Studio Visits

Barbara Bourland is the award-winning author of three novels, most recently The Force of Such Beauty and Fake Like Me. A finalist for the 2020 Edgar Best Novel Award and the recipient of a 2022 Independent Artist’s Award from the Maryland State Arts Council, her writing has been translated into Japanese, German, Hebrew, and Mandarin. She is at work on her fourth novel, Fields and Waves, forthcoming from Dutton. She lives in Baltimore.

barbarabourland.com

After running his own art studio for 20 years, Onyedika Chuke founded Storage Gallery on the ideals of community, discovery, and connoisseurship. Storage acts as an archive of makers that work in a range of materials and come from a wide demographic background. Drawing from his decade of experience at Susan Sheehan Gallery, dealing within the modern and postmodern secondary market, Chuke cultivates a canonical perspective through the gallery's activities. Half of the roster is dedicated to seasoned artists over the age of 70, while the other half focuses on nurturing younger artists under 40.

Photo: Emiliano Granado

K.O. Nnamdie is a curator, artist, writer and advisor based in Manhattan, NY. Nnamdie works as Director at anonymous gallery, in addition to running Restaurant Projects, a curatorial project and research-driven art advisory service based in New York City. Restaurant Projects was founded in 2018 and is based on Nnamdie’s interest in the intersection between hospitality and the arts. Nnamdie is also the arts editor at Family Style magazine and makes regular contributions to Gagosian Quarterly. They are currently working on their first book Doktor.

Tessa Ferreyros is a curatorial professional with 15 years of experience managing non-profit and private arts organizations and projects. She is currently the Director and Curator of Art-in-Buildings (AiB). AiB is an international program focused on bringing contemporary art by emerging and mid-career artists to non-traditional exhibition spaces for Time Equities Inc., a real estate firm with over 36 million square feet of property. AiB is currently active in over 45 properties across 14 states and 4 countries.She previously served as Curatorial Manager for Madison Square Park Conservancy where she organized large-scale installations with Leonardo Drew, Arlene Shechet, and Krzysztof Wodiczko and assisted with 58th International Art Exhibition at the Venice Biennale, featuringMartin Puryear: Liberty/Libertà. Prior to Madison Square Park Conservancy, Tessa worked as a Curatorial Assistant at The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) where she oversaw the Adrian Piper retrospective A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965-2016 and in the Curatorial Department at the Menil Collection in Houston, TX.

tessa-ferreyros.com

Megan Galardi is a curator and arts administrator based in Philadelphia, PA. Megan has worked with various art organizations in the non-profit and private sectors. Megan earned a Bachelor’s degree in Growth and Structure of Cities from Bryn Mawr College and a Master of Arts in Socially Engaged Art. In 2023 Megan founded Blah Blah Gallery, the only commercial gallery in Philadelphia dedicated to women and non-binary artists. She has curated exhibitions for the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program and works as a project manager and event coordinator in addition to her curatorial work with Blah Blah.

Welancora Gallery was founded by Ivy Jones over 10 years ago. The name of the gallery is an amalgam of the names of Ivy’s parents and older brother. Welancora is located in a brownstone in Brooklyn, New York. The purpose of the gallery is to represent an intergenerational group of artists from around the world, by placing their work with individual collectors and museums, publishing scholarly catalogs, holding exhibitions and participating in international art fairs.

welancoragallery.com

Alison Karasyk Hines (she/her) is an independent curator, writer, and editor born and bred in New York City. Her research interests focus on gender, space, memory, and materiality. Alison is currently part of Darling Green, a collaborative NY-based studio that organizes art exhibitions and provides curatorial services for art collections. She has held curatorial and editorial roles at the North Norwegian Arts Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. Alison was a 2020 resident at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo in Turin, Italy and was the 2018 recipient of the Ramapo Curatorial Prize. She has curated exhibitions at the Center for Book Arts (New York, NY), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen, DK), Palazzo Re Rebaudengo (Guarene, IT), the Hessel Museum of Art (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), and the Berrie Center for Performing and Visual Arts at Ramapo College (Mahwah, NJ), among others. Alison's research and writing on Louise Bourgeois's monumental artwork The Damned, the Possessed and the Beloved (2010) has been featured in numerous publications. She completed her BA at Oberlin College and her MA at the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College (CCS Bard).

Marshall N. Price is the Chief Curator and Nancy A. Nasher and David J. Haemisegger Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University and serves as adjunct faculty in the university’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies. He received a Ph.D. in Art History from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Before joining the Nasher Museum, Price was Curatorial Assistant at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and from 2003 until 2014 held the position of Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the National Academy Museum, New York. He has organized numerous exhibitions including Roy Lichtenstein: History in the Making, 1948-1960, Nina Chanel Abney: Royal Flush, Colour Correction: British and American Screenprints, 1967-75, Jeffrey Gibson: Said the Pigeon to the Squirrel, and John Cage: The Sight of Silence, among others.

Carolyn Salas was born in Los Angeles, CA. She lives and works in NYC and Upstate NY. She earned a BFA in sculpture from the College of Santa Fe and an MFA from Hunter College. She has attended residencies at the Abrons Art Center A.I.R. Space Program and The NARS Foundation, New York, NY; Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain Lake, NY; the Vermont Studio Center, Johnson, VT; and the Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, NM. She has also been a Chashama Studio Space recipient, and an Elizabeth Foundation Studio Program/Space awardee. Selected exhibitions include the Berkshire Museum, Berkshire MA; Torrance Art Museum, Torrance, Santa Barbara Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara; Ever Gold [Projects], San Francisco, CA; Casey Kaplan, Koenig & Clinton, Brookfield Arts, and Kate Werble Gallery, New York, Mrs., Maspeth, NY; Terrault Contemporary and Towson University, Baltimore, MD; Páramo Gallery, Guadalajara, Mexico; and NADA Special Projects, Miami, FL. Salas was named a 2021 Artist-in-Residence at Google and was commissioned by the United States Tennis Association and the Armory Show to create a new outdoor sculpture for the US Open. Most recently her work was displayed on Governors Island and is currently on view at Summit Public Art in New Jersey.Upcoming in 2024 Salas will have a solo exhibition at the University of New Mexico Museum in Las Cruces, NM and will be showing work at Bemis Contemporary Art Center in Omaha, Nebraska.

Niama Safia Sandy is a New York-based cultural anthropologist, curator, producer, organizer, multidisciplinary artist, and musician. Her creative practice delves into the human story — through the application and critical lenses of culture, healing, history, migration, music, race and ritual. Niama’s aim is to leverage history, the visual, written and performative arts, chiefly those of the Global Black Diaspora, to tell stories we know in ways we have not yet thought to tell them and to lift us all to a higher state of historical, ontological and spiritual wholeness in the process.

In 2020, Sandy created and produced FOR/FOUR, a conversation series featuring Black women and non-binary persons in the arts and culture. Shortly after the launch of the series, she helped found The Blacksmiths, a coalition of culture workers standing together to forge support for Black liberation against anti-Black racism in the academy and at presenting institutions. Through The Blacksmiths, Niama has produced resources and public events engaging communities, activists, artists across disciplines, and more to close the gaps in appropriate opportunities for Black artists of all disciplines, curators, and administrators on the global stage. Sandy is a co-founder and active steering committee member of THIS IS A MOVEMENT, an initiative seeking to create a more equitable music industry through an intersectional Black feminist lens, centered upon non-hierarchical, collaborative and imaginative modes of creation and organization launched in 2022.

Her current visual work explores a form she calls, “The Groove.” It is a mechanism for rest, resetting, and a kind of fulcrum of survival. It launches us into life, death, and all of the pleasures in between. It is at once mathematical and a refusal against the (ac)counting that whiteness and capitalism have long waged on humanity and on Black people in particular. It resists quantification in a world obsessed with what is measurable and commodifiable. The Groove, is a gesture toward freedom, an overriding/overwriting of the arcane systems of value that have never served us. Making the gesture with paint, sculpture with hand/body is a kind of way of apprehending time - past, present and future. It is a position toward light, balance, restoration, and release.

She has participated in and convened programs at TEDWomen, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, MICA, Harvard University, Oberlin College, The Public Theater, Brooklyn Museum, & more. Niama and her work have been featured in Artsy, The New York Times, Monopol (Germany), Teen Vogue, The Washington Post, Hyperallergic, Camera Austria, OkayAfrica, and other publications.

Her past artist residencies include 37d03d, The Watermill Center and Project for Empty Space. Niama is a founding curator of the Southeast Queens Biennial, as well as a member of the artist collectives the Resistance Revival Chorus and Wide Awakes. Niama is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute, School of Art.

Photo: Florian Koenigsberger

Jessilee Shipman is a Director at kaufmann repetto New York, where she coordinates the gallery's exhibitions, liaises with the program's artists, and manages the gallery's participation in US based art-fair presentations. She is also involved in the gallery's external projects, such as the new upstate collaborative arts space The Campus, and in the recent past, Tribeca Gallery Walk evenings. Prior to joining kaufmann repetto, Jessilee has held positions in major galleries and arts institutions in New York, including MoMA, Museum of Arts and Design, Jack Hanley Gallery, and GRIMM gallery. She holds a BFA from the University of Texas at Austin with a focus in Photography and Sculpture. While in Austin, Jessilee helped run Center Space Project, a collaborative curatorial project that is responsible for programming the campus based Visual Arts Center.

Adam Parker Smith is a Brooklyn-based sculptor. He attended Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia. His work has been shown widely in the USA as well as internationally in galleries and museums including the Brooklyn Museum, Marlborough Gallery, London, Derek Eller, New York, The Hole, New York, Ever Gold Projects, San Francisco, The Donum Estate, Sonoma, Galeria Curro, Guadalajara, Spurs Gallery, Beijing, The Times  Museum, Guangzhou, China, Kaiser-Franz-Josefs-Höhe, Austria, The Watermill Center, New York and the Maraya Art Centre, Sharjah, UAE. Smith’s work has been written about in, New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, Art in America, The Village Voice, ArtForum, Modern Painters, The Boston Globe, The New Yorker, and The New York Post.

adamparkersmithwork.com

Madeline Weisburg is Assistant Curator at the New Museum. At the New Museum, she has worked on numerous exhibitions, including Judy Chicago: Herstory, Mire Lee: Black Sun, Theater Gates: Young Lords and Their Traces, Kapwani Kiwanga: Off-Grid, Faith Ringgold: American People, Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America, Ed Atkins: Get Life/Love's Work, and Jordan Casteel: Within Reach, among others. She served as Curatorial Researcher for 59th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, “The Milk of Dreams,” and has previously held curatorial positions at the Jewish Museum and in the Department of Photography at MoMA. She was 2017–18 Curatorial Fellow at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Art Gallery at Columbia University. She holds an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art History: Critical and Curatorial Studies (MODA) from Columbia University and a dual BA in Art History and BFA in Studio Art from Tufts University in partnership with the School of the Museum Fine Arts, Boston.

Marcus Civin received an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine, and a BA in Theater from Brown University. He is Assistant Dean in the School of Art at Pratt Institute. His writing about art and interviews with artists have appeared in publications including Artforum, Art in America, Art Papers, Afterimage, Boston Art Review, The Brooklyn Rail, Camera Austria, Damn Magazine, and Maake Magazine. Poetry and short stories have appeared in The Capilano Review, Clementine, Full Bleed, Memoir Mixtapes, Mirage Period(ical), Nerve Lantern, The Paper, Urbanite, and No, Dear, among other publications. He has lectured, read, exhibited, and performed in classrooms, basements, bars, parking lots, parks, apartments, galleries, museums, and online. He is often interested in artists whose work addresses or involves politics, protest, history, community engagement, education, unusual materials, performance, text, collage, and humor. He grew up in Baltimore and appears ever-so-briefly in Prince’s last video about the city. You can find much of his writing at marcuscivinwriting.com, or on Instagram @marcuscivinwriting.

Jackie Clay (she/her) is a Birmingham-raised, New York-based art worker and curator. She is currently a program associate in the Arts and Culture program at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Prior to joining the Foundation in 2021, Jackie served as executive director and curator at the Coleman Center for the Arts, a contemporary arts organization that produces socially engaged public art projects in the Alabama Black Belt region.

Susan Cross is Senior Curator at MASS MoCA, where she has organized solo exhibitions, major commissions, and performances by Sarah Crowner, Alex Da Corte, Liz Deschenes, Marcos Ramirez ERRE, Spencer Finch, Liz Glynn, Katharina Grosse, Allison Janae Hamilton (co-curated with Larry Ossei-Mensah), Steffani Jemison, Ledelle Moe, Richard Nonas, Gamaliel Rodriguez, Cauleen Smith, and Simon Starling, among many others. Group exhibitions include Ceramics in the Expanded Field (2021), The Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night (2018), In the Abstract (2017), The Dying of the Light: Film as Medium and Metaphor (2014), Invisible Cities (2012), and The Workers: Precarity/Invisibility/Mobility (2011), co-curated with Carla Herrera-Prats. Cross edited the first monographs on Da Corte, Crowner, Finch, and Glynn and is the co-editor of Sol LeWitt: 100 Views. Previously, she was a curator at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. She has been a visiting lecturer in the art department at Williams College and serves on the board of the Williamstown Art Conservation Center and on the advisory board of the Journal of the Archives of American Art, Washington, DC. She received an MA from Williams College and was a 2019 Center for Curatorial Leadership Fellow.

Paul Efstathiou is the Director of Contemporary Art at Hollis Taggart Gallery in New York City and CT. Efstathiou is a second-generation art dealer and curator with 20 plus years of experience. Efstathiou has developed a well-trained and prescient eye, making him a successful dealer and curator of contemporary art. Paul is on the board of directors at the MoCA Westport Museum in CT. He has worked closely with 60 plus emerging and contemporary artists to date. Efstathiou is based both in New York City and Connecticut. He currently resides in Southport, CT with his wife and two children.

Jamillah Hinson is an independent curator and arts programmer. With a focus on historical and contemporary Black cultural and artistic traditions, her practice engages various methods of storytelling and centers artist and community narratives. She often works directly with emerging and early career artists whose practices center performance, experimental film, and sound. Hinson has realized exhibitions and developed programming with the Union for Contemporary Art, Ortega y Gasset Projects, the El Paso Museum of Art, The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, the Art Institute of Chicago, LATITUDE Chicago, Intuit: The Center for Intuitive & Outsider Art, and Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts, among other independent art and cultural spaces. She has received fellowships and residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Omaha, NE; Chicago Artists Coalition, Chicago, IL; and NXTHVN, New Haven, CT. She is a member of Concerned Black Image Makers, a lens based collective based in Chicago, IL, as well as a small international curatorial collective. Hinson has sat on juries for apexart, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, Wassaic Projects, and ACRE Projects.

Samantha Hunt is the author of five books. The Unwritten Book, a non-fiction investigation into our relationships with the dead; The Seas, about a girl who might be a mermaid; The Dark Dark, a collection of short fictions; Mr. Splitfoot, a ghost story; and The Invention of Everything Else about Nikola Tesla. Hunt is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Bard Fiction Prize, the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 Prize, the St. Francis College Literary Prize and a blue-ribbon winner of the Montgomery Place Pie contest. She has been a finalist for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner. Hunt teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. She is mother to three, sister to five. She is a gardener and beekeeper; a singer and forest enthusiast in upstate New York.

Engaged in broad fields of practice from public art and traditional gallery work to activist based Community Theater, Rachel Owens tackles issues of hierarchical social conditions, environmental destruction, consumption and the points where these things intersect. Working sculpturally, performatively and socially, she uses material as meaning: what the sculpture is made of- is what the sculpture means- is what the sculpture does. Bottle shards, cardboard, coal, cut up humvees, and the dust of marble are all used to convey meaning, emotion, and action as they take on forms from porch to iceberg. Often with jobs beyond metaphor, the sculptures become stages, public seating, centers for protest and elevated vantage points.

Owens has been included in exhibitions both in the US and internationally including The X Krasnoyarsk Biennial, RU; Franco Soffiantino Contemporary, IT; Austrian Cultural Forum, NY; The Frist Museum, TN; Socrates Sculpture Park, LIC; and the New Museum Window, NY among others. Her solo museum project, The Hypogean Tip commissioned for The Housatonic Museum of Art in Bridgeport CT subsequently traveled to The Sugarhill Museum in NYC. She has had reviews and inclusion in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art in America, Modern Painters, Flash Art and Triple Canopy Anthology and she has received grants from the Joan Mitchell, Pollack Krasner, and Harpo Foundations as well as a Cultural Humanitarian Grant from the US Consulate. Her work can be found in many collections in the US and abroad, among them; The Beth Rudin Dewoody Collection and The Bunker, The Pritzker Family, Berkshire Botanical Garden, Housatonic Museum of Art, Sprint Collection, Fidelity Collection and Donald Mullin Jr.
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Owens is Associate Professor of Art & Design and Chair of the Sculpture Department at SUNY Purchase College. She lives and works in Amenia, NY.

rachelowensart.org

Krista Scenna is an independent curator and gallery owner based in Brooklyn, NY. She earned her BA in Art History and Spanish from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA from New York University’s XE: Experimental Humanities & Social Engagement program. Scenna has worked for the ICA in Philadelphia, the Queens Museum, and the New Museum in various capacities. Past exhibitions include collaborations with BRIC, NURTUREart and Lesley Heller Workspace and site-specific exhibitions in alternative forums such DUMBO Arts Festival, SPRING/BREAK Art Show and the Cigar Factory, LLC. Scenna also connects local emerging artists with new art buyers as the Co-Founder and owner of Ground Floor Gallery based in Park Slope, Brooklyn from 2013-2020. The gallery continues to operate as an advisory platform specializing in commissions, professional development for artists and art consulting for new art buyers. Scenna is also a proud member of the Association of Women Art Dealers (AWAD) and was recently a guest curator at The Old Stone House, a historic exhibition space in Park Slope, Brooklyn.

Photo: Abigail Ekue

In 2010, Douglas Turner began writing art journalism, beginning with his culture blog, “The Architecture of Tomorrow”. His art and culture writing has appeared in numerous independent print and digital publications. His essays can be found in catalog essays, collections, and in the form of book introductions as well. In 2014 he launched AOT Project Salon and began curating salon-style exhibitions in his home in Brooklyn, New York, and the Lower East Side until 2019. Douglas is a Resident Curator with Standard Space, a contemporary gallery in Sharon, CT, exhibiting contemporary works by emerging and mid-career artists across diverse media. His most recent project is the creation of the Black Femme Residency. The Spring 2021 residency was hosted by Wassaic Project in historic Dutchess County, upstate New York. He serves as Vice President and Chief Operating Officer for the M. Spencer Foundation.

Angelik Vizcarrondo-Laboy (b. 1992, Puerto Rico) is a curator and writer of contemporary art and craft interested in advocating for underrepresented communities, stories, materials, and approaches. She has curated and juried exhibitions across the United States, including at the Crocker Art Museum, CA, Mindy Solomon Gallery, FL, the Center for Craft, NC, Jane Hartsook Gallery, NY, and the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD), NY, among others. Vizcarrondo-Laboy has written for multiple exhibition catalogs and publications such as Cultured, American Craft magazine, and the Journal of Modern Craft. She is the creator and co-host of the Clay in Color podcast. Her upcoming exhibition Funk You Too!: Humor and Irreverence in Ceramic Sculpture, opens in March 2023 at MAD Museum.

Carolina Wheat (b.1974, Detroit, MI) received her BFA in textiles from University of Michigan Stamps School and MFAW from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has written extensively about art, politics and culture, and has curated numerous socially conscientious large-scale exhibitions and events in Detroit, Berlin, London, Chicago, and New York. Wheat is co-founder and director of Elijah Wheat Showroom and is one of the founding members of the Nasty Women Exhibition movement. Her curatorial work has been reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, The New Yorker, Vulture, Hyperallergic, Fast Company, MAAKE Mag, The Brooklyn Rail, The Guardian, and China Daily, among others. Wheat has assisted The Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark, liaising with institutions on reproduction of Garbage Wall, 1970. As Director of Recruitment and Admissions at Parsons (NYC and Paris), SAIC, University of Michigan, Oregon College of Arts and Craft, Cornish, etc., Wheat focused on strategic enrollment management, portfolio development, art-writing and professional practices. As radio producer and activist for Low-Power FM, Wheat collaborated with WCBN, FreeRadioSAIC, Chicago Independent Radio Project (CHIRP), and the online platform Artfare where she broadcast 80+ weekly artist interviews. Carolina is now also Director at Fridman Gallery on the Bowery in NYC. In her role, she manages the gallery's program, liaising with incredible artists, and leading art-fair presentations.

Jeffrey Yang is the author of the poetry collections Line and Light; Hey, Marfa (winner of the Southwest Book Award); Vanishing-Line; and An Aquarium (winner of the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award). He is the translator of Bei Dao’s autobiography City Gate, Open Up; Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Liu Xiaobo’s June Fourth Elegies; Ahmatjan Osman’s Uyghurland, the Farthest Exile; and Su Shi’s East Slope. He is the editor of the poetry anthologies Birds, Beasts, and Seas and Time of Grief, a volume of Walt Whitman’s poetry and prose, The Sea Is a Continual Miracle, and an expanded edition of Mary Oppen’s Meaning a Life: An Autobiography. Yang has received fellowships from the DAAD artists-in-Berlin program, the Lannan Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Omina Freundeshilfe Foundation. He edits books for New Directions Publishing and New York Review Books.