Mitch Patrick, 07.26.201 (detail), 2022
Interlinked
South-West Brooklyn Exhibition
July 14 - August 2
Opening Reception: July 14, 6-8pm
NARS Main Gallery
Featuring works by Katie Coughlin, Stephanie Eche, Kiani Ferris, Nicholas Fraser, Judy Giera, Julia Justo, Nathan Kensinger, Laura Murray, Mitch Patrick, Cinthya Santos Briones, Katherine Vetne, Nilufa Yeasmin, and Tansy Xiao.
NARS Foundation is pleased to present Interlinked, an exhibition of artists living or working in South-West Brooklyn. Through video, sculpture, textiles, and painting, these works by 13 artists explore their personal and external relationships to the landscape, architecture, and people that shape this area of New York. From the simple poetry of a hand painted sign in a window, to the larger environmental impact of the surrounding waterways, these artists investigate the intimate and often unexpected ways we are linked to each other and our environments.
The South-West Brooklyn Exhibition series began at NARS in 2016, as a response to the growing and underrecognized artist community in South-West Brooklyn. This will be the second iteration of this series, which NARS aims to present every two years. This exhibition offers an opportunity for artists local to the area to be in conversation, highlighting their diverse experiences and artistic practices.
The artists in this exhibition were chosen through an open call by a jury of NARS Staff members and guest juror John Avelluto.
About the Juror:
John Avelluto (b. 1979) is an artist living, working and exhibiting in Brooklyn, NY where he was born and raised. Graduating from CUNY Brooklyn College, John has studied with artists William T Williams, Vito Acconci and Elizabeth Murray. His work has been exhibited at MoMA PS1, Pavel Zoubok Gallery, The Winter Show at the Armory, Centotto :: galleria [simposio] salotto, and Stand4 Gallery. His work has been documented in publications including New American Paintings and in Italian-American academic journals. In 2019, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at the John D Calandra Italian American Institute. John's work has been reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and included in the New York Times.
About the artists:
Katie Coughlin received her MFA from The Ohio State University(2018) and her BFA from Alfred University(2010). Katie has been an Artist in Resident at Red Lodge Clay Center and Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts. She has received multiple awards including the Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center, The Warren Mackenzie Advancement Award from Northern Clay Center, and most recently a 2020 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. A native New Yorker, Katie returned to the city in 2018 and lives and works in Brooklyn.
Stephanie Eche is a Mexican-American artist based in Brooklyn, NYC with roots in Arizona. She creates sculptures and paintings to investigate her mestizo heritage, explore motherhood, and preserve memories. She is the founder and principal of Distill Creative, host of the First Coat podcast, and co-founder of Communer. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, daughter, and two cats.
Eche has had a solo exhibition at eeeee in Mexico City, MX and has participated in group exhibitions at galleries throughout the USA, including Transmitter Gallery in Brooklyn, NY, Untitled Space in Manhattan, NY, Maake Projects in State College, PA, and Form and Concept in Santa Fe, NM. Eche’s work has been written about in Vantage Art Projects, Artsy, Art Spiel, and Hola Cultura. Eche has been a teaching artist for the Center for Urban Pedagogy, the SU-CASA program in Lower Manhattan, Root Division, and the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, CA. She was a Creative Community Fellow with National Arts Strategies and a Healthy Places Network Leader for Urban Land Institute.
Kiani Ferris (b. 1996, Seattle, WA) is a Brooklyn based artist and educator. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2020 and studied at Kyoto Seika University in 2018. She is currently a member of Trestle Art Space in Brooklyn, NY and is a recipient of the 2023 Liu Shiming Art Grant. She has recently exhibited at The Godwin-Ternbach Museum (Flushing, NY; 2022), Rockaway Beach (Queens, NY; 2022), and A.I.R. Gallery (Brooklyn, NY; 2022). Ferris organizes and authors exhibitions and public programming throughout New York. Recent curatorial projects include “Deliverance” at Trestle Art Space (Brooklyn, NY; 2023) and “Brooklyn Voices” at Brooklyn Children’s Museum (Brooklyn, NY; 2022). She has collaborated with organizations such as Brooklyn Children's Museum, Brooklyn Public Library, The Center for Brooklyn History, Brooklyn Chinese American Association, NYC Department of Education, Mi Casa Resiste, Friends of Brower Park, and The Lenape Center. Ferris deeply believes in the horizontalization of knowledge and teaches wheel throwing and mold making classes at Greenwich House Pottery (New York, NY) and Mouse Ceramic Studio (Brooklyn, NY).
Nicholas Fraser creates installations, videos and sculpture. His newest project, Left Hanging, was featured in the Spring/Break Art Fair, as well as in solo exhibitions at Installation Space (North Adams, MA) and Hofstra University's Rosenberg Gallery. All Consuming, a public sited sculpture, was commissioned for Randall's Island in 2015, the same year he participated in the Bronx Museum's AIM program. His video Follow was featured in the Museum's 2015 AIM Biennale. He was awarded a 2014 NYFA Fellowship for his ongoing video project Fronts. Fraser has completed residencies at Skowhegan, Art Omi, Sculpture Space, LMCC’s SwingSpace and was a BRIC Media Fellow in 2012. He's exhibited work at the Drawing Center, Interstate Projects, Flux Factory, Bronx Art Space, Art in Odd Places, La Mama La Galeria, Jack the Pelican and Taller Boricua. His work has been shown in Paris, Seoul, Toronto, Cuba and Germany. He earned his BFA at the Atlanta College of Art and his MFA at the School of Visual Art. Born in the U.K., he lives in Brooklyn.
Judy Giera holds an MFA in Art-Painting (Lehman College-City University of New York), an MFA in Theatre (The Actors Studio Drama School at Pace University) and spent a year in the graduate Performance + Performance Studies program at Pratt Institute. Her work has been seen in both solo and group exhibitions at venues including the Hudson River Museum, Waterloo Arts, SPANTZO, Ceres Gallery, Amos Eno Gallery, Gallery Aferro, White Columns (Online), and BronxArtSpace, Trestle Gallery among others. Her evening length performance with soundscape, ‘Blanche On A Winter’s Eve’ premiered at the United Solo Theatre Festival, garnering an award from festival organizers, and was curated into the First International Human Rights Arts Festival in 2017. Giera’s work has been featured in Vellum Magazine, Art511, and Art Spiel. Judy was a 2022 AIM Fellow with the Bronx Museum of the Arts and her work will be included in the Bronx Biennial in 2024. Giera was also awarded the Davyd Whaley Memorial Award for Abstraction from the Art Students League of New York. Recently, Judy is on the staff of the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, the only dedicated LGBTQ+ art museum in the world, as their Collections Manager. She resides in Brooklyn with her partner, two cats, and many houseplants.
Julia Justo is an indigenous artist born in Argentina in 1963. She earned a MFA with a concentration in painting from the National University of Argentina. She has exhibited in galleries and museum in the US and abroad including WhiteBox NYC, Smack Mellon, Bric Media Arts, Hunterdon Art Museum, Asheville Art Museum, American Folk Art Museum and BronxArtSpace among others. She has been granted numerous awards and residencies including, Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant, Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Grant, LMCC Grant (2019-2023), Trestle Gallery Residency, and Creative Capital NYC Taller. Her publications include the New York Times Guide for Immigrants to New York City, Memoir Magazine and News NY1 among others.
Nathan Kensinger is a Brooklyn based photographer, filmmaker, artist, and journalist whose work explores hidden urban landscapes, post-industrial ecologies, forgotten waterways, environmental contamination, and coastal communities endangered by sea level rise and climate change. He has lived and worked in South-West Brooklyn for the past 20 years, and during that time he has created an ongoing series of photo essays, documentary films, public arts projects, and video installations about New York City's changing waterfront. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of the City of New York, Queens Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Staten Island Museum, Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts, and in numerous galleries, and his films have screened at museums and film festivals worldwide, including the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI), Danish Film Institute in Copenhagen, DOC NYC, Slamdance, and Rooftop Films. His work has been featured by The New Yorker, New York Times, PBS NewsHour, National Public Radio, and Wall Street Journal. In 2021, Kensinger was selected as one of Filmmaker Magazine's "25 New Faces In Independent Film” for his films investigating environmental cleanups and the impacts of climate change in New York City. He previously wrote a column of photo essays about the city’s waterfront neighborhoods for Curbed/Vox Media from 2012 to 2020, and is currently a freelance environmental journalist, with bylines appearing at Gothamist/WNYC, New York City’s public radio station.
Laura Murray (b. Oklahoma City, OK) received her BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 2012. Her work has been included in numerous group shows in exhibition spaces such as Postmasters Gallery (New York, NY), Arc Gallery (San Francisco, CA), the Oklahoma City Museum of Art (OKC, OK), and Galerist (Istanbul). She has exhibited solo shows at HERE Art Center (New York, NY), The North Museum of Nature and Science (Lancaster, PA), and Snug Harbor Cultural Center (Staten Island, NY). Her work has been featured in New York Magazine, SciArt Magazine, The Nation, and Vice’s The Creators Project. She currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. Recently she gave birth to twins and is tired all of the time.
Mitch Patrick's studio practice encompasses a range of digital media, 3d printing, and drawing processes. Much of these practices look at the function and representation of pixels in digital images through the use of glyphs and typography. His 3d printing practice examines the pixel through current cosmological research programs and personal cell phone photography. His looping videos and performance work exhibit digitally constructed tableaux detailing the peculiar interactions between viewers, screens, pixels, and time. Mitch holds a BFA from the University of Montevallo (2007), and a MFA from Brooklyn College (2013). (b. 1985, McDonough, GA. Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.)
Cinthya Santos Briones is a visual artist, popular educator, and community organizer with indigenous Nahua roots based in New York. She grew up in small towns between mountains and valleys surrounded by indigenous communities -Nahuas, Otomi and Tepehuas- in central Mexico. She studied Ethnohistory and Anthropology and for ten years Cinthya worked as a researcher at the National Institute of Anthropology and History in México focused on issues on indigenous migration, codex, textiles and traditional medicine. As an artist, her work focuses on a multidisciplinary social practice that combines participatory art and the construction of collective narratives. Through a variety of non-linear storytelling mediums she juxtaposed photography, historical archives, writing, ethnography, drawings, collage embroidery, and popular education.
Cinthya holds an MFA in creative writing and photography from Ithaca College. And a certificate in Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism from the International Center of Photography (ICP). She is the recipient of fellowships and grants from the Magnum Foundation (2016/2018/2020), En Foco (2017/2022), National Geographic Research and Exploration (2018), We Woman (2019), National Fund for Culture and the Arts of México (2009/2011), etc.
Her work has been published in The New York Times, Pdn, California Sunday Magazine, Vogue, Open Society Foundations, Buzzfeed, The Intercept, New Yorker, The Nation Magazine, La Jornada, among others. She is co-author of the book “The Indigenous Worldview and its Representations in Textiles of the Nahua community of Santa Ana Tzacuala, Hidalgo”. And the documentary, The Huichapan Codex. Cinthya has worked at pro-immigrant organizations in New York as a community organizer on issues such as detection, education, and sanctuary. She has volunteered in programs accompanying migrants to the courts and asylum applications. And she is a guardian of unaccompanied migrant children.
Currently she is an Adjunct Faculty at the Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY. Cinthya is part of “Colectiva infancia” (childhood collective) made up of a group of anthropologists who works through ethnographic and visual research on studies around childhood in relation to migration, violence, urban studies and epistemologies of the Global South.
Katherine Vetne received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Boston University and a Master of Fine Arts from the San Francisco Art Institute. She is the recipient of SFAI’s Graduate Fellowship in Painting as well as the Allan B. Stone Award. Vetne has exhibited her work in galleries in Los Angeles, Boston and San Francisco. In June 2018, Vetne’s work was featured in We Tell Ourselves Stories…In Order to Live, a group exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, alongside the work of Sophie Calle, Stephanie Syjuco, and Lenka Clayton.
In 2018, Vetne’s work was featured in Heavy Metal – Women to Watch 2018 at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. Her 2019 debut solo exhibition at Catharine Clark Gallery, Whatever I See I Swallow, was generously supported by an Individual Artist Grant through the San Francisco Arts Commission. In 2021, Vetne was featured in a major exhibition on contemporary craft at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas and featured in the accompanying monograph, Crafting America. Vetne lives and works in the Brooklyn, New York and has been represented by Catharine Clark Gallery since 2019.
Nilufa Yeasmin (b.1995) is a multi-media artist based in New York. She holds a BFA in painting and drawing from the Visual Arts Conservatory at Purchase College and has recently completed an artist residency at Governors Island through BronxArtSpace. In addition to Purchase College her work has been on display at New York University, Jacob Burns Film Center and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Tansy Xiao is an artist, curator and writer based in New York. Xiao creates theatrical installations with non-linear narratives that often extend beyond the fourth wall. Her work explores the immense power and inherent inadequacy of language through the assemblage of stochastic audio and recontextualized objects. She finds solace in the unknown, ludicrousness in the authorities, and absurdity in the geopolitical demarcations that separate and differentiate people.
Xiao’s work has been shown at Queens Museum, New Media Caucus, Piksel Festival, Sound Scene, HASTAC Conference, The American Society for Theatre Research Conference, University of Porto, Osaka University of Art, The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New Adventures in Sound Art, Pelham Art Center, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, Azarian McCullough Art Gallery, among others. She has received grants and support from NYSCA Electronic Media & Film | Wave Farm, Brooklyn Arts Council, Foundation for Contemporary Arts and Harvestworks Digital Media Arts Center.
NARS Foundation Galleries are open to the public from 12pm - 5pm, Monday - Friday. Please contact info@narsfoundation.org with any other inquires.
Support for this exhibition is generously provided by:
