STONELEAF RETREAT

2022 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

STONELEAF is proud to announce our 2022 artists-in-residence, Priscilla Aleman, Sonia Louise Davis, Tamar Ettun, Moko Fukuyama, Langdon Graves, Las Hermanas Iglesias, Liz Ikiriko, Qinza Najm and Tiana Webb Evans.

We are excited to finally welcome Sonia Louise Davis, Langdon Graves, Liz Ikiriko, Qinza Najm, whose residencies have been deferred since 2020 due to COVID. 

Tamar Ettun was one of our artist-in-residence in 2019 and returns for a Family Residency this year. Las Hermanas Iglesias are also STONELEAF alumnae from 2018 and have been awarded the inaugural Peggy Toomer Family Residency.

For the second time only we welcome a writer-in-residence, Tiana Webb Evans. We are also proud to partner with River Valley Arts Collective and the Al Held Foundation for Moko Fukuyama’s residency. Moko's work will be included in River Valley Art Collective's 2022 On the Grounds outdoor sculpture exhibition at the Al Held Foundation from June 5 through October 16, 2022.

Thank you to the Al Held Foundation, River Valley Arts Collective and Sarah Arison for generously supporting our residencies.

2022 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE BIOS & STATEMENTS (in alphabetical order)

PRISCILLA ALEMAN (born 1991) is a visual artist based in New York.  Aleman graduated from Columbia University with her MFA in sculpture. Upon graduating she continued her art practice in Miami working with archaeologists conducting an intimate investigation of South Florida’s relationship to the Tropics and the Latin America Landscape. Bringing an understanding of past traditions in the Americas and its environmental history,  Aleman crafts her own sanctified installations as deified monuments and memorials. Her most recent solo exhibition “Origins of Devotion”  opened at The Wave Hill Sunroom Project Space New York. Aleman has exhibited in group shows at the Smithsonian American Art Museum Washington DC, The Margulies Collection Miami Florida,  YoungArts Miami Florida, among other venues. She has participated as Artist-in-Residence at Wheaton Arts New Jersey, Bronx Museum AIM fellowship, Art + Research Center at ICA Miami, was a project resident at The Deering Estate, and has received numerous awards including The Elizabeth Greenshield Foundation Fellowship, Cintas artist relief, Columbia University Travel Grant, and is a U.S. Presidential Scholar alumna. 

I am a Miami native. My training in archeology influences my practice for creating sculpture installations, enabling me to retrace ideas around the afterlife, Pre-Columbian cosmology, and the interplay of cultures from the global south. I examine archeological materials and ecological transformations in the Americas including the Caribbean. By having an understanding of the landscape’s past traditions and its environmental history,  I bring to life my own parallel and intersecting universes.  I am interested in materials that have resonance with people, in both the personal and historical senses. By creating new instantiations of the human figure, I investigate ancestral relationships to each body and social ecosystem. www.priscilla-aleman.com / @priscillaaleman.studio

SONIA LOUISE DAVIS. Born and raised in New York City, Sonia Louise Davis is a visual artist, writer and performer. She has presented her work at the Whitney Museum, ACRE, Sadie Halie Projects, Ortega Y Gasset and Rubber Factory, among other venues. Residencies and fellowships include the Laundromat Project's Create Change Fellowship, Culture Push Fellowship for Utopian Practice, Civitella Ranieri in Umbertide Italy, New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship at the International Studio & Curatorial Program, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's Workspace, and the SIP Fellowship at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Her newest book, "slow and soft and righteous, improvising at the end of the world (and how we make a new one)" was published in 2021 by Co-Conspirator Press. An honors graduate of Wesleyan University and an alumna of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Sonia lives in Harlem.

My visual artworks, performances and experimental texts are grounded in Black studies and informed by my training as a jazz vocalist. Improvisation is central to my embodied research. I make graphic scores using an invented gestural notation and this vocabulary manifests itself across site-specific interventions, mark-making on found objects, and playful hand-crafted textiles. My most recent body of work, created throughout the pandemic, is a suite of soft paintings made with an industrial rug-tufting machine. Guided by thinkers who study collectivity, movement and poetics, I situate my practice within a lineage of Black feminist abstraction. www.sonialouisedavis.com | @sonia_louise_davis

TAMAR ETTUN is a multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has had exhibitions and performances at Pioneer Works, PERFORMA, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, Sculpture Center, The Barrick Museum, The Watermill Center, Socrates Sculpture Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Fridman Gallery, among others. Ettun received awards and fellowships from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Chinati Foundation, Moca Tucson Artist Residency, MacDowell Fellowship, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund, and Iaspis. Ettun founded The Moving Company, an artists collective creating performances in public spaces and a social engagement project with Brooklyn teens hosted by The Brooklyn Museum. Ettun received her MFA from Yale University in 2010 where she was awarded the Alice English Kimball Fellowship. Ettun teaches at Columbia University School of Arts.

There is no direct English translation for the Hebrew word “davka”. The closest would be “purposefully.” There is no word for “awkward” in Hebrew. My work is an awkward, purposeful consideration of empathy and ritual. Using textile, ceramics, and time-based media, my work is a sensory examination of somatic empathy and compassion fatigue. Currently, I am working on “Lilit the Empathic Demon”, a multidisciplinary project which conjures the mythological demon Lilit, who comes from a healing tradition shared by Sumerian, Acadian and Jews in the Middle East. Lilit’s narrative is directly influenced by ceramic incantation bowls that were used in an empathic ritual to trap demons. The ritual was performed in second century Babylon, mostly by females concerned with medical issues like pregnancy and birth. Both formally and thematically, this ritual serves as the guiding principle of this piece. In my expansion of this ritual I’ve created a body of work containing hand-dyed textile collages, ceramic traps, and a video. https://tamarettun.com / @tamarettun

MOKO FUKUYAMA is a Japanese artist based in Brooklyn, New York. Fukuyama is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She has previously received grants, fellowships and commissions from notable art institutions such as Rema Hort Mann Foundation, Foundation For Contemporary Arts, Jerome Foundation, SOHO20, MacDowell, Yaddo, Recess, The Shed, ISCP (International Studio & Curatorial Program) and more. She completed her residency at The Kitchen, New York, New York in spring 2021. During the residency, she created American Recordings, Act I: American Harvest and Act II: American Frequency in collaboration with Yo! Vinyl Richie. She was a 2021 fellow at Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, Minnesota and Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, New York. She recently had her solo exhibition Streaming Surface at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, New York. 

My work is driven by a fascination with the art of storytelling and personal narrative. I explore the socioeconomic realities and psychology of everyday life through art. In making sculptures, movies, performance, and installations, I question how a place can shape the experiences and interior lives of subjects. My work ranges widely in medium, tone, and subject — from empathetic and satirical portrayals of our aquatic ecosystems to anthropological representations of the American political landscape — but the uniting thread is my desire to explore commonalities across diverse communities and to share my hope for social harmony with the public. https://mokofukuyama.com/ / @happy_mountains

LANGDON GRAVES is a Virginia-born, New York City-based artist who holds a BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University in Painting and Printmaking and an MFA from Parsons School of Design.  She is adjunct faculty at Parsons where she teaches for the First Year Program and HEOP; a Visiting Professor in the Graduate Fine Arts program and a CTL Faculty Research Fellow at Pratt Institute; and teaches young artists across NYC’s public schools for the DOE-affiliated organizations Studio in a School and Lincoln Center Education.  She has facilitated online workshops and professional development trainings for the NYC Department of Education and the Arts in Education Roundtable, and acted as a mentoring teaching artist for the Office of Arts and Special Projects’ three-year Arts Matter program.  Langdon is represented by Dinner Gallery in New York City and has had solo exhibitions in New York, Florida, Virginia, Arkansas, Vermont and Massachusetts and has participated in group shows and fairs throughout the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia.  Langdon has attended the Fountainhead Residency in Miami, the Kunstenaarsinitiatief Residency and Exhibition Program in the Netherlands, the Object Limited residency in Bisbee, Arizona and will attend STONELEAF Retreat in the summer of 2022.  She is a recipient of Canson & Beautiful Decay’s Wet Paint Grant and has been featured in Art in America, VICE, Juxtapoz, Art F City, Blouin Artinfo, Hyperallergic and Madeline Schwartzman’s See Yourself X.

My work centers around storytelling and belief and the societal and familial roles women play concerning both.  For the last few years, I’ve been collecting and revisiting ghost stories told by my grandmother, using them as a lens by which to examine the dynamics among the women in my family as well as look more broadly at what gets passed on by women from one generation to the next.  Leading up to and especially after my grandmother’s death, my focus shifted to mourning practices, rituals and belief systems that address the afterlife and explorations of spirit communication, which began as a way of trying to psychologically unpack her ghost stories.  I’ve become fascinated by what ghosts can reveal about life and the living, about our beliefs, values, grief and guilt.  I’m continually inspired by the power of stories to heal and unite, particularly when shared among women. www.langdongraves.com / @laaang

LAS HERMANAS IGLESIAS, inaugural recipients of the Peggy Toomer Family Residency. See here for further information.

LIZ IKIRIKO is a Tkaronto/Toronto-based, Nigerian Canadian artist and curator. As a researcher, maker, and mother her practice focuses on African and diasporic narratives. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is a part of the Dunlop Art Gallery’s permanent collection. She holds the position of co-curator of the 13th edition Bamako Encounters –African Biennial of Photography in Mali, West Africa; she is co-founder of Ways of Attuning: Curatorial Study Group and the Curator of Collections and Contemporary Engagement at the Art Gallery of York University.

We Make it Sacred is part of a new series using photography, collage and installation to mark the role of ritual, honour and ceremony in daily life. Informed by the traditional weaving practices developed by Nigerian Kalabari women, Ikiriko uses this ancestral knowledge as a method to maneuver through the dissonance and discord of our current Age. www.lizikiriko.com / @lizikiriko

QINZA NAJM is an NYC based Pakistani-American artist, born and raised in Lahore. She has been academically trained from Bath Univ- eristy England and at the The Art Students League of New York under the mentorship of renowned artist Larry Poons. Qinza has widely exhibited both nationally and internationally. Her works has been exhibited at prestigious institutions like Queens Museum, (NY) 2017, Christie's (Dubai) 2012, Art|Basel (Miami, FL) 2016, Museum of the Moving Image (NY) 2017, Spring/Break Art Show (NYC) 2021, Karachi Biennale (Karachi) 2019, A.I.R. Gallery (NY) 2019, National Museum of China in (Beijing) 2019, Frost Art Museum (Miami) 2021, and The Wolfsonain Museum (Miami) 2021 among others. She has been invited to be a part of critical artist residencies like Mass Moca (North Adams) 2020, Fountainhead (Miami) 2020, Worldco (Sofia, Bulgaria) 2017. Her work is nominated for the esteemed Rema Hort Foundation. She is currently a part of a prestigious fellowship at Bronx Museum, NYC 2021-22. 

Qinza Najm work is an amalgamation of her physical and mental journey between shifting cultures and personal growth. She is interested in mind and body connection and the narratives they bring together in the space between traditions and modernity. The recent body of works is inspired by her childhood time spent at her grandmother's home in Sargodha, interacting with the peeri (a traditional stool) in her kitchen, where she were used to spend most of her summer vacation learning about traditions and culture of this region through her Nani's stories; an old chess board on which she were used to play chess with her dad as a young girl, and a glitched zipper on a shirt her mom stitched for me as a kid. All these elements hold great visual allegories in her mind. After being away for decades from her homeland, she was able to see them from an outsider's perspective and developed an urge to re-interpret it into new connotations. As a trained psychologist, she has used diverse forms of creative expression - paintings, installations, sound, and other mediums - to create awareness and dialogue so the audience can re-create their own personal narratives with the work they experience. www.qinzanajm.com | @qinza1 

TIANA WEBB EVANS is a cultural producer, writer, and entrepreneur. She's known for her trans-disciplinary practice encompassing art, design, and culture and as the founder Jamaica Art Society, Yard Concept and ESP Group.

The Jamaica Art Society was founded in 2020 to support and celebrate Jamaican visual arts. ESP Group is a leading brand strategy and communications consultancy that collaborates with international clients across the art, design, and hospitality industries. Yard Concept is an experimental cultural platform dedicated to fostering greater collective consciousness through art, design, and community.

In addition to her professional endeavors, Tiana is an essayist with work published in Pin-Up, Curbed, Brooklyn Rail, A Womb of Violet, Volume II: Blackness, Resistance, and Being, and for the Taubman Art Museum. She has participated in talks for Arttable, Christie's, Cultivist, Design Miami, Neuehouse, Perez Art Museum, Miami, SohoHouse, and The Armory Show, and was a lecturer at Sotheby's Institute of Art. As a committed patron of the arts she advises and supports emerging artists, and serves on Laundromat Project’s National Advisory Board, and the boards of Project for Empty Space and the Female Design Council. www.jamaicaartsociety.com / http://espprinc.com / www.yard-concept.com / @tiana_webb_evans