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MAD Announces Spring 2017 Artist Studios Program Residents and Van Lier Fellow
Featuring artists Lucia Cuba, Camille Hoffman, Ariel Jackson, Adam Ledford, Yoshiyuki Minami, Rachel Rader, and Lauren Skelly Bailey
New York, NY (February 2, 2017)
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) announces the Spring session of its Artist Studios Program and Van Lier Fellowship. The selected artists, all of whom will be assigned open studio space in the Museum from February through May, are Lucia Cuba, Camille Hoffman, Ariel Jackson, Adam Ledford, Yoshiyuki Minami, Rachel Rader, and Lauren Skelly Bailey. Hoffman will be the Museum’s Van Lier Fellow.
An initiative launched by the MAD Education Department in 2008, the Artist Studios Program selects six emerging artists and designers, and assigns each a day of the week to work in one of the Museum’s sixth-floor open studios for a four-month period. The studios are accessible to the public, and visitors to MAD are invited to observe and interact with the artists at work. In 2016, the Museum introduced the Van Lier Fellowship as an addition to the program. The fellowship, funded by the New York Community Trust, provides a talented, culturally underrepresented rising artist with financial support and a dedicated studio at MAD for full-time use.
An innovative model of engagement, the Artist Studios Program has served more than 130 emerging and midcareer artists and designers. The artists welcome dialogue, making themselves available to discuss their work and craft; visitors to the studios are encouraged to inquire about their processes, materials, and concepts. This unusual course of communication is a remarkable opportunity for artists and visitors alike.
“The artists chosen for this session all have very investigatory practices. They rigorously explore materials, patterns, social conflicts, and complex histories,” said Carli Beseau, Manager of Artist Studios and Docent Programs at MAD. “I think visitors will find their conversations with the artists to be engaging and unexpected.”
Additionally, residents and fellows have the opportunity to host one MADmakes workshop during their residency cycle. MADmakes is a drop-in, hands-on educational series that invites visitors to learn the artists’ own methods and test their skills at art making and creative production. The series engages visitors in various techniques and ideas, facilitating greater understanding and appreciation of workmanship. Great for visitors of all ages, backgrounds, and interests, MADmakes workshops are free with Museum admission. They will take place as follows:
Thursday, February 16, 6 pm – Lauren Skelly Bailey
Thursday, March 9, 6 pm – Lucia Cuba
Thursday, April 13, 6 pm – Adam Ledford
Thursday, May 11, 6 pm – Camille Hoffman and Ariel Jackson
The Artist Studios Pecha Kucha Talk and Closing Reception will take place Thursday, May 18, 2017, at 6:30 pm.
The Spring 2017 Artist Studios Residents and Van Lier Fellow were selected from over 350 applicants by the Artist Studios Selection Committee, made up of Museum staff members and outside professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design.
Spring 2017 ARTIST STUDIOS RESIDENTS AND VAN LIER FELLOW
Rachel Rader’s studio practice includes traditional craft materials such as glass, metal, clay, and fiber, incorporated with performance art. As the creator of the organization Ancient Truth Investigators (ATI), Rader undertakes research into elements, and hand-makes works that resemble geological rock formations. In her performance work, she adopts the moniker Ráchel Räder, Chief Investigator. While in residence at MAD, Rader will create objects associated with ATI’s archeological discoveries, including chakra healing tools. Visitors will have the opportunity to participate in interviews for ATI with selected performances of the artist as Ráchel Räder, Chief Investigator, scheduled throughout the spring. |
Yoshiyuki Minami uses and advances manual textile-making techniques to create cloth that he turns into one-of-a-kind garments. He restricts himself to using sustainable, locally sourced materials and employs spontaneity to dictate his work, critically assessing and developing processes for each of his designs. Minami has a BA in Sociology with a sub-concentration in Economics, Work, and Society from the University of Michigan. He took part in the Artists in Residence program at Textile Arts Center in 2014–2015. |
Lauren Skelly Bailey explores surface, form, and the layering of histories with her ceramics. She is drawn to controlling the unexpected, and her intentional decision making allows her to develop new facets of her process of creating clay conglomerations. Bailey received her MFA in Ceramics from Rhode Island School of Design and her MA and BFA in Studio Art from Adelphi University. She has apprenticed internationally and exhibited nationally, and currently resides on Long Island. |
Adam Ledford creates installations that explore the narrative power of objects. Research into decorative arts is essential to his practice, whether this means examining museum collections or rummaging through thrift shops. Ledford is fascinated by the ways we project personal identity through our possessions and the public performance of domestic space. At MAD, Ledford will make flat-backed ceramic portraits of nineteenth-century household objects to re-create a parlor in a Victorian row home. Using objects drawn from regional museum collections, historical style guides, and local production centers, he hopes to create an echo of the room’s former inhabitants through reflections of their material culture. Ledford studied at Tyler School of Art and continues to live and teach community arts in Philadelphia. He has been an artist-in-residence both internationally and nationally. |
Lucia Cuba constructs garments as critical devices at the intersection of fashion design and social science. As a fashion designer and scholar, she is interested in issues of gender, health, and global fashion practices. She has developed projects concerned with activism, education, and the study of non-Western fashion systems. At MAD, Cuba will work on a new chapter of her ongoing project “Exercises on Health,” exploring notions of health and its absence through garments and wearable devices. The series will translate conversations with MAD visitors around the meanings and dimension of health into wearable forms using mixed media, transcending the original sites of conversations and expanding into, and impacting, other people and places. Cuba received an MFA in Fashion Design and Society from Parsons School of Design. She completed her BS in Social Psychology at Cayetano Heredia University in Peru, where she also undertook MA studies in Educational Psychology and PhD studies in Public Health. She currently works as Assistant Professor of Fashion at Parsons and is an independent designer. |
A multidisciplinary artist from Louisiana, Ariel Jackson pulls from her personal experience of living through Hurricane Katrina, her childhood on a farm and the aesthetics of her youth, and information regarding black lives in the face of tragedy and catastrophe. She uses these themes as a base for exploring historical, personal, and social perceptions of The Blues. Her mediums of interest are video, animation, and sculpture. At MAD, Jackson will use family and historical research on black farmers to create fabric sculptures of crops, mainly rice and soybeans—which her family grew from the 1950s through the ’80s in rural Louisiana—using a 1970s typewriter. As the granddaughter of black American farmers, she continues the tradition of producing one’s own crops while transforming it to function in a contemporary context. Jackson received her BFA in Studio Art at the Cooper Union. She has exhibited nationally and lives and works in Brooklyn. |
Camille Hoffman Camille Hoffman’s paintings are layered geographies, in which fragments of cultural objects are chromatically twisted and blended into complex wholes. From holiday-themed plastic tablecloths to dried paint shreds and found objects, Hoffman takes inspiration from Chinese landscape and Hudson River School painting, as well as the Philippine weaving and Jewish folk traditions of her ancestors. Disrupting visual perception, her scraps of materials take on new life, becoming a vehicle of spiritual agency for the artist amid the pressures of economic and political globalization. As a Van Lier Fellow at MAD, Hoffman will explore the history of American landscape painting through invented narrative and material experimentation. Working from contentious historical references related to Manifest Destiny and drawing from the Museum’s view of Columbus Circle and Trump International Hotel, she will develop an alternative topography composed of paint, papier-mâché personal documents, discarded holiday decorations, and domestic wares. Hoffman received her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art and her BFA in Community Arts and Painting from California College of the Arts. She has worked as an educator for over a decade and has shown her work throughout the United States and Europe. |
Van Lier Arts FellowABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum's curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design. The Museum will be celebrating its Diamond Jubilee 60th Anniversary this year.