Artist Residency

Saif Azzuz (b. 1987) is a Libyan-Yurok artist who resides in Pacifica, CA. He received a bachelor’s degree in Painting and Drawing from the California College of the Arts in 2013. Azzuz has a forthcoming solo exhibition at Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, TX in 2025 and has exhibited widely, including exhibitions at Anthony Meier Fine Arts, San Francisco, CA; Galerie Julien Cadet, Paris, FR; ICA SF, San Francisco, CA; Pt.2 Gallery, Oakland, CA; Rule Gallery, Denver, CO; Nicelle Beauchene Gallery, New York, NY; Jack Barrett, New York, NY and K Art, Buffalo, NY. Azzuz is a 2022 SFMOMA SECA Award finalist and has participated in the Clarion Alley Mural Project and the Facebook Artist in Residence program. Selected public collections include Rennie Museum, de Young Museum – Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, Gochman Family Collection, Facebook, North Carolina Museum of Art, Kadist, University of St. Thomas, Stanford Health Care Art Collection and UBS Art Collection.

Christopher Baliwas (b.1987, Redwood City) received his BA in Music Business from the California State Polytechnic University, Pomona in 2010 and an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College in 2022. His central practice of photography is often taken over by other mediums such as sound and sculpture. Concerned with legacies, material processes, and figures and histories of the underground, “Skin 2 skin”, his first and most recent solo exhibition at Theta, New York (2024), engaged with these themes in an attempt to inspire alternative senses of the world. Group exhibitions include Human Resources, Los Angeles (2023); Theta, New York (2023); and two-person exhibition with artist Woojae Kim at Malaspina Printmakers, Vancouver (2022). Under the alias reallynathan, Baliwas independently released the album “O” in 2020 and co-produced the mix series “Raise the Flag:” on NTS Radio alongside the artist formerly known as Slauson Malone. He currently lives in Los Angeles with his partner, Andrea Sipin, and their two children, Naima and Amari.

Mark Anthony Brown Jr. is a journeyman of sorts. Not dedicated to a single given location for too long, he currently lives and works between Cincinnati, Ohio, Durham, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. Mark has received a Bachelor of Science Technology from Bowling Green State University and a Master of Fine Art in Studio Art at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where was a fellow in Museum Practice at The Ackland Art Museum. Mark’s art practice is research driven and interdisciplinary; grounded in a photographic sensibility he utilizes photography, sculpture, drawing and painting with an interest in vernacular aesthetic practices, the manifestation of African retentions in the diaspora, semiotics, and archival practices. His work has been exhibited nationally; including the Cincinnati Art Museum, Mint Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia, The Ackland Art Museum and The Contemporary Art Museum in Raleigh, North Carolina. Mark has received various fellowships and awards including an Emerging Lens Fellowship from ArtWORKS in Chicago (2022), the Nexus Grant from Atlanta Contemporary (2022), and a Visiting Researcher Fellowship at Wilson Special Collection Library at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2023).

bree gant is an artist and thinker from the Westside of Detroit. They work across and between disciplines, rooted in ritual and intimacy and a legacy of Black queer femme performance. bree has held numerous residencies and fellowships, including Surf Point Foundation, McColl Center for Art and Innovation, Kresge Arts in Detroit, Art Matters Foundation, and People in Education. bree studied film at Howard University and is currently pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Art, Theory, and Practice at Northwestern University. They spend a significant amount of time binging science fiction and fantasy, waiting for the bus, and elbow-leaning in windows.

MATERIAL GIRLS is a flexible and non-hierarchical collective of artists dedicated to building community, fostering collaboration, and facilitating exhibitions. Currently MATERIAL GIRLS’ members are Rachael Starbuck (Pittsburgh, PA), Gracelee Lawrence (Climax, NY), Claire Lachow (Brooklyn, NY), Hilliary Gabryel (Queens, NY), and Cameron Cameron (Los Angeles, CA). Founded in 2016 by a group of female sculptors seeking solidarity outside an institutional context, MATERIAL GIRLS collaborates on site-specific installations and projects that exhibit the work of artists in their extended network. While each member has an independent studio practice, the collective explores overlapping areas of interest including gender politics, ongoing negotiations between humans and their environments, communication across distance, and the fluid relationship between digital and physical touch. MATERIAL GIRLS has been featured in publications including PAPER Magazine, Hyperallergic, Dallas Morning News, Art F City, and Conflict of Interest. Selected exhibitions include “Waiting for the Update” at James Madison University (Harrisonburg, VA); “Desire Paths” at Sweet Pass Sculpture Park (Dallas, TX); “My Shell Makes Itself” at 5-50 Gallery (Queens, NY); “Palms” at Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA); “xenomorphs” at Spring Break Art Show (New York, NY); and “xoxo” at The Museum of Human Achievement (Austin, TX).

Gabriella Moreno is a queer, latine artist whose practice uses the erotic as a lens to probe entanglements of gender, power, and queer desire. She has exhibited in New York, Milwaukee and Columbus. Recent exhibitions include a solo, “How the Threads of my Animal Unravel to You,” at Underscore in Milwaukee, WI, and “In Absentia” at the NY Studio School Project Space in Brooklyn, NY. This upcoming November she will present a solo show with Mimo Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. Moreno was a recipient of a Greater Columbus Arts Council Funds for Artists Grant in 2023 and 2024, additionally, she earned an Alumni Grant for Graduate Research and Scholarship from The Ohio State University in 2023. Moreno has a BFA in Visual and Critical Studies from the School of Visual Arts, where she was awarded the Silas H. Rhodes Scholarship, and received an MFA in Studio Art from The Ohio State University, where she was awarded the Dean’s Enrichment Fellowship.

Tendai Mupita was born in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1990 and graduated with a BFA from Chinhoyi University of Technology in 2015. In 2017, he was awarded the Blessing Ngobeni artist residency at the Bag Factory in Johannesburg, South Africa. He also participated in the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, USA in 2019. His work has been exhibited in numerous shows across Zimbabwe, Kenya, Italy, London, the USA, and South Africa. In 2020, he did a solo exhibition in Rome titled “Kuedza mudzimu nesengere”, which was featured in the September issue of Artforum magazine. In 2019, he participated in the Zimbabwe Cultural Center of Detroit’s artist exchange program and he was invited to discuss his work with Halima Cassels his work at the Charles Wright Museum of African American History in Detroit, USA. Tendai completed his Master’s in Sculpture at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia in 2023.

Bony Ramirez was born in 1996 in Tenares, Salcedo, Dominican Republic. He currently works in Jersey City, New Jersey. His rural upbringing in the Dominican Republic, his first encounters with Catholic imagery, and his deep interest in sources as varied as Italian mannerism, Renaissance portraiture, and children’s illustrations reverberate within and around the fictional characters he creates. If each figure appears to be transposed into a changing theatre of symbolic surroundings and backdrops, it is the artist’s technique that renders this possible. Ramirez creates his heavily stylized, proportionally distorted figures on paper, and adheres them onto wood panels featuring idyllic, colourful backdrops of Caribbean imagery. As Ramirez’s characters, developed separately and simultaneously in oil stick, paint, and coloured pencil, make their way onto his works, so too do various other symbolic appendages. Ramirez uses a variety of objects which either complement the playfulness and idyllicism of his work, such as colourful beads, or contrast it by penetrating it with violence, such as real knives stabbed into the canvas. Bony Ramirez has exhibited at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth (Texas), Bradley Ertaskiran (Montreal), the Newark Museum of Art (New Jersey), François Ghebaly (Los Angeles), Bank/MabSociety (Shanghai), Jeffrey Deitch (New York), among others, and was recognized in the Forbes 30 Under 30 Arts & Style category in 2023, and The Artsy Vanguard 2021. His work has recently been acquired by the permanent collection of the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami, as well as the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Newark Museum of Art, the Frye Art Museum, the Perez Art Museum Miami, and the X Museum in Beijing.

Lyric Shen lives and works in New York. Their current practice involves the composition of eustressed images that consider language, memory, and the fabrication of desire. Cast porcelain, steel, cosmopolitan artifacts such as vehicle remnants, and video hold glances that not only reflect their personal life but the cultural and industrial circumstances surrounding them. Through Shen’s chosen technique of water transfers, substrates surrender to a membrane-thin sheet of ink, which at once seals the evanescence of the moment while dissolving the accuracy of the reproduction or copy. Recent exhibitions include “Fuckgirl Collapse”, Room 3557 (Los Angeles, CA), “The Petal”, Et Al (San Francisco, CA), “Promise’s Room”, Silke Lindner (New York City, NY), “Biscuit”, Canada (New York City, NY), “Jupiter Finger”, Harkawik (Los Angeles, CA), “Terra Firma”, Murmurs (Los Angeles), “My Wishing Well”, Cone Shape Top Center for Arts & Music (Emeryville, CA), “Ancestral Recall”, The dA Center for the Arts (Pomona, CA), and “橄欖樹”，Taipei Artist Village (Taipei City, Taiwan). Shen’s work is in the permanent collections of the University of California and Santa Barbara Arts & Music Library. Shen’s writing and work have been featured in Cult Classic, Dizzy TV, Foundwork, Cultured Mag and Hyperallergic as well as in collective DIY editions such as an anthology published by Other Weapons Distribution.

Keioui Keijaun Thomas is a New York-based artist. She creates live performance and multimedia installations that address blackness outside of a codependent, binary structure of existence. Her performances combine rhapsodic layers of live and recorded voice, slipping between various modes of address, to explore the pleasures and pressures of dependency, care, and support. By centering self and communal care in real-time, Thomas’ practice aims to build bridges of understanding and community. Thomas has presented work both nationally and internationally at The Rhubarb Festival, Toronto (2023); Skopje Pride Queer Arts Festival, Skopje, Macedonia (2020); Dweller Festival, Brooklyn (2020); ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland (2019); Fierce Festival, Birmingham, UK (2019); Time-Based Art Festival, Portland (2016); Rapid Pulse Performance Art Festival, Chicago (2016); SPILL Festival of Performance, Ipswich, UK (2014); Out of Site Festival, Chicago (2014). Solo performances at The Knockdown Center, New York (2018), Harvard University, Cambridge (2018); Performance Space UK, Folkestone, UK (2016); Housing NY, Brooklyn (2016); and Human Resources, Los Angeles (2015). Select group exhibitions at Performance Space, New York (2019); Wrightwood 659, Chicago (2019); Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2019); Artists Space, New York (2018); Station Museum of Contemporary Art, Houston (2018); New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York (2018); Human Resources, Los Angeles (2018); Broad Museum, Los Angeles (2017); New Normal, Istanbul and Beirut (2017); Encuentro 2016, Santiago (2016); Centro Cultural del México Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2016); EXPO Chicago, Chicago (2015); Théâtre de la Ville, Paris (2015). Solo exhibitions include “Magma & Pearls”, MOCA Tucson, Arizona, 2023/24), “No Longer Strange Fruit”, JOAN, California (2023), “Come Hell or High Femmes”, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2022); and “Hands Up, Ass Out”, Participant Inc., New York (2021). Thomas is a 2022 recipient of the MAP Fund, the inaugural winner of the Queer|Art 2020 Illuminations Grant for Black Trans Women Visual Artists, and the Franklin Furnace Fund Recipient for 2018. She earned her Masters degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and her BFA with Honors from the School of Visual Arts in New York.