Announcing the 2022 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardees
The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2022-2023 award of a year-long rent-free studio space in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
The recipients for 2022 are aricoco (Ari Tabei), David Atkin, Jeane Cohen, Avram Finkelstein, Jim Gaylord, Yasi Ghanbari, William Kohler, Janice Nowinski, Maia Cruz Palileo, Martha Poggioli, Erin Riley, Kathia St. Hilaire, Jonathan Torres, Grace Sachi Troxell, Margaux Valengin, Naeem Mohaiemen, Cherrie Yu.
The seventeen artists were selected from a competitive pool of 1500 applicants by a jury comprising Ellen Altfest, Julie Curtiss, Deborah Kass, Arthur Simms, and Didier William. The residency period will last from September 2022 through August 2023, with an open studios weekend to be scheduled for spring 2023.
2022 Phillip Pearlstein Painter and Irving Sandler Prize
David Atkin is the recipient of the 2022 Philip Pearlstein Painter accolade. A dedicated member of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Artist Advisory Committee, Philip Pearlstein co-founded the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program (now known as the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program) in 1991 alongside Chuck Close, Janet Fish, Irving Sandler, and Robert Storr. Ronald Hall was the first recipient of this distinction in 2021, which will identify an outstanding representational painter and ensure that a non-abstract painter be awarded a residency annually in recognition of Pearlstein’s ongoing commitment to referential art.
This year's recipient of the Irving Sandler Prize is Arthur Simms '94. Founded in 2019, the $2,500 prize is awarded annually to program alumni who share Irving’s concern for the “intentions, visions, and experiences” of artists.
Artist Bios
aricoco (Ari Tabei) is an interdisciplinary visual artist based in NYC who was born and raised in Tokyo. In aricoco’s most recent solo exhibition at ChaShaMa space as a culmination of 3-month Immigrant Artist Fellowship, she showed both of her new and old works. In 2018, supported by Franklin Furnace Fund, aricoco presented a performance project and an installation piece at La MaMa Galleria. She was awarded LMCC Creative Engagnement Fund and created a virtual runway-performance show in 2020. In 2021, she received New York City Artist Corps Grant to continue working on her socially-engaged collaborative project PIPORNOT. Recently, aricoco has received SU-CASA residency program. She received M.F.A. in sculpture and video performance art from the University of Connecticut in 2007. www.aricoco.com
David Atkin, Philip Pearlstein Painter Distinction, is a painter and art educator. He was born and raised in Toronto, Canada, and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Bremen, Maine. His current portrait and figure works focus on internal states of mind and dreamlike moments. Though his figures exist in contemporary settings, they are immersed in dialogue with great themes and precedents in Western painting. Atkin recontextualizes these narrative connections in an attempt to reveal that we are, in all our moments, more than who might seem to be.Atkin has taught painting, drawing, and design at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, Massachusetts; Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University in Halifax; CUNY, Laguardia Community College; and the 92nd Street Y. He is presently on the upper school art faculty at Avenues: The World School in New York. Atkin’s work is in collections in both the US and Canada, including the Nova Scotia Museum of Art and Harvard University. He received his MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and his BFA from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design University. He also attended the Cooper Union, Parson’s School of Design, and the Ontario College of Art. www.davidatkinstudio.com
Jeane Cohen is an artist based in New York City. Her paintings are charged with immediacy and vitality. They record her process of integrating perceptions, imaginal experiences and emotions into the picture plane. Cohen has received grants from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, won first place in the Yeck Young Painters Competition, and is completing a Prison Education Teaching Fellowship at the University of Maine. She has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Monson Arts, the City of Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and the 40th Street Artist-in-Residence Program. Cohen has exhibited at Miami University, The Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Slag Gallery, Julius Caesar Gallery, Able Baker Contemporary, Vox Populi, Flying Object and Edgewood College. She received her MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2018, and her BA from Hampshire College in 2011. Cohen has recently taught in the Painting and Drawing Department at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, at Maine College of Art and Design, and with the Second Chance Pell Prison Program. www.jeanecohen.com
Avram Finkelstein is an artist and writer, and a founding member of the Silence=Death and Gran Fury collectives. His work has shown at MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the New Museum, the Metropolitan Museum, David Zwirner, the Shed, the Museum of the City of New York, Kunsthal KAdE, and the Migros Museum, and is in the permanent collections of MoMA, the Whitney, the New Museum, the Metropolitan, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and the Brooklyn Museum. He is featured in the artist oral history project at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art, and his book for UC Press, After Silence: A History of AIDS Through its Images was nominated for an International Center Of Photography 2018 Infinity Award in Critical Writing and Research. He has written for BOMB, frieze, Art21, and Foam, been interviewed by The New York Times, frieze, Artforum, NPR, Slate, and Interview, and spoken about art, social practice, AIDS activism, LGBTQ cultural production, and the American Left at Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, and NYU. http://www.avramfinkelstein.com
Jim Gaylord is a painter and sculptor whose current work is created from cutout paper, assembled into sculptural reliefs. Using elements of formalism, geometry and ornamentation, he constructs spaces that are simultaneously elegant and strange. Gaylord received his MFA from the University of California, Berkeley, and a BA from the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. He has exhibited at Deanna Evans Projects, New York, NY; Jeff Bailey Gallery, New York, NY; Gregory Lind Gallery, San Francisco, CA; DC Moore Gallery, New York, NY; AMT Gallery, Milan, Italy; and Pavel Zoubok Gallery, New York, NY. He has completed residencies at MacDowell and Yaddo, and has received fellowships from the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. His work is included in the permanent collections of Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Berkeley Art Museum, and the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum.http://www.jimgaylord.com
Yasi Ghanbari is an artist, educator, and administrator. Through video, performance, and installation, she explores personal and cultural expressions of privilege, identity, and engagement. Ghanbari has shown her work nationally and internationally at venues such as the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston), Centre for Contemporary Arts (Glasgow), NURTUREart (Brooklyn), and The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (New York). Ghanbari received their BA from Oberlin College and their MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in Film, Video, and New Media. She has completed residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (ME), The Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (NY), and ACRE (WI). http://www.yasighanbari.com
William Kohler, born in Boston in 1962, has exhibited internationally including in New York, Chicago, London, Paris, and Charlotte, NC. He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant in 2020, and attended the DNA artist residency in Provincetown, MA in 2019. He has taught drawing, painting, and art history at numerous schools including the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, American Academy of Art, and at Indiana University Northwest. He has an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (’87) and a BFA from The Maryland Institute College of Art (’85). During the last two years he has been traveling and painting between New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Vermont, Arizona and the Oregon coast. http://www.williekohler.com
Naeem Mohaiemen combines film, photography, archive, and essays to research the many forms of utopia-dystopia (families, borders, architecture, and uprisings)– beginning from Bangladesh’s two postcolonial markers (1947, 1971) and then radiating outward to transnational alliances and collisions in the Muslim world after 1945. Despite underlining mistakes and a historic tendency toward misrecognition of allies, a hope (against experience) for a future international left, as an alternative to current silos of race and religion, is a basis for the work. He is author of Midnight’s Third Child (Nokta, forthcoming) and Prisoners of Shothik Itihash (Kunsthalle Basel, 2014); editor of Chittagong Hill Tracts in the Blind Spot of Bangladesh Nationalism (Drishtipat, 2010); and co-editor with Eszter Szakacs of Solidarity Must be Defended (Tranzit, 2022) and with Lorenzo Fusi of System Error: War is a Force that Gives us Meaning (Sylvana, 2007). Naeem is Associate Professor of Visual Arts at Columbia University. http://www.shobak.org
Janice Nowinski paints from snapshots and found photographs, and also transcribes art historical paintings. Her work investigates the interiority of private lives and family scenes. The paintings are often not much larger than the snapshots that she is working from which makes for an intimate relationship between the photos and their transformation. Nowinski was born in New York City and lives in Brooklyn. She studied at the New York Studio School of Painting and Sculpture and received her MFA in painting from Yale University (1987). Her work has been exhibited at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the National Academy Museum, and the American University Museum. She has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Riverside Arts Center Freeark Gallery, Chicago, Illinois; John Davis Gallery, Hudson, New York; and the Washington Studio School Gallery, Washington, D.C. Nowinski’s work is represented by Thomas Erben Gallery, where she had her debut solo exhibition in 2021. Nowinski’s work has been reviewed in Art Forum, Hudson Review, Hyperallergic, Two Coats of Paint, Huffington Post and American Artist. She is the recent recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (2022). http://www.janicenowinski.com
Maia Cruz Palileo is influenced by the oral histories of their family’s arrival in the United States from the Philippines, as well as the colonial relationship between the two countries, Palileo’s paintings infuse these narratives with memory and care. Figures appear and disappear in lush landscapes, domestic interiors, and colonial structures. Deep blues and reds suggest dark realms where superstition, myth, and history blur. Evoking a hybrid sense of place, they serve as metaphors for migration and the persistence of tacit knowledge in the face of assimilation. Palileo is a recipient of the Nancy Graves Grant, Art Matters Grant, Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Program Grant, Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant, NYFA Painting Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation MFA Award and the Astraea Visual Arts Fund Award. They received an MFA in sculpture from Brooklyn College, City University of New York and BA in Studio Art at Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts. Palileo has participated in residencies at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Denniston Hill, Glenwild, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower East Side Print Shop, New York, Millay Colony, Austerlitz, and the Joan Mitchell Center, New Orleans. http:// www.maiacruzpalileo.com
Martha Poggioli is an interdisciplinary artist and designer from Brisbane, Australia, based in Chicago. Exploring systems of production and cultures of consumption, she works across sculpture, new media, installation, and performance. Her current research is deeply invested in legacies of intellectual property and industrial design in health, with a focus on contraceptive, prosthetic, and surgical devices. Awards and residencies include John Michael Kohler Arts Center Arts/Industry Residency in Foundry, Leroy Neiman Foundation Ox-Box Fellowship, Australian Tapestry Workshop Artist-in-Residence, Chicago DCASE Individual Artist Grant, Australia Council for the Arts Career Development Grant. Martha has exhibited at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, RMIT Design Hub, Mütter Museum, Julius Caesar, MaassArt Art Museum, SPACES and Kunstgewerbemuseum, among others. She holds a BFA from Queensland University of Technology and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. http://www.marthapoggioli.net
Erin M. Riley is a tapestry weaver live and working in Brooklyn, NY. Erin received a BFA from Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA, and a MFA from Tyler School of Art, Philadelphia, PA both in Fibers. Riley is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery, New York, NY and had solo exhibitions there in 2018 and 2021. Riley is a 2021 United States Artist Fellow, and her work was collected as part of the 2021 Academy of Arts & Letters Purchase Prize. She was a resident artist at Dieu Donné Workspace Program, The Corporation of Yaddo, MacDowell, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in 2012 and 2021 as an alumni artist-in-residence. http://www.erinmriley.com
Grace Sachi Troxell is a sculptor based in New York. In her current work she uses clay and found objects to explore entanglements between organic and inorganic materials, form and deformity, and digestion. She received a BS in Studio Art from Skidmore College, a Post-Graduate certificate in painting from the Glasgow School of Art, and her MFA from Cornell University. She has been artist in residence at MacDowell, Yaddo, Sculpture Space, the Studios at MASSMoCa, Woodstock Byrdcliffe, Willapa Bay AiR, The Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Dumfries House, Scotland, and The International Textile Art Symposium, Daugavpils Rothko Center, Latvia. She was the recipient of the Warren Mackenzie Advancement Award from the Northern Clay Center. http://www.gracesachitroxell.com
Kathia St. Hilaire was born and raised in South Florida and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. She received a MFA in Painting/ Printmaking at the Yale School of Art and BFA in Printmaking at the Rhode Island School of Design. She has lived in a predominantly Caribbean and African American area in South Florida all her life and her experiences growing up with tension between African American and Caribbean subcultures has influenced her to evaluate how her history exists within the black diaspora. St. Hilaire’s work is driven by her daily reality, as well as her strong connection to the Haitian community, recognizing both her ties and disconnection from her family’s ancestral past. In addition to drawing from her own personal experiences, St. Hilaire looks at western art for historical constructions, modalities of thought, and contemporary discourse to inform her practice while centering the work in Afro-Haitian culture. Her practice is an exploration into the relationships between materials, locations, and cultural processes. The work incorporates materials that are significant to her culture or signify broader themes of labor and migration. https://www.instagram.com/kathiast.hilaire
Jonathan Torres was born in San Juan, Puerto Rico in 1983, received his BFA in 2009 from the Escuela de Artes Plásticas, San Juan, and his MFA from Brooklyn College in 2012 under the mentorship of Vito Acconci. Nominee of the Joan Mitchell Foundation grant, Torres was selected for the Biennale Mercosul (Brazil 2016), won the Charles G. Shaw Award (NY, 2012) and the Arcos Dorados Award (Argentina, 2011). Torres has been exhibiting in solo and group shows between New York and Puerto Rico for over ten years. His work has been featured in Flash Art, Beautiful/Decay, and Art Observed, among other publications. Torres lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and his work belongs to important collections such as the Museum of Fine Art, Boston and Museo Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico.
Margaux Valengin examines the boundaries of the abstract and the figurative. Informed by their formative training in France, Belgium and England, the work bears the influence of the female surrealist painters who created a language of defiance in subverting the representational regimes of their times. Valengin’s paintings depict the persistence of organic forms such as female bodies, flora and fauna under the strictures of capitalist modernity. Through a collage-based process, rooted in both physical and digital archival research, she assembles dreamscapes of the collective unconscious - comprised of scientific illustration, internet stock images and allusions to European art history - to confront urgent questions of class and gender. Margaux Valengin grew up in France and studied painting at ENSAV La Cambre (Brussels, Belgium) and at the Royal College (London, UK). She had solo exhibitions at Y2K Group (New York), SPRING BREAK ART SHOW (New York), Galerie PACT (Paris, France), and Union Gallery (London, UK). Group exhibitions of Valengin's work include Haras National du Pin (France), Galerie PACT, FUTURE Gallery (Berlin, Germany), Olhão Space (São Paulo, Brasil), SIGNAL and Greenpoint Gallery Terminal (both in New York). http://www.margauxvalengin.com
Cherrie Yu is a 27 year old artist born in Xi’an, China. Her films and performances have shown at Chicago Cultural Center, the Museum of Contemporary Photography, the Arts Club of Chicago, Wassaic Project in New York, Mint Museum in Charlotte NC, and Chengdu Times Museum in China. She has been an artist in residence at ACRE Residency, Contemporary Calgary Museum, Monson Arts, Yaddo, McColl center, and a visiting artist at Emory University. She is the awardee of the 2021 Kala Art Institute Media Award Fellowship. http://cherrieyu.cargo.site
Arthur Simms, Irving Sandler Award Recipient, lives and works in Staten Island, NY. His most recent solo exhibition, And I Say, Brother Had A Very Good Day, One Halo, Martos Gallery, New York (2021) was reviewed in The New York Times, Artforum, TheGuide.Art, Hyperallergic, and New York Magazine, with Jerry Saltz naming it among the best exhibitions of the year. Other recent and forthcoming presentations include The Kingston Biennial, Kingston (2022); The American University, Washington DC (2022); The American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (2022); White Columns, New York (2022); Shoot the Lobster, New York (2019); and the 58th Venice Biennale (2019). Arthur Simms is the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards including The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award (2007); The American Academy of Arts and Letters (2006); The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1999/2000); Prix de Rome (2002/2003); The Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant (1997); and many others. He is Program Director and Professor of the Arts at CUNY, LaGuardia Community College, New York. Simms also serves on the Board of Directors of MacDowell, Peterborough, NH, and the Board of Governors of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME.
For over three decades, Arthur Simms has developed a singular approach to assemblage, producing a prolific body of sculpture, as well as dimensional paintings and works on paper. Born in Saint Andrew, Jamaica (1961), Simms was inspired in early childhood by the improvisationally constructed carts he saw transporting goods to and from the market (he lived in Kingston until age 7, when his family moved to New York). Simms developed a fluency with this sort of construction—clearly articulating a singular object from many disparate elements—and by the 1990s added hemp as both a practical binding agent and source of formal unison that would become his trademark. Bound by hemp, and by the late 90s, wire, Simms' sculptures contain natural material, found objects and items of autobiographical significance—spanning a vast diversity of forms. Some sculptures stand monumentally as opaque accumulations of twine; others are wrapped in bare networks of wire, their contents clearly legible. At once many and whole, rife with art and world historical references, Simms' sculptures both capture a breadth of cultural information and reflect the fractured, diffusive effects of the diasporic experience.