Aurora Tang - March 2023

Aurora Tang on the SPF grounds. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Tang has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) since 2009, and currently serves as its program director. As an independent curator Tang has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, MOCA Tucson, and the City of West Hollywood. She has also worked with the Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, and High Desert Test Sites, where she was managing director from 2011–15. Tang has taught at schools including Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Photo by Elon Schoenholz.

Ja'Hari Ortega - March 2023

Ja’Hari in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Ja’Hari Ortega is a Boston-based artist and advocate interested in the idea of visual language vernaculars. She works in a variety of mediums but is primarily drawn to metal. Having attended Boston's only public high school for the visual and performing arts as well as the nation’s first and only public independent college of art and design, Ja’Hari has been inspired by her city and the people in it. She quickly became a leader in her community and has worked with several arts organizations and institutions on projects such as Boston’s Radical Imagination for Racial Justice Grant that invites Boston-based artists and creatives of color to imagine and co-create justice with their communities.

Protección, 2021

8.5 x 3.5 inch (h x w)

Bronze Sculpture

Nicki Cherry - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Nicki Cherry is an artist based in New York and Chicago. Cherry’s monstrous fiberglass and concrete sculptures incorporate active systems of growth and decay—tulips bloom from stretching tendrils, ceramic bodies leak milky fluids, spine-shaped candles burn and diffuse scent. Their work embraces the awkward and absurd to explore the frequent discomfort that comes with being a body. After initially studying to become a particle physicist, Cherry received their BA from the University of Chicago in 2014 and their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019. Their work has been exhibited at NARS Foundation, the Border Project Space, Flux Factory, ELM Foundation and Shin Gallery in New York; AUTOMAT and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; and the Reva David Logan Center for the Arts, and Slate Arts and Performance in Chicago. They have received grants from Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Cherry was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Meg Hahn - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Meg Hahn is a painter based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions such as the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Able Baker Contemporary, Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Dunes, Zero Station, SOIL, and Collar Works among others. She has been awarded residencies at The Golden Foundation Residency Program, The Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Monhegan Artists’ Residency. She has also been a co-director at Border Patrol, a curatorial collective, since 2017. Meg received her BFA from Maine College of Art & Design.

Jake Price - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Jake Price, Director, Producer, Cinematography, Editor, Writer is a World Press Photo winning producer, director, immersive doc creator and educator. His films and immersive media convey intimate and poignant stories of the human spirit in demanding times. Jake directed the Webby nominated and World Press Photo awarded Unknown Spring, an immersive web doc that focused on tsunami survivors and Fukushima residents in the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear disaster. Unknown Spring was hailed by Filmmaker Magazine as a chronicle of and testament to the Japanese people’s resilience and humanity in the face of unspeakable odds, following the Fukushima meltdown. Jake’s films and immersive media have been funded by POV and were official selections at the New York Film Festival’s Convergence festival. His work appears in The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Orion Magazine, Newsweek, Le Monde II and others throughout the world. Jake is an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia Universities’ Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Jake holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston and teaches Visual Narratives at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Julia Jacquette - January 2023

Photo by Enrique Mendía

Julia Jacquette is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Primarily a painter, she also has worked in ceramics and published a graphic memoir. Slightly longer and more professional for other locations: Julia Jacquette is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the RISD Museum, among other institutions. Jacquette’s work was included in the first installment of PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition, and was the subject of retrospectives at the Tang Museum and at the Wellin Museum. She is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Enrique Mendía - January 2023

Photo by Julee Holcombe

Enrique Mendía is a filmmaker, photographer, art educator, and programmer based in Brooklyn. He was born and raised in Miami and still claims it as his home sometimes. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in Political Theory and studied narrative fiction filmmaking at the FAMU International Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He is currently a Teaching Artist at the Brooklyn Museum.

Julee Holcombe - January 2023

“The Passage” by Julee Holcombe

Julee Holcombe (b.1972) lives and works in New England. She received her MFA in Photography and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work questions photography's truth-telling ability in which to distill our sense of time and curiosity. Her work is documentary, fictional, and autobiographical, reflecting today's world. The landscapes she documents can be decades apart or miles apart as they are reassembled to create mythical realities.

Holcombe's current work, Mythic Patterns, is a slow meditation of our cultural past, culminating and appropriating source materials from magazines, books, and her photo archive. The work reassembles remote “mythic patterns” that mirror the current cultural shifts of a culture devoted to individualism. The work explores the balance of a more "collective" and "universal" experience that reveals the complex nature of the human condition in search of spiritual intimacy.

Holcombe's work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the British Museum of Art in London, England; Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA and the Phoenix Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including a full fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her photographs are in several private and public collections: the Portland Museum of Art, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Photo by Enrique Mendía

Jamie Roux - November 2022

Jamie Roux is a painter who lives in Maine.

Beatrice Wolert - November 2022

Beatrice Wolert in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Hilary Schaffner.

B​eatrice Wolert is a first-generation Polish American visual artist. She was raised in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where she lives and maintains her artistic practice. Wolert works between genres to explore concepts of impermanence, essentiality, and serendipity through the transformation of everyday materials and found objects. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Adelphi University and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Pratt Institute. She recently had a solo show at Underdonk in Bushwick curated by Melissa Staiger. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as ABC No Rio, A.I.R. Gallery, Artists Space, Denise Bibro, D.U.M.B.O. Art Center, Elizabeth Foundation for the ARTS, Feature, Inc., Ground Floor Gallery, Hudson Guild, HQ, Janet Kurnatowski, Lorimoto, NURTUREart, Park Church Co-Op, Roxbury Art Group, Trestle Contemporary Art Gallery, Trestle Projects, and Exit Art in New York. Nationally and internationally, she has exhibited at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI, BLAM Projects in Los Angeles, The Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in New Zealand, and Creative Innovation Center CIC, Taunton, England, amongst others. She has installed numerous public outdoor installations, given artist talks and partook in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Art’s shift​ residency, New York, NY, and the Bridge Residency, Los Angeles, CA. More: beawolert.com​, Instagram​ ​@beawolert​.

Teresa Silva - November 2022

Teresa Silva in Surf Point Foundation living room. Photo by Hilary Schaffner.

Teresa Silva is the Executive and Artistic Director at the Chicago Artists Coalition, a nonprofit organization supporting emerging and mid-career artists and curators. Silva has presented exhibitions, talks and lectures at venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, School of the Art Institute, Ox-Bow Art School and Artists' Residency, and the Artist Communities Alliance. She has served as a Visual Arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous others. In 2018, she was an Artists' Administrators Resident at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Program in Captiva, FL.

In 2022, Silva was ranked #5 in NewCity's prestigious list, Art 50: Chicago's Visual Vanguard for her influence and contributions to the Chicago art community.

Olga Herrera - September 2022

Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, independent curator, and scholar. She is currently Managing Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalization, networks of cultural production, and circulation of modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is the author of American Interventions and Modern Art in South America (University Press of Florida, 2017) winner of the 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication; Toward the Preservation of a Heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States (University of Notre Dame, 2008); and editor of the books Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic (AMA, 2019), and iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word (AMA, 2019). Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications of the International Center of the Art of the Americas, Archives of American Art Journal, MIT ARTMargins, Diálogo, Public Art Dialogue, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and others. Herrera holds a Ph.D. in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and theories of globalization from George Mason University. She is the founder of Artista, a Latinx and Latin American women artist digital platform.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg - September 2022

Might Delete Later (2021) by Joe Mama-Nitzberg.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg lives and works in Catskill, New York. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design. He works in various forms and media including photography, video and collage. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Gallerie Catherine Bastide, Regina Rex, David Zwirner, the Salzburger Kunstverein, the Renaissance Society, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Basilica Hudson and White Columns. His work is in the collection of the Walker Art Center and MOCA Los Angeles, and he is a recipient of an Art Matters Grant.

Visit Joe’s website here.

iliana emilia García - September 2022

Born in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, 1970, García received her AAS from Altos de Chavon/The School of Design in the Dominican Republic in 1989, and her BFA in Communication Design from Parsons The New School of Design in 1991. She is currently finishing her MA in Biography & Memoir at the Graduate Center in NY. Garcia works in big format drawings on canvas and paper, and escalating installations depicting her most iconic symbols: the chair and the written word. Her work has been written about in numerous art publications and exhibited at the Art Museum of the Americas, Washington, DC; BRIC, Brooklyn, NY; Exit Art, NY; The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, DC; El Museo del Barrio, NY; and other venues. Her work is part of the Smithsonian Museum of American Art collection, El Museo del Barrio’s collection, and several private collections. She is a founding member of the Dominican York Proyecto Grafica (DYPG), a printmaking collective.

Visit iliana’s website here.

Chanel Thervil - August 2022

Chanel Thervil is a Haitian American artist and educator that uses varying combinations of abstraction and portraiture to convene communal dialogue around culture, social issues, and existential questions. At the core of her practice lies a desire to empower and inspire tenderness and healing among communities of color through the arts. She's been making a splash in Boston via her educational collaborations, public art, and residencies with institutions like The Museum of Fine Arts, The Boston Children's Museum, and PBS Kids.

Visit Chanel’s website here.

Bryana Bibbs - August 2022

"3.1.21/3.9.21”, 2021, 15.5” x 9”, handwoven hand-carded hand-spun wool and angelina fiber

Bryana Bibbs (b. 1991) is a Chicago-based textile artist and art educator who earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts with an emphasis in Fiber and Material Studies at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her work comes from her struggles with depression, anxiety, relationships, self-validation, and how to deal with everyday occurrences. She is the founder of The We Were Never Alone Project - A Weaving Workshop for Victims and Survivors of Domestic Violence and serves on the Surface Design Association’s Education Committee. Bryana’s work has been on view at The Evanston Art Center (Evanston, Illinois), ARC Gallery (Chicago, Illinois), The Bridgeport Art Center (Chicago, Illinois), The Wayback (Chicago, Illinois), and Room482 (Brooklyn, New York), The Museum of Science and Industry (Chicago, Illinois), and Praxis Fiber Workshop (Cleveland, Ohio).

Visit Bryana’s website here.

Kate Fowle - August 2022

Kate Fowle is a curator and the former Director of MoMA PS1. From 2013–2019 she was the inaugural chief curator at Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow and director-at-large of Independent Curators International (ICI) in New York, where she was the executive director from 2009–13. Prior to this she was the inaugural international curator at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (2007–08). In 2002 she co-founded the Master’s Program in Curatorial Practice for California College of the Arts in San Francisco, for which she was the Chair until 2007. Before moving to the United States, Fowle was co-director of Smith + Fowle in London from 1996–2002. From 1994–96 she was curator at the Towner Art Gallery and Museum in Eastbourne, East Sussex.

Legacy Russell - August 2022

Legacy Russell is a curator and writer. Born and raised in New York City, she is the Executive Director & Chief Curator of The Kitchen. Formerly she was the Associate Curator of Exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem. Russell holds an MRes with Distinction in Art History from Goldsmiths, University of London with a focus in Visual Culture. Her academic, curatorial, and creative work focuses on gender, performance, digital selfdom, internet idolatry, and new media ritual. Russell’s written work, interviews, and essays have been published internationally. She is the recipient of the Thoma Foundation 2019 Arts Writing Award in Digital Art, a 2020 Rauschenberg Residency Fellow, and a recipient of the 2021 Creative Capital Award. Her first book is Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020). Her second book, BLACK MEME, is forthcoming via Verso Books.

Visit Legacy’s website here.

Tyrone Mitchell - July 2022

Ways of Grain by Tyrone Mitchell

I was born in 1944 in Savannah, Ga. Family moved to Atlantic City, NJ in the early 1950’s. I attended High School there. My interest in Art seems to be connected to an Artist/ Barber in Savannah, Ulysses Davis who made wooden pieces of both timely events as well as demons which he called his creations. That interest resurfaced during later High School. Upon graduating I came to New York and enrolled at the Art Students League and later in the New York Studio School. I have maintained a studio in NY since 1965. In 1969 I traveled in West Africa with a keen desire to witness first hand the culture and its creators. I am a Mcdowell Colony Fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow A recipient of a Readers Digest Fellowship held at The Claude Monet Foundation in Giverny, France. I am also a recipient of a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant. I am a Professor of Art at Queens College. I currently live and work in Ancram NY.

Cole Caswell - July 2022

Cole Caswell researches the remnants and patterns in our landscape that reflect contemporary strategies of survival. Through strata of observation, technology, subjectivity, and his surroundings, Caswell investigates geography and its impact on our perceived ability to survive. He uses traditional, historic and digital photographic media to investigate our present condition. Working and living in a nomadic format Cole travels throughout the county exploring our ability to subsist within the contemporary environment. His studio is located on Peaks Island off the coast of Maine.