Chautauqua Artists in Residence
Floating | Shabnam Jannesari
August 25th, 2022 – January 22nd, 2023
Holstein Gallery
This summer, the Erie Art Museum will present work from selected artists who participated in the Chautauqua School of Art residency program in Chautauqua, New York. This prestigious residency program presents the most contemporary artists, whose practices involve various media such as video, ceramics, fiber works, drawing, painting and more. Curated by Laura Domencic, Executive Director of the Erie Art Museum, this exhibition promises a display of the most cutting-edge art work in the country.
The Chautauqua School of Art residency program is a centerpiece of the Chautauqua Visual Arts (CVA). Founded in 1909, the School is an incubator of inclusive and expansive programming in the visual arts composed of workshops and one-on-one time with mentors covering all media. The curriculum intentionally deconstructs traditional methods that silo disciplines from each other and instead embraces a full range of studio and pragmatic studies including professional development for artists, the art of pedagogy, writing in the 21st century, archiving and the relevance of art history today. The Program is inclusive, which is reflected not only by our team who teach at Chautauqua Visual Arts, but also conveyed by the knowledge they share.
This year, Chautauqua School of Art had the highest number of applicants in their history. The program is multi-generational: 38 artists are selected each year, and this year, the ages span 21-74 from all parts of the United States and abroad.
Special thanks to our collaborators at the Chautauqua Institution, especially Sharon Louden, Artistic Director of the Visual Arts program. Sponsored by Doug & Deb Murphy.
Reception | Ivory Fu
The Things Left Unsaid | Abigail Nasari
-
She/They | Instagram | Website
Sunny Moxin Chen (b.1996) is a multi-disciplinary artist who currently lives in Boston, MA. She holds MFA Painting from Boston University and BFA in Painting & Studio for Interrelated Media from Massachusetts College of Art & Design. Chen’s work was recently selected for the national curated show at Main Street Arts (Clifton Springs, NY) and was awarded the “Best in Show” prize. She has also shown works at the Morgan Lehman Gallery (NYC, NY), Fowler-Kellogg Art Center (Chautauqua, NY), Piano Craft Gallery (Boston, MA), Faye G., Jo, & James Stone Gallery (Boston, MA), Cambridge Arts Association (Cambridge, MA), Musa Collective (MA/online), Project V Gallery (NYC/online), Hive Art Community (Brooklyn, NY) and so on. She has previously worked as an assistant in many non-profit art organizations such as MassArt Art Museum (Boston), UCCA Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing), WhiteBox Art Space (NYC), and she has worked as a co-director and curator at the Godine Family Gallery (Boston).
-
Colleen Coleman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York. She completed a Masters of Fine Arts degree in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, with a focus in performance and printmaking. Coleman’s practice includes, drawing, collage, installation and performance. Her work challenges social structures, class, and race, while in dialog with art history. Coleman’s work is a exploration of liminal spaces of becoming, and healing, she mines history, culture and science to create Parafictions.
-
She/Her | Instagram
Kym Cooper is from New York and currently lives in North Carolina. She holds a B.F.A. from American University in Washington, DC, a Master’s in Elementary Education from Lesley College in Cambridge, MA and a Juris Doctorate (law) degree from Howard University, in Washington, D.C. She has been drawing and painting since elementary school. She considers herself a multi-media abstract painter—one who creates scenarios that touch her spirit on canvas. She draws inspiration from being an Afro-American woman who was nurtured in a passionate, hostile, racist but loving environment that has defined her cultural identity. Cooper states, “In Art, you can express all that you are without fear. You get to choose your medium and your substance. Your train of thought, spirit and ancestors guide your heart.” She has exhibited her work in galleries, libraries and studios in New York and North Carolina. One of her paintings was featured in downtown Greensboro, NC in a kiosk for several weeks.
-
She/They | Instagram
Ivory Fu is from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and graduated from Yale University cum laude with Departmental Honors in both Art and Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology. She is a queer, femme, Chinese American artist inspired by the spirituality of interpersonal relationships between people, especially women, and our bodies. She explores how people negotiate the boundaries of their bodies when they choose to be vulnerable with others, wrapping themselves in shared grace with flesh serving as vessels of memory and emotion for themselves and their communities. By revealing the details of her loved ones’ and her own lived experiences, she shows how her marginalized immigrant community continues to preserve the dignity of everyday lives. In this way, she develops new blood bonds with viewers in her imagined futures, where their bodies can dance without fear.
-
Through her non-objective approach, Suzan Globus uses raw materials as both support and paint in her two- and three-dimensional work. She juxtaposes natural and discarded materials like raw canvas and tree bark with bold color in various media or lets the unadulterated material speak for itself. Globus focuses her artistic expression on creating a new way of seeing overlooked environmental and cultural issues, specifically gender equality and the fraying relationship between humankind and the natural environment.
Globus credits her formative years spent in Japan as the strongest influence on her work. She has exhibited work in museums in New Jersey and New York as well as juried and solo exhibits. Her art is in private collections across the country.
-
Judyta Grudzien is a New York City artist who was born and raised in Poland. Initially, her interest was in Polish literature, but she discovered a more universal language of photography.
Her photographic practice consists mainly of using 35mm and 4×5 film; for her analog photography is an experience that is more hands-on and authentic. Currently, she is exploring alternative photographic processes like cyanotypes, chemigrams, image transfers, mordançage, and other printing techniques.
Grudzien has shown her work in New York, Arizona, Philadelphia, Berlin and Barcelona. She received an Honorable Mention in 2018 Contemporary Photography Competition from Philadelphia Photo Art Center and another two from the 12th Julia Margret Cameron Award Non-Professional Section in Cityscape and Alternative Processes categories.
In 2020 she was granted two week darkroom residency founded by Back To The Lab and AlterWork Studios. Subsequently, in April of 2021, she had her first two-person show in AlterWork Studios.
-
Xayvier Haughton was born in St Catherine, Jamaica, in 1986. He completed his BFA at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in 2014, studied at the School of Visual Arts New York where he received his MFA in Fine Arts in 2022. His work explores issues surrounding fatherhood and masculinity. His work was featured in the Jamaica Biennial 2014 and 2017 and the Jamaica Cultural Development Commission (JCDC)’s National Visual Arts Exhibition and Competition in 2015, as well as at the Red Easel pop-up gallery in 2016 and was a part of a three-man exhibition Dark matter at the CAGE Gallery. Haughton’s work is focused on what he calls the “Afrikan'' consciousness.
-
Sara Hess (b. Augusta, Ga, 1996) is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Columbus, Ohio. Sara holds a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Georgia’s Lamar Dodd School of Art. She is currently an MFA candidate and Graduate Fellow at Ohio State University. Sara has exhibited her work regionally and nationally, most recently at ATHICA in Athens, Georgia, Stove Works in Chattanooga, Tennessee and IPCNY (International Print Center New York) in Manhattan, New York.
Hess seeks to pay better attention. Through her work and relationship to images and materials Hess endeavors to increase empathy and negotiate objective and subjective experiences. Currently, her practice is tied to collecting, documenting and repurposing found or discarded materials. Through this unfiltered approach to making, there is no room for material hierarchy. For Hess, rescuing, transforming, and reconstituting detritus imports some level of spiritual power upon inert objects and materials. The work is beginning to pulse with musings on her own interpersonal relationships investigating intimacy, human connection, and of course, love. Engaging, manipulating, and rearranging materials serves as an analog for navigating those relationships - a collection of iterations and a surrender to the acting agents or materials. She states, “Responding to these inanimate materials is listening. Listening is how I love.”
-
Shabnam Jannesari is an Iranian artist who received her MFA with distinction in Studio Art at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. She exhibited her work in the United States and abroad. Her recent solo exhibitions include The Ribbons of Space, at Hastings College, NE and The Carpet Grew Like a Garden, in Cambridge, MA. She participated in the group exhibition Narrative Imperative in Alexey von Schlippe Gallery at University of Connecticut Avery point, Domestic State in Beard and Weil Gallery at Wheaton College, MA and Crossing Cultures at A.P.E Gallery, Northampton, MA. Her paintings and drawings are in Fidelity’s Corporate Collection as well as the University of Massachusetts School of Law. She is a recipient of the Distinguished Art Fellowship at the University of Massachusetts – Dartmouth and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant, Canada (2020).
She incorporates both drawing and painting to explore the memories and nostalgia of distant intimacies in her life through narrative. She illuminates the plight of the Iranian woman – censored by an overreaching patriarchy. Jannesari’s paintings express her personal story, but they also reflect on the life of suppressed Iranian women in general. Jannesari carefully composes the figures which empowers the complex reality of Iranian female identity.
-
Forrest Lawson draws on the historical uses of abjected blood, as it’s tied to Queer identity, from the AIDs crisis through present uses of socio-political tools that continue to relegate Queerness. As an interdisciplinary artist, he draws from Queer and feminist theory to inform sculpture, print, and book arts that align with activist and liberatory practices. He has been awarded the grand prize of ArtFields 2019 and has continued to exhibit and attend residencies both nationally and internationally.
-
She/Her | Instagram
Abigail Nasari is currently a senior at Hope College and will graduate with a BFA in Studio Arts and minor Art History this December 2022. As a Tanzanian Korean growing up in Tanzania and Kenya East Africa, her cultural experiences and changing surroundings have inspired much of her work. Art has always been the medium through which she has processed her ever-changing environments and surrounding cultures. Most of her practice incorporates various mediums such as charcoal and Kanga/Kitenge fabrics from Tanzania into collage work or large scale figurative drawings. She has recently exhibited her work in the Fowler-Kellogg gallery in Chautauqua New York, and has also participated in several juried shows at Hope College in Holland Michigan.
-
He/They | Instagram | Website
Marshall Ransfield is currently pursuing a BFA while minoring in Art History at Columbus State University, in Columbus, GA. As a transdisciplinary artist, his practice draws from art history, research, personal experiences, and examining the world through his various identities as a queer, Maori, and Jewish individual. Through the act of weaving medium format photographs of the body, the resulting pieces depicts the distortion and censorship as it relates to the internal struggles of the queer body. He has exhibited his artwork at the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center in New York, and in several galleries around Georgia, including the Bo Bartlett Center, Schley Gallery, and the Bay Gallery.
-
They/Them | Instagram | Website
Gene Thompson is a queer, non-binary artist from Pittsburgh, PA and based in New Orleans, LA. They have been touring their work and collaborating with community organizations and artist residencies across the country since 2012. Thompson has worked professionally as a performer, muralist, public artist, printmaker, illustrator, and painter. Their current interdisciplinary artistic process involves using somatic and embodied practices, community organizing, and movement workshops. Thompson creates and directs inclusive public art events that connect people and seek to heal by confronting the trauma held in our bodies.
Thompson is a grateful recipient of residencies including: The Spectacular House Digital Gallery, Sulfur Studios (Savannah, GA), Pittsburgh Office of Public Art/Bike Pittsburgh, The New Hazlett Theater (Pittsburgh, PA), The Pittsburgh Children’s Museum, Laboratory (Spokane, WA), The Kelly-Strayhorn Theater, Charles Adams Studio Project (Lubbock, TX), Art In Odd Places (Orlando, FL), AS220 (Providence, RI), and Future Tenant (Pittsburgh).
-
Marshall Ransfield is currently pursuing a BFA while minoring in Art History at Columbus State University, in Columbus, GA. As a transdisciplinary artist, his practice draws from art history, research, personal experiences, and examining the world through his various identities as a queer, Maori, and Jewish individual. Through the act of weaving medium format photographs of the body, the resulting pieces depicts the distortion and censorship as it relates to the internal struggles of the queer body. He has exhibited his artwork at the Fowler-Kellogg Art Center in New York, and in several galleries around Georgia, including the Bo Bartlett Center, Schley Gallery, and the Bay Gallery.