Artists in Residence: Byrdcliffe 2022 Reflections

Kleinert/James Center for theArts

36Tinker Street

Woodstock, NY12498

April 29 - June 11, 2023

Malin Abrahamsson is an inter-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. She maintains an active arts practice and is the recipient of numerous public commissions, residencies, grants, and awards. In the fall of 2022, Malin was selected as a 2-year Works in Public fellow: a fully funded commission and public art program offered by The Arts Students League of New York. Born and raised in northern Sweden, Malin received her BFA with an honorable mention from The School of Visual Arts in 1998.

Conceptual artist from Houston, TX. Tyler Allen received his MFA in Integrated Practices from Pratt Institute (2022) & BFA from Texas Southern University (2019), Tyler Allen works in a variety of mediums, but focus on collage, printmaking, and assemblage.

Allen focuses on utilizing the Black image in many different forms to create and uplift the presence and traditions that exist within the multifaceted Black experience and exploring both historical and contemporary society, and the role that Black people have played in various circumstances. All allowing for the magic, strength, and willpower of Black culture to be displayed proudly. While also imputing motifs from his upbringing to create juxtapositions that are tied to sports, pop-culture, and environmental circumstances that are unique to Allen, but are also shared in many Black communities.

Kerri Ammirata

Kerri Ammirata is an artist who lives and works in Ridgewood, Queens. She earned her MFA from Boston University in 2010. She is the recipient of the following awards and residencies: Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, Woodstock (2022), The Sam and Adele Golden Foundation for the Arts, New York (2019), Ne'Na Contemporary Art Space/Monfai Cultural Center Residency, Chiang Mai, Thailand (2019), NYCT Cultural Advocacy & Equity Program, New York (2015); Vermont Studio Center, Clowes Full Fellowship (2012). Recent exhibitions include Gertie’s Window Project, NYC; CityLimits, Park Place Gallery, NYC; TheScenic Route,1969 Gallery, NYC; AlongtheMTrain, The Yard, NYC; Horology, Jack Hanley, NYC; WinterGroup Show, Orgy Park, NYC.

Referencing sacred geometry and mathematics, her paintings dissolve boundaries and disintegrate shapes into hypnotic, rhythmic marks. Each work is made with her invented technique of paint carving. The surfaces are formed through the accrual of hundreds of layers of acrylic paint which she then carve into with woodworking and printmaking tools; a ritualistic action that is both aggressive and meditative. Although the work is carefully planned, in the moment of execution, the relief carving dictates the final look of the piece. These contemplative movements create a sacred space within the studio in which to find truth and transcendence within each work.

Ari Chaves

Ari Chaves is a painter based in Brooklyn, and is originally from Upstate New York. Chaves works primarily in oils but also incorporates acrylic, latex paint, paper and cardboard into their practice. The medium of paint itself is significant to the work in that it relates to a transient and ephemeral experience. Growing up in about a dozen living spaces all in close proximity, Her understanding of “home” has always been a concept opposed to a location. Today their work collages actual and imagined spaces and histories with visual and emotional material collected from different sites and points in time. Chaves paints to explore scenes preserved by the potency of memory, while possessing the scope to intervene with re-written or newly imagined outcomes.

Sarah Crofts

Melissa Hyatt Foss is a musician, instrument-maker, composer and teaching artist hailing from Maryland and Vermont. After receiving her undergraduate degree in Art History at James Madison University she relocated to Buenos Aires, Argentina where she studied and developed her career as a performer, researcher, and teaching artist for over a decade. She completed her master’s degree in Musical Creation, New Technologies and Traditional Arts at the National University of Argentina, specializing in the recreation of Pre-Colonial sound artifacts of the Americas and electroacoustic composition. For seven years she was a soloist, touring in Argentina and around the world, with the Orchestra of Indigenous Instruments and New Technologies.

Melissa has cultivated an interdisciplinary practice that takes shape in hand-built musical instruments and organic electronica. Her work explores sound, its ability to affect consciousness, and its power to generate moments of collective effervescence.Her composition “Hanblecheyapi,” which was composed using a collection of her own recreations of historical instruments from the three Americas, was one of the International Rostrum of Composers’ 12 recommended works in 2018 and has since been broadcast by the BBC and other radio programs across Europe and Asia.

She is currently based in Baltimore, Maryland, where she is a Resident Artist with the Creative Alliance.

Peter Fulop studied ceramics in Hódmezovásárhely, Hungary. Fulop set up his studio in Ireland, and furthered his training in the UK, China, Korea, and Japan, where he became Koie Ryoji's student. Fulop's work can be found in many private and public collections including, Archie Bray Ceramic Foundation, MT, USA (2013) and

Freeborn & Peter’s LLP, Chicago, (2007) in USA; Mungyeong Ceramic Museum (2010-12) and Korea Ganjin Celadon Museum, Ganjin, (2011) in Korea; Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, Shigaraki (2007), INAX Corporation, Tokoname (2004) and IWCAT Collection, Tokoname (2004) in Japan; the National Museum of Ireland, Dublin (2008), the Office of Public Works, Farmleigh House, Dublin (2004) in Ireland; Ulster Museum, Belfast (2011) in Northern Ireland. Peter has received numerous Arts Council of Ireland, County Councils and Culture Ireland awards and bursaries in support of undertaking artistic residencies and for developing new work. His work was featured in several books, catalogues, magazines and newspapers, including Ceramics Ireland Magazine; Ceramic Review Magazine, UK; Irish Ceramics Book by John Goode, Millcove Press, Ireland; Hands On: The Art Of Crafting In Ireland Book by Sylvia Thompson, Liberties Press, Dublin, Ireland; House and Home Magazine, and many more.

Skye Gilkerson, 15°S;115°Wat14second,soundvibrations,inkonpaper,18” x 24”

Skye Gilkerson is an interdisciplinary artists based in New York, with roots on a fourth-generation farm in South Dakota. Her work in sculpture, installation, photography, film, and collage often playfully compares human timescales with celestial cycles, and has been shown at the Pensacola Museum of Art, the Contemporary Museum of Baltimore, and FLAG Foundation in New York. She was awarded a Chenven Foundation grant, a Smack Mellon Studio Fellowship, and artist residency grants with the La Napoule Art Foundation in La Napoule, France, and Tilleard Projects on Lamu Island, Kenya. Gilkerson’s solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art was listed by the Baltimore Sun as one of the Top Ten Art Shows of the Year. Her work is featured in the Robert L. Phannebecker Collection, the Vanderbilt University Collection, and many personal collections in the US and Germany.

Tristan Higginbotham (b. 1996) is a multidisciplinary from her Tennessee Mountain Home. Currently she maintains a studio practice in Brooklyn, NY and rehabilitates birds four days a week at the Wild Bird Fund. Tristan received her BFA from Watkins College in 2018. She participated in the NYC Audubon Governors Island residency in 2019, the Stoveworks residency in 2021, and is an advocate for Bird-Safe Glass.

Higginbotham’s recent sculptures have been directly inspired by the built habitats of animals and the structures engineered by humans to simulate them in the process of care and rehabilitation. Through her work with wildlife, both in a clinic and in the field, she has become obsessed with the practice of enrichment, by which an animal’s core environmental comforts and needs are provided via an echoing of and slight mimesis of nature. The resourcefulness employed here, necessary for both the nestmakers themselves and the copycats in turn, is a driving concept that she employes when she sculpts. She begins by collecting, foraging for charged items that resonate in their evocative gestures and the history worn on their surfaces. Wood, seed pods, bird eggs, and shells are then combined, through an open-ended process of formal exploration and intuitive play, with a number of inorganic, often structural materials, such as steel wire, discarded plastic, cable ties, and wet/dry felting. Using a diverse palette of homemade adhesives, including a lard-based suet and a wood glue/dryer lint/sawdust mix, the structures are fleshed out as collaged bodies, masses not concerned with straight replication, but content as distant relatives of the natural world.

Sarah House works primarily with ceramic materials to creates abstract sculpture and Installation art inspired by the complex beauty of natural fractals. House earned her BFA from Temple University Tyler School of Art, and her MFA from Tulane University, graduating from both institutions with honors. She has participated in nine Artist in Residence programs both internationally as well as within the United State. House is a Lamar Windgate Fellow, a Nyberg Fellow, and a 2022 Career Advancement Grant recipient from the Center for Craft. Sarah House has been recognized globally for her work while participating in exhibitions across Europe, Asia and North America. She is currently a Visual Arts Instructor at New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts, the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts. House is represented by Ann Connelly Fine Art, is a member of Baton Rouge Gallery and is a resident of 139 Mehle Studios in Old Arabi, Louisiana.

Karen

Karen Hudes is a writer and editor whose work has appeared in TinHouse, the NewYorkTimes, NewYork Magazine, TheAwland TheHairpin, among others. She earned an MFA in fiction writing at Hunter College, where she taught creative writing, and has also facilitated writing workshops at Fountain House in NYC.

Her personal essay, “Diode,” highlighted in the Byrdcliffe Guild 2022 AIR Exhibition, was published on ThomasPynchon.com in February 2023, and featured on the site Mad in America.

Nancy Y. Kim is a Bologna based Korean-American artist exploring identity and dislocation through experiences of otherness/foreignness and codifying them in elements of painting and sculpture. Selected as artist-in-residence at Byrdcliffe Artist Residency in Woodstock, NY and Villa Bergerie in Huesca, Spain, recent exhibitions include Foundation for Contemporary Art’s “Sonia Louise Presents” at Greene Naftali in NYC, “Brooklyn Seoul” at Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, and the Terrain Biennial in Chicago. She is a contributor to Maake Magazine, a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts (VCCA) Fellow, and VCCA Fellows Council member. Her works can be found in private collections in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Italy, Spain, and Switzerland.

Morgan King is a visual artist based in Brooklyn, NY working with textiles, collage and photography. They attended the School of Visual Arts in New York City, NY from 2013 - 2017 and graduated with Honors and a degree in Visual and Critical Studies. Morgan is currently pursuing their Masters in Library and Information Science at Simmons University. Their work interrogates the space between fact, fiction, and history, questioning the often arbitrary boundaries between them. Their process involves mining family archives as well as public, community centered archives and archives that collect histories of queer and trans people. In addition to making art from archival materials, They are also employed in archival settings, which has furthered their desire to understand the role of an archive on a personal and political level, as well as what it means to create one.

King expresses that “As a trans and gender non-conforming individual, everything I create takes root and filters through my own identity. As a result, I often craft combinations of images and materials that create a shared meaning despite their disparate sources, which to me represents the painful juxtaposition between nostalgia and identity.”

“The pieces I make are decisive yet clumsy, a combination of carefully considered elements with the reflexive intuition of quick mark making” states King, “No matter the medium, I approach all of my work through an archivist and collector’s eye”

Raghubir Kintisch

Raghubir Kintisch is a multidisciplinary artist, educator, and writer born in NYC and has lived and worked in Los Angeles since 1989. They received an MFA from OTIS College of Art and Design in 2017 and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design in 1976 This summer, Kintisch will be a Byrdcliffe Cottage Artist in Residence with partial funding courtesy of the Pollack-Krasner Foundation. Last year, they were a Byrdcliffe Communal Artist-in-Residence for visual arts and in 2021, a recipient of a Silver Sun Foundation residency through The Secret City - also in Woodstock, N.Y. - where they kick-started the last of four self-published books about the confluence of artistic and spiritual practice. Their two most recent and ongoing series, SleightsofMindand FromOneTongueCame ThousandsMore,consist mostly of oil paintings on paper although collage and ink paintings on paper are also included. These works explore the cumulative transformative power of fragments, abstractions, and the repetition of devotional iconography and the terrain of the trance practitioner.

Ariana Kolins is an interdisciplinary artist who makes art to process the world around her. Focusing on the unseen, she observes the beauty in the small daily moments of life, collects and transforms mundane objects into monumental and slightly absurd creations. It is her hope that through this work others will be inspired to look at their daily rituals with a new perspective. Ariana graduated with an MFA in Ceramics from the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has made and shown work throughout the country. Ariana currently lives in Farmington, Connecticut where she teaches Ceramics and Sculpture at Miss Porter’s School. You can see more of her work at www.arianakolins.com.

Cecilia Lu is a Chinese-American artist based in NYC. Her art practice engages multi-generational and familial histories in the context of mourning and non-western healing practices. She works primarily in installations composed of ceramics, video, performance, and printmaking. She received her BFA from Cornell University. Additionally, she is currently Curatorial Assistant at Wave Hill (Bronx, NY).

Weihui Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and grew up in Queens, New York. Her paintings explore the immigrant experience through personal narrative, as well as the broader environmental and psychological implications of the modern landscape. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Trestle Gallery, Site:Brooklyn, and 440 Gallery among others, and she has been awarded residencies at Santa Fe Art Institute (NM), Byrdcliffe (NY), ChaNorth (NY), and Arteles Creative Center (Finland). Lu holds a B.A. from Barnard College, Columbia University.

Danny Lulu

2022 AiR Program Assistant Julia Maisel-Berick created “Portrait on a Paper Quilt (Offering/Gathering)” during her two months working at Byrdcliffe. Julia likes to use repurposed materials, such as vintage lifestyle magazines, deadstock crayons, salvaged paints, and found natural objects in her work. An American Studies major at Vassar College, Julia reflects her interest in images of Americana, kitsch, mass media influence and the culture of domesticity in her compositions. During her time at Byrdcliffe, Julia’s work evolved to incorporate motifs of quilt squares, as she is fascinated with the communal heritage of quilting and the optical illusions of the patterns. She also embraced natural materials such as dried flowers, moth carcasses, and robin egg fragments to add elements of fragility and mortality.

Collin was born and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area. He studied Critical Geography, Relational Aesthetics, and Fine Metal Work during his undergrad at The Evergreen State College. After graduating, he spent a year traveling from Nicaragua to Chile working on bio-dynamic farms and making art with found materials. He then returned to San Francisco to study Intaglio Print Making and Classical Realism Painting. He received his MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute with a focus in painting, photography, and new genres in 2020. In 2022, he received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Fellowship, and was awarded a five month art residency at Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock New York. In February 2023, Collin was awarded a month long residency at The Jentel Foundation in Wyoming. He is now living and painting in an industrial loft in Philadelphia.

Born in Rhinebeck, NY, and longtime resident of Woodstock, NY, Eliza McKenna divides her time between the Hudson Valley and New York City. After having grown up in an environment riddled with opioid abuse, her photographs have focused on profoundly personal experiences with grief and loss. She attended Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and received her bachelors in film studies. During her time at Wesleyan, she was a course assistant to both film and photography courses, most notably working under photographer Sasha Rudensky. She is now pursuing her masters in fine art at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY. In 2021, after a long battle with a neurodegenerative disease, her father was killed by Covid-19. In an effort to makesense of this untimely loss, she began a photographic relationship with a man named Larry. Her work with Larry is ongoing.

Rangi McNeil

Amalya Megerman is multidisciplinary visual artist, working primarily between performance, installation, painting, and stained glass. Her work draws on traditional Jewish ritual, organic materials, and themes around body, anxiety, family history, and femininity. Her work probes the tensions between safety and discomfort, paranoia and vigilance, and what it means to be complicit. In doing so, she investigates and refigures the way intergenerational trauma manifests in her body.

Maurice Moore is currently a doctoral Performance Studies Candidate at the University of California-Davis. Moore’s art spans multiple disciplines including video, drawing and collage which they approach through queer Black theory incorporating archival written and visual material and re-interpreting their own past work. With inspiration from John Cage’s visual poems, Moore uses African American Vernacular/Gesture English (AAVE) to engage linguistically with the content of their work in both their video and artist statement.

In the film “Clapping While Black (feat. Pan-African flag)”, Moore describes the way it “involves mark making that allows a nonbinary person such as myself, the space and freedom to push further and engage wit balancing and negotiating the joys & pains Black Queer performers experience both inside and outside African and African American Diasporas as creatives.” Moore performs this mark-making on levels both visual and verbal that brings history, theory, and their own experience together in this five minute digital video piece.

Mindy Oringer

Simona Prives

Simona Prives is a Brooklyn-based visual artist whose work includes printmaking, painting, drawing, and time-based media. Having received her MFA from Pratt Institute, Prives creates animated collages that incorporate a variety of themes and materials. Her work explores the dialectic of growth and decay and examines our complex relationship between the organic and the man-made.

Prives has been awarded multiple residencies and fellowships, including the Harvestworks, Vermont Studio Center, the Santa Fe Art Institute and Scuola Internazionale di Grafica di Venezia. Prives’ work has been shown in galleries throughout New York and the United States, as well as at the China Arts Museum in Shanghai and in Tokyo, Japan.

Recently Prives was commissioned by MTA Arts & Design to create a 52 channel, site-specific video installation in Fulton Center, Lower Manhattan. Titled “Even While The Dust Moves,” the installation was displayed across the 52 large video screens within the Fulton Center. A wide range of media — including video, drawings, ink paintings, and printmaking — comprised each animated artwork within the larger whole.

Prives currently teaches art and design at Parsons, New York University and is an assistant professor at CUNY.

Allison Roberts, a lens-based artist, works primarily with photography, the moving image, and immersive installations. Roberts’s work has recently been exhibited in ChineseGanJue, South China Museum; Glimpses ofaDrownedWorld, Aggregate Space Gallery (CA); TracesoftheFuture, Momentum Gallery (Poland); ROMBAK,Multimedia University (Malaysia); Movements,Moments, Target Gallery (VA); and Contemporary Landscape, CICA Museum (South Korea). Her other recent exhibitions include solo shows at the Thelma Sadoff Center for the Arts (WI), and the Rae Cultural Centre, (Vaskjala, Estonia). She has been published in several photography journals including SHOTS,AllAboutPhoto,andPastiche,andHarborReview-an online space for poetry and art. Her experimental films have been selected for numerous international film festivals. Born and raised in Oklahoma, Roberts holds an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Website: allisonaroberts.com Instagram: @allison.a.roberts

Kath is a queer artist from Washington state, currently living in Bellingham. They graduated with a double degree from University of Washington in 2016: BFA in Painting & Drawing and a BA in English Literature. Kath’s studio practice focuses on creating unexpected relationships between disparate materials—both organic and inorganic. The attention toward relational dynamics in their work is centered on the notion of “two-ness,” or how we exist and situate ourselves within polarities. Although in flux, they understand this universal two-ness as the experience of finding ourselves both in and out, attached and disconnected, supported and falling—the kinds of dualities that saturate our human experiences, and rub up closely against the unsettling graininess of desire, memory, and power. Kath’s material work with form strives to exist as some kind of mirror, or at least a way to pause and peer at ways of being more closely. Kath has had a solo show, “Signs of Feeling,” at Terrain Gallery in Spokane, Washington and has been an artist-in-residence at Sou’Wester Arts Week in Seaside, Washington, PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon, and most recently the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild in Woodstock, NY.

Rochelle Voyles

Rochelle Voyles is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary artist originally from Toledo, Ohio who works in hand cut collage and acrylic paint. She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute. Her art is an act of deciphering human history and intent through the dislocation, concealment, and repurposing of found images.

She was a February 2023 resident at The Peter Bullough Foundation Residency in Winchester, VA, a September 2022 resident at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony in Woodstock, NY, and an April 2021 resident at the ChaNorth ChaShama Artist Residency in Pine Plains, NY. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, The Local Project, and Collarworks.

Her recent shows include “Floriography” curated by Sonja John at The Yard: Greenpoint, “Re-imagining Rural” with Chashama at One Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn, NY, “Void in Flux” at Random Access Gallery, Syracuse, NY, and “Not just Another Anthropocenic Love Story” at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn, NY.