Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: September 4 - September 30, 2024
MARK YOUR CALENDARS FOR this session’s open studios:
Thursday, September 26, 5-7PM
Andrés Argüelles Vigo
lima, peru
Andrés Argüelles Vigo (1988) Works and lives in Lima - Perú
I graduated in 2017 from the School of Fine Arts of Peru.
I am interested in reflecting on how the iconography of traditional art history has influenced different aspects of contemporary visual culture. Using painting, object and video, my work explores the history of universal (western) art through my own personal iconographic history.
Ariana Gomez
Buda, Texas
Ariana Gomez (she/her) is a visual artist based in Austin, TX. She spent twelve years in New York City working commercially and recently returned home to Austin to pursue a graduate degree from the University of Texas. This transition became a catalyst for her most recent work which explores the link between identity, land, home and memory. Working primarily with photography, film, text and sound, Gomez’s practice examines our notions of the ‘home’ as myth through reflections on her parent’s relationship to land. Her interest lies in the intersections of these mediums and how they work together to create an experiential memory-scape of place.
Gomez has exhibited both in the U.S. and internationally most recently showing at the Vermont Center for Photography, sTudio 7 for the Rockaway Artists’ Alliance in Fort Tilden, NY, and for The Print Space Gallery in London, UK. Recent awards include The Hopper Prize Grant, a 2024 University Residency Fellowship from Studios at MASS MoCA, and she was honored to be mentioned as a photographer to watch in Glass Tire’s Best of 2022. Her work has appeared online and in publications such as The New York Times, Lux Magazine, PhMuseum, Booooooom, and Ain’t Bad.
Gomez holds a BFA from The Rochester Institute of Technology and is a Diversify Photo Up Next Member. She is currently slated to receive her MFA in 2024.
Benjamin Garcia
auburn, new york
Photo by Lynda Le
Benjamin Garcia is a 2023 National Endowment for the Arts Fellow in poetry. His first collection, THROWN IN THE THROAT, was selected for the National Poetry Series, the Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, and as a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He worked for ten years as a sexual health and harm reduction educator in New York’s Finger Lakes region, where he received the Jill Gonzalez Health Educator Award recognizing contributions to HIV treatment and prevention. A CantoMundo and Lambda Literary fellow, he serves as core faculty at Alma College’s low-residency MFA program. His poems and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in: AGNI, Indiana Review, Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, and New England Review. His video poem “Ode to the Peacock” is available for viewing at the Broad Museum’s website as part of El Poder de la Poesia: Latinx Voices in Response to HIV/ AIDS. He is currently working on a multimedia project exploring ADHD and autism.
Elizabeth Robles
San juan, puerto rico
Elizabeth Robles (Camuy-P.R. 1960) is sculptor and multidisciplinary artist. She approaches art as a flexible practice that generates unexpected connections and a sense of plurality. Her art includes drawing, writing, book construction, planting, performance, assemblage, integration of the architectural and the flora and fauna of the archipelago of Puerto Rico. Transformation as potential, diversity, migration and pollination are some of her persistent themes.
Her works have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de PR (MAC), Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Museo de Arte de PR, Museo de las Américas, Hidrante, El Lobi, and Galería Francisco Oller (University of PR), among others.
She is a recipient of the Lexus Scholarship, Krasner & Pollock Foundation, El Serrucho - Beta Local. Among her artistic residencies are: La Casa de los Contrafuertes, SJ, Marquette University Language Department, Casa Silvana, Humacao, Focus on Puerto Rico, Mana Contemporary, Miami, and Taller Vivo MAC, Santurce.
Erick Alejandro Hernàndez
new haven, connecticut
Erick Alejandro Hernández is an artist from Cuba living and working in New Haven, CT. He received his BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and his MFA in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Hernández’s practice is invested in exploring how traditional techniques like oil painting and drawing can shift material forms in order to hold complex individual and collective histories. Revolving around overarching narratives such as a car crash or the death of a loved one, his paintings are investigative allegories exploring individual and shared experiences like grief, assimilation, and exile. Hernàndez has been a fellow at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Oxbow, Yaddo, Macdowell, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, among others. Recent group and solo exhibitions include Murmurs (Los Angeles, CA), The Mistake Room (Los Angeles, CA), Perrotin (New York, NY), and Yossi Milo (New York, NY).
James Gold
Pawtucket, rhode island
At once ancient and futuristic, my paintings depict fragments of hypothetical archaeology. Their lustrous surfaces are created with traditional painting techniques, yet are influenced by the hyperreality of digital imagery, occupying a space between fact and fable.
In my recent work, a papyrus scroll unfurls like a flag against a glowing coral background, an illusionistic black-and-white mosaic reveals swirling silhouetted artifacts, and an array of floating golden fragments on an electric-blue background suggests cartographic contours of islands and oceans. The cropped compositions imply that each painted object might extend infinitely beyond the edges.
My studio is an alchemical laboratory where I explore the sensuality of diverse materials. Starting with a sandy-textured pigmented gesso, I layer India ink, egg tempera, and sign-painting enamel in a range of shimmering colors, using stamps, brushes, abrasives, and calligraphy pens to realize objects that appear found, even to me. Viewers are invited into a world of “willing suspension of disbelief” as color and form become trompe l’oeil fragments of marble, tapestry, and papyrus. I create my paintings with love and care, and as I foreground an imagined future, I invite viewers to rethink the physicality of our contemporary world.
Each painting grows out of in-depth research and prompts investigations into an ever-expanding web of topics. As I read about archaeology, the history of design, neuroscience, geology, and the language of symbols, I gather and condense information into the surfaces of my paintings, driven by a desire to freely share the excitement of my discovery with viewers. This cycle of expansion (through learning) and compression (through making) allows me to cast a wide net, as I explore the question: What does our historical imagination look like?
Sangwoo Yoo
chicago, illinois
Sangwoo Yoo, born in Seoul, is an artist driven by the intention to reawaken modern senses and aims to engage with social realities and the environment through the ecological cycles of materials. He received his Master of Fine Arts in Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the United States and Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Seoul in Korea.
Yoo was the recipient of the 2024 Eldon Danhausen Fellowship, 2025 Anderson Ranch Arts Center, 2024 MASS MoCA Residency Fellowship, which was fully sponsored by the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been nominated for both the AICAD Post-Graduate Teaching Fellowship and the MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture. He won the second-place award in the 2023 William and Dorothy Yeck Award, and was the grand prize winner of the Hoguk Art Exhibition in Korea in 2016. His works have been displayed in renowned Korean institutions such as The War Memorial of Korea, the United Nations Peace Memorial Hall, the Yanggu Humanities Museum, and the ChunCheon National Museum. One of his pieces is currently part of the collection at The War Memorial of Korea in Seoul.
Moreover, Sangwoo is scheduled to participate in the 2024 EXPO CHICAGO with sponsorship from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and has held several solo exhibitions at Comfort Station Gallery, SITE Gallery in Chicago, Dos Gallery, and Red Brick Gallery in Seoul.
Steve Maldonado Silvestrini
toa alta, puerto rico
I am a traveler and witness until these acts are prolonged, then I am one of many actors within a complex theater. This theater scripts different manifestations of the natural world, a dialectic immersion process between landscape and archives or natural history collections. The voyage is an exploration of the living systems that exist among us, their relationships, and interconnectedness. Research and in-situ observations are the initial steps of my process that weave a makeshift anthropology and ecology. These may cascade into scientific publications or emerge as alternate narratives that inform my artworks. I examine the congruence between etymologies, semiotics, and other forms of non-verbal/non-visual communications that develop into culture, interspecies communication, and mutualisms.
Can we listen to what we cannot see and feel what we cannot hear? Can we reach the point of collaboration where we can be inclusive with the other beings we share this world and moment with? Are we able to construct living systems? And the networks that support and maintain them?
Tina Villadolid
brooklyn, new york
Tina’s creative practice is a reclamation of her complex inheritances as a Filipina American. She embodies resilience to generational trauma caused by American colonialism through temporal installation and action-based work at historical sites where Philippine stories are diminished or erased. By layering images of herself with those of her ancestors, she regenerates her matriarchal lineage to Filipina shamans as a feminine iconography. Playing with scale, illumination, and organic materiality, Tina’s work physicalizes a power shift.
In 2023 Tina graduated with an MFA in Social Practice from George Washington University. She was the recipient of the Nashman Center Prize for Community Engagement in the Arts and Design and the award for Outstanding MFA Work in Social Practice. She was in the inaugural cohort of the CARD Fellowship, a partnership of The Phillips Collection, the Nicholson Project, and the DC Public Library. In 2024, Tina will fulfill a Mary G. Stange research fellowship at the University of Michigan, and an artist residency at MASS MoCA.
Yalda Eskandari
eugene, oregon
Yalda Eskandari is an Iranian artist, who has been working as an interdisciplinary artist since 2011. Her work particularly focuses on definition of reality, on how our definition of the word could impact the way we define placement and femininity. Her research-base work references psychological and sociological perspectives to challenge established mindsets on the viewer’s mind. She currently is living and working in the US.