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.

Mary Temple - April 2024

Mary Temple may be best known for her immersive trompe l'oeil installations—subtle room-sized paintings of light and shadows of trees, flowers and shrubs. However, for the past ten years the artist has built a body of work on canvas and paper which both departs from and amplifies the installation work. While the more recent paintings share the landscape as cornerstone, they expand in color, mark and complexity of surface. Temple has exhibited her work internationally and throughout the United States. She has completed commissioned projects for solo and group institutional exhibitions that include the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, SF, CA; SculptureCenter, LIC, Queens, NY; Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA; The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Rice Gallery, Houston, TX; Western Bridge, Seattle, WA; The Drawing Center, NY, NY; Bunkamura Museum, Tokyo, Japan and the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution in D.C. among many others.

Visit Mary Temple’s website here.

Minsoo Thigpen - April 2024

Minsoo Thigpen (she/her) is a storyteller and tech worker based in Boston, with a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and BA in Applied Math from Brown University in 2018. She is currently working on building and designing tools for the responsible/ethical development of AI at Microsoft. Her work spans across painting, multimedia, zines and comics with a specific focus on family, language, diaspora and grief.

Visit Minsoo Thigpen’s website here.

Biba Bell - March 2024

Biba Bell in the Beverly Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Biba Bell is a dancer, choreographer, and writer based in Detroit. Her choreographic work, often set in unconventional venues, focuses on domesticity, labor, and architecture. Her current project investigates dance and arts activism as it intersects forest protection and conservation, through the lens of what she theorizes as epiphytic choreographies. Bell’s work has been presented at the Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, Roulette Intermedium, Jack NY, Centre Pompidou, Garage for Contemporary Culture, Jack Hanley Gallery, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Detroit Institute of Arts, Insel Hombroich, amongst others. She has performed with Maria Hassabi and Walter Dundervill and was a founding member of the performance collective Modern Garage Movement (2005-2011, 2021). She earned her PhD in Performance Studies from New York University and is an Associate Professor of Dance at Wayne State University. Of her dancing the New York Times writes "It’s invigorating to watch someone who borders on wild."

Visit Biba Bell’s website here.

Cody Castle-Stack - March 2024

Cody Castle-Stack in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Cody Castle-Stack (born 1994) is an artist and a local arts organizer based in Portland. His artistic practice is an endless painterly exercise, a sandbox to form, and challenge his notions of creation. Together, his paintings aim to elevate immediacy and symbolism, and prioritize aesthetic and conceptual variance over expressions of skill. In 2018, Castle-Stack co-founded New System Exhibitions, a not-for-profit art exhibition space in the beloved New System Laundry building in the West Bayside neighborhood of Portland. The six co-directors, young artists themselves, operate a scaled-back exhibition environment where local emerging artists are given ample space to execute their creative vision and share it with their community. He has exhibited throughout Maine and has received a Mellon Humanities Fellowship and Nellie C. Watterson Fellowship. Currently, Cody works as the director of art and exhibitions at Moss Galleries.

Visit Cody Castle-Stack’s website here.

Marisa Lerer - March 2024

Marisa Lerer at Surf Point. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Marisa Lerer, Ph.D. is Associate Professor of modern and contemporary art history and chair of the Art History & Digital Media Art Department at Manhattan College. She specializes in Latin American and Latinx art, public art, and memorials. Her interests in art in the public sphere are reflected in both the content of her courses and in publications, which have focused on art under dictatorship in Latin America, memorials dedicated to victims of state-sponsored terrorism in Argentina and Chile, Contested Monuments to Christopher Columbus and the 19th-century independence leader Juana Azurduy de Padilla in Buenos Aires, and public sculptures in the US southwest by Luis Jiménez. In 2023, she was the George Gurney Senior Fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum and was awarded a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend Grant for her current book project on Latinx public memorials. She has also been honored with fellowships from Fulbright, New York University/Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique, and CUNY’s Center for Place Culture and Politics, among others. She has previously held positions as Assistant Professor of contemporary art at the University of Denver and as a part-time faculty member at Parsons, The New School for Design. She serves on the editorial board of Public Art Dialogue, which functions as a forum for critical discourse and commentary about the practice of public art.

Read more about Marisa Lerer here.

Dan Dowd - February 2024

Dan Dowd. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Dan Dowd is an assemblage artist, photographer, and filmmaker living in Phippsburg, Maine since 2001. His artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States. In 2011, Dan was the recipient of a Good Idea Grant for his solo installation “Anna Hepler’s Head” at the Coleman Burke Gallery in Brunswick, ME. In 2020 he was chosen by the Maine Arts Commission to create a found object eagle relief sculpture for the Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham, ME. He is represented by Caldbeck Gallery in Rockland, ME and received his bachelor’s degree in Liberal Studies from Framingham University. Dan is an active member of the Phippsburg Land Trust and takes film photographs for “Faces of Phippsburg” a fundraising calendar for Phippsburg Historic Preservation (in it’s 17th year).

View Dan Dowd’s work here.

Kemi Ilesanmi - February 2024

Kemi Ilesanmi. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Kemi Ilesanmi has been a DMV worker, retail clerk, receptionist, business school dropout, museum curator, foundation officer, and nonprofit administrator. From 2012-2022, she served as executive director for The Laundromat Project (The LP), a community-based arts organization. Prior to that, Kemi worked at the Walker Art Center and Creative Capital Foundation in curatorial and programming roles, respectively. From 2015-2022, she served on New York City's Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission, including one term as Chair. She serves on the boards of the Brooklyn Museum of Art and Joan Mitchell Foundation. Brooklyn Magazine named her one of the borough's 50 most fascinating people in 2022, and Observer included her on the Arts Power 50 list in 2020. She has been honored by the Metropolitan Museum and Project for Empty Space. She is a graduate of Smith College, NYU, and Coro Leadership NY. Her ongoing commitment to holistic cultural and community care is deeply informed by her Nigerian and Black American roots.

Visit Kemi Ilesanmi’s website here.

Cedric Wilson - February 2024

Cedric Wilson. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Cedric Wilson is a multi-disciplinary artist born in Harlem New York, the son of a zookeeper father and a Roller Derby mother. His work contains an intimate immensity. The sense of colors and forms and movements in his art can be appreciated as visual symphonic poems. Cedric has exhibited at Anthem X at Miami Art Week 2022 upcoming residency at Kolaj Art Magazine in Scotland 2023.

View Cedric Wilson’s Instagram here.

Hollywood by Cedric Wilson. 19 x 24”

Dell Marie Hamilton - January 2024

Dell Marie Hamilton. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Artist, writer and curator, Dell Marie Hamilton has performed extensively throughout the Boston and New England area including at the MFA/Boston, the Clark Art Institute, and the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College. In 2019, she was a participating artist in the Havana Biennial and is a recipient of the Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston’s 2021 James and Audrey Foster Prize. Her expansive practice encompasses performance, painting, drawing, installation, video, sculpture, and photography. Her work has appeared in Hyperallergic, Art in America and NKA: Contemporary Journal of African Art as well as on the cover of Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and the Philosophy of Religion, an anthology published by Duke University Press in 2021. Dell is also the acting director of the Ethelbert Cooper Gallery at Harvard’s Hutchins Center for African and African American Research.

Visit Dell Marie Hamilton’s website here.

Emulsions in Departure #13 by Dell Marie Hamilton.