Rochelle Voyles
Artist-in-Residence February 2023
Rochelle Voyles is a Brooklyn based multi-disciplinary visual artist originally from the Midwest (b. 1989). She received her BFA in Fine Arts/Printmaking from Pratt Institute.
Her work transforms textile patterns into abstracted landscapes and figures using collage and paint. She uses the language of cloth to re-envision reality, embracing pattern for its own sake, manipulating and distorting its shape and form into images that call to mind metaphysical space and the digital image.
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In her collage work, she uses analog techniques to decontextualize emotionally charged images of our world, its traumatic history, and its picturesque landscapes into her own abstracted visions. Through her work she attempts to re-frame how she perceives the scariest and most beautiful parts of being alive.
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She was a 2022 resident at the Byrdcliffe Arts Colony and a 2021 resident at the ChaNorth ChaShaMa Artist Residency. She has shown at galleries in New York such as Trestle Gallery, Peninsula Art Space, The Local Project, and Collarworks.
John Felix Arnold
Artist-in-Residence February 2023
John Felix Arnold was born in Durham, NC and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Having been raised in the American southeast, his practice confronts, reimagines, and transforms mythologies, through a Queer lens, which have influenced and informed societal structures in history and the contemporary world. Arnold weaves together connections, materials, and techniques through multi-disciplinary works which utilize sculptural installation, drawing and mixed media, with ventures into performance, video, and sound. Stemming from a process of contemplation, his alchemical practice embraces materiality, polarity, liminality, catharsis, and interconnectedness always with a sense of seeking and curiosity.
He has exhibited work with SFMOMA, Nasher Museum of Art, B.R.I.C. Arts, The Luggage Store Gallery, Aggregate Space, and Tokyo’s Spes-Lab Experimental Art Space. He is a Duke University Visiting Artist in Residence, a Duke University Grant Awardee, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant Awardee, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs Grant Awardee, and two time Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant Nominee. His work is in collections of the Duke University Rubenstein Arts Center and Kai Kai Ki Ki Ltd. He has been published in Juxtapoz Magazine, The San Francisco Chronicle’s 96 Hours, Hi-Fructose, and is represented in Aggregate Space Gallery’s First 50 Retrospective hardcover publication. He is a contributing writer for the arts publications Coastal Post, and Border Crossing. He holds a BFA from Pratt Institute.
Maria T. Allocco
Artist-in-Residence February 2023
Maria T. Allocco is a Korean and Italian multiracial genre-fluid Academy of American Poets Prize recipient and the first writer accepted into both Columbia University’s Nonfiction and Poetry Master’s programs.
A former avid lucid dreamer who has sat ten 10-day Vipassana meditation retreats, Maria values clear awareness and compassionate activism. She’s been a social justice based educator in many schools, including: June Jordan School for Equity, Immaculate Conception Academy, Leadership High, Sunset Elementary, Youth Chance, and Hilltop School for Pregnant Minors.
Maria is a two-time Voices of Our Nation and Tin House alum who has been a featured artist, panelist, and workshop leader at mixed-race festivals including Canada’s Hapa-palooza and LA’s Mixed Remixed. Maria curated LitQuake SF’s first mixed-race reading, first mixed-race Asian reading, and co-founded the bay area’s first Multiracial Deep Refuge meditation group at the East Bay Meditation Center.
She’s been awarded residencies from Hambidge, Writing Between The Vines, Las Dos Brujas, KHN and Anne La Bastille. Her artwork has been exhibited at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, The Venice Art House, SOMArts, The Intersection for The Arts, Feast of Words, and more. Read her work in The Rumpus, Tin House, The Los Angeles Review, The Lantern Review, TAYO Magazine, and in the Fall 2022 issue of The Georgia Review.
Promiti Islam
Artist-in-Residence March 2023
Promiti Islam (she/they) is a writer and educator based in New York City. The daughter of Bangladeshi immigrants, Promiti learned early on of the power of language to mobilize communities and reimagine the world. They have received support from Kundiman, Asian American Feminist Collective, and The Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences. Promiti received the Kundiman Mentorship Lab Fellowship in Creative Non-Fiction and was a finalist for the Esalen Writers Camp WritingxWriters Fellowship. With their work, Promiti seeks to uplift the nuanced ways in which we experience the world through culture, diaspora, alienation, and a sense of home. They have a B.A. from Wesleyan University and M.A. from Columbia University in Peace and Human Rights Education. Promiti loves the ocean, pop culture trivia, and black eyeliner.
Andrea Pérez Bessin
Artist-in-Residence March 2023
Andrea Pérez Bessin is a printmaker and installation artist whose work focuses on syncretic amalgams of plants and humans that speak to the instability of the gender binary. They received their MFA in Studio art from the University of Connecticut, a BFA in Studio Art from Rhode Island College and a BA in Biology from Brown University. Their practice has been sustained through residencies and grants including Millay Arts, Wood/Raith Gender Identity Living Trust, Marks Family Endowment in the Arts and the Rhode Island State Council of the Arts Fellowship in Printmaking. Born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Andrea lives and works in Newport, Rhode Island.
Christopher M Tandy
Artist-in-Residence March 2023
Christopher M Tandy (b. 1984) is a Queer Northern California self-taught artist and educator. Identifying as an anti-disciplinary artist, they adopt methods for creating and thinking that are rooted in Queerness and stem from a rejection of being defined by discipline and/or output. Their practice and process are fluid, like the mercurial Queer space in the world around us. Using technology and traditional media in innovative ways, Tandy shares their vision, where, in fleeting moments, the veil thins, time blurs and mysteries are revealed. Their work serves as an invitation into this ephemeral world, giving us opportunity to discover new types of thought, language, connection, and understanding.
Tandy has contributed works to solo and group exhibitions at Glass Rice (CA), SOMA Arts Cultural Center (CA), The Magic Shack (CA), Art Helix (NY), Art Basel (FL), and most recently at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in NYC. Together, with their partner they run Blood Of A Fresh Kill, a bi-annual magazine which calls upon our Queer Ancestors to help us collectively disembowel the money-worshiping patriarchy so that we can build systems that are more equitable and not based on systematic control. Tandy was the recipient of a Quick Grant from the Center for Cultural Innovation in 2020 and 2022. In the Spring of 2023 he will be an Artist in Residence at the Peter Bullough Foundation in Winchester, VA.
Kimberly Anderson
Artist-in-Residence April 2023
Kimberly Anderson is a Brooklyn-based visual artist with roots in Richmond, Va. Her work combines photography and collage in a practice that examines themes of memory, identity and the shared cultural experiences within Black family histories. She explores the intricacies of her own family oral history and the importance of African American storytelling, while examining how fragile and susceptible to disappearance these memories and stories are.
Her work is multi dimensional and often centers themes of Black family folklore, imagination & spirituality with her own family as a recurring subject matter. By combining photography, collage, and alternative processes, she creates visual portals that question the value & volatility of memory. In her collage work, she creates alternate worlds guided by celestial and ancestral realms. In her ongoing practice, she seeks to reference historical knowledge of the past to sow new seeds that inform the future.
Kimberly’s work has been exhibited at Revelations Gallery, The International Center of Photography, skArtspace, and also featured with Kinship Photography Collective, Acres of Ancestry, Bronx Narratives Magazine & The Life at Six Feet Photography Project.
Les James
Artist-in-Residence April 2023
Les James is a writer and artist, originally from the Chicago metro area and currently based in central Virginia. Integrating an academic background in biology, learning sciences, and organizational psychology with eco-theopoetics, her work explores scientifically-inspired and spiritually-informed ideas about nature, consciousness, and social activism. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in several anthologies and online journals, including: When We Exhale: An Anthology of Black Women Rooted In Ancestral Medicine; The Future of Black: Afrofuturism, Black Comics, and Superhero Poetry anthology; BLUU Notes: An Anthology of Love, Justice, and Liberation; Gumbo Magazine; The Black Liberation Blueprint digital toolkit; Edge Effects magazine; Michigan Quarterly Review Online; and elsewhere. Her artwork has been included in EcoTheo Review, Geez magazine, juried group art shows in Iowa and Virginia, and elsewhere. She has been awarded scholarships, residencies, and funding by the Diverse Intelligences Summer Institute, the Peter Bullough Foundation, Foundation House, the Collegeville Institute, the Kenyon Institute, and the James River Writers conference. She is an alumna of the Hurston/Wright Foundation Summer Writers Week - Poetry Workshop.
Katie Prock
Artist-in-Residence April 2023
Katie Prock is a photographic artist and book maker. Prock earned her MFA in Studio Art at Florida Atlantic University, where she now works as an instructor in photography and digital media. Her studio practice utilizes alternative printing techniques and incorporates handcrafted processes which emphasize chance occurrence and imperfections. Her work and research focus on topics such as identity, gender, and family history. In addition to being exhibited across the United States, including Biblio 2020 at Art Palm Beach, Prock’s work has been featured abroad in the Body + Memory + City Photo Festival in Alicante, Spain, and the It’s Magic. A Beyond Experience exhibition in Rome.
Scott Walker
Artist-in-Residence May 2023
Scott Walker (b. 1996, Massachusetts) is a New York City based artist working in traditional fiber craft techniques, primarily embroidery. In his work, Scott uses a deliberately feminine aesthetic, one that is soft in both material and sensibility. His work has a quality of camp, often elevating unsophisticated subject matter. Scott is interested in the special place that pop culture icons hold in the queer imagination. Pop stars are exalted to goddesses and icons. CDs, movies, and magazines become avatars through which queer people express our feminine sides and communicate pieces of our identity.
Scott graduated from Parsons the New School for Design in 2018 with a BFA in Fine Art. Scott has exhibited his work in group shows in the US and internationally. He also collaborated with MTV in April 2021, creating 3 original artworks and social media posts for the brand.
Lena Crown
Artist-in-Residence May 2023
Lena Crown is a writer, editor, and educator from Oakland, California. She received her B.A. in Spanish and Latin American Studies from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, where she also studied creating writing as a Nemerov Writing Scholar. She continued to live and write in St. Louis as an editor and frequent contributor to ALIVE Magazine. She is now working on a braided memoir and an essay collection, and her work is published or forthcoming in Guernica, Gulf Coast, Narratively, North American Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, The Millions, Sonora Review, and The Offing, among others.
Lena received her MFA in Creative Nonfiction from George Mason University, where she taught creative writing and served as the Nonfiction Editor at phoebe journal. Previously, she read for CRAFT and River Styx. She currently serves as a PEN/Faulkner Writer in Residence. She also splits her time as a writer for Folklife, the digital publication at the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, as an editor for Autofocus Books, a small press, and as the Project Manager for the Author’s Corner program at The Inner Loop, a literary nonprofit.
MK Bailey
Artist-in-Residence May 2023
MK Bailey makes narrative, figure-based paintings and experimental landscapes that reflect her experience of the world. The predominant themes she works with are nostalgia/grief, anxiety, and the tension between dream and reality. Her work explores the line between ironically self-aware kitsch and a genuinely over-the-top-feminine aesthetic, and the light and bright imagery combines with the dark themes of the work to create tension between presentation and meaning. Although the main focus of Bailey’s practice is large-scale acrylic painting, she also uses digital mediums and has a burgeoning installation practice.
Bailey is currently based in Washington, D.C. Her first solo show, Secret Garden, was at IA&A Hillyer in April 2022 and was reviewed by The Washington Post. She is a repeat recipient of DC’s Commission on the Arts and Humanities Fellowship and was a finalist in the 2022 Trawick Prize. Bailey was the 2020 Gallery Artist-in-Residence at Capitol Hill Arts Workshop, where she co-founded The Residents Collective.