ARTISTS 2023
Cecilia Caldiera
Cecilia Caldiera is a New York City-based interdisciplinary artist. Using sculpture, printmaking, and ephemeral installation, she explores relationships among people, public space, time, and value. In her work, found objects are integrated into precarious new systems that challenge hierarchies of matter, recontextualizing local histories and sites’ material life with play and resilience. Cecilia graduated from Pratt Institute with a BFA in 2013 and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts in 2023, and she currently teaches at Pratt and the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop.
Hilary Devaney
Hilary Devaney (b. 1992) is a New York-based visual artist who uses painting to untangle structures of meaning-making. She received her MFA from Columbia University and her BA from Lewis & Clark College. Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include “Years of Night” at Kent Place Gallery, Summit, NJ and “Two for Today” at Shin Haus in NYC. She has also shown at Harkawik, Half Gallery, ChaShaMa, Evening Hours, and Westbeth among others. In 2023 she was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant. She participated in Catwalk Artist Residency and Camp David Artist Residency.
Kevin Cobb
Kevin Cobb is a painter and digital artist, born in Baltimore, MD and based in New York City, where he lives with his brilliant wife. He received his HSD from the GW Carver Center for Arts and Technology, his BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art, and his MFA from Columbia University. He’s shown in Baltimore, New York, Miami, Rhode Island, Los Angeles, and London, and won several awards for his paintings and digital artworks. Kevin’s work explores identity and perspective, technique and poiesis, illusion and truth.
Maria Jose Garcia
Maria Jose Garcia, is a sculptor and installation artist, making precarious amalgamations of materials sourced from Mexico, and the United States. Working with materials pertinent to her personal, cross-regional vernacular, opens a space for habitual observations to incite an uncanny slipstream of familiarity and belonging; a deliberate materialization of her relation to Mexico, her relation to the United States, and her relation to her body. Maria Jose, was born and raised in Mexico and currently resides in New York City, where she received an MFA from Hunter College.
Moss Y. Loke O’Connor
Moss Y. Loke O’Connor is an emerging transgender visual artist. Originally from London, UK, he moved to New York to attend Parsons, receiving a BFA in fine art in 2020. He recently graduated from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, NY, with an MFA in fine art and was the recipient of the EFA Robert Blackburn Award for outstanding achievement in printmaking. In recent years he has started exhibiting across NYC, and his work has been featured in exhibitions at Ed Varie & Flush Gallery, LIC-A, ChaShaMa, Ubique, Project Gallery V, AHA Fine Art, O’Flaherty’s, and BWAC. His writing and work have also been featured in print in Hyperallergic, e-flux Education, The Hand Magazine, and Themselves Publication.
Nora Normile
Nora Normile (b. 1992) received a BFA in Studio Art from NYU in 2015 and is a MFA from the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University in 2023. She currently teaches ceramic sculpture at Rutgers. She makes sculptures that reference domesticity, design and architecture through the materials she uses—wood, felt, ceramics, textiles, craft materials—and through the motifs—repeating pattern, ornamentation, decoration. She has had two solo exhibitions with Entrance gallery (New York, NY).
Vivian Vivas
Vivian Vivas is a visual artist that fuses moving image, performance, and installation to delve into contemporary issues such as migration, identity, and climate collapse. Growing up in the mountains of Colombia shaped Vivas’ artistic perception and formed the base of her practice, which is heavily influenced by her studies in art and ecology. She has a forthcoming solo show at Dilalica Gallery in Barcelona and a show at Alex Berggruen Gallery in NYC. Vivas received her MFA in Visual Arts with a concentration in Moving Image from Columbia University and was a 2022 finalist for the Frankenthaler Climate Award.
ARTISTS 2021
Amra Causevic
Amra Causevic (b 1984) is an installation artist who orchestrates instances of potentiality through object touch, activation, assembly, and interaction. The artist presents concrete possibilities of play through the physicality and sensory experience of the work, while exploring ideas of walking, memory, place, and migration. Amra Causevic was born in Bosnia and Herzegovina and currently resides in New York where she received her MFA from Hunter College.
Anthony Cudahy
Anthony Cudahy is a painter in Brooklyn, NY. He received his MFA from Hunter College. In 2021, he presented solo exhibitions at 1969 Gallery (NY, NY) and at Semiose Gallery (Paris). He has an upcoming solo show at Hales (NY, NY). He has been in shows at Deli Gallery, Half Gallery, Mamoth Contemporary, Kapp Kapp Philadelphia, Perrotin New York, James Fuentes, and ATHICA, among others. His work has also been featured and reviewed in publications including Artforum, W Mag Korea, Brooklyn Rail, GAYLETTER, Cultured Mag, Painters on Paintings, Strange Fire Collective, Mossless, and the Paris Review. In 2017 Dashwood Books released Vigil (RHYTHM) Vigil, a volume of his paintings alongside photographs by his husband Ian Lewandowski.
Paula Lycan
Paula Lycan is an artist working in photography and traditional darkroom practices to create portraits of intimate relationships, tracing a broader view of partnership, family, memory, and tenderness. Paula is an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Photography at Columbia University, has exhibited at The Jewish Museum, The International Print Center New York, and has work in the collections at the Mead Arts Museum, and MOMA Library. Paula was born in 1992 in Pensacola, FL, and grew up in San Diego, CA. She received her BA from UC Santa Cruz and her MFA in Photography at Columbia University, 2020. She currently lives and works in NYC.
Yuri Yuan
Yuri Yuan (b. 1996) is a New York-based artist. She was born in China and grew up in Singapore. She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2019, and an MFA from Columbia University in 2021. Yuan was a recipient of the Helen Frankenthaler Scholarship at Columbia University in 2020, and Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant in 2019. She has exhibited work at Alexander Berggruen Gallery, New York, NY; Make Room Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, NY; Sullivan Galleries, Chicago, IL; International Center for the Arts, Umbria, Italy.
Diana Sofia Lozano
Diana Sofia Lozano (b.1992, Cali, Colombia), is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work uses the language of botanical hybrids; the naturally occurring, genetically modified, and the imagined. Lozano presents biomimicry as metaphors for identity construction at the intersections of gender, sexuality, and race. Lozano has exhibited at Company Gallery, Wave Hill Gardens, Deli Gallery and Rachel Uffner in NYC, Guerrero Gallery in San Francisco, New Image Art in Los Angeles, Casa Prado in Barranquilla Colombia, and Capsule Gallery in Shanghai China, among others. Lozano received her MFA in Sculpture from Yale University in 2021.
Rebecca Baldwin
Rebecca Baldwin is an artist and library worker in New York City. She completed her MFA in Combined Media from Hunter College in 2019. In 2021 she earned 10 years of full-time service at the New York Public Library. Baldwin is interested in data and the presentation of ideas in a visual form. Concept driven and project based, her artworks occupy many different mediums including radio, websites, t-shirts and performance. At the Hercules Art Studio Program, the neighborhood of Lower Manhattan will offer inspiration and guide her work around real estate, mapping, and being an artist worker in New York City.
Keli Safia Maksud
Keli Safia Maksud (b.1985) is a Kenyan-Tanzanian-Canadian-Muslim-Christian visual artist and writer based in New York. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s interdisciplinary practice favors the space of in- between and its threshold, and works towards destabilizing received histories in orderto expose fictions of the state. Maksud’s earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at the Bamako Biennial, National Museum of Contemporary Art - Seoul, Galería Nueva and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil.
ARTISTS 2018
Cati Bestard
Cati’s work uses photography and sculpture to explore the architecture, history and elements of the spaces she inhabits. Her work plays with scale, context and the construction of systems. Through the manipulation of images, and through visual iterations that dilute and deconstruct the image, she builds specific relationships between the elements of a body of work. She relates the immobility of architecture to that of other social constructs, such as gender. Cati is from Mallorca and received her MFA from Columbia University.
Rachel Hillery
Rachel Hillery critiques power dynamics and cultural constructions of gender through written and spoken word. Hillery’s performances and installations arise from familiar situations, yet employ unconventional spatial and site-specific strategies. Dialogue, affect, gestures, and setting are all at play in her work. Hillery has exhibited her work in New York, Houston, and Miami. She earned an MFA from Hunter College in Spring 2019. Prior to attending Hunter College, she earned an M Arch from Columbia University, and undergraduate degrees in psychology and photography from Washington University in St. Louis. Hillery is a graduate of HSPVA in Houston, Texas.
Leeanne Maxey
Native to Little Rock, Arkansas, Leeanne Maxey lives and works in Brooklyn. Her work addresses American organized religion and fundamentalist Christian beliefs through a queer lens. Raised an evangelical Pentecostal, she returns to these beliefs with a critical stance. Maxey’s work has been exhibited in New York and Hudson, NY; Baltimore, MD; Richmond, VA; Boston, MA; and at the Arkansas Arts Center, and is in the Rare Books Collection at the Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. She is a proud participant of the Fire Island Artist Residency, and awards include the Kahn Career Entry Award, Constantin Alajalov Scholarship, and a merit scholarship from the Boston University CFA. Maxey received her MFA from Boston University in 2016 and her BFA from the University of Central Arkansas in 2011. She currently teaches painting at Brooklyn College.
Pablo Diaz
Pablo Diaz (b. 1983, Camagüey, Cuba) is a mixed media painter living in New York. He received a BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2006 where he currently teaches drawing and mixed media courses in the Outreach Program. Additionally, he is head technician for the school’s Letterpress Studio, and is the acting director for the Summer Art Intensive Program. In 2016, he received the Kossak Travel Grant to study fresco painting in Pompeii and the Convent of San Marco. In 2018, he received an MFA degree from Hunter College.
Manny Padernos
Padernos’ current work draws on his diverse background and personal history exploring themes of migration, labor, and a sense of place and belonging. Padernos completed in 2018 his MFA at the New York Studio School. While at the NYSS he received scholarships from Milton and Sally Avery, Jonathan and Barbara Silver, and the Ramapo Trust. He attended residencies at Wassaic Project, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Chashama North and Chautauqua Institution School of Art .
Phoebe Osborne
As a choreographer and visual artist based in New York City, Osborne’s work employs performance, video, installation, and sound as means to examine the relationship of bodies and environments in their imminent negotiations. Osborne’s works have been presented across the US and Europe, including performances at Transmediale Berlin, La Caldera Barcelona, SFMoMA and Oakland Museum of California and exhibitions at City Limits Gallery, False Flag, Southern Exposure, and SOMArts. Osborne was a 2017 DanceWEB artist-in-residence at Impulstanz in Vienna. They hold a BA in Dance from University of California, San Diego, an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University, and are a part-time resident artist at DAS Choreography in Amsterdam.
Sujung Chang
Chang Sujung (b. 1989) lives and works in New York. She was born in Seoul, South Korea and moved to America in 2014, at the age of 24. Chang’s work centers around her ongoing interest in the relationship between speed, distance, and time and engages with human movement in a concrete and biographical sense. She received her MFA from Hunter College in 2017. She is currently an artist-in-residence at Hercules Art Studio Program in New York City. She attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and Wassaic Artist Residency in 2017. Chang has recently exhibited at Ilmin Museum of Art, Seoul, South Korea, Jungganjijeom, Seoul, South Korea, and Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Gallery, New York. Chang works as a professional video editor as well.
Madhini Nirmal
Madhini Nirmal (b.1992) is a painter and printmaker from Chennai, India. In her mixed-media prints, non-human animals bring form to issues of power, caste and class.She has exhibited in the US, India and Thailand, with recent shows in the New York Studio School, Smack Mellon, New York and International Print Center New York (IPCNY). She is a 2018 recipient of the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Award from the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts and Scholarship from the Manhattan Graphics Center. Nirmal received her MFA from Hunter College, in 2018 and BVA in Painting from Stella Maris College, India.
ARTISTS 2016
Christopher Lin
Through careful arrangements of found objects and performative encounters, the everyday is twisted and made visceral in Christopher's sculptural and installation works. Play transforms into contemplation as he explores themes such as transience, the human condition, and environmental anxiety. His work has been exhibited around the US, recently in group shows at Flux Factory (Queens), CRUSH Curatorial (New York), and Ethan Cohen Fine Arts (New York) and in a solo exhibition at Ray Gallery (Brooklyn) in 2017. He has studied at Yale University and School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and, in 2016, he received the prestigious C12 Emerging Artist Fellowship from Hunter College where he received his MFA.
www.christopherlinstudio.com
Jenna Westra
(Hunter MFA ‘15) is a New York based artist working in photography and film. Her works have been exhibited widely, most recently in New York at Lubov Gallery and Thomas Hunter Projects, in Los Angeles at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, and in Boston at The Institute for Contemporary Art and Gallery Kayafas. Her work has been published or reviewed in the New York Times, The Boston Globe, Camera Austria, Nicotine Magazine, Papersafe, Bomb Magazine, and Hunted, a series of booklets produced by the Artists’ Institute. Jenna will present solo exhibitions at Lubov gallery in New York and Four Seasons Berlin in 2018.
www.jennawestra.com
Sophie Grant
(born 1985 in Santa Cruz, CA) is an artist living and working in NYC. She received her BA in Painting from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2008, completed her MFA at Hunter College in 2015, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2015. She has been a former resident of the Keyholder Program at the Lower East Side Printshop in New York, The Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna, FL, and Painting’s Edge in Idyllwild, CA.
www.sophiebgrant.com
August Vollbrecht
August recieved her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from Columbia University. Today she makes paintings and drawings in New York.
www.augustvollbrecht.com
Ilaria Ortensi
Ilaria’s work investigates how the construction and representation of contemporary space influence our imaginary. She uses both documentation and fiction to create images that viewers are encouraged to question. Ilaria’s work has been featured in group shows around the US, London, Berlin and Italy. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 2015. www.ilariaortensi.com
Jackson Polys
Jackson has worked as a visual artist based in Alaska as Stron Softi, with solo exhibitions at the Alaska State Museum and the Anchorage Museum, and exhibiting in Zurich and Brussels, before pursuing his undergraduate education in New York. He obtained a BA in Art History and Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2013.
Ofra Lapid
Lapid inquires into architecture and its history, particularly Modernism, a style familiar to her from growing up in Tel Aviv. She has exhibited at the Center for Contemporary Art, Fresh Paint #4, and the Contemporary Art Fair, Tel Aviv; Periscope Gallery, Salzburg; and a recent survey exhibition of New York MFA graduates in Brooklyn. Residencies include the Artists’ Village Schöppingen, Germany; Sculpture Space, Utica, New York; and the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida.
www.ofralapid.com