July Open Studio at RU House on Governors Island
July 25, 2026 | 12 – 5pm
Location: RU House at Colonels Row, Building #404B on Governors Island (map)
Ferry information | Video directions
On July 25, we warmly invite you to visit the RU House on Governors Island for a day of open studios. As part of the 2026 Organizations in Residence program, RU has a presence at the RU House at 404B Colonels Row from May through October, where RU artists and alums have studio spaces to develop new bodies of work across the 2026 season. On this day Elisa Bertaglia, Chris Glabb, Gabriele Grones, Mariana Maia Rocha and Tharini Sankarasubramanian open their studios to the public, offering a rare opportunity to engage with their creative processes and discover works in progress firsthand.
Governors Island is open to the public with free ferry rides before 11am on weekends — we hope you will join us and make a day of exploring the Island!
About:
Elisa Bertaglia is an Italian visual artist based in Brooklyn, who in her artistic research, freely pursues layers of experimentation by using changing mediums and techniques. Despite starting her career primarily as a painter, in recent years Bertaglia’s practice has become more eclectic and experimental, leading her to create wall drawings, sculptures, ceramics, installations, large or small scale paintings, and site-specific projects. Through a philosophical and conceptual approach, the artist investigates symbols in contemporary society and its short circuit which in recent years brought forth an identity and communication crisis. In particular, she analyzes the symbol as a semantic threshold in which a signifier and a meaning merge to communicate a universal message.
Chris Glabb aims to make the themes of Fine Art accessible through lowbrow referentiality, irony, a dry sense of humour, and the explicit appropriation of existing images. His practice is grounded in the philosophy that images and references function as social currency – tools that provide access to spaces, experiences, and opportunities that would otherwise be inaccessible. Engaging with questions of hierarchy, intersectional Queerness, and Indigenous identities, Glabb employs a Post-Pop Art sensibility to redefine relationships between moments in culture through processes of image manipulation and printmaking.
Gabriele Grones is a painter and visual artist whose artistic research is focused on the relationship that we establish with reality through the dialogue with the expressive codes of art history. His series of paintings in oil on canvas are mainly centered around specific subjects, such as natural details, figures or compositions. The details of plants and grass are carefully investigated from a close point of view, giving shape to every feature that evokes the complexity of reality. The portrait series are based on classical iconological references and often depict the same subjects in slightly different poses and light conditions in an obsessive representation mirroring the atmospheres of the early Flemish portraiture and metaphysical painting.
Mariana Maia Rocha is a visual artist and researcher whose interdisciplinary practice operates at the intersection of body, memory, and urban space. Working across drawing, photo-performance, installation, and material-based processes, she approaches drawing as an expanded field in which the body becomes an instrument of inscription. Through gestures of friction, pressure, and transfer — using graphite, latex, wax, and direct contact with architectural surfaces—her work produces indexical traces that register time, labor, and spatial transformation. Engaging with archives, ruins, construction sites, and provisional architectures, Rocha investigates how contemporary cities operate through cycles of construction, disappearance, and replacement.
Tharini Sankarasubramanian works across drawing, painting, and fiber art. Her practice is grounded in symbolic language, geometric abstraction, and her ongoing study of Indian philosophy, esoteric traditions, and the unseen forces that animate the world. Shaped by her upbringing in India, her work moves between the personal and the metaphysical. She holds an MFA in Graphic Design and Visual Experience from the Savannah College of Art and Design. In 2024, she completed a residency at Residency Unlimited in Brooklyn, NY. The interview, Summoning Unity: A Conversation with Tharini Sankarasubramanian, was published by Apotheosis Art in 2023.
This program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council. In-kind support is provided by Materials for the Arts.
RU is grateful for the partnership with Governors Island Arts.
