STONELEAF RETREAT

2019 ARTISTS-IN-RESIDENCE

 Announcing Artists for the 2019 STONELEAF Residency Program

STONELEAF RETREAT is excited to announce its 2019 Artists-in-Residence; Delali Ayivor, Lizania Cruz, Tarah Douglas, Tamar Ettun, Alison McNulty, Anne Nowak, Keisha Scarville, Hiba Schahbaz and Sacha Vega. 

This group of creative women with diverse practices, explore a range of topics including identity, race, gender, class, immigration, storytelling, materiality, personal freedom, censorship and memory.

We, at STONELEAF, have been thinking about division and the ways that political and social re-imagination of identity can unite us, which influenced our choice in artists.

June 15 - June 29, 2019: Alison McNulty, Hiba Schahbaz, Sacha Vega June 30 - July 14, 2019: Delali Ayivor, Tamar Ettun, Keisha Scarville August 3 - August 17, 2019: Lizania Cruz, Tarah Douglas, Anne Nowak

DELALI AYIVOR (Residency dates: June 30 - July 14, 2019)

Delali Ayivor is a Ghanaian-American writer, a 2011 U.S. Presidential Scholar in the Arts, a former artist-in-residence at the National YoungArts Foundation in Miami, Florida, a former associate artist in residence with experimental sound poet Tracie Morris at Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, and an attendee of the 2019 Tin House Winter Workshop--with author Hanif Abdurraqib--in Newport, Oregon. She gained her B.A. in anthropology from Reed College in Portland, OR and is a proud alumna of Interlochen Arts Academy where she studied creative writing from 2008 - 2011.  She has moderated discussion at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, New York as part of their Works in Process series and delivered a closing keynote speech at Americans for the Arts’ 2014 Annual Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. Her work has been published most recently in the Miami Herald, the Miami Rail and online by a Gathering of the Tribes. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

As a contemporary postcolonial subject, Delali creates from the locus of disjuncture, writing through the complexifying tangles of our increasingly globalized world. Themes include diaspora at the intersection with body dysmorphia, alternative facts at the intersection with the production of history, and post-modern romance at the intersection with the World Bank. Her work crosses formal boundaries; as a graduate of Interlochen Arts Academy in Interlochen, Michigan with a degree in creative writing and recipient of a B.A. in cultural anthropology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, Delali is fluent in poetry, but also utilizes prose and the appropriation of intellectual jargon. She also works across disciplines, actively seeking out collaboration and performance opportunities, having worked with painters, sculptors, jazz musicians, contemporary dancers, filmmakers and other artists in the past. www.delaliayivor.com | @_laney.boggs

LIZANIA CRUZ (Residency dates: August 3 - August 17, 2019)

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist and designer interested in how migration affects ways of being & belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has been an artist-in-residence and fellow at the Laundromat Project Create Change (2018-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), and Recess Session (2019).

Her work has been exhibited at the Arlington Arts Center, BronxArtSpace, Project for Empty Space, ArtCenter South Florida, Jenkins Johnson Project Space, The August Wilson Center, Sharjah’s First Design Biennale, and Untitled, Art Miami among others. Furthermore, her artworks and installations have been featured in Hyperallergic, Fuse News, KQED arts, and the New York Times. www.lizania.com | @lizaniacruz

TARAH DOUGLAS (Residency dates: August 3 - August 17, 2019)

tarah douglas is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is primarily centered around photography and fiber works. Her work is conceptually motivated, grappling with notions of identity, race, gender, class and its relationship to space through the lens of ritual and language. She has exhibited work throughout the United States including her first solo exhibition at the Harlem School of the Arts and as part of Studio Museum of Harlem’s Postcard Series. tarah holds a B.F.A from the University of Michigan. She currently lives and works in Newark, NJ. 

By extending beyond aesthetic purposes, my work is about the phenomenon of existence—existing within a culture and without a culture, and acknowledging the impact of these cultures imposing themselves on the subject. Dialogue and storytelling are at the core of my work; in particular the telling and retelling of stories and the historic role of photography and textiles as visual evidence of these stories individually and communally. Through my art practice, I want to examine narratives around the intersectionalities within identity, including mental health and trauma, and cultivate spaces of respite, reflection, and healing. Creating work that provides solace for me, the subject, and the viewer. www.tarahdouglas.com | @teafortarah

TAMAR ETTUN (Residency dates: June 30 - July 14, 2019)

Tamar Ettun is a sculptor and a performance artist based in Brooklyn, New York. She has had exhibitions and performances at The Barrick Museum UNLV, Art Omi Sculpture Garden, The Watermill Center, e-flux, Sculpture Center, Knockdown Center, Madison Square Park, Bryant Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, Indianapolis Museum of Art, The Jewish Museum, Uppsala Art Museum, Fridman Gallery, Braverman Gallery, Herzelia Biennial, PERFORMA 09, 11 and 13, among others. She received awards and fellowships from The Pollock Krasner Foundation, Franklin Furnace, MacDowell Fellowship, Marble House Project, RECESS, The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Art Production Fund and Iaspis, Swedish Arts Grants Committee. Ettun founded The Moving Company, an artist's 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. She studied at Cooper Union in 2007, while earning her BFA from Bezalel Academy, Jerusalem. She teaches at Columbia University School’s of Arts, and The New School Parsons School of Design.

My work strives to develop an intermedia sculpture that originates from and forms movement and stillness, but expands their possibilities. Simultaneously, I create performance art that can be read in sculptural terms and sculptures that suggest movement. In “One Thing Leads to Another,” a dancer wears an ice skates sculpture cast in 100 pounds of concrete, giving an immediate sense of a frustrated urge to move. Other pieces create social spaces and forge temporary communities through multisensory play. Since 2008 I have been working with inflatables: army parachutes, hot-air balloons, and huge hand-made bubbles that serve both as performance props, and as stand alone moving sculptures that the audience can enter. These colorful bubbles invites visitors to go into a meditative state, immersing themselves in the bright colors or music, and interact with one another in play.  www.tamarettun.com | @tamarzohara

ALISON MCNULTY (Residency dates: June 15 - June 29, 2019)

Alison McNulty is an artist and educator teaching at the French-American School of New York and Parsons School of Design at The New School.  Her work explores the fragile, entangled nature of our relationship to the material world and is deeply ingrained in a poetic understanding of space and materiality.  Often working in relation to neglected sites and overlooked phenomena, she uses ordinary, reclaimed materials like brick, dust, hair, spider webs, wood, bits of eraser, plants, and rocks.  Meditative and performative in nature, and engaged with concepts of time, history, and duration, her practice attempts to create possibilities for exchange and meaning-making between matter, language, and the unfolding experience of embodied perception.  McNulty currently accomplishes her work and research in equal parts between her studio, her desk, and the Hudson Highland trails, parks, and other outdoor spaces in the Hudson Valley region, where she has been based for the past four years. McNulty was born in Bristol, Indiana, earned her BFA from Washington University in St. Louis, and received an Alumni Fellowship from the University of Florida, where she completed her MFA.  Her recent exhibitions include a solo exhibition at BAU Gallery, Beacon, NY, and shows at Art Lot in Brooklyn, The Samuel Dorsky Museum in New Paltz, NY, the Theoretical Archeology Group Conference Exhibition, Syracuse, NY, and she will participate in the Wilderstein 5th Outdoor Sculpture Biennial, Rhinebeck, NY.

I am a multidisciplinary artist whose work excavates and examines ubiquitous traces of our living to speculate on what they can tell us about the constructs underlying the ways we make meaning, assign value, and participate in larger material cycles and systems through human and geological time.  My projects emerge from an interdisciplinary research perspective and are informed by the natural sciences, archeology, poetics, and philosophy.  Animated by a deep sense of attentiveness and reverence toward the complex ecological environments I work within, I cultivate a collaborative attitude toward the non-human material bodies, entangled web of relations, and natural processes my work intersects through place and site. www.alisonmcnulty.com | @mcnulty_alison

ANNE NOWAK (Residency dates: August 3 - August 17, 2019)

Anne Nowak (b. 1976) is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. Although she uses materials as different as paper, mirrors, stones and fabric, and different techniques such as screen printing, drawing, spray painting and cyanotype, her aesthetics is driven by a fascination towards the outer hemisphere. Using a deeply poetical language, Nowak creates magnetic works inviting the viewer on a mystical journey into micro universes of suns, moons and planets. She has exhibited at The Spring Break Exhibition in Copenhagen, Spring Break Art Show in New York City and had a solo exhibition at R2 Galleri, Denmark.

When I work the method becomes a part of the creation. I often work with a new theme and a new method. Nature is an inspiration in my work, as being born and raised on a small island (Bornholm). Now living in Copenhagen I try to get as much nature in my work as possible, I did a project called “The Dead People ́s Dead Flowers” where I gathered flowers from the compost in graveyards around the world for two years. Then I did a blueprint of each flower. Over 250 prints were made creating a simultaneously concrete and abstract exposure of death’s absence. I feel a responsibility to try to highlight some of the themes that are difficult to talk about, or issues that are critical and needs attention. My performance “The Cosmic Wall” was a part of a greater exhibition “Strangers Come To Town” in NYC 2018. Where 250 bricks covered in cosmic paint was assembled and disassembled as a wall, 2 times a day for 2 hours by me. As a comment to Trump’s wall between Mexico and the US. www.annenowak.org | @annenowak

KEISHA SCARVILLE (Residency dates: June 30 - July 14, 2019)

Keisha Scarville (b. Brooklyn, NY; lives Brooklyn, NY) weaves together themes dealing with transformation, place, and the unknown. She studied at the Rochester Institute of Technology and Parsons/The New School. Her work has shown at the Studio Museum of Harlem, The Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, Rush Arts Gallery, BRIC Arts Media House, Lesley Heller Gallery, Contact Gallery in Toronto, Aljira Center for Contemporary Art, Center for Photography at Woodstock, the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute, Museum of Contemporary Diasporan Arts, Baxter St CCNY, Lightwork, and The Brooklyn Museum of Art. Scarville has taken part in residencies at Vermont Studio Center, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, BRIC Workspace Residency Program, and Light Work Residency Program. Her work has been featured and reviewed in the New York Times, Vice, Transition, Nueva Luz, Small Axe, The Village Voice, and Hyperallgeric. Collections include the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, DC. Currently, Scarville is an adjunct faculty member at the International Center of Photography and Parsons School of Art & Design in New York

The crux of my work resides in narratives that are triggered by absence. In my practice, I examine the materiality of absence and the subjectivity of the body within a void. By engaging in a process of visual excavation, I explore the weight of histories and rituals contained within objects, landscapes, and the body to address questions of belonging in the midst of negation. My work speaks to how these devices activate the imagination, inscribe our identity, and upend what is hidden in memory. www.keishascarville.com | @scarvillek

HIBA SCHAHBAZ (Residency dates: June 15 - June 29, 2019)

Hiba Schahbaz is a Brooklyn-based artist. She trained as a miniature painter in Pakistan and received an MFA from Pratt Institute New York. In addition to exhibiting her work internationally in galleries and fairs including the NIU Art Museum and Center for Book Arts NY, Schahbaz has curated exhibitions of miniature painting in Pakistan and India. Her work has been written about in Vice, The Huffington Post, Coveteur, Vogue, NY Magazine, Forbes and others. She was an artist-in residence at MASS MoCA, The Wassaic Project and others and teaches miniature painting at the Art Students League in NY.

In my work, I am both the artist and the performer. I photograph my body and use these images as references for my paintings. Through the stories I create I contemplate what it means to be a woman. These works addresses issues of personal freedom, destruction, sexuality and censorship by unveiling the beauty, fragility and strength of the female form. www.hibaschahbaz.com | @hiba_schahbaz

SACHA VEGA (Residency dates: June 15 - June 29, 2019)

Sacha Vega (b. 1991) lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Her photo-based games currently appear in the forms of alternative prints, sculpture and installation work. She has been featured in exhibitions at Baxter St at CCNY, Pelham Art Center, Java Project, 99cent Plus Gallery and Pratt Institute. Her work has been included in publications like Outline, NYLON, Lenscratch, Gyroscope Prints, Prism Magazine, and Feature Shoot. She was a resident of ARTHA Project and holds a BFA in Photography from Pratt Institute. She is a founding member and 1/3 of the artist-led initiative Memory Foam, a collective that independently develops video interviews, produces events, curates exhibitions, and self publishes.

I am a photo-based artist manipulating the medium to investigate curiosities of perception, play, and memory. My practice toys with the viewing habits of photographic imagery as a means to address the act of looking. For me, the camera is the tool to collect textures and environments when venturing through a new physical space. Once back in the studio, those images are beginnings for experimental play and translation, informed by a range of researched presentation methods and theories (both of a scientific and poetic nature). As a child, I experienced vision-correcting treatments to delay my forecasted adolescent blindness, which I see as informing my conceptual questioning of objective sight. My work is motivated by the possibility of shaping micro-instances for self-assessment by creating figurative funhouse mirrors for viewers to wonder at the reflection. www.sachavega.com | @sachachavega