of collective action, challenging viewers to rethink the world around them and revealing the often unseen struggles of communities of color.

Her work has been shown at the Cooper Union, Google, the Sorbonne, and recognized by Forbes, Smithsonian Magazine, and The New York Times. Earlier in her career, Amanda worked as a researcher studying Alzheimer’s Disease at Columbia Medical Center and received her MFA from Pratt Institute.

Sunita Prasad is a New York City based artist working in film, video, and performance. Her work has been shown in solo exhibitions at Centre Clark in Montreal, Homesession in Barcelona, and Vox Populi in Philadelphia, as well as group shows at venues including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Smack Mellon, and UrbanGlass in New York. Sunita has received awards from the Art Matters Foundation, the Brooklyn Arts Council, and the Warner Bros. Production Fund, as well as residencies at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council and TAJ & SKE Projects, Bangalore. As a feature film editor, Sunita’s credits include the critically acclaimed documentary 93Queen and the Emmy-nominated Going to War.

TJ Proechel is a visual artist with an MFA in Art Theory and Practice from Northwestern University and a BFA in Photography from MICA. Through photography, video, and conceptual practices, Proechel’s work reframes historical, biographical, and imaged archives within a contemporary moment and geography. Proechel is currently finishing a long-form project called the Klingon Project, which looks at translation as a site of colonization through his grandfather’s translation of the Bible into Klingon and Klingon’s basis in the North American Indigenous language, Mutsun.

This coming summer, he is publishing an artist book, 28 Feet 8 Inches, about his attempt to actually and conceptually track down a real estate con artist. Proechel has worked as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Connecticut College in New London, CT and a part-time Professor at MICA in Baltimore, MD and exhibited broadly within the US and internationally at venues such as the Triennial of Photography in Hamburg and the Unseen Photo Festival in Amsterdam.

Kameelah Janan Rasheed (b. 1985) is a learner. As a learner, Rasheed grapples with the poetics, politics, and pleasures of the unfinished and uncontained. She is invested in Black storytelling technologies that invite us to consider ways of [un]learning and [un]knowing that are interdisciplinary, interspecies, and interstellar. Rasheed works across an ecosystem of iterative and provisional projects. These projects include sprawling, architecturally-scaled Xerox-based collages; large-scale text banner installations; publications; digital archives; lecture-performances; library interventions; poems/poetic gestures; and other forms yet to be determined.

Rasheed has had national and international solo exhibitions and projects at the New Museum, NY (two-person); Transmissions Gallery, Glasgow, UK; Rice University, Houston, TX; Brooklyn Public Library, NY; Brooklyn Historical Society, NY; and Brooklyn Museum, in addition to public installations with Public Art Fund and For Freedoms / Times Square Arts. Her work has also been exhibited at the 2017 Venice Biennale, and will be included in the Glasgow International, UK (2021) and Prospect.5 (2021). She is the author of two artist books, An Alphabetical Accumulation of Approximate Observations (Endless Editions, 2019) and No New Theories (Printed Matter, 2019).

Rowan Renee explores how queer identity is mediated by the law. Their work addresses intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence and the impact of the criminal justice system through image, text and installation. Their solo exhibitions include Z at Pioneer Works (2015) and Bodies of Wood at the Aperture Foundation (2017). They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, and were named a finalist for the 2020 NYFA Artist Fellowship in Craft/Sculpture.

Between the Lines, their current project supported by We, Women Photo, collaborates with ten incarcerated artists through correspondence based art workshops to address the impact of incarceration on LGBTQ+ communities in Florida. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), is included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood, at MoMA PS1. In 2021, they will be an Artist-in-Residence at the NARS Foundation and the Center for Book Arts in New York, and Red Bull House of Art in Detroit.

Born in Oxford, England, Safran-Hon grew up in Haifa, Israel. She received her BA Summa Cum Laude from Brandeis University, 2008, in Studio Art and Art History and an MFA from Yale University School of Art in 2010. Safran-Hon attended Skowhegan in 2012 and Art Omi in 2016. She was a 2019-2020​ Workspace Resident at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. Safran-Hon had solo exhibitions at Slag Gallery, NYC, Brandt Gallery, Amsterdam, and Marfa Contemporary, Marfa, TX, and group shows at the Haifa Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Marianne Boesky Gallery, and P.P.O.W Gallery. She was a recipient of the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize in 2020.

Safran-Hon's visual work reflects on the way in which political reality affects the everyday. She lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Slag Gallery.

Kenneth Tam's work often takes the form of video installations that include moving-image works and sculpture, and currently explores ideas around the negotiation and performance of group identity. His work has been exhibited at SculptureCenter, MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Hammer Museum among other institutions. He will have a solo exhibition at the Queens Museum in the spring of 2021, and will participate in The Shed's upcoming Open Call.  He recently produced his first live(streamed) performance at The Kitchen, and has been an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Pioneer Works, The Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts, and the 18th Street Arts Center in Santa Monica, CA. He is a graduate of the Cooper Union and is based in Brooklyn.

Chris Watts is a visual artist currently working in New York, NY. Through the transfiguration of painting, drawing, video, and installations his work revises, interrogates, and re-examines social and personal narratives. This re-examination is not to simply supplement a new narrative, but to create a project of disruption. These works have been exhibited at the Monica King Contemporary, New York; Urban Institute for Contemporary Arts, Grand Rapids, MI; David Klein Gallery, Detroit, MI; Knockdown Center, Queens, NY; Winston Salem State University, NC; Greensboro College, NC; and the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris, France.

Watts completed residency programs at the Marek Maria Pienkowski Foundation, Chelm, Poland (2019); the McColl Center for Art + Innovation, Charlotte NC (2019 and 2010); Henry Street Settlements Abrons Arts Center, New York, (2018); and the Lower Manhattan Culture Council Workspace Program, New York, NY (2016-2017). He participated as a Fellow in the Art & Law Program at Cornell University, NY (2018). He received training from the College of Arts + Architecture at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and from the Yale University School of Art.