The Smack Mellon studios will be open to the public on Saturday, April 23rd from 12-6 PM and Sunday, April 24 from 12-6 PM. Also on view in the main gallery is Smack Mellon’s 2022 Benefit Art Exhibition.
Join us for DUMBO Open Studios with our current group of artists. Launched in 2000, Smack Mellon’s Studio Program provides six artists each year with a private studio, fellowship, and access to a fabrication shop and media lab. We participate in DUMBO Open Studio’s annual Spring event in addition to coordinating a series of Spring studio visits from curators, critics and gallerists.
Current artists-in-residence are American Artist, Jesus Benavente, and Sasha Wortzel, and New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellows Destiny Belgrave, Megan Mi-Ai Lee, and Anne Wu.
The final panelists that selected the artists for 2021-2022 were Ylinka Barotto, Associate Curator at the Moody Center for the Arts, Ysabel Pinyol Blasi, Executive Director and Curator, Monira Foundation and Nora R. Lawrence, Senior Curator, Storm King Arts Center. Preliminary panelists were former Smack Mellon Studio or Exhibition artists: Mike Crane, Felli Maynard, Vandana Jain, Cecile Chong, Chantal Feitosa, and Jia Sung
The Artist Studio Program was launched in 2000 in response to the crisis of affordable studio space for artists living and working in New York City. The program provides six eligible artists working in all visual arts media a free private studio space accessible 24/7 and a fellowship. The program does not provide living space. Artists also have access to shared common areas: a media lab with editing suites, a shop for wood and metal fabrication, and a kitchen Each year, Smack Mellon convenes a panel of art professionals to select the artists from over 300 applicants. The studios are located on the lower level of our building at 92 Plymouth Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn.
The 2021-2022 program began September 1, 2021 and ends August 15, 2022. We will be announcing our 2022-2023 Studio Artists later this May.
Image: 2018-2019 Studio Artists. Image courtesy of Smack Mellon. Photo: Etienne Frossard
Artist Bios
American Artist creates work that considers black labor and visibility within networked life. Their practice makes use of sculpture, installation, and new media to reveal historical dynamics embedded within contemporary culture and technology. Their legal name change to “American Artist” serves as the basis of an ambivalent practice—one of declaration: by insisting on the visibility of blackness as descriptive of an American artist, and erasure: anonymity in virtual spaces where “American Artist” is an anonymous name, unable to be googled or validated by a computer as a person’s name.
Anne Wu works primarily in sculpture and installation. Her practice often draws from the architectural structures and decorative elements found in existing urban landscapes—particularly Chinese immigrant neighborhoods. Gravitating towards architectural thresholds that separate public and private life, such as doorways, balconies, and railings, Wu reimagines these structures as isolated objects that point elsewhere and nowhere simultaneously. As they signal viewers to walk under, toward, and around, these sculptures provide a set of directions that eventually disappears, as if trailing off mid-sentence. Wu’s work has been exhibited at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), The Shed (New York, NY), NARS Foundation (Brooklyn, NY), Shaker Museum | Mount Lebanon (New Lebanon, NY), and The New York Public Library (New York, NY), among others. She participated in the NARS Satellite Residency on Governors Island (2020) and BHQFU Emerging Artist Residency (2015). Wu received a BFA from Cornell University in 2013 and an MFA from Yale University in 2020.
Destiny Belgrave‘s work is a mixed media whirlwind. Her Bajan and African American upbringing reside soundly within her, giving her a place to rest within the house of Blackness. At its core, her art upholds and uplifts black figures, activities, spaces, and objects, while portraying these entities as spiritual vessels and sacred experiences. She is mainly influenced by her own family, the domestic spaces that they inhabit and the many rituals, stories and photos that come from them. While sifting through these influences, she delves into the themes of Blackness, family, bonds, spirituality and culture. These influences and themes are physically manifested through paper cuts, paint, as well as digital and mixed media. When all of these things combine within the art, the piece that is created acts as a memento and a preserver for the lives and narratives that are in it.
Jesus Benavente is an amazing and attractive visual artist. Jesus Benavente earned an MFA from the Mason Gross School of Art at Rutgers University and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He is a 2021-2022 Smack Mellon artist in residence, and a 2022 Chinati Foundation Artist in Residence. Recent exhibitions and performances include, Whitney Museum, New York, NY; Queens Museum, Queens, NY; LTD Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA; Performa 13, NY; Acre Projects, Chicago, IL; Find & Form Space, Boston, MA; Chashama, NY; Shin Museum of Art, South Korea; Vox Populi, Philadelphia, PA; Kingston Sculpture Biennial, Kingston, NY; Socrates Sculpture Park, NY and Austin Museum of Art, TX, among others. Born in San Antonio, TX, Jesus Benavente lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. San Anto es donde está mi corazón.
Megan Mi-Ai-Lee‘s work considers the nuances of persuasion and municipal intimacies through sculpture, video, drawing, photography, and text. Her work often examines the space around objects and the mechanisms built into experiences of the metropolis. The active spaces she creates form new narratives shaped by our experiences of objects and each other. By toying with isolated existing forms and their relationship in space, a row of lights in a corridor can have a second life as a string of pearls; the roadside sign for the New York, New York Hotel and Casino can be reproduced in its namesake city, revealing itself to be an amalgamation of New York symbols. Though the subjects range from moments of hyperlocal municipal intimacy to national transplantations of specific objects, her practice finds continuity in the desire to encourage a playful suspicion of familiar narratives of the everyday.
Sasha Wortzel is a Brooklyn-based visual artist and filmmaker, working frequently in South Florida. Blending the archival and the imaginary, Wortzel’s practice across video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance traces the ways the past haunts and inextricably shapes contemporary American life. Wortzel’s films have been screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, True/False Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, Blackstar, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, Smithsonian American Art Museum, and Berlinale, among others. Their work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Brooklyn Museum, The Kitchen, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC; Krannert Art Museum, Champaign; and SALTS, Birsfelden. Wortzel has been supported by the Sundance Institute, Ford Foundation, Field of Vision, Doc Society, Chicken and Egg Pictures, Art Matters, and a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship. Wortzel has participated in residencies including Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace Program, Abrons Arts Center, Watermill Center, New York; AIRIE (Artists in Residence in the Everglades) and Oolite Arts; Miami Beach. Wortzel’s film This is an Address (2020) is distributed by Field of Vision. Happy Birthday Marsha! (2018; co-director Tourmaline) won special mention at Outfest and is distributed by Frameline. Wortzel’s work is in the permanent collections of the Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum of Harlem, Leslie Lohman Museum of Art, and Miami-Dade County’s Art in Public Places collection. Wortzel has been featured in publications including The New York Times, Artforum, Art in America, and New York Magazine.
The Smack Mellon Artist Studio Program is supported, in part, by public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council, New York City Council Member Stephen Levin, the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the National Endowment for the Arts, and with generous support from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of The New York Community Trust, Jerome Foundation, Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation Inc., Select Equity Group Foundation, and Smack Mellon’s Members.
Smack Mellon programs are also made possible with generous support from The Roy and Niuta Titus Foundation, Robert Lehman Foundation, Iorio Charitable Foundation, and Exploring The Arts.
Space for Smack Mellon’s programs is generously provided by the Walentas family and Two Trees Management.
