Residency Unlimited (RU) is pleased to announce the 2024 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program. Please join us in welcoming local artists Koyoltzintli Miranda, Lin Qiqing, Nia Winslow, and Ruth Jeyaveeran for a three-month residency from April 1 – June 30, 2024! We are grateful to NYSCA and DCLA for supporting this annual program for artists who identify as Black, Indigenous and People of Color. Curated by Hayley Ferber, this year’s edition is focused on artistic practices that explore ideas connected to identity as an individual or as part of a larger community.
The four artists were selected through an open call by a panel of three distinguished arts professionals who reviewed 181 applications: Re’al Christian, Hayley Ferber, and Sophia Ma. Scroll down for full bios.
During their three-month residencies, the artists will meet weekly with a variety of arts professionals to discuss the progress of their multidisciplinary works in anticipation of a culminating group exhibition scheduled mid-June, curated by Hayley Ferber at All Street Gallery. They will also partake in a public Artist Talk event at the Clemente Center on April 18th from 7pm to 8:30pm.
About the artists:
Koyoltzintli Miranda is an interdisciplinary artist, healer, and educator living in NY. She grew up on the pacific coast and the Andean mountains in Ecuador, these are geographies that permeate her work. She focuses on sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives. Intersectional theories and earth-based healing inform her practice.
Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019 and 2023, Koyoltzintli’s work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo, among others. She has been an artist in residence in the U.S., France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the NYFA Fellowship, and the IA grant by the Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph Other Stories was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP, and her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240). In 2021, her work was included in the book “Latinx Photography in the United States” by Elizabeth Ferrer chief curator at BRIC. In 2022 she is one of the artists in residence at Socrates Sculpture Park and she has been awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship by US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF).
Lin Qiqing is a textile artist based in New York. As a former award-winning journalist from China, she tells stories about gender, immigration, language, and politics through her distinctive weaving with hand-spun paper yarn and working with natural dyes.
Qiqing’s experience growing up and working as a journalist in China had a profound impact on her practice. Switching her medium from text to textiles, weaving has become her new language. Through painting with threads, she looks into the complexities of human emotions and relationships.
Qiqing’s work takes the form of figurative tapestries, sculptural installation, writings, and social practice. The closeness to the material and laboring the body is essential: she spins her own yarn, mixes her own colors, and weaves on a hand loom.
Qiqing was a resident artist at the Houston Center of Contemporary Craft (2023), and a finalist for the Dorothy Waxman International Textile Design Prize (2023). Some of Lin Qiqing’s notable exhibitions include: Safe Keeping at Surface Design Association & 108 Contemporary, Tulsa, Oklahoma (2023); Threadscape at New York Textile Month’s Area Home, New York City (2023); Portal at Parsons MFA Textiles, New York, NY (2023); and Zero Draft at Downtown Yarns, New York City (2022).
Nia Winslow is a self-taught mixed media collage artist who draws inspiration from artists including Romare Bearden, Kerry James Marshall, Faith Ringgold, and Jacob Lawrence to illustrate the colorful essences of Black figures in each of her compositions. Using paper as her preferred material, Nia combines the complexities of different textures, cuttings and clippings to illuminate figures, moods and stories. Through her artistry, Nia combines her passion for style and her chosen medium to inspire self-love and inventiveness in individuals, with a principal focus on the African and Black diaspora.
Nia uses her work to emulate real-life experiences as it pertains to Black life. Mundane or complex, each piece is created to capture the essence of life through the lens of someone who experiences it. As no reality is the same, each work is created using several different pieces of paper and magazine clippings to create a completed composition. Each piece of material is used to represent a distinct emotion, background, and way of life. Each collection of clippings is used to produce a whole creation; therefore, she considers each work a piece of a whole. The “whole” represents Nia’s entire body of work – a conglomeration of designs used to depict separate, but sometimes similar Black existences.
Ruth Jeyavareen‘s work is based on traditional material practices. Drawing from her experience as part of the South Asian diaspora, she uses textiles to examine a shared history of alienation and dissociation. In her felted soft sculptures and installations, the boundary between human, animal, and flora dissolves to tell a story of isolation, migration, and evolution. The forms evoke vessels, tools, toys, plants, ornaments and bones, hinting at objects that have been buried and forgotten, and are now rediscovered through the ritual of felting. Each piece functions as an intimate excavation as the fibers shift and resettle creating unexpected marks that rise to the surface.
Ruth Jeyaveeran’s first solo show, Soft Remains, was exhibited at Field Projects in 2023. Other recent exhibitions include: Felt Experience at the Brattleboro Museum, Communion, a solo installation at Main Window Dumbo, and Amplify, a public sculpture at the Queens Botanical Garden. Jeyaveeran has exhibited at various venues in and around New York, including ABC No Rio, Westbeth Gallery, Ely Center of Contemporary Art, The Border Project, Paradice Palase, Bronx Art Space, The Yard, and the Art and Design Gallery at FIT.
Jeyaveeran has taught courses in textiles and fibers at Parsons School of Design, and she frequently leads workshops on felting and the therapeutic benefits of craft. Currently, she is an Associate Professor of Textile Design at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
About the jurors:
Re’al Christian is a writer and editor based in Queens, NY. Her writing has appeared in BOMB Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, Art in America, Artforum, and ART PAPERS, where she is a Contributing Editor. She has written catalogue texts for Howardena Pindell, Zipora Fried, Performa, Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, and the recent anthology Track Changes: A Handbook for Art Criticism. Her curatorial projects include The Black Index (2020–22) and Life as Activity: David Lamelas (2021), which she worked on as a graduate curatorial fellow at the Hunter College Art Galleries, as well as Repetition means a/void at Parent Company (2023), Steven Anthony Johnson II: Getting Blood from Stone at ISCP (2022), and The earth leaked red ochre at Miriam Gallery (2022).
Christian is the Assistant Director of Editorial Initiatives at the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. She received her MA in Art History from Hunter College and her bachelor’s degree from New York University, where she double majored in Art History and Media, Culture, and Communication.
Hayley Ferber is a contemporary arts facilitator, curator, educator and artist living in Brooklyn, NY. In her current role as Associate Director of Operations at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center and previous role as Deputy Director of Chashama, she supports a creative community of multidisciplinary artists. Independently, she has curated exhibitions for The Clemente Center, Residency Unlimited, Equity Gallery, New York Artists Circle, Robert Berry Gallery, and the Yard: Williamsburg, among others. As a visiting curator, Hayley has worked with artists from Residency Unlimited, ISCP, the NARS Foundation, Kunstraum LLC and ChaNorth, and has served as guest juror for NYSCA, the DCLA, Brooklyn Arts Council, and Queens Council on the Arts. Hayley’s personal artistic practice explores nautical themes through artist books and printmaking. She has exhibited her work at the Kalamazoo Book Art Center, Equity Gallery, Chashama, the Pelham Art Center, 440 Gallery, 92NY and Aqua Art Miami among others. She was a resident artist at ChaNorth in 2021 and received her MAT in Art & Design Education from RISD and BS in Studio Art from NYU.
Sophia Ma is an independent curator and writer. Her recent exhibition includes “Between Line and Thread: Connecting the Asian American Arts Center Collection,” which took place through January 2024 in Think! Chinatown. The most recent project Ma completed in August 2023 was “Gathering”, a two-sited exhibition of forty-five members of Asianish, an informal artist and cultural producers collective of Asian descent with FiveMyles and Tiger Strikes Asteroid-New York. She was the co-grantee of the Asian Women Giving Circle grant and the Brooklyn Arts Fund with Cecile Chong. In November 2023, Chiquita Room in Barcelona hosted Ma for a three-week curatorial residency, during which she curated Marina Sagona’s third solo exhibition, “Stabat Mater,” in the space. Her upcoming projects include a two-artist exhibition with Jamie Chan and Sonya Derman at Essex Flowers and a photography show of Ed Cheng’s work at Think!Chinatown.
Ma worked in development, programming, and operations for the Museum of Chinese in America and the event fundraising consultancy Projects Plus Inc. In the Fall of 2020, Ma completed her master’s in art history and curatorial studies from Hunter College, CUNY, with a thesis on the relationship between the work and spiritual practices of the abstract painter Bernice Lee Bing (1936-1998), who has since yielded a major retrospective at the Asia Art Museum in San Francisco. Ma has written for multiple online art publications, including The Brooklyn Rail, Art Papers, Hyperallergic, Art Spiel, Arte Fuse, and White Hot Magazine. She currently works for M+ American Friends Foundation as their Programs and Members Manager, connecting audiences in the US to the work of M+ through programming and events.
About All Street:
All Street is a community oriented gallery and multimedia art collective holding space for exhibitions, experimental productions, and creative gatherings with locations in New York City’s East Village and Chinatown. Instagram: @all.st.nyc
The 2024 NYC-Based Artist Residency Program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature. This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council.
