Marc Handelman - January 2025

Marc Handelman (he/him) is a visual artist and teacher, based in Brooklyn, New York. Often involving long-term research-oriented projects, Handelman’s work examines the aesthetics of state, colonial and imperial power in the afterlives of Landscape in contemporary life. His practice explores the ways the present is haunted, as through a ventriloquism of these images, tropes, and forms of rhetoric, so ingrained, so naturalized and so seemingly emptied out, that they appear nearly invisible. Through painting, in addition to artists’ books, installation and video, his work resurfaces these afterlives, critically exploring their ideological violence, as it reimagines different way of seeing, feeling, and thinking through Landscape and our entanglements within it. Handelman received his BFA in Painting from RISD and an MFA from Columbia University. He has exhibited extensively throughout the United States as well as internationally in such venues as PS1 MoMA, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Artists Space, The Orlando Museum of Art, The Royal Academy of Art in London, The Royal Swedish Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, The Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, The Portland Museum of Contemporary Art, The Rubin Museum, The Matsumoto City Museum of Art, and the Storefront for Art and Architecture, among others. Handelman is an Associate Professor at The Mason Gross School of the Arts, at Rutgers University. He is represented by Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in New York.

Visit Marc’s website here.

Marc Handelman, Installation view of Discovery of a Flower, Contours of a Pond, SE Cooper Contemporary, Portland, OR, 2022. Photo by Derek Franklin

Jarid del Deo - January 2025

Jarid del Deo is a painter living and working in Maine. His oil paintings utilize the New England landscape as a tested vehicle for investigating color, shape and composition. Del Deo prefers a long contemplative study of his surroundings, plucking out details that best describe a place. A personal point of view and sense of the mystical are important to him.

Visit Jarid’s website here.

Reuben Telushkin - January 2025

Reuben Telushkin (b. 1988, Holyoke, MA) is based in Detroit, MI. He graduated with a BA in Studio Art from Hampshire College in 2012. He lived in Oakland, CA, exhibiting at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco with a grant from Burnt Oranges. He then moved to Detroit in 2015, where he worked at Allied Media Projects. He was a resident at Talking Dolls Studio, where he exhibited a solo exhibition in 2022. From 2017-2021 he was a National Organizer at Jewish Voice for Peace, working to end US material support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine, and building common cause between the American Jewish left and the Black liberation movement in the US. Recently he was a Gilbert Fellow at Cranbrook Academy of Art, where he earned an MFA in 4D Design in 2024. He has exhibited at Brecht Forum in New York, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, the Charles H. Wright Museum of African American History, and he has produced public commissions for Library Street Collective. He was a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, ACRE Residency, and is scheduled to attend Surf Point in York, ME and the Interactive Electronic Arts residency at Alfred University. Telushkin’s work synthesizes traditional craft with digital fabrication to problematize binaries of human/machine, ancient/modern, nature/culture, etc. Applying fractal geometric design principles across a diversity of media such as sculpture, sound, writing, and performance, Telushkin takes things apart and puts them back together, in a desire to understand the nature of imperfect systems.

Visit Ruben’s website here.

Kaitlin Kylie Pomerantz - February 2025

Photo by Naomieh Jovin

Kaitlin Pomerantz is a visual artist, educator, and arts researcher engaged with ecosystems resiliencies under extractive economies. She is the founder of MATTERS, an arts learning initiative connecting materials, labor and land.

Visit Kaitlin’s website here.

Untitled (Viriditas), 2024

Mary Henderson - February 2025

Photo by Constance Mensh

Mary Henderson is a visual artist living and working in Philadelphia. She received an AB in fine arts from Amherst College, and an MFA in painting from the University of Pennsylvania. She has been awarded grants and fellowships from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Joseph Robert Foundation, the Center for Emerging Artists, and the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts; she has also completed residencies at Pouch Cove, Soaring Gardens, the Jentel Foundation and the Hambidge Center (where she was the Nena Griffith Distinguished Fellow). Her work has been shown throughout the United States at venues including SPRING/BREAK Los Angeles, the Delaware Contemporary Museum, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Muskegon Museum of Art, the Michener Museum, the Woodmere Museum, Marcia Wood Gallery, Lyons Wier Gallery and Wilding Cran Gallery. Her paintings have been featured in Artmaze, Harper's Magazine, L’Espresso (Italy), New American Paintings, The Philadelphia Inquirer and Art in America. Selected collections include the Rockefeller Foundation, the Muskegon Museum of Art and the West Collection. She is the former co-director of the Philadelphia site of the nonprofit network of artist-run spaces, Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and currently works as a project manager for Mural Arts Philadelphia.

Visit Mary’s website here.

Elijah Ober - February 2025

Elijah Ober is sculptor and animator born and raised in the north-eastern United States. His work explores our relationships with other species, nature at large, digital and manual fabrication processes, our past, and our future. His 2022 show at the CMCA “CALCIUM/ your future ex-squirrelfriend” explored the membranes of our built environment and the horizon of self-actualization. He was included in the PMA and CMCA Biennials in 2020. He graduated from Bowdoin college in 2015, and has attended residencies at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Monson Arts, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture.

Visit Elijah’s website here.

Kearra Amaya Gopee - November 2024

Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) (b. 1994, Miami, FL) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist and facilitator from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, The Kitchen, BAM, and at film festivals internationally. Previously, they have been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art, the Global Fund for Women. From 2023-2024, they were an Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program. In 2024, they will be in residence at the International Studio and Curatorial Program as well as Headlands Center for the Arts. They have participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Red Bull Arts Detroit and NLS Kingston in Jamaica, among others. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University.

Visit Kearra’s website here.

Gina Siepel - November 2024

Gina Siepel (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and woodworker, based in Greenfield MA . Their artistic practice reflects an engagement with place, history, queer experience, and ecology, and their work integrates conceptual concerns and craftsmanship with a focus on wood as a natural and a cultural material. Gina’s works have been shown in museums and galleries nationally, including the Museum for Art in Wood, the Colby Museum, the DeCordova Museum, Vox Populi Gallery, the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, and Amherst College. Gina has been a fellow or artist-in-residence at Skowhegan, Hewnoaks, the Winterthur Museum, the Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, and Mildred’s Lane. She was a 2023 recipient of a Teaching Artist Cohort Grant from the Center for Craft, and has received grants from the Puffin Foundation, and the Northampton Arts Council. Gina holds a BFA from the School of Art + Design at SUNY Purchase and an MFA from the Maine College of Art, and has taught at Amherst College, Mount Holyoke College, and the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. Gina is currently a MacLeish Field Station Artist-in-Residence at Smith College.

Visit Gina’s website here.

Bee Daniel - November 2024

Bee is a 35 year old trans woman with thick eyebrows and a big mouth. Born and raised in western Maine she moved to Portland at age 18, tried art school but went broke and quit to write graffiti and play in bands. She worked on art however and whenever she could, often times for quick money to stay afloat, but learned many different mediums as a result. She helped found New Fruit, a studio space/venue/ print shop and collective in 2014 and was able to learn from and work alongside many renowned artists both local and national. Her graffiti past eventually lead her to learn sign painting and mural work. She has since installed large scale murals all over the country, both of her own works and the works of her peers.

Visit Bee’s website here.

photo credit: Cam Spear

Teresa Silva ‘22 - September 2024

Teresa Silva is an independent curator and writer based in Chicago, IL. Currently, she is co-director of Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Chicago), a non-profit network of independently programmed, artist-run exhibition spaces with locations in Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Greenville, SC. Silva has organized projects and collaborated with artists such as Alberto Aguilar, Susan Giles, Erol Scott Harris, Benjamin Larose, Kirsten Leenaars, Kalup Linzy, Wen Liu, Yvette Mayorga, Josue Pellot, Emilio Rojas, Luis A. Sahagún, Edra Soto, Maryam Taghavi, Denise Treizman, and many more. Previously, she was the director of exhibitions and residencies and then executive and artistic director at the Chicago Artists Coalition from 2014-2022.

Silva previously attended Surf Point in November 2022.

Emilie Stark-Menneg - September 2024

Emilie Stark-Menneg is a Maine-based artist. She received her MFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Art and Design in 2019 and her BFA in combined media from Cornell University in 2007. Her show, Thread of Her Scent is currently on view at the Farnsworth Museum of Art through September 22nd 2024. She is included in the Shelburne Museum Biennial, New England Now: Strange States, in Shelburne, Vermont, open through October 20, 2024. Her recent show, Supernatural, at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art was a multi-media installation, which included works from their collection. Her work was featured in De Buck Gallery’s Online Viewing Room. She has had solo exhibitions at the Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York City; Steven Harvey Fine Arts Projects, New York City; Field Projects Gallery, New York City; Allouche Gallery, New York City; Makebish Gallery, New York City; Kijidome Gallery, Boston, MA; Elizabeth Moss Gallery, Falmouth, ME; and the Leonard R. Craig Gallery, Unity College, Unity, ME. Her installation, Sing Me to Another Sound was included in the 2015 Portland Museum of Art Biennial. Stark-Menneg has collaborated with the American poet Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon on several performances, including at the Cornell Council for the Arts Biennial and the DeCordova Museum’s 2019 Biennial. Stark-Menneg was included in Shrubs a group show at Night Gallery, Los Angeles, in January 2022. Internationally, she has shown in group shows with Woaw Gallery, Hong Kong and Nexx Asia in Taipei, Taiwan. She was recently awarded a Surf Point Foundation Residency in York, Maine. Her work is in the collections of the Farnsworth Museum of Art and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art.

Visit Emilie Stark-Menneg’s website here.

Tigist Yoseph Ron - September 2024

Tigist Yoseph Ron writes: “I was born 1977 in Gondar, Ethiopia. I immigrated to Israel in 1984 and now lives and works in Ra’anana, Israel. I am a graduate of the Visual Communications Department at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design In Jerusalem. The main themes in my work are femininity, motherhood, and community. The starting point for the works generally is a person I am close to, but as the process progresses, the specific identity of the person is slightly obscured in order to emphasize the movement and rhythm that are created. Sometimes the way the light falls on a figure or strong emotions leadsme to place more emphasis on the relations between the shapes and forms in the drawing.”

Visit Tigist Yoseph Ron’s website here.

Grant Klarich Johnson - August 2024

Grant Klarich Johnson is a writer, curator, and educator based in Los Angeles, where he serves as Director of Communications at Regen Projects and teaches at UCLA and ArtCenter College of Design. Interested in international artistic trajectories, shared aesthetic impulses, and formal exchanges, his research considers twentieth and twenty-first century art, craft, textiles, and fashion in a global context. His work has been supported by a Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellowship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellowship at The Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. His writing and interviews have appeared in Artforum, Frieze, and The Brooklyn Rail among other publications, and catalogues including, ‘Catherine Opie: harmony is fraught,’ ‘With Pleasure: Pattern and Decoration in American Art, 1972-1985’ and ‘Emily Gernild, Black Lemons.’ He has worked directly with wide variety of artists on exhibition, performance, and publication projects, including Sheila Hicks, Senga Nengudi, and Lita Albuquerque. He holds a BA from Kenyon College, where he majored in studio art and English, and worked for The Kenyon Review, and a PhD in art history from the University of Southern California.

Victoria Fu - August 2024

Victoria Fu is a visual artist who was born and raised in Los Angeles. She received her MFA from CalArts, MA in Art History/Museum Studies from University of Southern California, and BA from Stanford University. She attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and was in residence at Skowhegan. Fu has received grants from Art Matters and the Harpo Foundation, and is a Guggenheim Fellow. Her artwork is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, Pérez Art Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, among others. She also often collaborates with artist Matt Rich, including designing a subway station for LA Metro. Fu lives and works in San Diego, where she is Professor of Visual Arts at University of San Diego.

Visit Victoria Fu’s website here.

Dena Beard - August 2024

Dena Beard is director of the Leonard & Claire Tow Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College. She was Executive Director of The Lab in San Francisco from 2014–2023 and Assistant Curator at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive from 2007–2014. Beard has organized hundreds projects with artists such as Lutz Bacher, Sadie Barnette, Tongo Eisen-Martin, Ellen Fullman, Dora García, Jacqueline Kiyomi Gork, Anna Halprin, Asher Hartman, Annea Lockwood, Barry McGee, Silke Otto-Knapp, Brontez Purnell, Wadada Leo Smith, and Apichatpong Weerasethakul.

Becci Davis - July 2024

Becci Davis is a visual artist who finds inspiration in exploring nature, archives, memory, and connection to place. Born and raised in Georgia, she now calls Providence, Rhode Island home. Becci works across disciplines, gathering still and moving images, documents, objects, sound, and oral narratives. These archival elements are transformed by her creative practice through layering, sequencing, juxtaposition, manipulating materiality, and adding text. This alchemical process results in monuments of duality: objects, images, and time-based media that combine past and present, nature and artifice, pride and anger, joy and grief, memory and recorded history, evidence and critique.

Visit Becci Davis’ website here.

A.J. McClenon - July 2024

A.J. McClenon is a multidisciplinary artist born and raised in Washington, DC, and currently resides in Chicago. A.J. is a fellowship recipient at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and received a Masters in Fine Arts (2014); and a Bachelor of Arts with a minor in creative writing from the University of Maryland College Park and also studied at The New School. A.J. has performed and shown work in spaces like the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago Filmmakers, LA Film Forum, Echo Park Film Center, Danspace Project, Woman Made Gallery, Longwood Art Gallery, Roman Susan Gallery, Links Hall, the National Museum of African American History & Culture, and Hyde Park Art Center. Alongside artistic experiences, A.J. is passionate about teaching, youth rights, and community collaborations and is currently the co-founder of Film School. This touring film series features Black films that have remained in obscurity.

While excavating tangible ways to approach sonic textures A.J.'s work arrives as poems, Bildungsroman refrains, visual scores, and mixed media translations through performance, installation, repurposed materials, drawings, and moving images. These works represent “place," nature, and the body. Processes of regeneration: sound from image and then the image to material/objects; found and collected objects to assemblage become articulations for Black migrations, geomorphology, escapism, and ecosystems found in nature and technology.

Visit A.J. McClenon’s website here.

Triton Mobley - July 2024

Triton Mobley is a new media artist and researcher, and professor of graphic + computation design whose interventionist works, and guerrilla performances have been exhibited at CURRENTS Virtual Festival, Geidai Games Online at Tokyo University of the Arts, Art Basel Miami and staged in New York, Boston, Providence, and Japan. Triton’s praxis culls together critical making methodologies across performative installations, programmable fabrications and speculative industrial design—fashioning polemical art object assemblages that engender public reexamination. Triton holds an MFA in Digital+Media from the Rhode Island School of Design and earned his PhD in Media Arts + Practice—as an Annenberg Fellow—from the University of Southern California. Triton's doctoral research and praxis has been presented at the African American History, Culture & Digital Humanities’ conference Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black in Maryland, Art Machines: International Symposium on Computational Media Art at City University of Hong Kong, the (IM)POSSIBILITY conference at Harvard, and most recently at the Taboo - Transgression - Transcendence conference in Vienna. His essay Volumetric Black: Post-Cinematic Blackness is available in the anthology Materializing Digital Futures: Touch, Movement, Vision and Sound by Bloomsbury Press. His latest essay, DEEP.FAKE.BLACKNESS. will be featured in the semiannual publication series Pounds Per Image [PPI] by Pratt Institute. His anthology series of installations titled Keloid Archives debuted in a solo exhibition at Soloway Gallery in Brooklyn in fall 2022, was part of a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art - Arlington in spring 2023, and his latest body of work, Coloured.Aesthetica. debuted in a solo show in February 2024 at the Chazan Gallery in Providence.

Visit Triton Mobley’s website here.

Kayla Mohammadi - July 2024

Kayla Mohammadi, born in San Francisco, received her B.F.A. from University of Washington and M.F.A. from Boston University. Her recent exhibits include Overlap at Caldbeck Gallery, Rockland, ME; The Shape of Color at Perimeter Gallery, Belfast, ME; One Place, Two Views at Maier Art Museum, Lynchburg, VA; Contemporary Responses to Modernism at University of Southern Maine; and Patterns of Influence at The Painting Center, NYC. Kayla s the recipient of several awards including: The American Academy of Arts and Letters Childe Hassam Purchase Prize in 2014; the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award for Painters in 2008 and the Joan Mitchell Artist Residency in New Orleans; the Dedalus Foundation Award for the Vermont Studio School Fellowship in 2008; the Ludwig Vogelstein Foundation Grant in 2006; the Blanche E. Colman Award in 2004; and the Constantin Alajalov Scholarship. She has lectured at institutions including Rhode Island School of Design, University of Washington, Vermont Studio School, and Dartmouth College. She is Assistant Professor at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston and lives and works in Boston and Walpole, Maine.

Visit Kayla Mahammadi’s website here.

Sarah Rose Sharp - April 2024

Sarah Rose Sharp is a writer, photographer and multimedia artist. She writes about art and culture for a number of print and online venues. Sarah was a 2015 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow for Art Criticism and is a 2018 recipient of the Rabkin Foundation Prize. She is a guest lecturer at several universities in Southeast Michigan and served as a mentor in the NYFA Immigrant Artist Mentorship Program in 2018. Sarah has served as guest curator and juror for institutions including Penn State University, Scarab Club, The Terhune Gallery, and The Ann Arbor Art Center. Sarah has shown her work in New York, Seattle, Columbus & Toledo, OH, Covington, KY, and Detroit—including at the Detroit Institute of Arts—with solo shows at Simone De Sousa Gallery and Public Pool. She is primarily concerned with artist and viewer experiences of making and engaging with art.

Visit Sarah Rose Sharp’s website here.