Every year, the Museum offers a twelve-month studio residency for three emerging artists. Each artist is granted a free non-living studio space, a $20,000 fellowship, and a $1,000 materials stipend. The program is designed to serve emerging artists of African descent locally, nationally and internationally. Artists’ media may include sculpture, painting, printmaking, digital art, mixed media, photography, and film and video. At the end of the residency, an exhibition of the artists’ work will be presented in the Museum’s galleries.
Mequitta Ahuja
Born 1976, Grand Rapids, MI
Education
2003, MFA, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL
1998, BA, Hampshire College, Amherst, MA
Dubbed “Automythography” by the artist, Mequitta Ahuja’s work blends cultural history and myth with personal narrative. By combining these elements, she integrates representational forms relating to both painting and photography and spanning the artistic modes of portraiture, fiction, realism and abstraction. She depicts “Black hair as an embodiment of drawing, equating drawn texture to hair texture…in response to the history of Black hair as a barometer of social and personal consciousness.” Ahuja’s process of self-portraiture begins with private performances in front of the camera, which she documents using a remote shutter control. The resulting photographs act as non-fictional source material for Ahuja’s preliminary drawings, to which she later adds invented elements. The resulting self-portraits embody a means of self-invention and creative self-sufficiency.
Lauren Kelley
Born 1975, Baltimore, MD
Education
1999, MFA, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, IL
1997, BFA, Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore, MD
Video artist Lauren Kelley’s stop-motion animations are bawdy soap operas acted out by black Barbie dolls. This body of work began as a response to 1970s politics that helped transform the national perception of women from weak to strong. Kelley cites various sources of inspiration; among them are Todd Haynes’ Karen Carpenter Story and the Yes Men’s societal toy endeavors. Kelley says that both inspirations compelled her “to insert a small voice into a large feminine archetype.” Her interest in feminine strength has expanded to encompass an obsession with personal and cultural place, or turf.
Valerie Piraino
Born 1981, Kigali, Rwanda
Education
2009, MFA, Columbia University School of the Arts, New York, NY
2004, BFA, Maryland Institute college of Art, Baltimore, MD
Installation artist Valerie Piraino’s practice is concerned with reconciling the gap between the understanding of her birthplace, Rwanda—which she gained through family photographs—and the disparate reality of the place that confronted her upon returning as an adult. She is dexterous in her influences, ideas and production; oftentimes, she will reuse a work in several different contexts to create new installations. Piraino notes of this practice, “Observing the themes, materials and imagery that I repeatedly return to fosters a deeper of understanding of what my artistic motivations are.”
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