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MAD Announces Winter 2018 Artist Studios Program Residents and Van Lier Fellow
Featuring artists Andrew Bearnot, Esperanza Cortés, Katya Grokhovsky, Dana Melamed, Emily Oliveira, Emiko Shinozaki, and Xin Liu
New York, NY (January 30, 2018)
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) announces the Winter 2018 session of its Artist Studios Program and Van Lier Fellowship. The selected artists, who will work in MAD’s sixth-floor open studios from January 30, 2018, through May 27, 2018, are Andrew Bearnot, Esperanza Cortés, Katya Grokhovsky, Dana Melamed, Emily Oliveira, Emiko Shinozaki, and Van Lier Fellow Xin Liu.
Launched nine years ago by the Museum’s Education Department, the Artist Studios Program assigns studio space to seven emerging to midcareer artists and designers for a four-month period, during which visitors to MAD are invited to observe and interact with the artists at work. A diverse committee of Museum staff members and outside professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design selects six residents to work at MAD one day per week, as well as one full-time Van Lier Fellow, whose fellowship is funded by the New York Community Trust. Introduced to the Artist Studios Program in 2016, the Van Lier Fellowship provides talented young people from historically underrepresented populations who are dedicated to a career in the arts with financial support and a dedicated studio at MAD for full-time use.
The MAD Artist Studios Program is both a platform for creativity and an innovative model of engagement that has served nearly 150 artists and designers. The studios are open to the public, and the residents welcome dialogue around concepts, materials, and processes. This is an exciting chance for museumgoers to meet working artists, and a remarkable opportunity for the residents to actively participate in the public’s engagement with their work.
During each Artist Studios Program session, some of the artists-in-residence elect to host a MADmakes workshop. MADmakes is a drop-in, hands-on educational series that invites visitors to learn the artists’ own methods and test their skills at art making and creative production. The series engages visitors in various techniques and ideas, facilitating greater understanding and appreciation of skill-based practices. Great for visitors of all ages, backgrounds, and interests, MADmakes workshops are free with Museum admission. This session’s workshops will take place as follows:
Thursday, February 15, 6 pm
Thursday, March 8, 6 pm
Thursday, April 12, 6 pm
Thursday, May 10, 6 pm
The Artist Studios Talk and Closing Reception will take place Saturday, May 19, at 3 pm.
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Mixing scientific research with personal narratives, Xin Liu creates transformative, participatory experiences and bodily objects to examine the constitution of subjectivity and affects. She trained as an engineer for two decades, and technology functions as her native language and craft within her art practice. As a Van Lier Fellow at MAD, Liu will continue a project about living and dying in space. She is organizing a performance in outer space, turning earthly bodies into star matter. During her residency, she will design a series of tools and procedures for collecting, cremating, and casing the earth organism and living experiences. Liu earned a Master’s degree in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT Media Lab and an MFA in Digital and Media from Rhode Island School of Design. She also holds a BE in Measurement, Control Technology, and Instruments and a BA in Interaction Design from Tsinghua University in Beijing. For more information, please visit: www.xxxxxxxxxinliu.com.
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Xin Liu|
Emily Oliveira uses traditionally domestic textiles and decorative materials, scrambling the imagery to explore and perform queer, utopian futurity. Her sculptures and installations evoke the sublimated and redirected emotional and intellectual energy of Latinx women and femmes, and the visual culture that springs from that marginalization. Her performance work explores themes of feminine labor, interlaced with recurring narratives surrounding race, class, and gender in American music and popular culture. At MAD, Oliveira will create a series of hand-embroidered, sequined banners, evoking Latin American and Catholic devotional textiles, to examine the labor of grief and the language of queer grieving on both personal and political scales. She will use this painstaking medium, primarily associated with the hetero-domestic feminine sphere, to publicly explore mourning-as-labor. Oliveira earned a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and studied performance at Brown University.
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Emily Oliveira|
Emiko Shinozaki has cultivated her practice at the intersection of science, music, and craft, variously drawing from her trining in organic chemistry and classical music, as well as her experience designing clothing, leather accessories, and jewelry. Compositional techniques including structural variation, retrograde, inversion, and repetition inspire and appear in Shinozaki’s jewelry. At MAD, Shinozaki will seek to open a dialogue about the potential of innovative technologies in contemporary craft through a project based in epidermal electronics. She will create a form of interactive jewelry using thin layers of gold, silver, silicone, and circuitry. Each piece of “skin jewelry” will be programmed to communicate with external devices and will perform as a wearable capacitive touch sensor to trigger music, lights, and video. Shinozaki holds an AAS in International Fashion Design and a Millinery Certificate from the Fashion Institute of Technology, as well as a BA in Music from Oberlin College. For more information, please visit: www.emikoshinozaki.com.
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Emiko Shinozaki|
Katya Grokhovsky’s interdisciplinary process-based practice combines painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, performanc, and video to explore issues of gender, labor, alienation, displacement, and the self, often employing the body as a tool to interweave the personal and the political. Through cutting and juxtaposing found objects, she exposes the grotesque in the societal constructs of femininity and masculinity and scrutinizes the idea of the binary in the everyday. At MAD, Grokhovsky will work on Theater of the Mundane, a project that explores the absurdity of the human condition through sculptural mixed-media installation and performance. She will deconstruct, assemble, and juxtapose clothing with personal archives and found objects, manipulating and treating the surfaces with embroidery, appliqué, painting, and papier-mâché, to underscore loneliness, memories, and longing via the handmade and discarded. Grokhovsky holds an MFA in Sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a BFA in Painting from the Victorian College of the Arts, and a BA with Honors in Fashion from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. For more information, please visit: www.katyagrokhovsky.net.
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Katya Grokhovsky|
A self-described materialist with a background in materials science and traditional craft media, Andrew Bearnot explores the aesthetic potential and technical intricacies of the material world. He is interested broadly in technologies of making and specifically in craftsmanship as a way of both encoding and producing knowledge. His practice focuses on the matter and material culture of the everyday, questioning how the familiar can become unfamiliar, and how objects come into and out of being. At MAD, Bearnot will consider the themes present in the Grimms’ tale of Hansel and Gretel, namely the dangers of desire and consumption. He will engage these themes through sugar-sculpting techniques, translating hair and meat into pulled sugar candy. Bearnot holds an MFA in Visual Art from the University of Chicago, a BA with Honors in Glass from Rhode Island School of Design, and an ScB in Materials Engineering from Brown University. For more information, please visit: www.andrewbearnot.net.
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Andrew Bearnot |
Dana Melamed explores the power struggle between humanity and the environment through assembled wall sculptures, each comprising a unique urban topography. Melamed composes her work layer upon layer, fusing scratched patches of foil, paper, wood, found industrial objects, and wires onto aluminum mesh. The sense of nature reclaiming her land is conveyed in heavily stressed surfaces transformed into decayed structural ruins. At MAD, Melamed will create a series of small engine sculptures, each of which constitutes a distinctive urban microcosm. She often uses imagery relating to power sources such as engines or turbines—symbols of humankind’s great achievements and destruction. The pieces will grow organically, building up from the surface to form an imaginary topography. Melamed holds a degree in Fine Art from the Tel Aviv Art Design Center and Tel Aviv School of Visual Art, and a degree in Architectural Rendering and Drafting from Ort Technikum Givatayim in Israel. For more information, please visit: www.danamelamed.com.
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Dana Melamed|
Esperanza Cortés’ work encourages viewers to reconsider social and historical narratives dealing with colonialism, and raises critical questions about the politics of erasure and exclusion. Her artwork examines the extent to which a consciousness, national or personal, defines itself through the opposing force of a transcultural experience. As an immigrant artist, she finds inspiration in the mosaic of the Americas and the continuously evolving nature of their folk art traditions, art rituals, music, and dance, all of which inform her sculptures, paintings, installations, works on paper, site-specific projects, and interventions. At MAD, Cortés will create sculptures that utilize parts of the human body as symbols and expressions of nature, vulnerability, and power. The sculptures will be made of metal, wood, clay, or plaster and embellished with gold-plated chains, beads, and amulets. For more information, please visit: www.esperanzacortes.com.
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Esperanza CortésABOUT 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.