Residency Unlimited (RU) is pleased to announce the 2022 Voices of Multiplicity (VoM) Artist Residency Program. Launched on February 7th, this three-month program provides a learning space for artists to gain cross-disciplinary competencies in social practice through the exploration of three interlinked fields: Restorative Justice (Repair, Mediate, Transform), Wellness Justice (Mental health stigma & awareness), Eco Justice (soil, air and water).
For this first edition of VoM, we welcome four New York based artists, Trasonia Abbott, Adalky F. Capellán, Marissa A. Gutierrez-Vicario and Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman, who were recommended by a group of experts. These artists identify as BIPoC and their respective practices are intrinsically connected to community engagement and social justice activism.
This program is structured around weekly specialized workshops and field trips that are designed to enhance artists’ knowledge, strengthen artistic identity, provide a platform to engage with community members, stakeholders & collaborators and gain skill sets to build community cohesion in culturally diverse areas in NYC.
Workshop leaders include:
- Dr. Carianna Arredondo (artist, educator, academic researcher)
- Bert Benally (Diné (Navajo), artist and educator)
- Michael Carey (Coordinator of Justice Initiatives, Brooklyn Public Library)
- Brianna Harlan (multiform artist, community organizer)
- Eric Mason (artist and educator, EdD Art & Art Education program, Columbia University, Teachers College)
- Edwin Maxwell (Director of Neighborhood Services, Brooklyn Public Library) and Acacia Thompson (Environmental Justice Coordinator, Brooklyn Public Library)
- Kerwin Pilgrim (Director of Adult Learning, Brooklyn Public Library)
- Carlos Rodriguez Perez (former Director of the Wellness and Recovery Division, NYC H+H Kings County Behavioral Health Service)
The VoM team is led by RU Guest Curator Ayelet Danielle Aldouby in conjunction with Carina Maye (artist and art educator), Brianna Harlan (artist and community organizer) and RU intern Silvia Lucca (program coordinator).
On May 4, 2022, VoM will conclude with a public panel bringing together the VoM resident artists and other guest speakers, held at the Art and Art Education program, Teachers College, Columbia University.
About the Artists
Trasonia Abbott is a multi-disciplinary, non-binary artist from Richmond, Virginia. They graduated from Pratt Institute in 2020 with a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Writing and a minor in Film. Trasonia is passionate about community building through arts and education. In the summer of 2020, they came together with some neighbors to found Queens Liberation Project (QLP), a mutual aid group mostly involved in resource redistribution events. In 2021 they curated and hosted a 3 night series of talks surrounding blackness and the future of art and activism after 2020, for Flux Factory’s Rhizome Project. The series ended with the Celebration of Black Life Cypher, bringing together black artists to showcase their works. In 2021, Trasonia participated in the Abolitionist Youth Organizing Institute run by Project NIA and worked with fellow artist Ada Chen to put together the first Queens Solidarity Festival, which brought together Black and Indigenous lead organizations, artists and community with free food and a day of workshops and performances. Current projects include a mixtape centered on processing state violence, the planning of the second iteration of the Celebration of Black Life Cypher, as well as organizing a Coat Drive with QLP that will benefit the women staying at the Radisson Hotel Women Shelter in Jamaica, Queens.
Adalky F. Capellán is a New York based artist and graduate of DePauw University. The influences of her artwork reflect the fabric of Afro-Caribbean women, community storytelling, and history that is woven into Washington Heights. She currently paints figurative works on canvas and on paper about community members in her community. Over the past decade, her interest in grassroots collaborations that use art as a way to empower and document the community members while displacement lingers in the community reflected through new neighbors or local businesses closing down. She was a member of the Atelier Artist Residency sponsored by the Northern Manhattan Art Alliance (NoMAA), Broadway Community Housing, No Longer Empty in 2010, and Chashama RFP in 2018-2020. Her illustrative work was also featured in La Galeria, a magazine, and others. Since then, she’s worked as a housing organizer and in housing tech spaces helping folks join in the fight using technology in documenting their housing situations in protection for potential housing court cases. Currently, she is an art specialist at Adapt Network in Brooklyn teaching Art to artists who identify as differently-abled.
Marissa A. Gutierrez-Vicario is the Founder and Executive Director of Art and Resistance Through Education (ARTE). As a committed human rights and peace-building activist, artist, educator, and advocate for youth, Marissa launched ARTE in 2013 to help young people amplify their voices and organize for human rights change in their communities through the visual arts. As a Mexican-American artist, Marissa explores piñata-making, a cultural artform inherited by a family member at the age of seven. Through this artform, Marissa explores impermanence, in the development of art that walks a tightrope between creation and destruction. Marissa currently serves as an Adjunct Lecturer at the City College of New York in the Art Education department and is an Artist-in-Residence at the Initiative for a Just Society at Columbia University. Marissa also serves on the Global Fund for Women’s Artist Changemaker Advisory Council. In spring 2021, Marissa served as the Soros Visiting Practitioner Chair at the School of Public Policy at Central European University in Vienna, Austria. Marissa holds a B.A. in Political Science and International Relations, from the University of Southern California, an M.P.A. from the Wagner School of Public Service at New York University, and an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education in Art Education.
Ibtisam Tasnim Zaman is a Black Lesbian American Multidisciplinary intersectional feminist artist who is currently based in New York where she works as a full time artist and linguistic interpreter. She received a Bachelor’s of Arts, with a triple major in Sociology, Economics and History, from Bangalore University in India. Her art practice consists of creative writing, spoken word poetry performance, narrative painting of BIPOC people, and community art projects. Her work draws inspiration from Persian Islamic geometric art, Indian classical art, surrealism, and magical realism. Originally from Tulsa, Oklahoma, Ibtisam moved at age six to England, and then lived between the UAE and India. Her mother made the decision shortly after 9/11 to escape the violence that Muslims and BIPOC are still facing today. In 2021 she was commissioned to create a mural at the NYC Health + Hospitals/Gotham Health, St. Nicolas for the NY Health and Hospitals Arts and Medicine Program, funded by the Laurie M Tisch Illumination Fund. She has performed her poetry for Ruckus, in NY and is currently completing a residency at the Peter Bullough Foundation in VA. Internationally, Ibtisam has performed in theater productions in the UAE; her work has been featured in The Gender Bender Exhibition by The Sandbox Collective and the Goethe Institut, in Bangalore, India with her first narrative portrait, Al Awra The Intimate Parts.
The 2022 VoM Artist Residency Program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
