Press Room

Featuring artists-in-residence Jamie Boyle, Rachel Grobstein, Anthony Iacono, Maryam Turkey, Brigitta Varadi, and Chang Yuchen, and Artist Fellow Tamara Santibañez

New York, NY (January 23, 2019)

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) is pleased to announce the Winter 2019 session of its Artist Studios program and Artist Fellowship. The selected artists, who will work in MAD's sixth-floor open studios from February 5 through August 4, 2019, are Jamie Boyle, Rachel Grobstein, Anthony Iacono, Tamara Santibañez, Maryam Turkey, Brigitta Varadi, and Chang Yuchen. Santibañez is this cycle's Artist Fellow.

"We are delighted to welcome this new group to our Artist Studios and are excited to share their diverse practices, which range from leather tooling, fiber arts, and miniature sculpture to ceramics and product design, with our audiences of all ages," said Petra Pankow, Associate Director of Education Programs. "Our visitors often start their exploration of MAD in the Artist Studios and relish the unique opportunity to engage with a working artist firsthand."

Launched in 2008, the Artist Studios program assigns studio space to seven emerging to midcareer artists and designers for a six-month period. A diverse committee of Museum staff and outside professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design selects six resident artists, each of whom works in the studios one day per week, as well as one full-time Artist Fellow. Studios are open to the public, welcoming visitors to observe and engage in the exchange of ideas while providing artists with the opportunity to open a dialogue surrounding their artistic practice. Both a platform for creativity and an innovative model of public engagement, the Artist Studios program has served over 150 artists and designers.

Introduced to the Artist Studios program in 2016, the Artist Fellowship provides talented young people from historically underrepresented populations who are dedicated to a career in the arts with financial support and a studio at MAD for full-time use. This cycle's fellowship is funded by Marcia Docter, and was made possible by the generous support of The New York Community Trust.

Residents have a range of opportunities to interface with the public outside of their regular studio hours, whether by facilitating a Studio Sunday family program, teaching a class for adults or teens, or hosting 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 take place on the second Thursday of the month and are free with Museum admission.

For more information about adult, youth, and family workshops led by Artist Studios residents, visit madmuseum.org/programs.

 

Artist Fellow: Tamara Santibañez | Mixed Media
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday

Tamara Santibañez draws from her holistic identity as it relates to the worlds of the American South, Mexican tradition, immigrant family dynamics, queerness, punk rock, and sadomasochism. She grounds her own experiences through piecing together formative fabrics, sounds, sensations, and memories into physical relics. Using painting, sculpture, and textiles to cross-reference seemingly disparate parts of her cultural background, she uncovers commonalities and weaves connections otherwise unseen, creating artifacts that represent complexities not often granted to marginalized communities.  

At MAD, Santibañez will undertake a new body of work using leather tooling to reproduce punk and heavy metal patches and logos. Engaging with traditional motifs and techniques of Mexican leatherworking, she will create cross-cultural wall tapestry collages that blur the lines between chosen subculture and inherited familial culture.

For more information, visit www.tamarasantibanez.com.

 

Brigitta Varadi | Mixed Media
Tuesday

Utilizing painting, textile, video, and public engagement, Brigitta Varadi explores cultural traditions that relate to the invisible, everyday rituals of working life. She examines the disappearing traditions and daily activities of small, secluded communities around the world: from her grandmother mopping the kitchen floor several times a day to the "liberty" tea made by inhabitants of New York State and the marking system of the dwindling community of shepherds in Ireland.

At MAD, Varadi will focus on a community-based research project commissioned by Burlington City Arts (BCA), an arts education and studio center in Burlington, Vermont. The project will investigate traditional methods and sustainable local materials. In addition to working with raw wool to explore artisan felting and dyeing techniques, Varadi will gather local clay from Shelburne Farms to create three thousand wood-fired tiles, referencing the cleaning and restoration of three thousand porcelain tiles from the farm's original historic home. Her residency at MAD and Shelburne Farms will culminate in a solo exhibit at the BCA Center, Vermont, in February 2020.  

For more information, visit www.brigittavaradi.net.

 

Anthony Iacono | Paper Collage
Wednesday

Anthony Iacono's painted collages depict anonymous queer bodies with quotidian objects recontextualized into perverse and fetishistic scenarios. An alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, he earned a BFA from the School of Visual Arts and an MFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Iacono received MICA's Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship in 2017 and was a 2018 resident artist at LMCC Workspace. He has had solo exhibitions at PPOW Gallery and participated in group shows at Jack Hanley Gallery, 106 Green, and Rockaway Topless. His most recent solo exhibition opened in the fall of 2018 at Marinaro Gallery, New York.

At MAD, Iacono will work on a series focused on the queer body depicted through the collaging of cut and painted paper. He will also begin developing a new body of frottage works using found and made rubbing plates with collaged papers and chalk.

For more information, visit www.anthonyiacono.com.

 

Jamie Boyle | Fiber/Mixed Media
Thursday

Jamie Boyle employs textile processes, archival impulses, and a bricoleur's aesthetic to create sculptures, installations, performances, and weavings. Boyle scrutinizes ordinary discards—a pop song's lyrics, the movement of hands as they tie shoelaces, a bit of beautiful garbage—and wonders what it means to be a body among these phenomena. Boyle has grown increasingly committed to handweaving processes, driven by the physicality and proximity to the elemental nature of cloth, so ubiquitous and essential to daily human experience, and inspired by the body, ever present through the histories and encoded associations—warmth, domesticity, language, symbol, mourning, prayer—of the form.

At MAD, Boyle will develop and create a text-based double ikat weaving that explores and utilizes the reversibility of the resist-dyed cloth. The words and phrases that comprise this weaving will employ letters that are legible both forward and backward. Through folding, draping, or simply reversing the cloth, Boyle will bring different phrases into conversation with each other. Alongside the weaving, the artist will develop the installation mechanism or performance that activates this cloth, enabling its multiple readings.  

For more information, visit www.jamieboyleandfriends.com.

 

Chang Yuchen | Fiber
Friday

Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner, perceiving embroidery as drawing, weaving as writing, clothing as portable theater, and installation as moving image.

At MAD, Yuchen will expand on her project "Use Value," in which she produces useful commodities to comment on artists' labor by working within the common rules of economics: the price of each product is calculated based on the average hourly rate of all day jobs that Yuchen has worked, multiplied by how many hours she spent on the product, in addition to the cost of the raw materials. In the Artist Studios, Yuchen will create a series of facial masks, exploring protection, fear, and the fragility and power of the body in both the public and private realms.

For more information, visit www.changyuchen.com.

 

Rachel Grobstein | Mixed-Media Sculpture
Saturday

Rachel Grobstein creates miniature sculptures and paintings based on objects from everyday life. Her work ranges from constellations that evoke arrangements of natural specimens to still lifesthat catalogue a daily world where domestic routine meets consumer culture and personal history. These pieces invite close scrutiny and attention through a radical scale shift and handmade detail.
At MAD, Grobstein will expand her recent series of miniature sculptures of roadside memorials. As private markers in public spaces, these transient monuments confront us with mortality in everyday contexts, functioning as anonymous tributes, expressions of love, and collective gathering spaces for negotiating grief and trauma. This series explores our relationship with the dead, unpacking how memory is maintained and evolves through objects and places.
For more information, visit www.rachelgrobstein.com.

 

Maryam Turkey | Mixed-Media Design
Sunday

Maryam Turkey is an Iraqi-American industrial designer who aspires to design innovative objects and experiences that reflect our contemporary time.

At MAD, Turkey will continue pushing the application of terra-cotta (baked earth) in our daily objects and decors as a reminder that humans are inevitably intertwined with nature—water, earth, plants. No matter how much we improve our synthetic technologies, she believes in the value of interacting with other living things. Her interest in terra-cotta emerged from her piece Mzamla, an innovative water-cooler design that keeps water fresh and cool without electricity. She capitalizes on the medium's porousness by positioning plants beneath the cooler to utilize water leakage from the terra-cotta.

For more information, visit www.maryamturkey.com.

 

For more information about the Artist Studios program and Artist Fellowship at the Museum of Arts and Design, visit madmuseum.org/artist-studios.

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. For more information, visit madmuseum.org.