2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007

2023

Joe Silvestro

Joseph Silvestro is dedicated to locating and exposing beauty from the carnage. The artist wants to address and behold the sublime in his work. Scale is very significant in this pursuit. Ultimately, Silvestro seeks to engage in, and generate discourse about, the uplifting nature of the critique of aesthetics. His work over the past quarter century has taken many forms, but usually it has addressed his interest in words, symbols, and space. Language is everywhere. There is a flag on the moon. Space is everywhere. He thinks about this stuff a lot more than he would like to admit.

Yet, Silvestro is drawn to the idea that language has no inherent physical scale except when it becomes part of the visible world. When words or symbols enter space in this way, they become part of a more exciting problem. What should be done with them? Writers must address and react to problems of transparency or authenticity because they try to communicate with specificity and clarity to transfer meaning. But visual artists can tinker with words using a wider array of tools with a different effect. The alphabet or a word, a list, or phrase can be transformed by treating them as, or with – or within, marks, still-lifes, signage, shapes, and visual puns.

Most recently, Silvestro’s interest in words also concerns the language of media and social justice activism. His newer work addresses deep interests in language, politics, and communal artistic engagement within physical space across painting, performative intervention, community outreach, and traditional design. It is also informed by his personal formal sensibilities and efforts to find beauty, poetry, balance, and visual richness throughout his daily life.

Heather Williams

2022 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Heather Williams is a multidisciplinary artist born in St. Croix, USVI and raised in Brooklyn, NY. She uses abstract painting, sculpture and video to explore dualities, and complexities within relationships such as damage and repair.  She sculpts faces that are called Witnesses to the past, present and future. They serve as guardians and are quiet, raw, and imperfect yet powerful in their presence. Her abstract work is layered, and textured. Figures emerge on the canvas as Williams pushes the material in an intuitive, organic manner, exploring relationships between one form to another. Her video work is in response to current social issues. Williams’ latest film titled, Safe Passage asks the viewer, “Is there a safe passage for the Black body?” Each work is a love letter to the quiet yet powerful black woman and pays homage to her ancestral roots. 

Heather earned a Masters in Fine Art from the School of Visual Arts in 2020 at the height of the pandemic.  She has been awarded the Paula Rhodes memorial award for exceptional achievement in MFA Art Practice. Her short film, Safe Passage was awarded honorable mention at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago. She has also been awarded residencies at EILEEN S. KAMINSKY FAMILY FOUNDATION (ESKFF) at Mana Contemporary, ArtCrawl Harlem at Governors Island, NY and a Sustainable Arts Fellowship at Gallery Aferro, NJ. She has exhibited in many group exhibitions including Peel off the Surface, Tribeca Loft, and solo shows Damage and Repair at Akwaaba Gallery and Protective Spirits at The Bridge Art Gallery.  Her sculptures and abstract paintings are in many private collections. 

https://www.heathermwilliams.com/

Krystle Lemonias

2022 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Krystle Lemonias is recognized for her influences from the intersecting concepts of class, commodification, gender, economic inequity, citizenship, and labor rights. She believes immigrant Black communities contribute richly to the United States’ cultural diversity and the workforce despite the barriers faced. Her works explore primarily women’s domestic labor contributions that play an integral role in the function of our society and contemplate the domestic socialization passed on through generations to do these jobs. Her work also explores personal and political intersections of power that govern how people interact daily through an immigrant lens, creating an entry point to consider the impact larger systems have on people from colonized nations.

Lemonias’ art is grounded in the principles of painting, sculpture, and drawing. Her practice establishes formal and intuitive processes that use interdisciplinary techniques to stitch together intersecting themes with personal narratives. She explores the social complexity regarding class, gender, citizenship, commodification, economic inequity, and labor rights. She uses found materials, patios, printmaking methods, and iconography to stitch together these themes with personal narratives. Each of her pieces reflects the complexity of being resilient through society’s exploitative structures then, using this understanding to get over and ahead for one’s self. What is the cost of resilience? Who really has the power? 

Her works have been exhibited at Blum and Poe in the Show Me the Signs campaign for #sayhername and Make America What America Must Become at the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans. She has also shown at the New York Academy of Art in the AXA Art Prize Exhibition in 2020, and at the International Print Center of New York in the New Prints: Umbra in 2019. 

Lemonias was born in Jamaica, in 1989, and became of age in New Jersey. She acquired a BFA in printmaking from New Jersey City University in 2018. She is currently a Master’s in Fine Arts candidate at the University of South Florida.

https://www.krystlelemonias.com/

2022

Le’Andra LeSeur

2022 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Le’Andra LeSeur (b. 1989 in Bronx, NY) is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. LeSeur’s body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. Through the insertion of her body and voice into her work, she provides her audience with an opportunity to contemplate themes such as identity, family, Black grief and joy, the experience of invisibility, and what it means to take up space as a queer Black woman—a rejection of the stereotypes which attempt to push these identities to the margins.

LeSeur has received several notable awards including the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur recently appeared in conversation with Marilyn Minter at the Brooklyn Museum, presented by the Tory Burch Foundation and has lectured at RISD Museum of Art, Providence, RI, and SCAD Atlanta, among others. Her work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions at The Shed, New York, NY; Marlborough, New York, NY; Atlanta Contemporary, Atlanta, GA; A.I.R. Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Assembly Room, New York, NY; Microscope Gallery, Brooklyn, NY; Anacostia Art Center, Washington, D.C.; SITELAB, Grand Rapids, MI; Arnika Dawkins, Atlanta, GA; and others. Residences include NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and MASS MoCA. LeSeur is represented by Marlborough Gallery in NY, NY.

https://lleseur.com/

Hidemi Takagi

2022 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Hidemi Takagi has a strong history of working with various immigrant, minority and underserved communities on projects that include photography as well as social/public engagement and installation elements. As an immigrant from Japan, she is interested in the mixing of these histories with local culture. Her husband is Haitian and grew up in Brooklyn and they have a daughter; so Caribbean culture also plays a significant role in her own life. For the past 6 years, she has been working on the projects in her Bedford Stuyvesant community, Brooklyn. As a resident of New York City since 1997, living in various neighborhoods in NYC, she finds the established cultures within her homes and photographs the color, joy, and life of the people who came from diverse communities. She became interested in social engagement art projects since 2015. Usually she spends some time with her subjects and creates portraits project together.

IDENTITIES is an ongoing photography installation project (Portraits + Interview) started with Takagi’s family’s identities during the pandemic — a project she wants to expand to contribute to a national discourse on mixed-race identities at this key anti-racist time. Her daughter, who is half Haitian American and half Japanese American, was born and is growing up in New York City. Takagi herself was born in Japan and came to New York City in 1997. Her husband was born in Haiti and grew up in Brooklyn. In New York, they have let go of some aspects of their original cultures, and at the same time, they have not sought much to assimilate. Through the process of creating IDENTITIES, she searches to visualize her family’s roots and the cultural tendrils that have grown and intertwined from them and also address the issues of mixed-race identity, racism, and immigration in America. She wants to look at biracial issues related to others who thus identify and explore questions of biraciality/multiraciality in a range of US locales, and to investigate representing mixed-race identities across America. 

https://www.hidemitakagi.com/

Patricia Cazorla & Nancy Saleme

Patricia Cazorla & Nancy Saleme (aunt and niece duo) began working together in 2010, focusing on immigration issues; specifically undocumented farm workers, including children, in the US.  Since then, they have been awarded major commissions in North Salem, NY, Berlin, Germany, New York, NY Philadelphia, PA, and Copenhagen, Denmark. Market Street Perennial builds on the duo’s long engagement with the city of Newark, honoring the people who pass by the block and creating an enormous, vivid garden that never dies, even as the seasons change. Evoking hope and the power of working people in two languages, the work is a gift of art that will last for a year.

Their summer 2017 project, Flying High for Equality, was a commission for Joyce Kilmer Park inspired by American novelist Richard Bach’s bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull, using oversized, colorful sculptures of the city’s sparrows as a metaphor for the search for equality. Sparrows are creatures of resilience, audacity, intelligence, and beauty that mirror many of the qualities of New York City’s communities. An earlier installation for the Kaufman Arcade in NYC’s garment district, Across the Bridge, was a tribute to the Amtrak Dock Vertical Lift, a bridge built in 1937 that spans the Passaic River in Newark, NJ, and carries train traffic. This portrait symbolizes life’s challenges, the migrations that shape society, new horizons and confrontation with the unknown. Another earlier project, the Garden of Opportunities, visualizes the reality of migrant labor in the US:  “every beautiful tomato we look at in the supermarket, and almost every fruit and vegetable we eat, is picked by a human hand.” Their work has been reviewed in Univision News, Remezcla, EFE Spanish international news agency, El Diario – La Prensa, Univision 41, Daily News- New York-Bronx, and Riverdale Press.

galeriagalou.com/cazorla_saleme.html

Tenesh Webber

Webber’s  work occupies a space between drawing, sculpture and photography. She creates abstract photograms (camera-less, photographic prints), by making sculptural objects out of thread, cut paper and found objects. Through work in the darkroom, these sculptural objects become the abstract photographic works.  

An extension of her photographic work are the recent experimental drawings, where she layers forms and lines, using charcoal, drafting, and colored pencils, on Stonehenge paper. The drawings have become an integral part of Webber’s  studio practice, and she now works between the two media.

A further extension of the photographic and drawing work are Webber’s recent silkscreen prints, where she selects her photographic imagery as a starting point for multi-layered prints, which has allowed her to continue her abstract explorations further into color and layering.

https://www.teneshwebber.com/

Anonda Bell

Anonda Bell is a New York and New Jersey based artist working in a variety of media, including drawing, painting, ceramics, printmaking and installation.  Her work engages with ideas about psychology and the motivations, desires and innate qualities of the human mind.  Her work has been shown in group exhibitions and solo shows in the United States and Australia.  She has a Masters in Fine Arts from Monash University (Australia), a Post Graduate Diploma from University of Melbourne (Australia), Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting and Printmaking from R.M.I.T. University (Australia) and a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Psychology and English from the University of Melbourne (Australia).  Bell is the Director & Chief Curator of the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers University – Newark.  Bell received a 2022 Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts.

Anonda Bell’s work engages with notions of human psychology, the motivations, desires and innate qualities of the human mind. The work is interdisciplinary, referencing such things as ecology, philosophy, feminism, biology, and history. She likes to draw attention to aspects of the social, political and cultural landscape which sometimes are overlooked due to their ubiquity, or because they are deemed (by some) to be unimportant. She likes to draw attention to, and provoking curiosity in, events, people and circumstances that are for some reason taken for granted, or obscured (be it deliberate obfuscation or unintentional invisibility). Bell’s research into any subject of interest is ongoing and (as a consequence) the work grows in complexity and magnitude over time. She considers her artwork successful if it provokes questions, rather than assuming that everything has already been answered.

http://www.anondabell.com/

Armisey Smith

2021 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Armisey Smith is a native of Brooklyn, New York, living in Newark, NJ. Armisey earned a BFA in Illustration from Parsons School of Design and an MPS in Arts and Cultural Management from Pratt Institute. Armisey is an arts administrator, educator, illustrator, and curator. Her amalgamation has afforded various opportunities to collaborate with essential stakeholders and community-based organizations in New York and New Jersey, serving primarily marginalized communities. Presently, she is the director of arts education at Studio Montclair, working with a cohort of visual art instructors who teach adults with disabilities.

Her artistic practicum is consistently expanding into areas that delve into aspects of systemic oppression. Her prominent subjects illuminate the plight of black women and other women of color from past to present. She believes the production and exhibition of her works are an inherent part of her moral obligation to herself and the public. Selections of her works were exhibited in galleries and museums throughout the tri-state area. She has been the lead artist on several public art mural projects in New Jersey, including Treat Place Four Corners Project, Lincoln Park, Benjamin Franklin School, and Sussex Avenue School.

Armisey Smith’s artwork takes a critical view of social, political, and cultural issues of African-American women and other women of color. She frequently references her personal experiences to express the weight of America’s social ills. She explores these themes extensively via illustration and fine art. The body of work traverses the causal relationships between the Covid pandemic and systemic racism; her work employs familiar and visceral visual cues to underscore these irrevocable themes. Her mandate is to encourage an emotional and intellectual response to the pieces and illuminate black women’s pain, power, and resilience. She uses various materials and processes in each of her projects subsets or outgrowths; her methodologies are congruous and purposeful. The variety of materials used between the different projects are associated with serial disquietudes through the subject matter. The subject matter of each agglomeration of work inspires the material selection and the manifestation of the work. Each project often consists of multiple pieces in different media, grouped around specific themes, meanings, and anticipated outcomes to elicit various responses. Her research of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, reconstruction, jim-crow, the civil rights movement, and Black Lives Matter catalyzes areas of interest that voice the next body of work.

https://www.armiseysmith.com/

Anna Parisi

https://www.annaparisi.site/

Mic Diño Boekelmann

2021 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Mic Diño Boekelmann (b. 1970, Quezon City, Philippines) 

Mic was uprooted and replanted in Germany, Israel and finally the US, where she received a BA from UC Berkeley. Her visuals incorporate the Manila envelope, which was originally made from Manila hemp or abacá. This was inspired by her mother’s memories of growing up in Bicol where she saw workers process abacá fibers. 

Her work has been shown at the Salmagundi Club, Allied Artists of America, Phillips Mill, Princeton Public LIbrary, Trenton City Museum and Sardenhaus Munich. Mic has been awarded the Sustainable Arts Foundation Fellowship, the Chautauqua Visual Arts Residency and was accepted to the NYFA Immigrant Artist Program, Creative Capital Professional Development Program and Emerging Programs Institute with the Alliance of Artists Communities. Her works are part of the permanent Campus Collection at Princeton University. As an educator, incubator and facilitator, she co-leads PAD (Princeton Artist Directory) and NExSE, a Filipino American Artist Collective). Mic lives and works in Princeton, New Jersey where she runs an artist-run space for exhibitions, panel discussions and artist retreats. 

Manila Envelopes were originally made with Abaca fiber aka Manila Hemp taken from a native banana plant (Abaca) of the Philippines. Mic’s use of the envelopes were inspired by her mother’s memories of growing up in Bicol where she saw workers process abacá fibers, which shone like gold in the heat of the sun. She also uses the shape of Jasmine, the national flower of the Philippines and Plumeria in her work. 

Like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs, Mic collects and connects fragments that will ultimately lead her back to a place where she belongs as a whole – a place where she can play, be safe and be visible. It is an exciting journey of unearthing, visually articulating and displaying the complexity of identity. 

https://www.micboekelmann.com/

Ruth Borgenicht

2021 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

There are multiple definitions of the word “culture”, and they seemingly come from completely unrelated realms.  Some refer specifically to the arts and customs of a people, other definitions refer to cultivation, like cultured pearls and cultured milk.  Not surprisingly, these definitions share a common origin: humankind’s agrarian roots.  These various definitions indicate that culture, food, and traditions are inextricably linked, evolved concurrently and anchored to a geographic location. 

For her residency at Gallery Aferro, Ruth Borgenicht plans to develop participatory tools to manifest the various incarnations of culture. And whenever possible, utilize locally scavenged materials and resources to link the works with a sense of place. Ultimately she would like to create a space to encourage interactivity by sharing food and inviting people to engage with objects and each other. Eagerly waiting a post-pandemic opportunity….. 

With an intent to generate a sense of place and community through the interaction with her work, Borgenicht feels a responsibility to recognize, reinforce and enact interdependence and democratic values thus reinforcing connections amongst people to a locale and each other.

https://ruthborgenicht.com/

Kay Reese

2021 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

At age 20, Kay Reese, an award-winning visual artist/photographer, became a Franciscan nun: coming of age in the civil rights, Vietnam, moon-landing era.  She studied liberal arts at Fordham University before leaving the convent to follow her muse and studying fine art at the College of New Rochelle.  After stints as Art Chair at Cathedral H.S., and Career Development Specialist at NYC’s Department of Employment, as Project Director at Parsons School of Design, and as Director of Internal Communications at the YWCA, Reese opened Design Media, a consulting firm. After the trauma of a breast removal and re-construction, and on her first attempt receiving the Bronx Council of the Arts, BRIO Award in 2000, she decided to continue her life’s journey of being an actively practicing artist.

In 1999, learning of her great, great, grandmother’s emancipation from a Georgia plantation, and witnessing the NYC police killing of Amadou Diallo an innocent African immigrant in her former Bronx neighborhood, inflamed Reese’s   personal experience of racism.  Her social voice, now urgently re-awakened, race became the guiding principle in her life-long commitment to exploring issues of identity, race, power, and the effect of their “accepted” social constructs and contracts.  Guided by an innate curiosity, sensitivity, concern for people and for observing the human condition Reese began using photographs, objects, and collaged digital and mixed media strategies to expose and challenge prevailing oppressive social and political belief systems in American society. In 2021 Reese received a residency at Gallery Aferro in Newark NJ, her current home base.  Reese exhibits and has works in private collections throughout the U.S.  

Kay Reese believes most people possess unique intellectual, spiritual, and moral qualities, positive social values, and physical assets. However, the one visibly distinct physical characteristic of Black people is their hair. Specifically, its kinky texture; brilliantly designed for the exigencies of warm climates, but easily functional in colder ones. It is, notably, the oldest, most unique, flexible, and genetically advanced hair on earth. It represents who Black people are and have been for centuries. Yet, despite major contributions to humanity Black ethnic characteristics have been judged, and most consistently targeted for discrimination, abuse, rejection, and attempted holocaust by various societies and other ethnic groups. 

Today, Reese’s artistic language embraces the natural texture of Black hair as a foundational artistic element within itself. It is visually transferable within her surrealist and abstract narratives as a pure entity aside from its historical relevance. But even more powerful because of it.  For Reese using this texture articulates and reframes conceptual references of the Black experience. Her uncompromising viewpoint is reflected in “scenes” or active landscapes that convey their universal struggle for freedom, recognition of accomplishments and contributions to human prosperity and well-being. From the Trans-Atlantic trade to surviving in hostile cultures with forced identities reshaped by brutal supremacist regimes her narratives ironically challenge the values of both Blacks and whites.  Her observations can be as raw and honest as “black coffee with no sugar.” However, Reese also “portrays” the Black spirit in its triumph over evil even though embracing it might ensure its survival. Her abstract and/or surreal portrayals of Black life and history tell their objective story yet are nonetheless evocative; eliciting emotional response which she believes is the purpose and value of art. Reese’s work is meant to be seen and experienced emotionally which she believes is the key to human understanding.

https://www.kayreese.com/

---

2021

Anjali Benjamin-Webb

2021 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Anjali Benjamin-Webb (b. 1997) is a Black American and Sri Lankan Tamil interdisciplinary visual artist working primarily in sculptural installation, video, text, and print. She received a BA in Political Science and Studio Art from Wellesley College in 2018. After graduating, she founded Palmyra Projects; a collaborative business practice dedicated to realizing the visionary ideas of disruptors, creators, and revolutionaries around the world.

Benjamin-Webb’s first major series, Of Tigers and Panthers (2018), marked the beginning of the artist’s use of sculptural installation to communicate directly with the senses, and with our ever-changing conceptions of time, space, and permanence. It is in this liminal space that the gravity of loss, absence, and grief is confronted. 

Her second series, Bedtime Stories for Children of War (2019), was created during the artist’s time in Colombo when the 2019 Easter Bombings occurred. As old ghosts of the Sri Lankan Civil War stirred, Benjamin-Webb returned to the healing energy of natural materials, light, and space to honor the displaced, disappeared, and desecrated.

Benjamin-Webb is keenly aware of the necessity for collective mourning and of how preciously and precariously we are all positioned between life and death. Her work gathers the remnants of state enacted violence to disentangle our relationships to the deadening structures intent on destroying us.

Benjamin-Webb is currently a death doula-in-training and a Kearney Fellow at Gallery Aferro. Her newest body of work centers the language of the dying and the grief of those who mourn them. 

www.anjalibenjaminwebb.com

Dominique Duroseau

Dominique Duroseau was born in Chicago and raised primarily in Haiti. Duroseau’s work has been exhibited in the Dumbo Arts Festival and Bushwick Open Studios, Brooklyn, NY; Harlem Art Walking Tour, New York, NY; Nave Gallery, Somerville, MA; Walsh Gallery at Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ; Gallery Aferro, Newark, NJ; and forthcoming in “Power, Protest, and Resistance” for Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation at Skylight Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Duroseau earned an Architectural degree from the New Jersey School of Architecture and a Fine Arts degree from Kean University.

Not every social issue should be boiled down to a buzz-word, simply to catch attention. We live in a time of media distractions that trend then reduce many social issues to white noise.

Dominique Duroseau has created a series of narratives which document our time, her own timeline, demonstrating our constant striving within today’s society. Taking into account culture, language, and social aspects, Dominique’s work depicts our contemporary struggles. Favoring more everyday matter as materials — repurposed goods, found objects, “clean trash” — She transforms our social dilemmas into abstracted imagery that reflects our long-growing list of struggles, and distill them into art. Through this multi-media approach, Duroseau has translated her observations into a series of works which are conceptual while representational, architectural yet abstract. Dominique uses sculpture, video performance, photography, printmaking, text and site-specific installations to devise a visual language representing the black sub-culture; these are victims of cultural indifference, coded vernacular, entrenched economic dispositions, and many more such issues.

In this series, Duroseau analyzes the etymology of the Haitian Creole word “nèg” — French spelling “nègre”, rooted in the Latin term for “black” — which has a number of racially-charged permutations across different languages, most notably the word “Nigger.” Through juxtaposition, translation, contextual placement, and other techniques, Dominique is creating analytical platforms where observers should question the historical complexities of a word and its continued presence in advertisements and media.

dominiqueduroseau.com

Gilbert Hsiao

What’s on top? What’s on bottom? What’s near? What’s far? If something is on top, why does it look like it’s on the bottom? If something’s far, why does it look near? Why do things look near or far while they’re actually on the same plane? What is empty space, what is light, what is material? What is constant, what is changing, why is it changing if it’s static? How can it be static if it’s changing? The shifting is illusory. Or is it?

Gilbert Hsiao (b. 1956) spends his time between Jersey City, NJ and Olivebridge, NY. He attended Columbia University and Pratt Institute. Solo exhibitions include Jump and Flow (2012) at Minus Space, Brooklyn, NY, Assymetrical Symmetry (2011) at SNO, Sydney, Australia, Filtered (2011) at Galerie Sonja Roesch in Houston TX, and Light Noise (2010) at dr Julius | ap in Berlin. Recent group shows include Unlikely Iterations of the Abstract (2013) at Contemporary Arts Museum Houston curated by Bill Arning, Buzz (2012-13) at Gallery Nara Roesler in Sao Palo, Brazil, curated by Vik Muniz, and Doppler Stop (2012-13), curated by Mel Prest which toured several European countries in 2012 and was recently shown at Parallel Art Space in Bushwick in 2013. He was NYFA fellow in 2008 and was a resident of the Marie Walsh Sharpe Art Foundation Space Program in New York in 2012-13. He is represented in collections including the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Bristol Myers Squib Collection, Progressive Collection, and the collection of Barbara and Eugene Schwartz, New York, NY.

gilberthsiao.com

Katrina Bello

2020 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Born in Davao City, Philippines, Katrina Bello is a visual artist who works in New Jersey in the United States and in Metro Manila in the Philippines. Her work as a visual artist is informed by observations and experiences of natural environments encountered during the course of her travels and migration. She has participated in solo and group exhibitions in the United States and the Philippines, and has been awarded fellowships and residencies in the United States. She attended the College of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines in Diliman, Quezon City, and received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey. She received her MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, Maryland in the United States. Katrina is the founder of north willow, an informal artist-run attic exhibition space in Montclair in New Jersey.

Bello’s drawings are about the beauty, complexity, fragility and what is compelling about the natural world. She sees nature and our relationship to it as her point of departure in understanding humanity. What she’s particularly interested in drawing are landscapes of wildernesses, especially the ones that are distant and remote. Deserts, open seas, mountain ranges and forests – their breadth and seeming emptiness speak of what is “other” to our human world, our dreams, our fears and what is beyond our control. These places are also fragile and undergoing dramatic change from increased urbanization. 

When Bello is in the studio making drawings, questions about our place, effect and purpose in the natural world occupy her thoughts. These questions come from the experience of migrating from coastal environments that have undergone dramatic change, and where some parts no longer exist. These questions are what propel her to choose drawing as the medium to carry what she feels and thinks about these subjects. Bello counts on the drawing medium to be a focused and tactile way of representing the patterns and forms found in nature. She uses detailed line drawing, size and scale as the means of insisting on the urgency of the subject of the work. The works are either 5 by 8 feet, or 5 by 8 inches in size. Through drawing, she’s creating spaces that are vast, yet finite and intimate. She want to viewer to get a sense of either being enveloped and surrounded by this space, or the sense that they can hold it in the palm of their hand.

http://katrinabello.com/

Luis-Miguel Caraballo

As an Elizabeth, New Jersey native, Luis-Miguel (formerly known as LouieBlaka) has been influenced deeply by his city roots. With a BFA in studio painting, he considers his art to be a fusion of contemporary with an edge of street art. Luis-Miguel has also been active within the street art community creating murals that can be seen throughout cities in New Jersey, Miami, Brazil, and Croatia. His work has been featured in various galleries, exhibitions and publications including the New York Times Best Seller “Crushing It!” by Gary Vaynerchuk.

Luis-Miguel earned a BaFA in studio painting from Montclair State University. Upon his college graduation, Louie embarked on a teaching career, and for the next five years, used his gifts and passion for art to teach painting at Perth Amboy High School. During that period, he discovered the importance of, not only honing his craft, but also inspiring others to nurture their own passions and love for the arts, no matter where they come from.  In 2018, Luis-Miguel left his full-time teaching position to pursue his dreams as an independent artist.  By 2019, he was the recipient of the City of Perth Amboy & AARP’s Intergenerational Mural Grant, and later that year was named resident artist for the WATT Hotel in Rahway, New Jersey. He was also commissioned as the featured artist for the interior of the Stratford, Connecticut State Farm branch.

Marsha Goldberg

Marsha Goldberg is a visual artist who lives in Highland Park, NJ, and works primarily in painting, drawing, and printmaking. She received an MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University, a BFA in Painting from Boston University, and has also studied at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Skowhegan, ME. She was a founding member of the Brickbottom Artists Building in Somerville, MA, and has attended several artists residency programs, most recently the Ucross Foundation in Wyoming in 2016.  

Goldberg’s work in recent years has encompassed a variety of media and ideas. One group of graphite drawings and related paintings is based on news photographs of war-related explosions and the resulting smoke. A group of paintings on 6×6-inch wood panels employs a grid of painted dots to playfully respond to the woodgrain patterns. Most recently, she has been exploring the possibilities of cyanotype by layering ink-drawings on acetate and varying exposure times. The result is a record of shifting light and the passage of time. What connects this body of work is an attention to detail, an interest in the materiality of whichever medium she’s engaged with, and an approach that is experimental and process-based.

A frequent traveler, Goldberg has time spent in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, which informs her work. She has exhibited widely and her work is in several public collections, including Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum, the Boston Public Library, and the Zimmerli Museum at Rutgers University. She has been a part-time lecturer at Douglass College at Rutgers University and Kean University. She is currently an artist-educator at the Paul Robeson Galleries at Rutgers/Newark.

www.marshagoldberg.com

---

2020

Alanna Fields

2020 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Alanna Fields (b. 1990), creates work that draws upon the black queer archive. Working intimately with found photographs and vernacular photography, Fields’ work aims to reconstruct the way in which we process images of the past, pushing them past nostalgia towards the deep investigation of queer life. Further investigated within this work is the dialogue between black queer bodies in the photographic space, through gesture, the negotiation between queer legibility, and masking. In her multi-paneled mixed-media collages, Fields’ utilizes wax as a means to blur legibility and address the historical suppression of black queer representation. The presence of text within work often functions as whispers, buried under the wax and slipping in and out of legibility. The incorporation of found objects, functions as another means of concealment, fragmentation, and reconfiguration of the black queer body.

Doreen Oliver

2020 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Doreen Oliver is a writer, performer, and speaker whose work illuminates the beauty, heartbreak, and unpredictability of life, often through the lens of parenthood. Her critically-acclaimed one-woman show, EVERYTHING IS FINE UNTIL IT’S NOT, debuted at the New York International Fringe Festival (FringeNYC) and broke the record for the fastest sell-out of a run in the festival’s 20-year history. In fall 2017, the show premiered Off-Broadway via the United Solo Festival with five sold-out performances and won the United Solo & Backstage Audience Award. 

Doreen’s essays on autism, race, and the chaos and contradictions of motherhood have appeared in several national publications including the New York Times and the Washington Post Sunday Magazine.  She has performed her pieces at the Yale Repertory Theatre, Symphony Space and the South Orange Performing Arts Center, and was twice selected for the national storytelling showcase, “Listen To Your Mother.” As a speaker, she has shared her insights nationally from college classrooms to ideas festivals like The Nantucket Project, where fellow speakers included George W. Bush, Tig Notaro, and Laura Dern.

As a producer and head of development for Lee Daniels Entertainment, Doreen helped bring to the big screen such independent films as the Oscar-winning Precious (Mo’Nique), Shadowboxer (Helen Mirren), and The Woodsman (Kevin Bacon).  Early in her career, she created and produced the sold-out talent showcase series “Frustrated Artists in Corporate America,” which included appearances by then up-and-coming talents actor/comedian Demetri Martin and Tony-nominee Anika Larsen. She also honed her storytelling skills working in Original Programming at HBO in Los Angeles.

Doreen is a graduate of Yale University and Stanford Graduate School of Business, where she was a Charles Bonini fellow. She has been awarded residencies and grants from Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) and the Louis Sudler Fund for the Arts at Yale, and is an alum of Tin House Summer Writers Workshop and Voices of Our Nations Arts Foundation (VONA). She is working on a memoir. Follow her on Twitter or on Facebook. She is the seventh recipient of Gallery Aferro’s Sustainable Arts Fellowship, a residency designed for artists who are parents.

Yoland Skeete

Yoland Skeete-Laessig is a Newark, NJ based artist of Caribbean descent.  She is co-founder of the Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center in Newark, one of Newark’s leading artist run alternative spaces which she ran from 1993 to 2015. Under her leadership the organization received awards and recognition from New York Foundation For The Arts and New Jersey State Council on the Arts as well as the City Of Newark, for outstanding cultural contributions and arts programming. 

Ms. Skeete immigrated to the US as a child, attended the School Of Visual Arts for undergraduate studies in film, video and photography, continued and completed her graduate studies at Tufts University/MIT Graduate program in Anthropological Filmmaking under Jean Rouche, and received an MFA at Hunter College. She is certified in the business of Arts Administration from Seton Hall University and has been adjunct professor at Rockland Community College, Raritan Valley Community College, New Jersey City University and Rutgers University, Newark until 2009.

Ms. Skeete has been a documentarian, and artist for as long as she can remember. Although making her living in photography and film, her personal work is a ritual of how life is experienced utilizing any and every medium to accomplish her goals. Ms. Skeete has exhibited her video and photography and multimedia installations in galleries and museums in the US and abroad including the Museum of Modern Art, the Queens Museum of Art, the Newark Museum, Museum of Contemporary Arts and Crafts in New York City, Biblioteque Nacional de Paris and The Musee D’Art Moderne De La Ville De Paris, Husby Konsthalle, Stockholm, Sweden, and Estesio Gallery, Beddingstrande, Sweden.

Ms. Skeete’s photographs and video work are in the print collection of the Museum of Modern Art, African American Museum of Life and Culture, Dallas, Texas, Carolyn Alexander of Alexander Bonin Gallery in Chelsea, and American Express Corporation.  She has been a recipient of the Glide Memorial Grant, The Graff Travel Grant, The New Jersey Council on the Humanities Grant and the Melon Grant distributed through New Jersey Performing Arts Center’s Humanities program. She has been an Artist in Residence at Art In General, The Arts Council of the Essex Area, and has received educational grants and awards for her work with youth and media. She continues to exhibit her work locally, nationally and internationally.  In 2012 she participated in the exhibition “A BILHA PROJECTO DE ARTE. CELEBRA O DIA DE PORTUGAL DE CAMÕES E DAS COMUNIDADES PORTUGUESAS NEWARK” which toured the US and is permanently housed in the Bilha Museum in Portugal. 

Also an author, in 2016 Ms. Skeete’s “When Newark Had a Chinatown: My Personal Journey” was published. The book is a product of the artist’s own research into a time when the city of Newark, NJ had a thriving Chinese community.

http://www.yolandskeete.com/about.html

Hal Laessig

Hal Laessig is an architectural designer, developer, and artist who has contributed for many decades to the cultural life of Newark, including as the cofounder of Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center. He has resided in the city since 1976, after studying at NJIT and completing graduate work at Cranbrook Academy of Art. Sumei Multidisciplinary Arts Center was a nonprofit organization, located in downtown Newark, whose mission was to provide a space for artists of diverse backgrounds and disciplines to interact with the public through performance, exhibition and teaching thus creating an exchange of cultural ideas and practices.

As an artist Laessig works in architecture and creates urban-inspired drawings and public installations. Often working in collaboration with architect Thomas Bish, his work has been exhibited at the 1985 Venice Biennale, the Queens Museum of Art, The Newark Museum, Aljira A Center for Contemporary Art, and other venues. Together with Bish, in 1992 Laessig created a 17-volume catalogue of books titled  the “Newark Hidden City Project: Rethinking the City,” and can be currently found in the Newark Public Library Special Collections.

Leassig also provides design and management for projects for local arts organizations and for public art installations. Recent projects include a collaboration with artist Charlee Swanson for the winning entry in New Jersey Transit’s Juried  Public Art competition for the Davenport Light Rail station in Newark, NJ, completed in 2014. Hal has also managed the conversion of an 8,000 s.f. storefront for Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Arts at 591 Broad St, Newark, NJ; HUD block grants for several non-profits from the City of Newark; installation of the outdoor artwork of Grace Graupe Pillard along the Hudson-Bergen Light Rail Transit Line and at the NJ Transit Aberdeen train station; and project management for two art installations by Willie Cole at the Washington Park station of the Newark light rail line.

http://www.newark-metametrics.com/

Bisa Washington

2019 Recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity

Bisa Washington is a sculptor, printmaker, and writer. Issues in her work focus around her heritage and identity as an African American woman. She was a Geraldine R. Dodge Resident and Women’s Studio Workshop alumna. There she created a suite of handmade paper and mixed media prints inspired by the secrets kept by the women in her family for generations, resulting in the artist’s book, Promise Not to Tell. She lives and works in Newark, NJ.

Washington is the first recipient of the Lynn and John Kearney Fellowship for Equity.

John Matturri

John Matturri was raised in Newark, lives in NYC, and for several years has maintained a studio in Newark. After graduate studies in Cinema at NYU and Philosophy at CUNY-Graduate Center, he taught both philosophy and film at Queens College for many years. He participated in photographic workshops with Lisette Model and Ken Heyman, and his practice greatly benefited from collaborations with many prominent experimental artists, including Ken Jacobs, Jack Smith, Richard Foreman, John Zorn, Stuart Sherman, and Shelley Hirsch.

Following initial experiments in experimental film, Matturri concentrated on slide shows, which after performing in a number of John Zorn musical compositions came to involve a wide range of techniques of improvised optical manipulation. His interest in montage led — particularly after a hiatus associated with his philosophical studies — to a shift to structuring images and words into arrangements and sequences on panels and walls.

After an initial Emily Harvey Foundation residency in Venice, Italy, in 2007, his work has centered on various modes of presentation of still images based on extensive photographic city archives. Matturri’s work has been shown at the Brooklyn Historical
Society Museum, Downtown Whitney, Collective for Living Cinema, The Phatory, June Bateman Fine Arts, Newark Public Library, and the Archivio Emily Harvey, among other venues.

In 2009, he was co-curator of “Beginningless Thought / Endless Seeing,” a comprehensive NYU retrospective of the work of Stuart Sherman, selected to Artforum‘s year’s 10 best list for two years and P.S.1’s 2010 five-year review of significant art events. His most recent major critical writing was “Homeless Objects: Notes on Jack Smith,” published in a special issue of Criticism devoted to Smith’s work.

Nene Aïssatou Diallo

2019 marked the 13th year since Diallo immigrated from Guinea to the United States. Though she claims Newark to be home and labels herself American, she often finds herself disconnected from her “African-ness,” and Guinea. To work through this tension and displacement, she centralizes energy towards her artwork – which results in acts of healing, clarity, and release. This tension also forces her to confront the politics that are inherent to her dual-identities: Immigrant and American, African-ness and Blackness. These labels are all demanding space in one body while all fighting against legacies of erasure, silence, and violence, which in turn allows her work to advocate for and be in solidarity with social movements and revolutions including, Black Lives Matter. With African wax prints, photography, collage, and video, Diallo attempts to eloquently synthesize the variables of her identity using objects and materials as stand-ins.

She is always working on two things simultaneously. Often, her projects merge into one cohesive body of work. Currently, she is making flags and documenting the reminders of home that people take with them as they migrate. She is stitching language, both in english and in her native tongue Pular, across textile materials representative of her identities — playing with concepts of freedom and the American dream. The final products exist as sculptures that demand the right to occupy space.

Feel free to follow Diallo on Instagram at @neneaisha and @selfworshipping.

---

2019

Joe Silvestro

Joe Silvestro’s work over the past quarter century has taken many forms, but usually it has addressed his interest in words, symbols, and space. Language is everywhere. There is a flag on the moon. Space is everywhere. He thinks about this stuff a lot more than he would like to admit.

Yet, he is drawn to the idea that language has no inherent physical scale except when it becomes part of the visible world. When words or symbols enter space in this way, they become part of a more exciting problem. What should be done with them?

Writers must address and react to problems of transparency or authenticity because they try to communicate with specificity and clarity to transfer meaning. But visual artists can tinker with words using a wider array of tools with a different effect. The alphabet or a word, a list, or phrase can be transformed by treating them as, or with – or within, marks, still lifes, signage, shapes, and visual puns.

Most recently, Silvestro’s interest in words also concerns the language of media and social justice activism. His newer work addresses deep interests in language, politics, and communal artistic engagement within physical space across painting, performative intervention, community outreach, and traditional design. It is also informed by his personal formal sensibilities and efforts to find beauty, poetry, balance, and visual richness throughout his daily life.

Bud McNichol

2019 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

In 2019 Bud McNichol is returning to Gallery Aferro an an artist in residence for the second time, this time as a Sustainable Arts Fellow. McNichol is a New Jersey-based artist and has been practicing art for the past 19 years, focusing primarily on painting. He’s exhibited extensively throughout New Jersey and New York, as well as Pennsylvania and Illinois, and his work’s been written about in Hyperalleric.

McNichol is interested in the necessities involved in the act of painting as well as the concept behind a particular piece or series’ germination. The physical and mental act of art making is one of problem solving. McNichol’s approach to each painting is a conversation between the work and himself. He isn’t interested in a rote approach to process. There is in him, a refusal to have the work recognized by an identifiable style; ‘A Fine Disregard’ for convention. A series of work is never abandoned. It can always be revisited and informed by new directions that have been taken. New work, in turn, responds to parameters set up in previous series.

Anne Q. McKeown

My work contrasts rational, conceptual processes with intuitive inquiry. I research, investigate, and shape materials using chance, accident, and random samplings, as well as imagery from the canon of art history. I am driven to create work that is richly layered, that feels expressive, measured, and substantial.

I have been employing manipulated wire grids. The wire grids are cut to create stencils for my mark making. Along with the wire drawings I have built a series of shapes based on the design technique of camouflage. These camouflage shapes are created from overlapped lines that are an accumulation of tracings from the canon of western painting. Shapes are interspersed with marks to create levels and a sense of motion and chaos in my paintings and prints.

My work speaks directly to my world, marks and shapes are broken from a strict order; tumbling over; blocking; competing for space. The crowding marks and shapes reflect the shifting world as systems and beliefs shred and burst into new compilations. There are bits of the familiar but those are hints and allusions. I am not looking to create an order. I am recording a moment of being.

Anne Q. McKeown is an artist whose practice includes painting, printmaking and handmade paper. McKeown has traveled to and worked in Egypt, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Korea, Cuba and South Africa. She has worked with artists at the Artist Proof Studio and Phumani Paper in Johannesburg, South Africa. McKeown has spoken on art discussion panels, including an interview with Richard Tuttle at the New York Editions and Artist Book Fair 2008, she has juried exhibitions, including the 2007 Philagrafika Invitational Portfolio, and has presented her work as a visiting artist at various Universities, including the University of Johannesburg, South Africa.

McKeown has taught Art Appreciation and Drawing courses at the University of Connecticut in Stamford and Papermaking at Mason Gross School of the Arts; as well as many workshops and demonstrations, including the 2010 Pulp Painting Symposium at the Southwest School of Art in San Antonio, Texas. Since 2001 she has been the Master Papermaker at the Brodsky Center for Innovative Editions. McKeown holds her B.A in Studio Art, 1992 from Skidmore College and her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University School of Art. Over the last three years her work has been shown at the SOHO20 CHELSEA Gallery, New York where she is a Fellowship member. She has shown at the Hall of Awa in Yamakawa, Japan JARFO Gallery in Kyoto, Japan; at Rupert Ravens Contemporary and Gallery Aferro in Newark, NJ, at the Noyes Museum in Oceanville, NJ and the Hogar Collection Gallery in Brooklyn, NY among others. Her work involves exploration, working with painting, printmaking, papermaking and wire drawings. She makes and takes apart systems using color, chance and intuition.

www.anneqmckeown.com

Dana Majana

Dana Majana is a painter and drawer who is interested in the congruence between sight, experience and the translation of the hand. Her work is made by taking images and inspiration and imitating them using physicality of oil paint, spray paint, acrylic.  Application and texture, speed and testing the memory play a role in the reproduction. Dana draws inspiration from everyday, mundane information that can feel overlooked or perhaps will be forgotten about.

She received her Bachelor of Fine Art in Painting and Art History from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University and her Masters of Fine Art in Fine Arts from School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Her work and life thrives on human interaction and teaching others about art and visual culture. She is currently a part-time lecturer of Art History and Visual Arts at Essex County College, Union County College and Brookdale Community College in New Jersey.  She feels a strong connection between working with others and drawing inspiration from the random and ever changing day to day tasks.

Tasha Lewis

Tasha Lewis is a young cyanotype artist from Indianapolis, Indiana. She writes, “although almost all of my work is three-dimensional, I still consider my art to be in the photographic realm. I am drawn to cyanotype both because of its history and because of its flexibility. My current body of work is drawn from an investigation into the cultural/scientific/historical context in which the cyanotype was born.

Popularized by scientists, and botanists in particular, the cyanotype is intrinsically tied into the scientific recording boom of the late 19th and early 20th century. These are the times of the curiosity cabinet, the prints of Anna Atkins and a rush of explorers/scientists to colonial lands to bring back specimens from foreign ecosystems. The cyanotype is a process of documenting. The resultant image— which is the basic fodder for all of my work— is a kind of scientific stand-in for the actual object in question. I realized that there is something too static about the way we record nature— a force which is anything but static. My pieces, in herds or swarms, have a kind of inborn rebellion in them. They break out of surfaces we expect to be solid, and in so doing are launching an attack into our personal space”.

tashalewis.info

Giacomo Colosi

Giacomo Colosi is an Italian artist living in United States whose work is about relationships between the human condition and human behavior. Using a raw, humorous, and absurd style, his practice relies on memory process, vulnerability, absence, and archives. He also invites the audience to be part of his memory process, where each represents a stage of life, particular experience, or a particular place. He creates a synergy with his environment and encourages participants to revisit their memories based on their personal belongings.

As an artist, Giacomo has been researching ways in which art can be applied to the everyday life, fact and fiction, not only as its dispositive for self-reflection, but as a way to generate and install models and have possible interactions that could provide new ways to engage and involve people — as it relates to the body and the world. He blurs the lines between art and life suggesting that we examine if what we believe constitutes a “reality” that matters, a human action/situation rather than any definition of “everyday reality” based on standard normalcy or a social code we create.

www.giacomocolosi.com

Anna Arcuri

Anna Arcuri is an emerging fine artist and New Jersey native. She is a recent graduate from William Paterson University of New Jersey’s Art Studio, Bachelor of Arts program, where she also acquired a minor in Art History. Arcuri’s artistic process is a logic-based ritual, with hours spent dedicated to research including reciting the writings of David Lynch, referencing Ana Mendieta’​s ​Siluetas, reading essays on various art philosophies and criticisms, watching films extending over many genres, and so much more. She has always found herself separated from reality, lost in her thoughts and imagination. Arcuri’s art is a representation of her multi-layered consciousness, and her relationship to her environment.

Arcuri marries Photography and Sculpture to emulate the shifting energy of a science-fiction thriller. Dimensionally cyclical, Arcuri’s photography is a forensic plane, created by capturing microcosms within pieces of her sculptures. The sculptures utilize recognizable materials and ambiguous textures. Referencing mundane life, then whimsically contorting it, into a whole new world, or object from a parallel universe, the
underlying narrative, comfort in escapism, propels the journey from one realm to another.

Dependent on shifting interpretations and viewer participation, there is no wrong way to feel about this work, divergent from its supposed intent. It is universally bizarre, so all interpretations are valid. A playful, mysterious, and adventurous, push and pull between our reality and beyond.

http://www.annaarcuri.com

---

2018

Jacob Mandel

Jacob Mandel’s work focuses on ideas, introspection, memory, and emotions. Through his practice he reflects on experiential phenomenon using photography as a parallel to the way we see the world. His work is influenced by a passion for the history of photography, and a constant engagement with attempting to define his perception of the world around him. Mandel believes photographic processes can be used to subvert expectations of what a photograph can or must do. Through that contradiction of purpose he believes his artwork mirrors our own understanding, and misunderstanding, of the world around us. Experimentation is crucial to Jacob’s artistic practice and pushing the boundaries of his vision is something he strives for constantly. Jacob also combines media and images, layering content, ideas, textures, and processes. This is another way in which he works to create artwork that acts as a mirror to perception while creating a type of visual poetry. Mandel feels that diversity of experience is crucial to one’s ability to empathize and understand other cultures. The layering of media and images in his work is his way of engaging in social awareness. Creating an immersive experience, walking the line between photography, installation, poetry, and illustration, Jacob illustrates his own meditations on understanding and creating one’s identity and introspective consciousness. This work, though deeply personal and specific to his life, creates an allegory for experience that isn’t tethered to one singular type of experience. Through presenting these ideas, Jacob encourages the viewer to look upon themselves and attempt to understand their own place amongst our shared reality.

Jacob Mandel was born in December 1990. He graduated with honors from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2012 receiving a BFA in Photography and a minor degree in Art History. Since graduating he planted himself in the Newark arts community and recently left his position as the Gallery Manager at Gallery Aferro in Downtown Newark after six years. Jacob is the co-founder and Administrative Director of Collaborate Audio Lab, a Newark-based music and arts organization producing and collaborating on community-oriented creative content. He also has partnered with other local non-profits like Oculus Art Collaborative to produce exhibitions and events. As a curator, Jacob has done projects for Newark Open Doors, major group and solo exhibitions in Gallery Aferro’s main gallery, and exhibitions outside of Newark including at the Arts Guild of New Jersey in Rahway, NJ. In 2013 Mandel was awarded a scholarship as a mentee of Evonne Davis to attend the Nonprofit Emerging Leaders Certificate Program at The Institute for Ethical Leadership at Rutgers Business School. In 2016 he was nominated for an Ubuntu Award at Newark’s 30 under 30 hosted by Them Cloud Kids. His work in a growing art community like Newark’s has shown him that collaboration, self motivating, and idea sharing are crucial to one’s professional and creative success.

Mia Duran

Mia Duran seeks to represent herself and other women of color in strong and empowering paintings. In art history, women of color have very rarely been given agency over their image. By having ongoing conversations with her subjects, Duran works towards ensuring that these women feel they have a voice over their image, their bodies and their agency.

Focusing on women, Duran plays with the idea of ‘femininity’ and how it can be portrayed in traditional and nontraditional materials and interpretations of her subjects. While the main focus of her work is painting; weaving, sewing, crocheting and other crafts traditionally seen as women’s work is both rendered and used direct. Along side these ‘feminine’ materials, strong ‘male’ objects, many times phallic weapons such as knives, and jobs, such as painting, play with the complexity of her subjects.

Culture is another topic that is inseparable from the women being represented. The background of these women plays a subtle, but key part of the color palette, background and objects chosen.

Mia Duran was born into a strong Latino community in Fresno, CA. She received her B.F.A in painting from the San Francisco Art Institute in 2014. She has lived in the greater New York Area since 2014.

www.miaduran.com

Amy Faris

2018 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Amy Faris was born in central New Jersey and has lived in Philadelphia, New York and Detroit. She received her MFA in painting from the New York Academy of Art.

Her work can be explained as personal investigations into the formation of identity within the home environment, where it is subjected to the combined pressures of memory and domestic relationships. Her drawings and installations utilize the simplest art-identified materials (graphite, paper, paint) in combination with building materials (sheet rock, joint compound, wood, plaster) and household objects/detritus (furniture, lint, clothing). Her choice of materials and deliberate, handcrafted process are an intentional meditation on the constructive nature of identity evolution. Her work has recently been included in Black and White, Site: Brooklyn, Onward, 2018 Outsider Art Fair, NY, Et Tu Art Brute, Andrew Edlin Gallery, NY and in Small Works at the Mikhail Zakin Gallery in Demarest, NJ.

She has been the recipient of a Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation grant for residency at the Vermont Studio Center, a Domestic Scholarship from the Kosciuszko Foundation, and a Leslie T. and Frances U. Posey Foundation Scholarship for graduate level study.

She is the 2018 Sustainable Arts Foundation Artist in Residence at Aferro Gallery in Newark, NJ.

In addition to her studio practice, Amy is an adjunct professor in the visual arts departments of Brookdale Community College, Lincroft, NJ and Georgian Court University, Lakewood, NJ and is the founder and former coordinator of the Brookdale Visiting Artist Program.

Sharde Hickenbottom

Valerie Huhn moved to the New York City area to pursue a life of art and education at The New School – Parsons and the School of Visual Arts. She then moved west and completed her BFA and MFA degrees at the San Francisco Art Institute.

Valerie works in a variety of media from photography and video to mixed-media to sculpture and site-specific installation. Her work has been shown throughout the United States and internationally. Residencies include Chashama, NYC, Long Beach Island, NJ, and Aspen, CO. Her work is in the MoMA Books Collection as well as private collections. She has won numerous awards, including several for her recent fingerprint work, which continues to provide her with new material and ideas to explore.

Lori Roper

Lori is a writer, teaching artist and producer, committed to writing which insists upon addressing issues of social justice; especially for the marginalized and disenfranchised. The intention of her story-telling, is devoted to the craft of performance. Her new collection of solo plays entitled Nothing to See Here, is in development with the support of Gallery Aferro, in Newark, NJ. Lori’s solo play Talk White, a work from the collection Nothing to See Here, was recently selected by the RestorationART and Billie Holiday Theatre as a part of their project, 50 in 50: Writing Ourselves into Existence, collection of solo plays written by women of color. Lori’s latest play, Hawks Tavern co-written with Rick Sordelet, is an historical play set during the Newark Riots of 67’. Hawks Tavern, has received developmental opportunities by Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT as well as The Kenyon Playwrights Conference in Gambier, OH. Lori is writing the book and lyrics for Elmora, a musical set in an immigrant-rich neighborhood ensnared in the deportation crisis. Elmora, which she is creating with composer Peter Ncanywa, is receiving developmental support from The United Church of Christ Congregational in Plainfield, NJ. Lori’s play, The Sisters Grey, recently received a complete page to stage development and production through the August Wilson Center for African American Culture’s “New Theatre Initiative.” The Sisters Grey received a staged reading at The College of William and Mary. An excerpt from The Sisters Grey was also featured in Luna Stage’s first annual short play festival.

Lori has served as a faculty member of Words and Music, sponsored by the Pirate’s Alley Faulkner Society. During the 2010 Words and Music Festival, she launched the panel discussion about the relationship between race and literature by presenting a reading of her essay, Making War to Create Love, which placed as a finalist in the William Wisdom Creative Writing competition. Throughout her teaching career she has directed students, most notably, in a production of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor for which she and her students were awarded “Best Overall Performance” at the New Jersey Folger Shakespeare Festival. Lori is a theater adjudicator and workshop instructor for the New Jersey, Somerset County Teen Arts Festival. As a seventeen-year teaching veteran, her experiences as an award-winning educator fuel her dedication to powerful and honest writing. She is a recipient of the prestigious ING Unsung Heroes Award for Innovation and Excellence in Education. In that vein, Lori Roper created Atticus Theatre Workshop, a writing lab for aspiring playwrights. Her work as a playwright, essayist and poet cast illumination upon complex subjects such as education, race, gender, religion and class. Lori is also an avid poet who hosts workshops with adults and children. Her most recent workshop and performance took place at the Burgdorff Arts Center in Woodbridge, NJ.

Lori obtained her Master of Arts in English Education from New York University from which she graduated Summa Cum Laude.  Lori is a graduate of The College of William and Mary where she received a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and a Bachelor of Science in Sociology.  She was awarded an annual Writer-In-Residence grant at the Ethical Cultural Society of Essex County, NJ and has served as a member of  the faculty at Essex County Community College. Lori is an alumna of the Creative Capital Professional Development Program. Lori was Gallery Aferro’s first, but hopefully not its last, writer in residence.

Kern Samuel

Kern Samuel was born on the island of Trinidad in the West Indies. He is the son of tradespeople and his mother Maudlyn ran a small sewing shop from home. There is where he discovered art, spending many evenings keenly observing his mother as she created outfits or just doodling quietly to pass the time. At fourteen his family migrated to the United States and settled in New Jersey. By that time, he had developed a strong passion for art and creativity and knew he wanted to be an artist. At eighteen he received a full tuition scholarship to attend The Cooper Union in New York City.

After college he became very interested in community building and became a part of The Sable Project, a small off-the-grid artist community in Vermont. There, he had the opportunity to collaborate with many dance artists, often recalling his formative years at home with his mother, to create original costumes for performances.

He took his interest in community and collaboration back to New Jersey where he works as an Educator at The Newark Museum.

Michelle Suriel

Michelle Suriel has a variety of artworks that she has done in the past. Michelle’s primary media include charcoal, pastel, watercolor, and pencil. The artworks she focuses on consists of human and landscape element. Each artwork shows the different ways she works and details she focuses on.

Julie Ann Nagle

Julie Ann Nagle is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. She is fascinated by uniting personal expression with science and innovation, and with the people who have found ways to do so to change the world. Her current work melds analytic investigations of specific sites with deeply personal narratives. After receiving her BFA at The Cooper Union School of Art she completed her MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media at Virginia Commonwealth University. Among the many residencies she has participated in, they have included the Museum of Fine Arts Houston Core Program, the MacDowell Colony and Yaddo. Additionally, she has been awarded a Jerome Foundation Fellowship grant and is a National Academies Keck Futures Initiatives (NAFKI) Grant subawardee among others. She believes knowledge is power, and sees each project as a means for immersing herself in the study of her subject. Her position as an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at William Paterson University is an extension of her studio practice.

Mary Valverde

2017 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Mary A. Valverde (born 1975, Queens, New York) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and professor based in New York. Valverde teaches at Hunter College, CUNY and has lectured at institutions including The Ford Foundation, Stanford University, University of Pennsylvania, F.I.T., and Long Island University’s MFA departments. Valverde is Commissioner (Sculptor seat), Arts Commission/Public Design Commission of the City of New York, since 2015. She received her MFA at the University of Pennsylvania in 2012 and her BFA from the School of Visual Arts, NY in 1999. Valverde is the recipient of University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design’s Full Dean’s Diversity Fellowship, and in 2010 received the Artist Fellowship, Inc. Individual Artist Award and the Mayer Foundation Grant. She is the 2017 Parent-Artist Artist-in-Residence at Gallery Aferro, NJ. Mary A. Valverde was the 2011 MFA Lecturer at the ICA Philadelphia, was the Thomas Hunter Ceramic Artist in Residence in 2014, artist in residence at Artist Alliance Residency 2007, and at Aljira Center for Contemporary Art’s Emerge Program in 2006. Valverde has exhibited her work at MoCA North Miami, The New Jersey State Museum, BRAC, Art Center South Florida, El Museo del Barrio, The Queens Museum of Art, Jersey City Museum, Momenta Gallery, Saltworks Gallery, Corridor Gallery, Rush Arts Gallery, Diaspora Vibe Gallery, Abrons Art Center, Cuchifritos Gallery, Gallery Aferro, Tribes Gallery, among others. Valverde has contributed to various projects through the BASE collective.

---

2017

Jay Wilson

What Jay Wilson offers is art, hope, and a sense that no one is alone. Healing-through-art is what he practices. Wilson’s intention is to continue to build up the youth in my community through service and love. He is known primarily as a fine artist with an extensive background in graffiti. Wilson’s work is known for showing the true challenges of living in New Jersey’s largest city; Newark. Through Jay’s art he tells stories of whimsical irony, pensive despair, and playful joy. One of the main themes throughout Wilson’s work is that of the dispossessed youth. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? Wilson wants to tell their truth. Many of Wilson’s works are self-portraits of himself and his interactions with the world around him. Jay likes to think that he is using his own image as a portal whereby, Wilson aims to offer transcendence to the masses of voiceless youth who can’t or won’t be heard.

Sara Wolfe

Wolfe’s abstract paintings reference a child-like sense of object and space. Working wet on wet, her images evolve quickly through an improvisational process. As infants learning to draw make figures with twenty arms, they express a new awareness of their limbs rather than a representational observation. Wolfe’s act of painting similarly involves capturing our physical experience of existing in the world, and memories of those heightened moments of awareness.
Her recent work deals with creating the illusion of pattern and then breaking it. She plays with the suggestion of three-dimensional space within flat shapes and the idea of the possibility of the edge of the painted surface being peeled off and lifted back.

Sara Wolfe’s paintings have been exhibited in venues including the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA, the 92nd Street Y and Exit Art in New York City, and The Center for Contemporary Art and Arts Guild in New Jersey. Solo shows include Gallery Aferro in Newark in 2009 and Hamilton Square in Jersey City in 2014. Wolfe has been the recipient of numerous fellowships, including those from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation and the Joan Mitchell Foundation. Residencies include Yaddo, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Centers and the Association of Independent Schools of Art and Design. Wolfe holds an M.F.A. from Rutgers’ Mason Gross School of the Arts and has studied painting in Florence, Italy and at the School for Visual Arts in New York City. She has taught painting and drawing at Rutgers University, Middlesex County College, New Jersey City University and at SUNY in New Paltz, NY.

Will Ortega

William A. Ortega is a Colombian born artist who grew up in Hudson County NJ. He received his BFA from New Jersey City University and his MFA from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts. He is currently pursuing a Master’s in Professional Studies at the School of Visual Arts in NYC, focused on contemporary digital photographic media.

As a first generation Latin American, Ortega’s work focuses on the process of assimilation by exploring many themes of identity through his photographic images. As an example some of his projects have explored the idea of gender roles and how they are developed according to cultural signifiers. His interest lies in how “transitional” families define these gender roles and how the idea of the male role changes/evolves from generation to generation.

Most projects are semi-biographical and approached by themes with humor creating narratives that exhibit elements and border on a ridiculous assumption of identity. Ortega’s projects are underlined with a sincere question about place, whether in its immediate physical presence by documenting and inspecting used items, immediate family, ancestry and cultural racial history and its psychological impact. His work references male relationships and the modern day view of masculinity that addresses perplexing suggestions ingrained by our cultural unconsciousness.

Essential Elements Creative Collective

RAGE, PAIN, DESPERATION, ANXIETY, INTOXICATING BLISS where is it safe to fully release these emotions without ridicule and judgement? without hurting someone or yourself? To go into the extreme places, the taboo places with a safety net and help to find your way back to yourself? We seek to move the process of self confrontation out of hiding and isolation into a communal experience of catharsis via a shared emotional journey, illustrated by art. Living and working in and around Newark, NJ a city in recovery, the members of this collective know intimately the trials of resurrecting from devastation. Through our own bouts with rage, debilitating sadness and grief, the options were to go numb or willingly enter the fire, and burn with the hope of resurrecting from nothing. We each chose the latter and through our commitment to a journey of healing, our sisterhood, creativity and art making have been a stronghold. We discovered that we do not have to suffer alone, there are people, there are tools: we have each other and a home for critical and radical expression. There will be no withholding, for the sake of sanity. The first step to rehab is admitting ‘what is’ to yourself and others: no censoring no editing.

The collective is comprised of Newark based artists including; “The serial optimist”, Kelly Thomas (performance artist, healer, activist), “The abstract expressionist” , Sophia Domeville (painter/visual artist), “The Emcee”, Sheikia, (performing artist, educator, healer), & Jessica Dunston “Wearable Art Creatress” (jewelry designer, writer, healer).

Jo-El Lopez

Jo-El Lopez was born in Juncos, Puerto Rico and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. Lopez uses the visual storytelling of traditional realism to convey complex commentary on the intersection of faith and modernity, the strength of family, and the multidimensional contemporary urban experience. Gallery AFerro hosted Lopez’s first solo show, Speaking In Tongues, which focused on these top[ics in early 2016. The decades the artist spent under the Pentecostal doctrine, a bold color palette informed by both abstract painting as well as older traditions of icon-making, all meld to create Lopez’s kaleidoscopic worldview. The collection of artworks previously on view at Gallery Aferro from January 27 – March 12, 2016 reveal a restless, deeply engaged spirit closely observing not only his immediate environment, but the larger historic trajectory of national news.
Lopez asserts, “Originally, I studied business and fine arts at Kean University and at Montclair State University and was prepared for a life in the corporate arena. But my life’s journey has led me back to artmaking and my true passion. My work shows my voyage from that life choice to now.” In just four years since leaving the business world to focus on art, Lopez’s work has appeared regularly in tri-state area exhibtions at The Bronx Art Center, Gallery Aferro, The Center for Contemporary Art, New Jersey City State University Gallery, Rupert Raven Contemporary, and Jersey City’s City Hall.

Caitlin Masley

2017 Recipient of the Sustainable Arts Fellowship

Caitlin Masley’s work focuses on built forms, ruins, monuments and topographies in their moments of change. This can be referred to as a “Topography Crux”, the point or moment where the installation, sculptures or wall drawings are embodied negotiations of geopolitical space. Each series of works are organized around an examination of materials from a specific place in a specific moment in history (such as cement and Brutalist architecture) and often a way for Masley to deconstruct a political situation, breach a physical boundary or conceptualize a topography. This examination of space and architectural situations stems from ideas of possibilities of forms suiting the needs of a changing landscape and its mobile population. Caitlin’s obsessive treatment of surface space hand-records all these landscapes, blocks, tunnels, passageways and uses the material textures that allows her to dig back into the organic matter of these topographies. This process often visually references Landsat imagery and historical satellite imagery with the use of cement and metallics deposits found in the earth and referencing the global economy. Inspiration also comes from a personal archive of images researched and culled from political media outlets, online archives and photos from abandoned cities and social structural projects around the world. The works collectively record the invisible history of where we go, where we live, how we create, erase and redraw borders and structures and where we call home.

Caitlin Masley holds a Masters of Fine Art from the University of Arizona and a Masters of Science in Design and Urban Ecology from Parsons/The New School. She is the recipient of several grants and fellowships, including an Emerging Artist Fellowship from the Socrates Sculpture Park, a Pollock-Krasner Fellowship, Barbara Deming Memorial Fund Grant, Puffin Foundation Grant and Foundation for Contemporary Art (emergency grant) and the LMCC Swing Space Grant and Residency among others. Masley has been an Artist-in-Residence in Austria, Germany, Quebec, Norway and Switzerland, as well as had work included in group exhibitions at MOMA/PS1, Center for Built Environment, Storefront for Art and Architecture and site-specific solo exhibitions and major projects include; Katonah Museum of Art, McColl Center for Contemporary Art, Islip Museum, Urban Institute of Contemporary Art, HVcc Foundation, Kingston Museum of Contemporary Art and the HDLU Museum in Zagreb, Croatia. Masley’s work is included in the Pfizer Corporate Collection, Benaki Museum Collection, Holt Renfrew Collection, Progressive Corporate Collection and many Private Collections. Masley’s work is featured in the book titled”The Artist as Culture Producer: Living and Sustaining a Creative Life,” edited by Sharon Louden to be published in 2017.

Alex Scott Cumming

Alex Scott Cumming pursues intuitive imagery association to compose narratives of the subconscious. By accessing synchronicities, his work contains esoteric syntax; forms translated from space by the artist. These forms manifest within mnestic process, and develop into concepts of social evaluation and revolution. Finished pieces carry an accumulative resonance of process and concept. His medias include painting, collage, illustration, printmaking, photography, and various literary arts.

Alex Scott Cumming is exhibition designer and a working artist at Gallery Aferro. Beginning as a volunteer, his skills and background in installation and design were quickly trusted and utilized. Alex Scott studied interdisciplinary art at Montclair State. Shortly afterwards, he began working with Newark ­based, Oculus Art Collaborative, specializing in curation and project coordination. Their show in 2012’s Newark Open Doors, “Transformation” renovated the Kislak Building in Downtown Newark into multiple installation studios and a performance space. Alex’s practice includes painting, graphic design, photography, and writing. He has also worked in film production, printmaking, and music. Alex’s work focuses on psychological imagery, primitivism, and evolution.

---

2016

Lizzy Storm

Lizzy Storm’s artwork addresses space, light, and perception. Inspired by calculus and higher mathematics and how they are used in physics and other sciences, she delves into the mystery of the infinitely small and the infinitely large and comes to the surface with diagrammatic, illustrative works informed by the complexity of nature as well as minimal forms. She uses artistic conventions like atmospheric perspective, color theory, and tonal structure in combination with mathy visualizations like vector or streamline plots and three dimensional metric space to inspire visual thinking on abstract concepts.

Through her work, she can connect not only to experienced members of the science and technology communities, but to young thinkers who are also inspired by math and other STEM fields. Somewhere in the middle, countless thousands of “nonmath people” can still find a way to contemplate the beauty in the artwork.

Lizzy Storm is an emerging artist raised and currently residing in West Orange, NJ. A view of New York City’s skyline from the hills of her home town has left Lizzy with a constant reminder of the visual information involved in understanding deep space and spatial relationships. Studying illustration at Rhode Island School of Design, Lizzy honed her skills in visual communication. A well of inspiration was opened through her investigation of geometric perspective drawing in conjunction with landscape painting. The resulting work, both 2D and 3D, bridges a gap between the romanticism and realism of illustration and the abstract mathematics of geometry and physics. She has returned home to New Jersey to exhibit and work in the local arts community.

Wendy Letven

Wendy’s work stems initially from drawing and observation but ultimately she is in search of a narrative that is both personal and universal. Letven works in series that mark a preoccupation with the fusion of images from everyday life with the visualization of a more internal sense of the world. One medium suggests another, one image suggests the next. While this might imply a linear progression, themes recur, particularly those of a psychological, social nature. Our tenuous relationship to our environment and what it means to come of age at this particular point in time, are two themes that currently consume her.

Wendy Letven grew up in a family of artists in the Philadelphia area, so drawing and painting were second nature to her. Letven attended Washington University in St. Louis and Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. After art school she moved to New York and received an MFA in painting from Hunter College. Letven lived there for over a decade before she moved to New Jersey in search of some trees and a slower-paced lifestyle in which she could devote more time to her work. In 2007 Letven began teaching art and design at Parsons, The New School of Design in New York. Through teaching  she is able to share what she knows and to continue to evolve as a visual artist. Letven’s work involves a lot of experimentation with different mediums. She moves freely from painting and drawing to printmaking and collaging. Most Sunday mornings Letven collages directly into her sketchbook after reading the paper. In the last year Letven has begun to explore sequential narrative in the form of woodblock prints and rostoscope animation.

Emily Tumbleson

Emily Tumbleson is a New York-born photographer and a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Her home and family remains in the NYC/New Jersey area.

She came to the medium as a young adult after years of practicing and studying painting and drawing. Her interest in photography lies largely in its ability to interpret the artist’s situation and perspective within his or her immediate environment, and to act as an ambassador to the imaginative eye. It is filled with a curiosity in the act of looking around.

Outside the fine art realm, Emily was involved in documentation of preschool children around Newark, NJ, for the Head Start program, a project that she intends to adapt into a children’s book.

Emily’s photographic expertise has also extended toward commercial photography, with a background in school portraiture and, more currently, events and professional head shots.

Emily received her BFA in Fine Art Photography from Glasgow School of Art, Scotland, in 2013. She previously received a Bachelors of Arts in Studio Art Practice from Goucher College in Baltimore.

---

2015

Sunil Garg

Sunil Garg apprenticed with established artists, sculptors and musicians from a young age. He is an experimental and experiential 3D, illumination and “new media” artist who lives and works in Summit, NJ. After earning a Ph.D., in Physical Chemistry, Sunil worked in industrial research developing new materials and fabrication processes for consumer, textile and electronic applications as well as in product development and marketing. He, subsequently, earned a J.D. in Law and practiced environmental, energy and natural resources law. He amalgamates his scientific and technical experiences, his involvement with political, environmental and waste management issues, and musical and art and performance experiences in his art work.

Sunil is a published author, and a recorded “avant-garde” jazz musician having performed with such musicians as Beaver Harris, Cecil McBee, Dave Burrell, Jimmy Garrison, Hammiett Blueitt, and others.

He has exhibited solo at Sridharani Gallery, New Delhi, India, and his numerous group exhibitions include, e.g., Sculpture Key West, Florida, Queens Museum, New York City, Grounds for Sculpture, Hamilton, NJ, the New Jersey Law Center, New Brunswick, NJ, Chelsea Highline Open Studios, NYC, National Academy Museum on Museum Mile in NYC, Art Factory, Paterson, NJ, Crossing Art Gallery, NYC, and the Akins Museum in Pawling, New York and solo installation of large scale “wire+light” 3D works on the grounds of Grand Summit Hotel, Summit, NJ

---

2014

Dahlia Elsayed

Writing and painting are close processes for me, coming in part from my background in writing, as well as an interest in the relationship between language and image. For over a decade, I have been making paintings and installation that synthesize an internal and external experience of place, connecting the topographical with the psychological.

Visually, the work pulls from conceptual art, comics, cartography and landscape painting and employs symbols of hard data- text, geologic forms, geographic borders, signs/markers, coastlines, tide schedules – to frame the soft data of the ephemeral, adapting a quantitative schema to the qualitative.

My interest in this type of work is personal: for three generations my family has moved from continent to continent due to political and religious persecution. This has fostered a deep curiosity into how story shapes a landscape, and its inverse, how landscape takes a mythic form in narrative.

Ms. Elsayed is the inaugural recipient of the 18-month Aferro Studio Residency for midcareer NJ-based artists. Her paintings, prints and artist books have been shown at galleries and art institutions throughout the United States and internationally, including exhibitions at the 12th Cairo Biennale, BravinLee Programs, Clementine Gallery and the Jersey City Museum. Her work is in the public collections of the US Department of State, Johnson & Johnson Corporation, The Jersey City Museum, Zimmerli Art Museum, Hunterdon Museum of Art, Noyes Museum of Art, Montclair Art Museum, Newark Public Library, New Jersey State Museum, and Morris Museum. A large number of her works were commissioned for the permanent collection of the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York. Dahlia has received awards from the Edward Albee Foundation, Visual Studies Workshop, The Newark Museum, ArtsLink, The Dodge Foundation, Women’s Studio Workshop, Headlands Center for the Arts,The NJ State Council on the Arts and most recently a grant from The Joan Mitchell Foundation.

She received her MFA from Columbia University, and lives and works in New Jersey.

Luis Poveda

Poveda defines his style as “Experience Art”, in which he transforms gallery spaces into sensory environments. Infused with conceptual themes of his family’s adversities, being bicultural and his developmental experiences; his playful and imaginative nature serve as the foundation for his works. Poveda tackles contemporary psychosocial concepts. He deconstructs his subject matter and designs with aesthetic qualities that stimulate the senses. His creations are suggestive of the toys he once played with, however clearly demonstrating a preindustrial quality.

Luis Raul Poveda is a Latin American visual artist from New Jersey born on November 10, 1987. He received his B.F.A from Kean University where he studied Studio Art and Art History. Poveda’s works debuted during the National Arts Program Group Exhibition in 2012. His first solo exhibition was held at the Nancy Dryfoos Gallery on May 2014.

Adejoke Tugbiyele

Adejoke Tugbiyele is a Nigerian-American sculptor and experimental video artist. She works in various mediums including wire, natural fibers, fabric, and wood. The themes in her work range from sexual identity and human rights to leadership and governance. Tugbiyele’s work has been exhibited and screened at reputable institutions both in the United States and internationally including the The Center for Contemporary Art in Lagos Nigeria, the Museum of Arts and Design, The Jewish Museum of New York, The Centre for Contemporary Art in Torun Poland, The Museum of Biblical Art, The James E. Lewis Museum of Art, The Reginald F. Lewis Museum, Spelman College Museum of Art and The United Nations Headquarters. She has also shown at Art Dubai 2014, the 6th Annual Joburg Art Fair in 2013, Johannesburg, South Africa and the 2014 video art fair, LOOP Barcelona, Spain and the Goethe Institute in Lagos, Nigeria. After studying and practicing as an architect, Tugbiyele went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art (2013). She is the recipient of several awards including the Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship 2013-14, The Amalie Rothschild Award (2013) and the William M. Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture (2012) at Maryland Institute College of Art.  She has appeared/published as an artist and queer activist on CNN international, The Feminist Wire and the Huffington Post.  Her work has been featured in numerous publications including Metropolis M magazine in the Netherlands and Omenka Magazine in Lagos, Nigeria.

Tugbiyele is the recipient of several awards including the Fulbright U.S. Student Fellowship 2013-14, The Amalie Rothschild Award (2013) and the William M. Phillips Award for best figurative sculpture (2012) at Maryland Institute College of Art. She has appeared on CNN International as a queer artist/activist and has published in The Huffington Post, The Feminist Wire and Omenka Magazine. Tugbiyele received a Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture from Maryland Institute College of Art (2013) and is currently an Artist in Residence at Gallery Aferro. Her work, AFRIKEA (2009), has received mention by art critic Roberta Smith in the New York Times and now sits permanently in the contemporary African art collection of the Newark Museum.

---

2013

Jermaine D. Clark

Jermaine Clark is a photographer based in New Jersey. Building off momentum from an earlier, highly biographical project about Black masculinity, Clark plans to use his studio space to begin several new projects, one of which will consist of portraits of African-American women. The project will be presented as large scale prints with an accompanying musical compilation.

He writes: “Black women of all ages will be a part of this project. Many of these women will not be considered mainstream beauties.Their beauty is seen and appreciated by the community and the people that they have raised and nurtured. “

An additional project, RE-VIBE, mines imagery associated with Blaxplotation, the Black Panther Movement, Black Power, and the Age of Aquarius and will be output using an UV flocked poster style of printing. “With this collection I want to reconnect to the Black community’s revolutionary past…the images will feel larger than life and reflect my experience of history.”

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall

My most recent body of work, After Kempf, is an exploration into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender hate crimes. Using mixed media, such as ceramic, concrete, and found materials, I transform everyday objects that have been used as weapons in specific hate
crime cases. The project’s title references the psychiatrist who invented Gay Panic Defense as an explanation of this type of violence.

I studied over 50 LGBT hate crime cases from 1970 to 2010, and found that a link connecting this cross-section of cases is the weapon used. Similar to crimes of passion, these weapons are generally banal objects, such as a hammer, bat or can of tomatoes.
Rarely can these weapons be used at a distance, illustrating the intimacy of the act as blood and sweat merge in struggle.

I sculpt these artifacts, allowing scars from the making process to remain on their surface. Clay becomes skin as I press into the surface, leaving the trace of my hand and simultaneously representing the act of violence itself. Here the twisting, mutilation and ultimate undoing of the body is transferred to the objects. The disturbance of everyday objects calls into question the very system in which they exist.

Phoenix Lindsey-Hall is an international mixed media artist who earned a MFA in Photography from Parsons The New School of Design in 2012 and a BFA in Photography from Savannah College of Art in 2004.  Lindsey-Hall has shown in various galleries in New York, NY, Philadelphia, PA, Louisville, KY, Savannah GA and in Pingyao, China.  Her most recent body of work, After Kempf, is a photographic and sculptural exploration of violence, trauma and hate crimes based on regulating difference. In addition to being selected for the spring 2013 Gallery Aferro residency program,  she has also been selected for the current Emerge Program with the Aljira Center for Contemporary Arts in Newark, NJ.

Planta

Planta will be creating multimedia works that begin with large –scale drawings range in size from 42 inches x 42 inches to 9 feet x 20 feet. She writes: “This mark making symbolizes both my visceral, emotive and aesthetic discoveries. I attempt to merge a traditionalist aesthetic along with a primal and simplistic approach to the figure. In this Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Kara Walker and William H. Johnson have inspired some of the visual aspects of my work . The writings of bell hooks, Carl Jung, Rudolf Arnheim and Joseph Campbell inform part of my conceptual process. The randomness of the papers’ torn edges is symbolic of my own imperfections”.

Ambika Trasi

My work deals with the fragile state of objects, spaces, and individuals. All material is ephemeral– unstable in the weight of its meaning, easily changed by its environment and our relationship to it.

I am interested in the ways that people instill and extract “meaning” through ceremony, and in our tendency to honor routines. As an individual brought up in the West with an eastern background, I try to create a dialogue between the eastern and western elements that make up my life and often contradict and overlap each other. Ancient rituals get reinterpreted as a result of my diasporic perspective, and contemporary ones are explored in terms of their potentially primordial origins.

Ultimately ritual—whether religious or secular, deeply rooted or not—is merely repeated action: an inane process that temporarily affords us some stability and empowerment. The antiquated belief that formal rituals are vital in sustaining the universe is not unlike our impulse to rely on quotidian ones to keep our individual lives in order today. By imprinting “meaning” onto otherwise empty space and time, we are seeking some sense out of the nonsense, creating order out of disorder, and challenging our fear of absurdity. Perception— how we chooseto see our world and the actions we take as a result— becomes the transformative tool through which we shape our reality.

Ambika Trasi was born and raised in Metuchen, NJ. She received her BFA at NYU in 2010, concentrated in printmaking, and minored in South Asian Studies. A visual artist, she currently lives and works back and forth between New Jersey and New York City.

Ibrahim A. Ahmed III

Through analyzing the immigrant experience, my work examines several levels of identity. The first is the dual/hybridized/transparent identity of the immigrant, which has been a personal struggle since my migration to the United States in the late 90’s from the country of Bahrain. The second, which my most current work has been exploring, is the loss of identity through the loss of my native language, Arabic.

I explore this theme by utilizing primitive printmaking techniques by pressing paper (because we read and write on paper) to a series of selected Arabic words, which I paint in black (since we learn from textbooks, which are predominately printed in the same shades) on the wall in a Calligraphic style to create a print. I select specific words, ones that represent a social norm/identity that is native to my home land. For example the word ‘man’, which in the United States carries a different social context as opposed to its Middle Eastern counterpart. During this process the Arabic words, which are written right to left, reverse when removed from the wall, thus representing an Anglicization of the Arabic language. Their new forms become a product of dualities, two surfaces compressing the paint to create a new formed word/identity. The reversed abstracted words take on a new perception, which by following my example of the word ‘man’ once anglicized, takes on both western and eastern meanings. I use these words and social constructs as a reflection of my experiences of being an easterner in the western world. The abstracted forms in my work reveal the loss of identity by my losing my understanding of my native tongue.

The prints created during what has now become the first step of this project are left as is, on paper. However, the evolution of my work has moved towards removing the positive space or the anglicized words, collaging those pieces, and assembling them onto a grey canvas; I choose grey to reflect the in-between/transparency of being neither Egyptian nor American. I add geometric patterns to hint towards my artistic heritage. The reconfiguring of both calligraphy and geometric patterns are symbolic of rethinking the traditional eastern identity in the modern western world.

Dara Alter

With the convenience of Google Earth and Street View, we can now travel without ever leaving our seats. All that’s missing is the physical experience of being present in a place. I fill this gap by compressing experiences and transferring them into my landscape paintings.

As part of that journey, I study place by considering a location’s experiential properties along with its natural and physical properties. Every component of a place enters my work—from the fly buzzing around one’s face, to the dull sound of drilling heard many miles away. My work takes shape as elements of abstraction weave in and out of vegetation and architecture.

Piotr Czerwinski

I work in two formats: small-scale sketches and large-scale paintings. Small-scale sketches are done on paper using painting and drawing techniques. This scale allows the sketches to be personal and private exploration of forms and relationships between them. The sketches serve as spontaneous ‘notes’ that translate and archive my personal intuitive experiences and perceptions of shapes, structures, and color relationships found in nature. On the grounds of their nature, the sketches pose a question to which I seek an answer in the large-scale paintings. In large painting formats I am able to incorporate grand gesture and energy, which often accompanies spontaneous, intuitive process of creating. Large-scale format dictates to the viewer angle and degree of perception. It results in that the surroundings do not take away or disturb attention. The painting fills entire field of view of the observer. These paintings are an attempt to find answer to intriguing questions of relations between forms, structures, colors and light.

During the residency I will paint a cycle of large format paintings. The series will be inspired by history and location of the New York City and Newark metropolitan region, its industrial and port tradition, architecture found at the coastline, transportation networks, and by influence of geographic and industrial conditions on its character. The paintings will translate into my language the development of this place and constant changes that are still occurring. For the purpose, I will study available materials that refer to the development of this region.

I came to the United States 10 years ago and recently moved to NJ from Chicago. I was born and raised in a small town in Upper Silesia in Poland. Since childhood I have always been fascinated with observing the phenomenon of light as well as nature. Because I grew up in a family where the tradition of art was deeply rooted, it was not difficult for me to discover the passion I had for painting and drawing. With time, I began to develop an interest in architecture as well. After receiving my master’s from the Academy of Fine Arts in 1999, I began working as a designer and illustrator for Diskau Advertising Agency in Katowice, Poland. A year later, I began working for Leo Burnett, an American advertising agency, which had one of its branches located in Warsaw. Then, I worked for a newspaper called Trybuna Slaska (Silesian Tribune) as a graphic artist and illustrator.

Patricia Dahlman

I plan to make larger sculptures, and to work with a broader range of materials. I will use the studio space to work with found objects and build structures from wood, metal, and wire and incorporate them into my sewn sculptures.During the last decade, I have focused on making sculpture and two dimensional works by cutting out forms in canvas, then stuffing and sewing the forms together. These stuffed, sewn forms are either stitched using different colors of thread or covered with colors of fabric. The stitching or fabric covering is like drawing or painting and I like the color, light and surface the thread or fabric makes on the stuffed canvas. The sewn forms that are covered with fabric are simplified and minimal and contrast different colors and shapes. The work is figurative but influenced by abstract art. It is sometimes humorous and often political. The subject matter is taken from personal thoughts, experiences in my life and reactions to political events around the world.

Patricia Dahlman was born in Cincinnati, Ohio and studied art at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio and Yale University Summer School of Art and Music in Norfolk, Connecticut. Dahlman has lived and worked as an artist in Seattle, San Francisco and the New York City area. She has received a New Jersey Printmaking Fellowship to Rutgers Center for Innovative Print and Paper, two Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation Fellowships to attend Vermont Studio Center and Virginia Center for Creative Arts, a Puffin Foundation Grant Award, a Yaddo Artist Residency, and a Gallery Aferro Studio Residency. Dahlman has exhibited her work all over the United States and has been included in exhibitions at George Adams Gallery in NYC, Bedford Gallery in Walnut Creek, CA, The Center for Book Arts in NYC, and the New York Public Library, Mid-Manhattan Library. In 2010 Dahlman had a one person exhibition “The Art and Science of Happiness: Patricia Dahlman,” as part of the Dana Women Artist Series, at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.

Vikki Michalios

My obsessions emanate from the care and respect of the natural environment. I am interested in building an installation that blends horticulture together with art. Working with hydroponics technology, I would like to construct a viable off-grid ecologically sustainable garden. Through a combination of agricultural methods, I plan to construct a portable hydroponic garden with whimsical delight and major plant greenery.

Concerns about wasteful agricultural methods, ramifications of genetically altered foods, and environmental impacts are brought to light by combining off-industry growing with technology and art. Common hardware store gear such as pvc piping, buckets, and pumps for example, are compiled and constructed to suit new purposes. The transportable garden will modify itself by acclimating to new settings and surroundings. The blending of art, agriculture, and sustainable technologies encourage dialogue that advocates responsible use of the environments natural resources. This empowers viewers to navigate paths toward making a meaningful difference in altering practices for a sustainable future.

Vikki Michalios is a visual artist in the New York City and Newark Metro areas with a studio/lab in Jersey City. She completed a Bachelor of Arts degree program from The Evergreen State College in 1992. While working toward her MFA degree from the University of Oregon, Vikki was awarded fellowships at the Chautauqua Institution during the summers. She relocated from her native Pacific Northwest residence to New York City upon completing her MFA program in 1995. Her work deals with environmental systems and concerns using painting, drawing, experimental print-making, and installation. She has exhibited at the Hunterdon Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Jersey City Museum, Blackburn 20/20 at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, Center for Contemporary Arts in Bedminster, Contemporary Artists Center Woodside, AIR Gallery, and Denise Bibro among others. She has been published or reviewed in The Star Ledger, New York Arts Magazine, and Steven Zevitas publication, Studio Visit Magazine. Michalioshas been awarded residencies at Millay Colony of Art, city without walls ArtReach, and Chautauqua Institution.

---

2012

Ruby Amanze

The desire to belong somewhere definitive, as opposed to straddling multiple cultural identities, is common amongst expatriates. The social demographic of neither here nor there is a fragile middle space to navigate. In my diaspora experience, I hone a genetic memory of West Africa, but have simultaneously formed a unique hybrid culture and identity to authenticate my existence.

In my work I explore themes of authenticity, cross-cultural synapse and the migration towards or away from aspects of one’s origin. My large-scale drawings create a visual vocabulary to identify various populations and the hybrid that ensues as a cross pollination of those cultures and peoples. The imagery of these characters often reference biological organisms and processes, or mathematic functions that have the ability to both divide and multiply. Each drawing investigates the dynamic and complex relationships these distinct identities and cultures have with one another. Their visual interactions address issues of a presumed cultural hierarchy, various degrees of kinship and the isolationist desire to maintain authenticity.

I view drawing as a self-sufficient, non-precursory medium, with an ability to absorb, layer, erase and reveal mark-making processes. Drawing is an interactive dialogue between myself, the paper, the materials and the processes. It is a back and forth exchange where I both relinquish control to the inherent nature of my materials, while actively making conscious decisions to either initiate marks or respond. Upon ‘completion’ there are multiple drawings that exist beneath the visible surface of the paper.

Ruby Onyinyechi Amanze is a brooklyn based artist and educator of Nigerian birth and British upbringing. She has come to not only accept this reality, but ultimately find empowerment in the authenticity of the hybrid. Her drawings have been influenced greatly by textile processes, print-making, collage, architecture and the Japanese philosophy of wabi-sabi that emphasizes the beauty in that which is transient. Her collection of writings are just words, slightly disjointed like thoughts, and hopefully minus sequins or other forms of embellishment. During her time at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia, she studied photography and fiber/material studies. She then went on to earn an inter-disciplinary MFA at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. Aside from her passion for art, Ruby is one of those weird running people. Outside. On a track. Up hills. And in her mind.

Alexandra Desipris and Polina Zaitseva

Polina Zaitseva and Alexandra Desipris will be utilizing this collaborative residency to explore various ideas connecting women and nature and women as intermediaries between humanity as a whole and the natural world. The intention is to cover different spectrums of this theme and coincide with a joint film project while influencing each others personal work by communication and exchange.

Alexandra Desipris is a Greek-American painter and sculptor from Northern New Jersey. Her paintings and related art explore the relationships between her ethnic background, femininity, liminal states, and stylized imagery such as Byzantine icons, or direct symbol systems like tarot cards and religious imagery. In addition to painting and sculpting she has studied spinning, weaving, natural dying, and embroidery believing that “women’s work” is important to understanding the historical and cultural contributions to art that were traditionally the only creative outlet allowed to women in very patriarchal Greek society, as well as many other cultures, and what that means to her creative endeavor as a modern woman. She incorporates various ideas from literature and semiotics into her work to create a narrative structure that she feels gives the images more significance and an ability to communicate directly to the subconscious. Her goal as an artist is to create a series of images that function without the need for verbal discussion.

During this residency I intend to further explore ideas of women as creative communicators and mediators through traditional outlets using my own stylized method of communication. Very specifically I will take the imagery presented in traditional Greek funeral lamentations and use this to create a visual language that exists outside of the aural poetic structure of the “miroloyia.” I will be experimenting with various techniques such as “champlevé” etching on metal, and large scale paintings on wood as well as exploring multimedia ideas with my partner, Polina Zaitseva.

Polina Zaitseva is a Russian-born multimedia artist with a background in both video production and design. She has exhibited her artwork all throughout New Jersey and New York. She is currently working as an animation director and illustrator for the upcoming documentary, Three Candles. Polina has had solo exhibitions at the Index Art Center, Fort Lee Museum, and Visual Arts Gallery at New Jersey City University. She’s participated in multiple group exhibitions including Digital Graffiti Festival, Visual Arts Center of NJ, ArcheTime Film Festival, Walsh Gallery of Seton Hall, Galapagos Art Space, and Jersey City Museum. She is currently a design adjunct at NJIT, the College of Architecture and Design. This is her first residency.

Although my main ideas have been revolving around female image and self-identity, this project includes animalistic themes of human nature. I question if the civility truly exists in modern women without trying to prove anything. It is a visual narrative, as well as a study of innocence and animal impudence. I will be using mixed media, such as photography and digital manipulation to reflect the animalistic nature of a woman thriving for identity. No matter how we box our identity into a civilized world, we are still the animal within.

I truly enjoy the exploration of all mediums and various themes. I treat every project as its own initial concept or narrative, with its own experimentation and challenges. The best way for me to connect to people is through visual communication. An image is a powerful tool. It is a conversation between the creator and the audience. It is the intermediary connection. My goal is to continue to create and develop those conversations.

Malik Hardaway-Whitaker

During the residency I will be working on “Brick City,” a collection of bricks from around the city with painted scenes of Newark on each brick. Separately each brick stands alone as a symbol of its painted scenario. However together they form “Brick City, “ a reflective look at our beautiful city in the artist form of its name sake. The plan is to complete the series within the 6 month residency time period with a public showing at the end. Approximately 50-60 bricks will be painted on to create an entire brick wall of images of Newark. Each brick will offer a subtle flavor and history of the city rarely seen displayed together. The piece is to remind its citizens and all that view the exhibit of the beauty that Newark possesses even through the years of negatively stained rumors. Once completed, each brick will be photographed to create an up-to-date, educational yet fun coffee table history book on Newark and its wonders and people.The book will be self published and for sale while the piece is on display. The goal here is to bring all the beauty of Newark to the forefront of our minds and to remind us that our city has more to offer than most remember or realize.

As a Newark born artist, the trials and tribulations of living in the inner city have helped to shape my passion and appreciation for life. My artistic style is pure, unique and thought provoking. It is a reflection of my passion towards my fellow man. I seek to pass on and inspire positive messages to my community an all who view my works. I specialize in portraiture impressions through visual translation based on individualized customer needs. I have studied many forms of art; oil, watercolor, acrylic, pencil, charcoal and pastels. My specific style offers a strong, colorful and mysterious perspective on people geared towards inspiring everyone to remember their own vitality for life and beauty.

James Horner

In continuing my exploration of the effects of the environment on individuals through art, I will use my studio space at the Gallery Aferro as a research lab where I could not only document the effects of the environment on individuals, but also create an environment for them to react to.

Environmental psychology is a direct study of the relationship between an environment and how that environment affects its inhabitants. Specific aspects of this field work by identifying a problem and through the identification of said problem, discovering a solution. Therefore it is necessary for environmental psychology to be problem oriented. The problems identified by environmental psychologists affect all members of society. These problems can be anything from the psychological effects of urban crowding to the architectural design of public schools and extend from the public arena into the individual household.

In society, individuals are exposed to different forms of the environment that they are faced with everyday — encompassing natural environments, social settings, built environments, learning environments, and informational environments. All of these environments can be overwhelming or underwhelming and thus a driving force in ones attitudes, moods, and beliefs. I’m interested in delving into the psyche of individuals to see how they are being affected. And studying this through art can be very revealing of what’s up with society today.

James Horner is a painter who lives in New York City. His colorful expressionistic paintings explore the psychological effects of the environment on individuals. Figures are often abstracted to the point of the grotesque and overwhelmed or torn apart by their surroundings. Shapes interact with figures in space as lines connect atmospheres in different directions, creating islands with systems of thought. Horner communicates his viewpoint thorough a unique style of painting, which samples from traditional and contemporary abstract/expressionist,  surrealist, pop art.

Horner has an MFA in painting from Lehman College; has exhibited nationally and internationally in group shows; regularly donates work for charity art auctions, such as the Bellport Boys and Girls Club Beach Ball and the Housingworks Design on a Dime; won the OUT Magazine Tylenol PM Sleepwear Design Challenge, and participates in the annual Harlem Art Walking Tour of open studios. He is also an art critic for the Examiner and Bronx Art Guide websites and writes a blog called James and the Lovelies.

Mona Kamal

I build large multi- media installations through which I confront the complexity of my migratory history as I have roots in India, Pakistan and Canada with a North African birth. Through the fragments of my known identity I piece together my culture and place of belonging the result being a constructed space that incorporates many cultures. Through my installations I am literally trying to find my own place within my current locale while taking into consideration my personal as well as my family’s history.

I construct domestic structures by utilizing building materials such as concrete, bricks, plaster and wood. To complete the puzzle of my story of migration I incorporate objects that originate from the places to which I lay claim into my work. I have used grasses from Northern Ontario, sand from India and old family photographs. The materials and the process used within my work is symbolic to my ongoing attempt to identify my place of belonging. My installations are spaces that represent fragments of homes that have been constructed from threading together memories and imagining an environment that defines my bicultural socialization. From gathering family stories, historical artefacts and through my own personal experience I continuously weave a story of migration, culture, nationalism and identity.

Mona Kamal attempts to define the complexity of her migratory history through installations. She has exhibited throughout Canada, in New York and in New Delhi India. Mona has had solo exhibitions at YYZ Artists’ Outlet and the Harbourfront Centre in Toronto, Ontario as well as group exhibitions at A Space Gallery in Toronto, Rush Arts Gallery and Exit Art in New York and Gallery Espace in New Delhi. She has received several grants for the creation of her artworks through the Ontario and the Toronto Arts Councils. She has attended residencies at the Banff Centre in Banff, Canada (2011) the Sanskriti Foundation in New Delhi (2007), Studio LLC at the Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning (2011). She is an active member of the arts community in New York and has curated an exhibition (2010) and taught at Parsons the New School for Design. She received her BFA from NSCAD University in Halifax Canada and her MFA from Parsons the New School for Design. Mona lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

JC Lenochan

Decolonizing the mind is an installation performance with public interaction in regards to pedagogy as it relates to issues of identity, race and class stratification. The walls of the space will be consumed by chalkboards with text and images opposite blank chalkboards for the public’s response. Simultaneously, four high school students will be creating a pile of old school desk in the middle of the space that will involve sound and audio from Ngugi Wa Thiongo’s book “Decolonizing the Mind”.

“Language as culture is the collective memory bank of a people’s experience in history”. – Ngugi Wa Thiongo

Maria Michails

Searching for my own reconciliation between nature and culture it was necessary for me to contemplate on the intrinsic value of both. As an artist and citizen, it is vital that my life practice and studio work seamlessly co-exist, aiming to have as little negative impact on the environment as possible. Investigating new approaches to art-making coincides with rethinking of materials and methodologies and how these new ideas could be applied in the broader culture as well.

My projects contextually link industrial resource use and consumptive human behavior with current environmental problems. Using a multitude of mediums for each installation there is, nonetheless, a focus on a specific object that functions as a motif and is chosen for its nostalgic and historical reference. The shift toward human-powered energy production using such motifs is to bring the body into direct relationship with the objects. These objects are made with re-purposed mechanical and bicycle parts and coupled with new energy-efficient technology inspired by DIY thinking and human-powered mechanisms used in developing countries. The projects specifically link energy and a local resource being managed or used that has global repercussions; such as energy and water in the desert or energy and topsoil in the Midwest.

My personal experience with embodied knowledge leads me to believe that humans learn deeply through experiential stimulus in our bodies. Human-powered tasks promote physical and psychological awareness of the relationship between human consumption and human expenditure. In my research, I seek to understand how the use of human-power can affect attitudes and behavior toward resource use. Is it meaningful to a society with abundant wealth or only when there is economic disparity and social injustice present, such as in developing countries (where human-power is essential in providing basic conveniences)? The mechanisms may not power modern homes – that isn’t the intention. I believe, though, that the act provides a closer connection to the process and highlights a very important notion – that of empowerment.

S*OIL examines the history of industrialization in relation to living systems. At the nucleus of the installation is a railway handcar mechanism that generates electricity to power visual components. The installation magnifies the complexities inherent in natural processes and raises the question: Can industrial processes be modified to emulate the closed-loop, sustainable methodologies of natural processes? The project is currently in the prototype stage and the goal is to complete it this spring for a solo exhibition next fall.This project will require some offsite fabrication (metal), video editing, programming and testing of the Botanicalls unit, assembling the planters and framing, and growing the seedlings.

The second project, Mobilis, will be a nine-foot human-powered convertible automobile with a hand held GPS device (a smart phone) that communicates with Google Earth running on a mac mini. When the user enters coordinates of wilderness areas into the cell phone program, Google Earth locates the geographical area as well as the adjacent corridors with industrial activity, to screen on a monitor. But in order to see the satellite images the user must pedal to power the monitor. I will be working on the software aspect, a topographical map book, drawings and building a prototype. My goal is to have the prototype completed by the end of the residency for ISEA2012 (International Symposium on Electronic Art) in September.

The third project is to create a human-power project kit that would accompany me during workshops at educational institutions. The kit will be a small-scale version of my installation practice, making human-powered ‘artworks’ accessible to students and educators in an easy-to-assemble DIY kit. Additional parts are included for the user to create something original to power. I will have a first version prototype ready for a workshop I will give late April and depending on the results from that workshop, I will work with a product designer to finalize a prototype before seeking investors to continue through to the manufacturing stage.

Bud McNichol

I’ve been a practicing artist for the past 12 years, focusing primarily on painting. I have explored many styles and color palettes throughout that time before evolving into my current state. As I’ve continued my practice, the process has become more improvisational. The act of painting is a conversation between the work and I. I am not interested in a rote approach to art making. It is through letting go that discoveries are made. As far as subject, ideas come from experiences. Whether it be from books, movies, conversations or some chance encounter on the street; inspiration is everywhere.

Nell Painter

I’m intrigued by people’s interaction in society, a theme my art shares with my former vocation of American historian. Actually, I should say that missed connection fascinates me as much as interaction, for obliviousness—to other people, to utter disaster—inhabits my work, perhaps more than the interaction I tell myself I’d prefer to find.

My paintings and drawings since 2009 span a range from abstract to figurative. Currently I’m concentrating on digital + manual paintings inspired by the archive of Brooklyn photographs made in the 1970s and 1980s by Lucille Fornasieri-Gold. My Brooklyn paintings spring from various roots: a photographic archive, printmaking, collage, and a process both digital and manual. On top of scanned, edited, colored, composed, fractured, layered, repeated, and flattened images produced with Photoshop, I paint colors and patterns whose textures can come only from a painter’s hand. Their imagery betrays digital manipulation, and their painterly surfaces occlude historical import.

My formal art training consists of a BFA in painting from Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers-the State University of New Jersey in 2009 and an MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2011. In my previous life as historian I earned a Ph.D. at Harvard in 1974 and held the Edwards Professorship in American History at Princeton University. I have published seven books, the most recent, The History of White People, came out in March of this year with a front-page review in the New York Times Book Review. Currently the Virtual Artist in Residence of the Creative Research Center of Montclair State University, I have shown my work in student exhibitions at Mason Gross and RISD and supplied cover art for a book of poetry and last summer’s issue of the journal SIGNS. While I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, NJN TV’s “State of the Arts” profiled me as both historian and art student. In 2012 the Brooklyn Historical Society will mount an exhibition of my Brooklyn paintings along with the photographic archive that inspired them.

---

2011

Katrina Bello

My current work is located in a dialogue between the relevance of painting and questions of my ethics. While my ongoing interests lie in place and memory, and spatiality and materiality, my struggle is to reconcile those interests with the complexities beneath the surface of my subjects: their historical, social and political contexts. Doubt is an attitude that drives me in this current studio practice: suspicion of being complicit with certain studio habits, uncertainties in the level of responsibility I’m taking towards questions of context, and finding ill-fits between my commitment to painting and certain truths about my subject. Some of the questions I have been asking myself are: How is painting a relevant medium in this inquiry? Because painting is still linked to long established definitions of beauty, what can it tell me and the audience about contemporary art production and spectatorship? Is painting even still possible in our chaotic and sped up present?”

Also, narrative is something I’m currently thinking about. It is pervasive in my work. It holds together the layers of formal oppositions, tensions, transformations and revisions that occur within the painting and drawings. It defines my animation work.

And so for this residency at Gallery Aferro, I intend to focus particularly on narrative as the boundary to put in specific form the questions I have above.

Katrina Bello was born in Davao City, Philippines. She is a visual artist who lives and works back and forth between Montclair and Newark in New Jersey, Baltimore, New York City, and Metro Manila. She is also working on newark bunker projects, a rogue curatorial experiment in Newark, New Jersey. As she works on this project and participates in solo and group exhibitions, Katrina currently pursues her MFA in Studio Art at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She received her BFA from Mason Gross School of the Arts in Rutgers University in New Jersey, and attended the University of the Philippines College of Fine Arts in Diliman, Quezon City as an Industrial Design Major.

Marcy Chevali

I build my work as representations of emotional situations in my life. The materials I use and the way they interact become metaphors and diagrams. I choose ordinary materials for certain qualities that accurately portray the situations with which I am concerned. Often, additional attributes of the materials become unexpectedly significant. My work is wrapped, covered, bound, enclosed, hidden, surrounded. Paradoxically, it is often transparent, translucent or with gaping holes, revealing the walls of an empty room. When looked through, my pieces alter perspective, cause things to appear distorted, cloudy, tinged or steeped.

In building and transforming these autobiographical narratives, I hope that I can understand and rework the situations. I think of the results as obsessive gestures of hope.

I have recently begun to and will continue to explore emotional, ambiguous dichotomies such as function and insignificance, need and disposal, contained and non-contained. Things that quickly shift and adopt opposite meaning interest me. I will consider subtle patterns of everyday life and recognize things that persist and those that fade away. I will continue to shape and reshape these emotions until I understand them. I expect to continue to develop these themes using techniques of shape, repetition, and accumulation. I would like to make installation work which could relate more to the human body. I would like to build experiences that move though narrative, lingering and developing within the viewer, rather than moments that pass quickly.

Marcy Chevali was born in Cleveland, Ohio. She received a BFA from The Ohio State University and explored the spatial metaphors of her emotions while earning a MFA from Maine College of Art. Her work has been shown at venues such as Aicon Gallery, AC Institute, The ICA at MECA, and The Gallery of Contemporary Art and Sacred Heart University. During the pauses from tangling or untangling thread, she twists images into short videos as part of the collective afternoon girls.

Nadja Frank and Jomar Statkun

Nadja Frank and Jomar Statkun have been working on numerous collaborative projects together for the past few years. They have drawn from their individual practices to focus on where their work intersects and explores common themes. Scale and self-appropriation have been common threads that have fused, as well as caused necessary tensions, throughout the collaborative works. Whether inspired by natural environments or man-made structures, their works have explored and exploited physical landscapes, sound situations, art markets and the making and unmaking of the social structures that exist in the experiencing of “art”, both in a natural environment and a created gallery/art house setting.

Nadja Frank was born in Lohr am Main, Germany. She received her Diploma in Fine Arts with Honors from Hochschule fur bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany in 2008. She has exhibited internationally in numerous solo exhibitions (401contemporary Berlin/London, Germany;Margini Arte Contemporanea, Massa, Italy; Galerie Conradi, Hamburg, Germany) and group exhibitions (Kunst Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn, Germany; Kunstverein Hamburg, Germany, Silvershed, New York). Her work operates on the edge between painting, sculpture and architectural environments. Her recent site-specific installations deal with transience, the process of making and unmaking, and the movement/evolution of color through space and time. Displacement of imagery and object has been an obsession throughout Frank’s work, finding tension and collision in the gaps between and natural and man-made worlds. She currently lives in New York.

Jomar Statkun was born in Freehold, NJ. He received his MFA at Boston University. There he received the Jack Kramer Award and the Esther B. and Albert S. Kahn Award. Most recently he was an Artist in Residence at Redgate Artist Residency in Beijing, China, the Gowanus Studio Space in Brooklyn, NY and the Short Term Residency Program at the PS122 gallery, NY. Jomar Statkun has exhibited internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and has works in many in private and public collections.

Statkun is interested in formal engagements with aesthetics. He is preoccupied with colonialism, transmigrant and immigrant culture and political activities and uses art as an encompassing foil, analogue and counterpart to discuss historical influences on a rage of socio-political attitudes and positions that are subtexts to a cultural discourse that subsumes them and hands them over to capitalism – what he considers a highly problematic neoliberal brand of capitalism. He currently lives in New York.

Don Edler

There is a playful futility in my work. Stemming from a long-standing interest in cosmology and structural systems, my work deals with trying to understand the architecture(s) of the universe. My work owes its genesis to the fact that pure science has not been able to delineate the structures that define our universe or devise a satisfactory architecture to encompass the enormity of the sublime.

As an artist I investigate the structural systems that may never be known. I combine on-going research and exploration of contemporary physics with my own imaginations; creating works that exist outside of the strict confines of our physical world. My work aims to encourage a personal understanding of the universe and relies on intuitions and imaginations where measurements and mathematics have failed.

With my recent work Conic Portal through Space I explored the relationship between inner space and outer space. The installation was devised as a site-specific architectural intervention that brought the outside space into the site and at the same time pulled the viewer out. The work was built at an alternative arts space over the course of five days, and required approximately one thousand pounds of recycled wood obtained from dumpsters and Craigslist. By piercing the wall of the building I created a portal which connected the inside and outside spaces. A 30 foot conic form spiraled through the space, confronting the viewer head-on as they entered the space. Inspired by black holes and inter-dimensional portals, the work acted to excite the viewer’s imagination. I wanted to promote the contemplation of the nature of space-time as well as creating an awareness of the presence and limitations of the architecture in which the work existed.

I was recently gifted approximately 800 pounds of old 4×4 wood beams that were part of a old fence surrounding a farm in rural Pennsylvania and I intend to use this beautiful old hard-wood lumber as the foundation of a new sculptural project. The new piece would incorporate the old fence beams, tube-style TVs, VCRs, paint, drywall, insulation fiberglass, shipping pallets and candy.

Born in Bremen, Germany, Don Edler and his family moved to South Florida when he was a small child. Growing up in a small beach town,Don spent most of his young life out-doors or with his Father in the garage where together they would build things, from bamboo kites to motorized surf boards. Don began taking Saturday morning art classes at a very early age when his parents noticed a general lack of interest in team sports but a fascination with Lego building blocks. Don studied Industrial Design at the College for Creative Studies in Detroit, Film and Animation at NYU, and Sculpture and New Media at the University of Florida. Don credits his eclectic curriculum as a formative experience which exposed him to a much more diverse range of artistic possibilities and as the source of a unique tool set which has helped him realize his work through multilayered, technically complicated sculpture and installation.

Vikki Michalios

The abstract prints, “Mind Inside Nature” addresses nature’s process of finding balance in an interrelated system in great need of healing. A great amount of time is spent drawing with graphite, ink, charcoal, and several types of papers including tracing paper, a variety of printmaking paper, and velum. The drawings are a critical thought process used to translate into prints. Images are carved and rendered onto several copper plates using printmaking techniques such as aquatint, drypoint, and acid baths. The plates are combined sometimes using four or five at one time to form compositions. The prints are deliberated and scrutinized and altered during an additive and subtractive approach to space, line, form, and color similar to drawing. Forms interact with each other as I aim to affect equilibrium between abstract elements in a defined space. Each composition is built from the last. This is how the visual language evolves and how the process forever reinvents itself. When the plates are ready, I collaborate with a Rie Hasegawa of Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop and produce hundreds of pieces and variety sizes.

Vikki Michalios has exhibited nationally at venues including recently at the Center for Contemporary Art, Troy, NY, Denise Bibro Fine Art, NY, NY. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and residencies including Fellowship,Millay Colony of Art, Austerlitz, NY, Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT, Chautauqua Institution, NY and the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT.

Objects of Desire

For the inaugural residency with the lab, a collaborative, thematic residency at Gallery Aferro, curator and artist Nancy Mahl will be working with Carrie Lincourt, Kasha Minenko and others to explore “Devices of Pleasure.”

We aim to build and display interactive electromechanical objects that enhance the audience’s pursuit of aesthetic delight. We are interested in an embrace of hedonism in art–a contemporary reflection of an ethos manifested the 60’s and 70’s in work by filmmakers and performers Jack Smith, the Cockettes, and Kenneth Anger, among others. Rather than limit ourselves to film, we wish to make a variety of objects — some of which will integrate projected imagery, and some of which will create an aural, visceral, and or olfactory experience of pleasure in public space. One of the motivations of the project is an avoidance of the solitary onanistic pleasure that is associated with the viewing and collecting of art. We would like to create an installation where pleasure is shared, and the viewer’s joy makes her/him feel a part of something larger.

We envision an installation that creates, at least temporarily, a community of pleasure rather than of purpose or identity. Our vision is not specifically erotic (as erotic tastes are too specific to be universally shared), though inspiring a polymorphously perverse pleasure through texture, sound, motion or scent is certainly to be hoped for. We wish to cultivate an infant’s delight in the novel more than the furtive pleasure of the dirty bookstore’s customer (though we don’t discount the value of furtive pleasure.) We also  envision creating delight that is not anticipated or sought by the audience. A pleasure unrelated to whatever desires the audience arrives with–a pleasure that we give, rather that one that is expected.

Our varied skill sets and backgrounds (sound installation artist, video artist, machinist, visual artist, mechanic) will allow us to collaboratively explore our ideas and create this installation. That the four of us have very different ideas of what constitutes pleasure, and that we think in a variety of native languages, we also see as a boon, and a factor that may make our work especially relevant and legible to Aferro’s diverse audience. We envision using a studio space as a workshop for design and fabrication, a meeting space for brainstorming, a studio for shooting images, and an important place to meet and interact with other artists. We also embrace the idea of a shared space for a specific project as an alternative to working in solitude and an opportunity to challenge and inspire each other. We are taking the model of an architectural studio for inspiration and look forward to working together en charette to create our devices.

2010

Kenseth Armstead

Citizen James is a feature length screenplay that I wrote, based on James Armistead Lafayette’s true story as an invisible-man-double-agent-displaced-founder.  Citizen James is also a multimedia installation project comprised of a hand-drawn, HD video, production environment developed to create footage from the screenplay.

During the Residency, I will install a working film set in the studio. The life-sized tableaus, handmade, drawn and constructed by the artist, render an immersive abstraction of an espionage landscape.  The sets are flexible, extensible and collapsible, allowing the artist to scale and customize the shoots to suit the particularities of a given gallery and neighborhood context.

Shoots will occur as scheduled Open-Source Casting® events.  Using the screenplay Citizen James, actors, passersby and invited guests will reenact James’s role ending the American Revolution by reading for the part of James, Cornwallis, The Marquis Lafayette or George Washington, based on the schedule.  The sets allow anyone to “walk on” and be directed by the artist into preset cast positions and costumes, while reading lines from teleprompters just off camera.  During the residency there will be a rotation of 5-6 scenes shot in repetition.  This allows for the possibility of editing together hundreds of different people’s performances into a single director’s cut of James’s idiosyncratic historic role.

In the end, experimental, hybrid footage, will emerge.

Lane Cooper

“What Persists” – a proposal dealing with memory and loss, place and site … the difference between the thing and itself.
Memory itself is an act of re-imagining. Through this process a concrete experience of place becomes mutable, shifting, insubstantial, a ghost of itself. The re-presenting of this experience is at once analogous to this process of memory, losing and reconfiguring information, and a means of projecting the insubstantial into an other where it will again be re-member, re-imagined, a thing unto itself, existing wholly within the interior. To be sent out from this interior again calls for a translation, and yet another generation of re- imagining … this is the nature of loss and transformation.

Practicals: I will document my experience of the residency via video. I will use the video as a source for a body of work. The parts of this body, when viewed in proximity to one another, will demonstrate what of the experience, if anything, transcends translation;
what is lost; and what persists. In this process loss is manifested in transliteration via media: the same source information re-inscribed via a variety of media including text, video, digital print and painting. The resulting body of work is a map formed by the overlay of the literary, the material and the cognitive.

The body of work will include:
Video
Prints
Painting
Text

The subject of my work is the “ultrathin” moment between conception and creation. It is the moment of emergence. My work depicts that moment … a moment which cannot be written or spoken. In addition to painting, my work encompasses a variety of approaches with digital video and digital print being the most common. I also work through drawing, traditional silk- screen, collage, installation, etc. In all of my work the process involves gathering and capturing; editing and layering. I often seek to strain the limits of the medium’s ability to depict/transmit meaning. How far can I push and extend digital, for instance, before it breaks apart and the image gets lost. What happens in-between these bits of information? How are the gaps filled in?

Beth Gilfilen

For me, painting is full of risk, spontaneity, potential.  I choose painting to describe the anxieties of our time. As in life, I manage uncertainty through a conscious tracking of time with fluid paint.  Like a conversation, alternating line and wash test out form and ideas, all the while doing so with abandon; a blind movement forward. I map references to the body and time, forging temporal structures. As I work, the all-encompassing motion of laying down line deviates, sprouting off to create appendages and more fragmented forms. Jaunty, disjointed, fractured entities twist in space and appear on the verge of collapse. I am acutely aware of touch and the reconstruction of spatial memory. A kinetic energy can take over. Often, I interrupt improvisation with more conscious maneuvers. I shift to distant, material concerns as I outline, obliterate the excess, and sometimes create a skim coat through which the painting’s history can be viewed. The best paintings I make are the ones I can’t explain.

In the same way I pollute my abstract paintings with figurative and spatial references, I plan to complicate my working methods through engagement with the other artists and visitors in Newark. Like many artists, I am a very private artist. However, I am at a point in my work in which I sense a great need to get out of my comfort zone, and be challenged by my peers, my audience, and whomever visits my studio. Rather than beginning my works with a connection to the materials or myself, I would like start from the outside, collecting a series of responses from other residents that describe what their thoughts are on the “zeitgeist” of our time. This project could extend to other groups, such as local schools, or collections of statements from blogs, or from newspapers.

Polling, like abstraction, is a type of mapping can be understood in terms of a consensus. I would like to translate how these groups perceive our times into a series of large-scale paintings on primed paper. This method relieves me of the preciousness of working on canvases, yet I can still move around on the paper, perhaps cutting sections and reorienting those during the course of the residency. This could result in imagery that utilizes a very abstract language, or could incorporate more literal forms. I am open to whatever happens. The inability of symbols to adequately quantify experience has always been important in my work, yet I plan to challenge my own personal preferences. I value the power of how an image can be read, whether abstract or more literal, and would like to honor the perceptions of those around with a me with a project that encompasses their fears, anxieties, and hopes for our times.

Hiroshi Kumagi

Hiroshi Kumagai was born in Tokyo, Japan and now lives and works in Jersey City, New Jersey. His works involve the creation of conceptually based sociopolitical illustrations. In 2006 he began utilizing vinyl and images of quintessential American family and popular culture items to address issues of gender roles, the fragility of family dynamics, and the underlying threads of violence and danger that underpin American society.

“As a part of ongoing theme, I started collecting images of individuals who are engaging in online video chat, such as AIM and Skype. I was first fascinated by the intimate quality of the images and then captivated by the exhibitionist and voyeuristic quality of this method of communication. I intended not to make a judgment on digital communication or users of the medium, but to observe and abstract images as a transcription of what’s lost in translation.”

Ann Lepore

“I am researching new technologies and methods for projecting computer animations, using custom -built projectors, mirrors and other tools. The overall goal for the projection is for it to both be interactive in some way and for it to speak to the aesthetics of printmaking styles of public protest 1930-1945.”

I have completed several projects documenting the complex relationships between insular or private communities, and the larger public communities that surround them. This is a theme that was started with my work and residencies at Taliesin, where I documented the relationship between the exclusive intellectual enclave of Frank Lloyd Wrightʼs Fellowship located at Taliesin and the surrounding farmingcommunity of Spring Green, Wisconsin.

The images and installations I create are heavily influenced by my experiences not just as an artist, but as a member of a community that is defined by the physical assertions and limitations of a very specific environment.”

Caroline Mak

By performing and enacting a series of repetitive transformative actions – whether it is painstakingly braiding and knotting length of tubing, or tearing and gnawing through slabs of foam – through the physicality of my actions, I bestow upon the material an ability to further decay, multiply or spread beyond its original confines. The systems that emerge in my installations contain references to disciplines ranging from topography, biology and the decorative arts.

I intend to transform the studio into an imaginary geological landscape and living ‘map’, where materials slowly accumulate forming compressed layers – yet also erode – over the duration of the residency. The residency will allow me to utilize the studio as a site for the creation of an on-going, dynamic installation that functions as a record of both my time and process during this set time period.

Only materials ‘local’ to the area will be utilized – these will slowly sediment and accumulate, forming a sculptural and material map of my practice, as well a record of scavenged and discarded materials that can be found in and around the neighborhood that Gallery Aferro is located. Rather than using the studio as a trash receptacle however, the space will be ever shifting, referencing actual geological systems (albeit one where the timeframe has been condensed).

And like all geological systems, with accumulation of layers, comes the necessary erosion and removal of sediment. This can be through an act such as trading materials with other artists, or exchange with the local community. In order to keep the system a closed one, all proceeds from the sale or trade of materials will be returned to the installation in the studio. I hope to create a fantastical world that intermittently utilizes scientific principles, yet is also a very personal material diary of the residency, the neighborhood, and of my own process. This residency will allow me to work towards my most ambitious and large scale installation yet, hopefully incorporating elements of performance and public interaction, pushing my practice in more critically challenging directions.

Alison Owen

I would like to continue a body of work that focuses on domestic objects and textiles. I will use a variety of materials, found on site, in the surrounding neighborhoods, or swept up during the cleaning of the studio. I would like to make large wallpaper inspired work directly on the wall, using masking tape, dirt/detritus, thread, nails, and found materials, and then create groupings of sculptures/objects on pedestals, in display cabinets or vitrines, with drawings and ephemera in filing cabinets and card catalogs.

I have worked with dirt on the wall, without other materials or elements. I have also worked primarily with furniture, frames, textiles, and other objects.

I would like to try to bring these two methods of working together, to experiment with the ways that wallpaper and domestic objects and imagery could interact with a more sterile and blank space. The Aferro studio would be perfect for this project because it would detach the work from domestic connotations of space- the space instead would be in the scale of museum or gallery installations. I would like to set up a sort of museum space dedicated to these fragile and awkward remakings of patterns and objects, using not only furniture and objects but also pedestals, wall labels and pins and mounting devices, and other objects associated with museums and gallery spaces.

My installations quietly invade the environment, altering it significant yet subtle ways. I use simple materials such as masking tape, thumbtacks, dirt, and thread. The compositions develop in response to the physical and emotional characteristics of the site and the objects in it. I highlight the overlooked spaces, paying attention to corners, edges, and the point where one material meets another. Whether I am using dirt and detritus to create patterns on the wall, or using paint and thread to articulate line and shadow, the work appears to grow out of the space, and melt back into it.

I am interested in the crossover between domestic space and gallery space, and how one can make these spaces overlap, or converse. At a residency in a row of soon-to-be-demolished apartments, I was inspired by the layers of history found in the space, from the large decorative choices like wallpaper and carpet to the mundane or accidental things like nail holes in the wall, water damage, and peeling ceilings. Each space held the results of many people leaving their mark, intentionally or not. In these rooms, I pulled back some layers, and added my own. I created new wallpaper using dirt and cut paper, I delineated volumes of space with stretched thread or wooden slats, and add ghostlike decorative elements such as crown molding made of masking tape, a stained glass window made of cellophane and duct tape, and a row of potted plants made from broken crockery and found objects. My installations and objects repurpose the things that we sweep up, throw away, and overlook. In them, I interact with everyone who has built the room, remodeled it, cleaned it, or lived in it, and hold all of these past actions in a fragile balance with my own.

Peter Owen

I make drawings and paintings that are based on my daily experience in urban spaces – my walk to work, the skyline seen from my apartment, the errands run throughout the week. I keep a camera on me all the time, and throughout the day, I document where I am. Each photograph is quite ordinary, but holds significance for the part it plays in the mapping of my life. Details that might be overlooked, such as the curve of a lampost or the molding on a windowsill, are captured so that later on they can be incorporated into minutely detailed compositions. In a way, drawing is like retracing my steps. However, rather than trying to piece together a coherent, objective narrative, I work with layers of imagery. Buildings are overlaid atop one another and allowed to tangle together.

Over time the layers obliterate parts of what is underneath, and the composition is woven out of hundreds of these daily recordings. I overload certain sections, and then counterbalance those areas with finely articulated, delicate structures – fire escapes, streetlights, the exposed pipes running through alleys. I am attempting to describe the experience of living in places that are constantly being transformed by construction and demolition.

I recently participated in a residency where for  three months, I documented the changes in the city- the result of a lot of demolition to expand the railway station. Each day the landscape was altered, and I worked quickly to photograph and notate the changes in large mixed-media drawings, and one large permanent wall painting. The residency was held in a soon-to-be-demolished apartment building, and I was given a flat to use as a studio. This was the first time that I was able to work site- specifically, I painted on the largest wall in the house, carving into the wall, painting on it, removing wallpaper and then layering it back on. This process was very invigorating to me; I enjoyed the challenge of covering a huge space, and reacting to a specific architectural environment. The wall work has a similar sensibility to my other paintings and drawings, but I had to adjust to the scale and the surface, and all of my habits were challenged and stretched. I was able to work looser and more sculpturally.

In the studio at Gallery Aferro, I would like to explore the surrounding neighborhoods, and build up a composition first of all using local imagery, but also using imagery from my daily life, which would be spent traveling between the program and my apartment in NYC. All of these spaces would be woven together as a record of my surroundings, and a record of the demolition, change, and renewal that is a constant factor in all cities. In my practice, I take the endless motions of a city and slow them down, showing a sort of frame-by- frame account of the demolition and construction, but these frames are overlapped and jumbled together. I would like to work directly on the walls in the studio, and to see how the work can become even more dimensional, moving into and out of the wall. I plan to work on small works on paper at the same time.

Blithe Riley

My practice investigates structures that regulate human behavior. These include those that are self-made and those that are inflicted by external forces. I am interested in how these systems inform our perception of time, and shape lived experience.

A few questions:
What constitutes a lived life? How do we choose what activities (labor/leisure) we repeat, and what we isolate as a moment in time? How does repetition and variation shape identity and autonomy?

My work builds and takes from systems that are human made, those in which error and subjectivity are immersed into the layers of logic. I draw inspiration from task lists, diary entries, weather reports, navigation systems, and repetitive behaviors. With video at the center of my practice, my work takes the form of single channel videos, installations, drawings, and performances.

These ideas inform not only my approach to art, but to how I exist living in a high-density city where space and time are the ultimate commodity. My work offers temporary respite from the systems of regulation I subscribe to. It provides a sense of autonomy and a way to take a hold of time as a producer, and not a victim of its passing.

During my residency, I will be working on an ongoing project called The Edna Experiments. The project began during the summer of 2009 and has become a platform for producing a series of drawings and videos about idiosyncratic systems, revolving around everyday mundane tasks. The project was initially inspired by a series of diaries that I found in 2008 that chronicle the life of a woman named Edna. In these diaries she records the most mundane details of her life (mainly domestic labor), but absolutely no emotions. I became interested in these diaries both as a score for creating time-based work from, but also as a bazaar record of a life. The project has since expanded from using the diaries as sole source material, to the creation of other fictional self-regulatory structures that I develop through my own writing.

During my time at the Aferro, I plan to culminate this project into a large-scale installation that will include drawings, video, and objects. I am interested in creating a three dimensional space that is a kind of diary, or space where time and labor are simultaneously enacted and recorded.

Calla Thompson

Working along a continuum between drawing and photography, my practice involves both photo-based digital montage works and drawing installation works.  I will use my time in residence to test materials, produce a major drawing installation in the Aferro space, as well as to plan and apply for off-site site-specific installations, using my work at Aferro as a springboard.  The residency will allow me concentrated time to experiment and to conduct in-studio production of potential off-site works.

Over the past three years I have conceived and produced two bodies of photomontage work, Nicebergs and Icebergs and Mark.  My last drawing installation was Flag. This was a 50×40 ft. piece that I produced and installed on the risers of the museum’s outdoor front staircase, generating the visual effect of fragmentation and reconciliation, depending on where the viewer positioned him or herself.

Calla Thompson’s art practice crosses media, examining the way power is enacted and exchanged in our culture.  The visual language and wry humor in her work are at once comforting and familiar, dislocating and suggestive.

Barbara Wallace

The kitchen table is a very important symbol and vehicle for stimulating creativity and achieving excellence in my life and psyche. I have been aware for some time that James Joyce had a special relationship with his kitchen. When it came to his great masterpiece Ulysses, Joyce “worked wherever he could find space – at a kitchen table, in the living room, or sometimes even propped up in bed.” The kitchen table of my family of origin served as an aid in propelling two of four children into the position of high school class Valedictorian. For creating my sculpture, in place of my kitchen table, I actually use the portable dishwasher, which has wheels, which are very helpful for a person working in 3-D. According to the historians, Dylan Thomas’ first desk was his kitchen table. In summary, the breakfast nook in my kitchen currently serves as my studio. I use my portable dishwasher instead of my real sculpture table. I work in intervals of 20 minutes or less with regular interruptions from my children, telephone and doorbell. Nothing has prevented me from making art.

The human figure is the inspiration, starting point, and measure of all things in my artwork. In earlier works I have represented life-size figures and larger than life body parts. My artwork is a celebration of life. As in much of the artwork that we have from antiquity, my work is also a memorial to those who have died. In our modern time, most of us are familiar with photographic images of global war, natural disasters, and human suffering. In a sense every time that I combine groups of bodies, groups of heads, or use any human references, I memorialize and celebrate the lives of those victims and also the survivors. The human figures in my sculptures are represented as alive, not dead, and they occupy a level of existence that celebrates humanity and togetherness even in times of great tragedy and terror.

---

2009

Eve + Bowie

Eve + Bowie are artists Eve Biddle and Bowie Zunino working as a collaborative team, creating relational, community-oriented, participatory events.  edible sculptures and temporary tattoos engage the viewer through eating and wearing.  These absurd and intimate experiences of consuming or physically handling the art create common bonds between participants.  through conversation and private thought we cause people to question and expand their perceptions with the firm belief that challenging the way people think can bring about social awareness and change.

We will be creating and exhibiting the project Temporary Vitals.  We began working with women who have had their thyroids removed.  We created temporary tattoos of drawings made of thyroids and asked the women to wear the “temporary vital” on their necks where their thyroid used to be.  We photographed their necks and then presented the photographs along with temporary tattoos so that viewers could apply the tattoos to themselves and each other.

We will be expanding the project to the entire endocrine system, and designing new interactive materials and distribution models for learning.  Each major gland in the endocrine system is integral to our bodies but most people do not where they are or what they do.

Eve + Bowie, along with Elan Bogarin created the Wassaic Project, an annual event of free art, music, dance, performance and camping in Wassaic, NY.

Tai Hwa Goh

Recently I am interested in the irony and the contrast between fragility of prints on paper and concrete architectural elements.  These represent vulnerable human and monumental layers of history.  I would like to continue combining installation and prints but extend to experimental display of my prints using not only interior environment but also urban surroundings.

The body not only acts as a container of my soul but also leads my minds and thoughts into various investigations.  My body is both outward and inward, and it is also a widely open “site.”  My works present scenarios of the imagination regarding bodily experiences.  I use hand waxed Korean paper exploring layers of selfhood and markings of memories.  The layered waxed papers mimic both the vulnerability of the body and the strength of selfness.

Hyo Jeong Nam

I tie thread endlessly.  It is a natural act.  I unconsciously start tying it and then my purpose becomes clear. Metaphorically I see thread as female.  This is partly because thread is used for sewing, which is considered women’s work.  Thread plays the role of connecting separate parts.  Extending the width and length of my work mirrors how our lives succeed from our great ancestors to our grandchildren, and from the past to the present.

The thoughts, speech and behavior which define my character are largely formed in my inner world.  This inner world has been formed and affected by the spirits of my parents, ancestors and Korean heritage.  Everything is affected by everything else.  This is a reflection of life and the urge to live.

A Room of One’s Own is a site specific installation I will work on, a space formed by thread.  Although the space created with thread is not completely separated from the studio space, it shows woman’s sensibility of her own space.

Kathryn Okeson

I want to make a book. Another one. Bigger. The pages disambiguated, not bound. Hung. Handled. A maze. I am the mouse. You too. Follow my life. Left turn after adolescence. And meet me now. I will be making a book that dismantles book, that alters the surface which is read. Inter/feres with the act of reading. These pages, graphic. Novel. An artist’s book. Yes, really. Art. I swear! Real art processes will be used! Drawing! Photographs! Alternative means of printing! I mean it! I will im/prove myself! I am a real artist! I have skills! And ideas! I will use them together!

The community. I am around educators. All of the time. Not artists. And while I am working with kids to become artists, they still struggle with critique. I need the access to conversation, reflection, constructive critique. Plus, I really don’t want to flesh out autobiographical stuff with 17 year olds. I need the immersive experience which re-orients the creative process that happens by being in a location associated with artmaking.

Previous projects and books I have made are small, precious, quick-put-away-the-knife-and-oh-dear-the-expensive-paper-too size. I have made work which begins dialogue, which pursues a question, and resists an answer. I have made work which creeps into public spaces, that whispers: bookmarks in the library, rubber bands at the post office, photographs which document the body politic. With this project, I want to make a book which says “Let us stop keeping too much information. Let pages be released of their responsibility as narrators, and instead simply bear witness.”

Ben Pranger

All my sculpture and drawings are embedded with language.  Codes, such as Braille or Morse, take possession of an object to create an opaque, tactile art containing hidden messages.  Braille pegs and alternating colors communicate a verbal content accessible to a few (the blind and telegraph operators) but the code influences and structures the form as a whole.

During the residency, I will develop three projects: interactive Braille block installations, sculpture embedded with coded language, and a series of large-scale conditional text drawings.  For the interactive piece, I will make a set of custom-designed Braille blocks and invite blind and sighted participants to make a large rhizomatic constructions that looks something like a cross between a Scrabble, Tinkertoys and Braille.  I will continue to embed language and information in objects, and will experiment with other materials in combination with found wood.  I will also be working on a series of large Morse code drawings that respond to a text according to a series of instructions.

Ryan Roa

“People today are constantly on the move. We exist in a time influenced by technology, one of bigger, faster and more. Western culture is best described, by the gas station chain slogan of Mobil “on the run”. Constantly inundated with massive amounts of information, people have grown to process information at amazingly high speeds. Through this constant state of mass organized confusion that we all live in; I wait for a break in time, a moment of peace, a chance to rest and clear my head so that I can separate my agendas from societies.

I am interested in the notion of freedom defined by Webster as the quality or state of being free. My work is derived from personal observations, and is dependant on my need to physically interact with materials, and the world around me.”

Ryan will be creating a new body of sculptural work with interactive aspects influenced by the larger context of Newark.

Kwabena Slaughter

I think of cameras, along with photographs, as cultural artifacts. In the same way that an anthropologist can look at jewelry or clothing to learn about the culture that created those things, the design of a camera and the photos it takes can tell us about the culture that created them. Stripped of its cultural history a “camera” is simply an enclosed object with a hole in one side through which light enters. As such, the camera predates photography by thousands of years. With these factors of origin, evolution, and technology as a starting point, my work asks the question: “what would photography look like if it had grown out of a different aesthetic tradition?”

The photos I make explore the representation of space, time, and narrative through a panoramic style. Using a specially modified camera I shoot directly onto long rolls of color slide-film. The image fills the entire film-strip, without any frame breaks, looking much like a photographic scroll. The strips of slide-film, which can be up to 100-ft long, are displayed on light-boxes. The long horizontal strips of film serve as both as a measure of the dimensions of the subject and also as a record of the subjects movement over time.

I will be designing and constructing sets, choreographing movements for dancers, lighting the scenes and photographing them. I am aiming towards a work that is in the range of 6 feet tall by 20-40 feet wide.

---

2008

Anonda Bell

“I am interested in the idea of knowledge and in particular how relative it can be to the time and circumstances in which it was generated. I am fascinated in the conflation of objective and subjective information as a way of developing systems for understanding archetypes, a way to develop systems to identify what ‘normal’ in any given set of circumstances. My recent practice has been concerned with the interaction of science and art. Trained as a painter and printmaker, I now focus primarily on paper based practice. I create large format installations using many media – acrylic, oil, watercolor, enamel, glass, felt and fabric. I am interested particularly in the ephemeral nature of my work. It is pinned or nailed to the wall, and can be reconstituted in many different ways.

Using a quasi-scientific approach, I would like to work on a project to investigate the hidden, elusive and frequently culturally derived meanings for people, places and things. I suspect that my project will not aim to result in concrete conclusions, but rather to confirm the impossibility of ever really knowing anything. In particular I am interested in investigating the phenomenon of natural history. The study of the natural world was an obsession for both scientists and lay people in the 1800s. After the release of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, arguments raged either way that the process of evolution was evidenced in natural specimens. At the time, natural history represented a way of colonizing foreign lands. This occurred though rigorous and ‘scientific’ documentation (with the implication of objective, rational, impartial mannerisms) of specimens that were specific to certain places. The burgeoning scientific world and specifically studies of physiognomy, neuroscience, biology, created domains for the classification of people by new means, their physical existence became a way to view their inevitable temperament. Through these means a person could be characterized as a weak character through their physique, morally lacking through the shape of their nose, or prone to monthly insanity through their possession of a uterus.”

Anonda will use her time as an Aferro resident to create a large wall based installation that evokes a sense of chaos rather than order, utilizing essential discourses particular to visual and written natural history propaganda to demonstrate the utter confusion rather than clarity that results from conflicting scientific and social discourses.

Beatrice Coron

“Stories are written, and in my case, cut. I invent cities, worlds and situations. They are memories, associations of words, ideas, observations and thoughts that unfold in improbable juxtapositions. Each observer makes his or her own story in this accumulation of real or imaginary lives to remember the past and foresee the future. Whether automatic writing or premeditated scenes, images pass through words. The creative inspiration comes from a text, a poem, or from a concept that I reduce to a mere title, or an amalgam of deformed words. Part of the pleasure is finding words that are identical in French and in English: word play, translation add complexity and meaning.

In my graphic style, windows are used not to see out but in. The cutting blade traces labyrinths and poetic meandering. Shadows suggest danger but also opportunities for new adventures.”

Beatrice is currently completing two new works, 30 feet long, based on the fiction of Italo Calvino.

Rodney Gilbert

Rodney will work to create arts performances and arts education programs for the community, such as staged readings of new and published works by local and national playwrights, and educational workshops in theatre that will utilize Gallery Aferro’s visual arts programming. In collaboration with Playwrights Theatre of NJ, he will enable local actors to present the life stories of senior citizens from Newark. In partnership with Passage Theatre of Trenton, adolescent actors will do a staged reading of an anti-gang piece.

His innovative approach creates spaces that are truly welcoming public forums, as well as more private environments for experimentation and sharing.

Norene Leddy

Norene’s work combines video, sculpture and installation.

Aphrodite Project: Platforms is an interactive artwork that combines the rich mythology of Aphrodite, the priestesses/prostitutes of ancient Greece, with the advertising and safety concerns of contemporary sex workers in the streets, providing technological access to people for whom it would not normally be available. The prototype sandals utilize the latest wireless and GPS technology in order to ensure safety while working. The sandal prototype are embedded with an LCD screen, GPS receiver, radio beacon, speakers and wireless capacity. They are also customizable.

In addition to continuing her highly community-oriented work with the Aphrodite Project, Norene plans to create a new series of drawings that extend her more individualized fine-art practice.

Beth Ann Morrison

Beth Ann Morrison will be working on a project in collaboration with Arts Unbound and Walsh Gallery.

Individuals living with developmental, physical, or mental disabilities will be creating a large-scale sculptural installation to be exhibited at Walsh Gallery as One Breath, an “encompassing, organically-formed fabric environment. The floors will offer drifts of upholstered seating options, colored lighting will reflect the motions of visitors, multi-tonal sound will subtly drift through the space and the translucent walls will reveal the images of many people’s ideas of healing space.”

She will begin by gathering donated and/or recycled fabrics and inviting groups of people to visit and create their contribution to the piece. She will be fabricating these elements into walls, as well as creating the floors, ceiling and foam pockets. The supporting structure will be created with found bamboo that will need to be soaked and shaped.

Margaret Murphy

Margaret Murphy was born in Baltimore, Maryland in the working class neighborhood of Hampden. Living now in Jersey City, NJ for eleven years she claims it reminds her of Baltimore. Much of Margaret’s work over the years has been influenced by working class beliefs and values, feminism, kitsch, religion and politics.

Ryan Schroeder

Ryan’s first project at Aferro will be the construction of a miniature wooden oil tower (approximately 9’ tall) with 5-7 interchangeable platforms. On each platform a basin, made from beeswax, will house frozen sculptures made from casein paint. The forms of these paint-sculptures will resemble gas cans.

His work offers a “critique of materialist philosophy by making the unseen incarnate and dematerializing objects found within the immediate environment. The violence inherent in the depreciation of visualization is called into question in order to strategize new ways of being…”

In recent projects, vessels (milk cartons, wine bottles, etc.) derived from the artist’s own consumptive practices have been cast in frozen casein and encaustic and displayed as disappearing still lifes in the streets of New York City. As the sculptures dissolve, they begin to suggest monochromatic paintings, transforming the dross of the world into a subject of meditation.

“This act of recycling underlies the ambivalent relationship between object and image. As the ubiquitous, commercial vessel loses its formal status and cultural significance, it simultaneously becomes material for a less distinct, yet more complex, referent.”

Irys Schenker

Irys Schenker’s work unites architectural concepts with craft traditions.

“Cardboard, yarn, thread, ribbon, fabric and other quotidian materials combine to explore how we relate to spaces and structures. I depict subtle moments of introspection within places that have traces of human inhabitance. I think of my work as a perpetual quest for home.

My stitched window screen pieces are like contemporary samplers. They use the idea of the simulacrum, navigating the limitations of the screen’s grid to transform the original or copied image or model.

My new cardboard pieces are formed with an inquiry into concepts in Japanese and Modern architecture. “A House,” is a depiction of a domicile where the rooms are discrete suspended components. Travel snapshots appear out of windows and skylights.

Currently I am working on a series of life size free standing facade-like cardboard structures called “Destinations.”

Sara Wolfe

Sara Wolfe’s abstract paintings reference a childlike sense of space. She will be working on murals within her studio space utilizing rejected mixed house paint from the local Home Depot and independent hardware stores, in a process that she believes “ties local residents to the mural.”

“As infants learning to draw make figures with twenty arms, they express a new awareness of their limbs rather than a representational observation. My act of painting similarly involves capturing our physical experience of existing in the world, and memories of those heightened moments of awareness.

My interest lies in memory: how we re-create, embellish and merge it with other experiences. I reference a physical experience from a moment ago and a tangential childhood memory in the same image. My work ultimately reveals a sense of play and a longing to re-create that state of innocence.”

---

2007

Gianluca Bianchino

Gianluca Bianchino is a painter whose large-scale series, Spatial, has expanded to drawing and video.

He writes: “Nature is my platform of study. Specifically, I work with telescopic images of celestial bodies (galaxies, nebulaes and planets), and panoramic/satellite images of extreme conditions of our planet’s landscape (hurricanes, tornados and volcanic eruptions).

My paintings, which are crafted in oil, most often consist of dyptics and tryptics incorporating both abstract and representational images.  The use of dyptics and tryptics in formal compositions is influenced by religious art, strongly present through my Catholic upbringing in Southern Italy.”

Bianchino’s intention is to evoke both macro and microcosmic space, causing the viewer to reflect upon their own sense of placement, and to question conventional notions of linear space/time.

He will be creating studies for further additions to the series.

Kevin Darmanie

Kevin Darmanie, born in Trinidad, is a longtime Newark resident who makes paintings, prints, and comics. He was the co-curator of 2006’s Black Rock. During his residency Darmanie has created a series of oversize comic pages that each functions independently but can be read as part of an ongoing narrative. The series features an alter ego, Kedar, in a minutely observed city not dissimilar to Newark, caught between neglect and gentrification.

Darmanie has also continued to work on a series of paintings of varying scale, based on features of his own body. The series is suggestive of the contribution of historical lineage, as well as the idiosyncrasies of personal appearance, to an ongoing identity.

Jerry Gant

Working in mixed media, Jerry Grant is a self-educated visual artist and performance poet whose signature murals can be found in large urban centers including Newark, New York City, Boston, and London England. He works in canvas, metal, wood, fabric and wire, constantly.

Recent exhibitions include My Brother’s Thread: A Retrospective of Fiber Works by and for Men of the African Diaspora curated by Harlem Needle Arts at Lincoln Center, and But I was cool…, a three man show at Aljira. Jerry has been a fixture of the Newark arts scene for the past 15 years. As an installation artist, unofficial and official mentor to young artists, entrepreneur and MC, Jerry’s activities and creations can be seen as a single unified expression of his perspective. The viral quality of his imagery allows it to move between the street and the gallery, as visitors to his exhibitions recognize design motifs they may have seen on the back of a jacket or on a wall years ago.

According to the artist, “In every individual lies a wall of expression and culture; the acknowledgment of the artists that came before stimulates the construction of new walls that are greater than their struggles, pain and shortcomings.”

Reviewing the Aljira exhibition, critic Holland Cotter wrote in the Times, “It is Mr. Gant who offers the most abstract and positive take… in the form of a mediating remedy through art. For the occasion, he built a thin, high throne made of plywood and equipped with halo-like headphones and a crown. The throne, at once regal and fragile, is actually designed as a listening station.

Julia’s First Dream

Sebastián Patané Masuelli

Sebastian Patane Masuelli’s (Argentina, 1978) installations and actions are recognizable by their startling degree of beauty, and by minimal arrangements suggestive of a complex thought process. He attempts to make visible connections between the physical limitations of objects, and their imaginative possibilities. His work has been seen recently in The Mistake I Make is To Try and Think, a solo show at 58 Gallery in Jersey City, NJ and El Museo del Bario’s S Files in New York, NY.

Founder of the Fease art collective, which took over abandoned storefronts with performance and exhibitions, he has been the instigator for many art events in the tri-state area since 1999.

Ana de Portela

Ana de Portela has described herself as a sculptor who produces video and performances as well as someone who writes and motivates.

She has worked yearlong volunteer commitments in Paraguay through Amigos de las America and as Director for Video-in-the Community through Peace Corps/VISTA, organizing “community related spectacles” in inner city barrios such as outdoor movie nights.

She has found the space for her own art making with residencies at the PS. 1 Clocktower and at the International Women’s Foundation Die Hogue, as one of 3 Americans invited to Germany, along with Laura Cottingham and the Guerrilla Girls. After her time at Gallery Aferro, she will travel to Prague to the Center for Alternative Culture at the Meetfactory by invitation of David Cerny. Her most recent solo exhibition was at Bronx Haven Arts in 2006.

Jesse Wright

Jesse Wright (American / Jamaican, 1974) lives and works in Jersey City, NJ. His work relies heavily on a background in painting and design. It often incorporates materials found while walking on journeys between Jersey City and New York City (what’s left of messages found in ripped posters and half painted over billboards, clipped newspaper headlines lying there on the subway’s floor, the pop-up windows, textbooks, Scriptures, and intuition). Switching technique to reflect the many ways in which we communicate and the layers of meanings. These elements are re-purposed to reflect a spiritual connection underlying daily experience and observation. Traveling internationally gave a respect for iconography that transcends language. Working in technologies gave an awareness of the various ways we are able to communicate and how fragmented the messages can become.

Recent work has involved large scale (mixedmedia) paintings referencing the chaos of the “Book of Revelation” along side the peace of the “Transfiguration” found in scripture.

This approach is carried over to (if not inspired by) several “books”. During a difficult time the artist began to gather scraps of paper heading to and from work to arrange in the evening as an immediate outlet to record and collage random scraps of conversations, thoughts, and found papers. These arrangements evolved into several books. The processess of gathering and arranging carried over into large scale paintings as the energy could no longer be contained within the space of the page. They eventually begin to develop an “arc” of a story and often evolve from slap-dash collage to full-blown paintings / compositions.

During his time at Aferro, Wright plans to move from the “wall to the floor” to explore stand alone objects and sculpture, and to work with materials like asphalt, plaster, and tar.