Jason Lujan - July 2023

Jason Lujan in the Pool Room at Surf Point Foundation. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Jason Lujan is originally from Marfa, Texas and now lives in Toronto. As an artist, he creates tools for understanding and interpreting the processes by which different cultures approach each other as a result of travel and communication and are later homogenized. Largely integrating visual components rooted in North American and Asia, the work focuses on the possibilities and limitations of the exchanging of ideas, meanings, and values, questioning the concepts of authorship and authenticity.

Visit Jason’s website here.

Carol Thompson - July 2023

Carol Thompson. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Born and raised in a small town in Minnesota, in May of 1973, Thompson moved to NYC. Apart from a stint in Atlanta where she served as the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art at the High Museum from 2001 to 2019, she has spent most of her adult life in Manhattan. Since January of 2020, she has lived in Harlem. Acutely aware of the unique challenges that accompany the task of diversifying museum collections within Eurocentric institutions, Thompson is committed to being an agent of change as she works toward social justice by advancing greater recognition of the art of Africa and of the African Diaspora. The art of Burkina Faso is a special focus. Since 1987, she has made seven visits to this little-known nation, including most recently, in 2021, 2022, and 2023. Another of her passion projects focuses on the art of street artist, the late Curtis Lee Levon Cuffie.

Lilly Hern-Fondation - April 2023

Lilly Hern-Fondation in the Sunrise Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen,

Lilly Hern-Fondation is a Brooklyn-based arts worker, writer, and artist. Originally from Los Angeles, she studied literature and photography at the University of Washington, Seattle and received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She currently works as Senior Project Manager of Exhibitions and Commissions at MoMA PS1; previously, she held positions as the Programs Director at CUE Art Foundation and Project Manager at Creative Time.

Deborah Jack - April 2023

Deborah Jack in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Deborah Jack, is a St. Maarten and Jersey City based multi-disciplinary artist whose work is based in video/sound installation, photography, painting and text. Her work engages a variety of strategies for mining the intersections of histories, cultural memory, ecology and climate change, while negotiating a global present. Her work is featured in the exhibition Forecast Form: Art in the Caribbean Diaspora, 1990’s-Today at the MCA Chicago and will travel to ICA Boston in Fall 2023. In Fall 2021 Deborah Jack: 20 Years was presented at Pen + Brush in New York City. Group exhibitions include the Perez Art Museum of Miami exhibition and the traveling exhibition, SITE Santa Fe Biennial, Brooklyn Museum of Art, TENT Rotterdam, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, the Frost Museum at FIU, Portland Museum in Maine, and Delaware Art Museum. Her work has been reviewed in Hyperallergic, Whitehot , Frieze and BOMB Magazine. She will be a 2023 Changing Climate Resident at the Santa Fe Art Institute. Deborah is currently a Professor of Art at New Jersey City University.

Visit Deborah’s website here.

Untitled #8, from Intertidal Imaginaries: The Resistant Geographies of the Shore(coast) in the Aftermath of Saltwater(storm surges), 2021

Jackie Tileston - April 2023

Jackie Tileston in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Jackie Tileston (b. Manila, Philippines) spent her childhood as an itinerant “Third Culture Kid”, living in the Philippines, India, England, and France, before moving to the US. She has a B.A. from Yale University and an MFA from Indiana University. Her work has been featured in solo exhibitions in Chicago, Houston, Philadelphia, and Dallas, and group exhibitions at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Art in General, the Painting Center and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts. Tileston is the recipient of the Core Fellowship Residency, the Pew Fellowship in the Arts, the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Residency, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award and residency Tileston lives and works in Philadelphia, where she is an Associate Professor in Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania.

Visit Jackie’s website here.

Hilary Irons - April 2023

Hilary Irons in the Split Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Hilary Irons is a Maine-based painter and curator. She is Gallery and Exhibitions Director at the University of New England, and is represented by Dowling Walsh Gallery. She received an MFA from the Yale School of Art in '08 and a BFA from Parsons School of Design in '02, and has attended residencies at the Albers Foundation, Skowhegan, MacDowell, the American Academy in Rome, the Pace House, Hewnoaks, and the Canterbury Shaker Village.

View Hilary’s website here.

Karen Gelardi - March 2023

Karen Gelardi in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Karen Gelardi is a Maine-based artist working across varied mediums to test the elasticity of imagery and to model resilient systems. Influenced by Bauhaus principles, Karen combines fine art, craft, and industrial production processes in her practice. Karen has been awarded residencies at Hewnoaks Artist Colony and the Quimby Colony and received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the St. Botolph Club Foundation. Karen has exhibited her work at Coleman Burke and Curator galleries in New York, Northern-Southern in Texas, and widely throughout Maine including the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Able Baker Gallery, Perimeter, Interloc, Space Gallery, and the Map Room.

Aurora Tang - March 2023

Aurora Tang on the SPF grounds. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Aurora Tang is a curator and researcher based in Los Angeles. Tang has worked with the Center for Land Use Interpretation (CLUI) since 2009, and currently serves as its program director. As an independent curator Tang has organized recent exhibitions at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, MOCA Tucson, and the City of West Hollywood. She has also worked with the Getty Research Institute, Getty Conservation Institute, and High Desert Test Sites, where she was managing director from 2011–15. Tang has taught at schools including Otis College of Art and Design and the University of Southern California. She is the recipient of an Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts Curatorial Research Fellowship.

Photo by Elon Schoenholz.

Ja'Hari Ortega - March 2023

Ja’Hari in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Heather Henriksen.

Ja’Hari Ortega is a Boston-based artist and advocate interested in the idea of visual language vernaculars. She works in a variety of mediums but is primarily drawn to metal. Having attended Boston's only public high school for the visual and performing arts as well as the nation’s first and only public independent college of art and design, Ja’Hari has been inspired by her city and the people in it. She quickly became a leader in her community and has worked with several arts organizations and institutions on projects such as Boston’s Radical Imagination for Racial Justice Grant that invites Boston-based artists and creatives of color to imagine and co-create justice with their communities.

Protección, 2021

8.5 x 3.5 inch (h x w)

Bronze Sculpture

Nicki Cherry - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Nicki Cherry is an artist based in New York and Chicago. Cherry’s monstrous fiberglass and concrete sculptures incorporate active systems of growth and decay—tulips bloom from stretching tendrils, ceramic bodies leak milky fluids, spine-shaped candles burn and diffuse scent. Their work embraces the awkward and absurd to explore the frequent discomfort that comes with being a body. After initially studying to become a particle physicist, Cherry received their BA from the University of Chicago in 2014 and their MFA from Yale School of Art in 2019. Their work has been exhibited at NARS Foundation, the Border Project Space, Flux Factory, ELM Foundation and Shin Gallery in New York; AUTOMAT and Icebox Project Space in Philadelphia; and the Reva David Logan Center for the Arts, and Slate Arts and Performance in Chicago. They have received grants from Café Royal Cultural Foundation, Queens Council on the Arts, and the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs. Cherry was a 2022 AIM Fellow at the Bronx Museum of Arts.

Meg Hahn - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Meg Hahn is a painter based in Portland, Maine. Her work has been included in numerous exhibitions such as the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Able Baker Contemporary, Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Dunes, Zero Station, SOIL, and Collar Works among others. She has been awarded residencies at The Golden Foundation Residency Program, The Vermont Studio Center, Hewnoaks Artist Colony, and the Monhegan Artists’ Residency. She has also been a co-director at Border Patrol, a curatorial collective, since 2017. Meg received her BFA from Maine College of Art & Design.

Jake Price - February 2023

Photo by Jake Price ‘23.

Jake Price, Director, Producer, Cinematography, Editor, Writer is a World Press Photo winning producer, director, immersive doc creator and educator. His films and immersive media convey intimate and poignant stories of the human spirit in demanding times. Jake directed the Webby nominated and World Press Photo awarded Unknown Spring, an immersive web doc that focused on tsunami survivors and Fukushima residents in the aftermath of Japan’s nuclear disaster. Unknown Spring was hailed by Filmmaker Magazine as a chronicle of and testament to the Japanese people’s resilience and humanity in the face of unspeakable odds, following the Fukushima meltdown. Jake’s films and immersive media have been funded by POV and were official selections at the New York Film Festival’s Convergence festival. His work appears in The New York Times, TIME, The New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Orion Magazine, Newsweek, Le Monde II and others throughout the world. Jake is an Ochberg Fellow at Columbia Universities’ Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma. Jake holds an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College in Boston and teaches Visual Narratives at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University.

Julia Jacquette - January 2023

Photo by Enrique Mendía

Julia Jacquette is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Primarily a painter, she also has worked in ceramics and published a graphic memoir. Slightly longer and more professional for other locations: Julia Jacquette is an American artist based in New York City and Amsterdam. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the RISD Museum, among other institutions. Jacquette’s work was included in the first installment of PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition, and was the subject of retrospectives at the Tang Museum and at the Wellin Museum. She is currently on the faculty at the Fashion Institute of Technology.

Enrique Mendía - January 2023

Photo by Julee Holcombe

Enrique Mendía is a filmmaker, photographer, art educator, and programmer based in Brooklyn. He was born and raised in Miami and still claims it as his home sometimes. He received a Bachelor of Arts from Bowdoin College in Political Theory and studied narrative fiction filmmaking at the FAMU International Film and TV School of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague. He is currently a Teaching Artist at the Brooklyn Museum.

Julee Holcombe - January 2023

“The Passage” by Julee Holcombe

Julee Holcombe (b.1972) lives and works in New England. She received her MFA in Photography and Electronic Media at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. Her work questions photography's truth-telling ability in which to distill our sense of time and curiosity. Her work is documentary, fictional, and autobiographical, reflecting today's world. The landscapes she documents can be decades apart or miles apart as they are reassembled to create mythical realities.

Holcombe's current work, Mythic Patterns, is a slow meditation of our cultural past, culminating and appropriating source materials from magazines, books, and her photo archive. The work reassembles remote “mythic patterns” that mirror the current cultural shifts of a culture devoted to individualism. The work explores the balance of a more "collective" and "universal" experience that reveals the complex nature of the human condition in search of spiritual intimacy.

Holcombe's work has been widely exhibited nationally and internationally, most notably at the British Museum of Art in London, England; Portland Museum of Art, ME; DeCordova Museum, Lincoln, MA and the Phoenix Museum of Art. She has received numerous awards and residencies, including a full fellowship to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her photographs are in several private and public collections: the Portland Museum of Art, the Fitchburg Art Museum and the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College.

Photo by Enrique Mendía

Jamie Roux - November 2022

Jamie Roux is a painter who lives in Maine.

Teresa Silva - November 2022

Teresa Silva is the Executive and Artistic Director at the Chicago Artists Coalition, a nonprofit organization supporting emerging and mid-career artists and curators. Silva has presented exhibitions, talks and lectures at venues such as the Chicago Cultural Center, Mana Contemporary, School of the Art Institute, Ox-Bow Art School and Artists' Residency, and the Artist Communities Alliance. She has served as a Visual Arts panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts and numerous others. In 2018, she was an Artists' Administrators Resident at the Robert Rauschenberg Residency Program in Captiva, FL. In 2022, Silva was ranked #5 in NewCity's prestigious list, Art 50: Chicago's Visual Vanguard for her influence and contributions to the Chicago art community.

Beatrice Wolert - November 2022

Beatrice Wolert in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Hilary Schaffner.

B​eatrice Wolert is a first-generation Polish American visual artist. She was raised in Greenpoint, Brooklyn where she lives and maintains her artistic practice. Wolert works between genres to explore concepts of impermanence, essentiality, and serendipity through the transformation of everyday materials and found objects. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Design from Adelphi University and a Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Pratt Institute. She recently had a solo show at Underdonk in Bushwick curated by Melissa Staiger. Her work has been exhibited at venues such as ABC No Rio, A.I.R. Gallery, Artists Space, Denise Bibro, D.U.M.B.O. Art Center, Elizabeth Foundation for the ARTS, Feature, Inc., Ground Floor Gallery, Hudson Guild, HQ, Janet Kurnatowski, Lorimoto, NURTUREart, Park Church Co-Op, Roxbury Art Group, Trestle Contemporary Art Gallery, Trestle Projects, and Exit Art in New York. Nationally and internationally, she has exhibited at Woman Made Gallery in Chicago, Hera Gallery, Wakefield, RI, BLAM Projects in Los Angeles, The Aratoi Wairarapa Museum of Art and History in New Zealand, and Creative Innovation Center CIC, Taunton, England, amongst others. She has installed numerous public outdoor installations, given artist talks and partook in the Elizabeth Foundation for the Art’s shift​ residency, New York, NY, and the Bridge Residency, Los Angeles, CA. More: beawolert.com​, Instagram​ ​@beawolert​.

Olga Herrera - September 2022

Olga U. Herrera is an art historian, independent curator, and scholar. She is currently Managing Director of the Crossing Latinidades Humanities Research Initiative at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on the intersections of globalization, networks of cultural production, and circulation of modern and contemporary art of the Americas. She is the author of American Interventions and Modern Art in South America (University Press of Florida, 2017) winner of the 2018 SECAC Award for Excellence in Scholarly Research and Publication; Toward the Preservation of a Heritage: Latin American and Latino Art in the Midwestern United States (University of Notre Dame, 2008); and editor of the books Scherezade García: From This Side of the Atlantic (AMA, 2019), and iliana emilia García: The Reason/The Object/The Word (AMA, 2019). Her essays and interviews have appeared in publications of the International Center of the Art of the Americas, Archives of American Art Journal, MIT ARTMargins, Diálogo, Public Art Dialogue, Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas, and others. Herrera holds a Ph.D. in Latin American modern and contemporary art history and theories of globalization from George Mason University. She is the founder of Artista, a Latinx and Latin American women artist digital platform.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg - September 2022

Might Delete Later (2021) by Joe Mama-Nitzberg.

Joe Mama-Nitzberg lives and works in Catskill, New York. He received his MFA from Art Center College of Design. He works in various forms and media including photography, video and collage. His work has been featured in exhibitions at Grant Wahlquist Gallery, Gallerie Catherine Bastide, Regina Rex, David Zwirner, the Salzburger Kunstverein, the Renaissance Society, the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Denmark), Basilica Hudson and White Columns. His work is in the collection of the Walker Art Center and MOCA Los Angeles, and he is a recipient of an Art Matters Grant.

Visit Joe’s website here.