MAD’s Artist Studios are online!

The Museum’s Artist Fellow, Charisse Pearlina Weston, and Artist Studios resident Alex Dolores Salerno host an informal, virtual studio visit via Zoom webinar. Learn about new directions in contemporary art and design while joining the artists in their homes and studios. Preview works in progress and chat with Charisse and Alex about their inspirations and creative practices.

Open Studio Hours take place on Fridays and welcome visitors of all ages, families, classes and camps, creative cohorts, aspiring artists, and more. Participants are invited to participate in the conversation via Zoom's chat function and will not be on-screen. Members of MAD’s Education team will be on hand to facilitate and help answer any questions.

Established in 2008, MAD’s Artist Studios program has served as an important platform for more than 180 artists and designers to advance their careers.

12:00–12:30 pm ET with Charisse Pearlina Weston
12:30–1:00 pm ET with Alex Dolores Salerno

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Charisse Pearlina Weston’s creative work emerges from deep material investigations of poetics and the autobiographical. She utilizes glass to conceptually embody both the everyday risk of anti-black violence and the precocity and malleability of blackness in the face of this violence. Melding glass sculptures and photography with poetic fragments of black experience, her work examines the interstices of black interiors and intimacies. She reuses and re-articulates materials from past installations to formulate the next to represent both repetition as a symbol of Black cultural production and its reliance on an order of temporal engagement in which the second time encodes an emergent originality. Weston received her MFA from the University of California-Irvine, an MSc from the University of Edinburgh, a BA from the University of North Texas, and completed the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center and Recess (forthcoming), as well as group shows at the Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, and ArtPace, San Antonio (forthcoming).

Alex Dolores Salerno works to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, and the commodification of rest. Their interdisciplinary practice embodies a multiplicity of support structures, and the accumulation of used medical ephemera and bedding collected from their own life and community. Drawing from the bed as a site of collectivity and protest, they argue that to celebrate diverse bodyminds requires an embrace of our interdependencies and a reconfiguration of value and time away from capitalist frameworks. Salerno has exhibited at The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s 8th Floor Gallery, the Ford Foundation Gallery, and Franklin Street Works, and has participated in Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability Residency Program. They earned their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College.