Press Room

Featuring artists Austin Ballard, Cristina Dias, Pamela Liou, Aqeel Malcolm, Patrice Renee Washington, Mallory Weston, and Sarah Zapata

New York, NY (June 24, 2016)

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) announces the newest session of its Artist Studios Residency Program and Van Lier Fellowship. The selected artists, all of whom will be assigned studio space in the Museum from June through September, are Austin Ballard, Cristina Dias, Pamela Liou, Aqeel Malcolm, Patrice Renee Washington, Mallory Weston, and Sarah Zapata.

Launched as an education initiative in 2008, the Artist Studios Program brings artists and designers to the Museum's sixth floor, where they work in studios that are open to the public. An innovative model of engagement, the program has served more than 130 emerging and midcareer artists and designers. Each Artist Studios Program Resident is assigned studio space one day a week, while the Van Lier Fellow, whose residency is funded by the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship Program, works 40 hours per week. The artists welcome dialogue, making themselves available to discuss their work and craft; visitors to the studios are encouraged to inquire about their processes, materials, and concepts.

"The Artist Studios are an essential part of the Museum experience," said Carli Beseau, Manager of Artist Studios and Docent Programs. "The artists bring materials and processes to life for the public, and foster dialogue. The goal is to encourage appreciation and understanding of creativity today."

The Summer 2016 Artist Studios Residents and Van Lier Fellow were selected from over 350 applicants by the Artist Studios Selection Committee, made up of Museum staff members and outside professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design.

SUMMER 2016 ARTIST STUDIOS RESIDENTS

Cristina Dias (Tuesday)

Cristina Dias is an artist inspired by nature. Fascinated with carnivorous plants, she invites visitors to take a fresh look at surfaces, textures, colors, and forms. At MAD, Dias explores ways to push the interactive nature of her work by inviting visitors to engage with her creative process as she works on her ongoing series Criatura. In this series, materials such as wire, fibers, and magnets are embedded into pigmented silicone. This allows for pieces that are flexible and that can be arranged into different compositions, making Dias' wearable art both versatile and playful. Dias received her BFA in 3D/Metals from Massachusetts College of Art and Design and has taken classes at Opere International Jewellery School, Netherlands, and University of Brasília, Brazil. She also has a Certificate in Arts Administration from New York University.

Sarah Zapata (Wednesday)

Exploring issues pertaining to her identity as a Peruvian American artist, Sarah Zapata's work examines the appropriation of value within processes and objects that deal with imagery of the feminine, the fetishized, and the handmade. She uses ubiquitous objects and common materials such as yarn, fabrics, and paper to create a body of work steeped in tradition, systems of control, labor, and cultural relevance. In the Artist Studios, Zapata works with broad fields of color that serve a narrative function sculpturally. These color fields are created through weaving, cutting, sewing, and latch hooking to reference the arpilleras made almost exclusively by women during guerilla occupation in Peru. Zapata received her BFA in Fibers from the University of North Texas. She currently has an installation on view at El Museo del Barrio, New York, and has participated in several residency programs.

Patrice Renee Washington (Thursday)

Patrice Renee Washington's work exists somewhere within the space of thwarted potential and clumsy optimism. Often using humor and the sometimes uncomfortable convergence of materials, she pieces together new mythologies reinterpreting the domestic and historic. Her objects often find themselves in peculiar relationships with one another, pushing the boundaries of usefulness, functionality, and irreverence. While in residence at MAD, Washington works predominantly in clay, producing work aimed at the investigation of domestic and public spaces as they relate to the cultural inclusion/non-inclusion of bodies. Namely, she will be creating sculptures that address social and cultural use and exploring functionality in a utilitarian sense. Washington received her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and her BFA in Sculpture from Metropolitan State College of Denver. She has been featured in several exhibitions throughout the United States and is an instructor at 92nd Street Y.

Austin Ballard (Friday)

Austin Ballard's practice offers a platform for questioning our heavily designed lived environments by merging them with those objects and places that often appear uncategorized, unstable, and inhospitable. Serving as a connection between man-made architecture and the natural landscape, his sculptures balance our relationships to these settings through a diversity of imagery, materials, and sophisticated construction. At MAD, Ballard works on new mixed-media sculptural work that mingles craft and design through an array of materials and processes addressing the intersections between art object, vessel, and architectural model. Evoking digital imagery and handcrafted techniques, these works combine woven cane and reed with putty and hand-dyed plywood. Ballard received his MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design, a Teaching Certificate from the RISD/Sheridan Center at Brown University, and his BFA from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. He has been featured in several international exhibitions, received numerous awards and residencies, and served as an instructor in both textiles and sculpture.

Mallory Weston (Saturday)

Mallory Weston works with a variety of media, including metal, fiber, concrete, and spray paint, to create bold, compelling, and interactive wearable art. Her work is a marriage between traditional jewelry and textile techniques in which large wearable pieces look like metal, but move with the fluidity of fabric. Most recently, her work has revolved around a fascination with snakes, both their form and symbolically. While in residence at MAD, Weston continues pushing serpentine imagery, symbolism, and dichotomies to create new work not traditionally associated with jewelry. She received her MFA in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from Rhode Island School of Design and her BFA in Crafts with a concentration in Jewelry and Metalsmithing from the University of the Arts. She teaches at a variety of schools and universities in the New York tri-state area.

Pamela Liou (Sunday)

Pamela Liou is a computational designer, artist, and writer who examines the tensions between craftsmanship, technology, and commerce to reveal the hidden socioeconomic infrastructures undergirding the global garment industry. Through an examination of supply chain, market design, and digital fabrication, Liou's work offers alternative modalities for production and distribution through the combination of digital and physical toolmaking. In the Artist Studios, Liou is further developing her Doti Project, a desktop Jacquard loom that leverages digital fabrication to enable expressive textile production at home and encourages broader design literacy. Liou is focusing on creating a corpus of woven pieces with the loom, showing the capabilities of the machine, and getting visitor feedback. She received her MFA from New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program and her BFA in Dramatic Writing, also at New York University. Liou has an active studio practice and works as a design consultant.

VAN LIER FELLOW

Aqeel Malcolm (Tuesday–Friday and Sunday)

Aqeel Malcolm is exploring intersectionality as it relates to the layers of his own identity as a Black, Queer, African American and Jamaican American male. Craft is essential to his studio practice, especially working with fibers and weaving, as are ideas of intimacy and masculinity. A question that persists in his work is "What constitutes masculinity, and how is it affecting the men of today?" As a Van Lier Fellow at MAD, Malcolm works full-time in the Artist Studios exploring two projects. The first includes collecting his body hair and incorporating it into weavings. This project is an investigation into the ways hair can be manipulated when it is detached from the body, and also an examination into the process of fabrication. His second project gives him an opportunity to examine his fascination with the sheerness and transparency of lace. Working on an AVL Compu-Dobby loom, Malcolm creates textiles using huck and leno weave structures. He recently graduated with a BFA in Fiber and a concentration in Experimental Fashion from Maryland Institute College of Art with several awards to his credit.

Malcolm's fellowship at MAD is made possible by the New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship Program, which supports talented young people from historically underrepresented populations who are dedicated to a career in the arts.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum's curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design.