Join us for Fall Open Studios with Smack Mellon’s 2019-2020 Studio Artists. The studios will be open to the public on Saturday, September 28th from 12PM-8PM and Sunday, September 29th from 12PM-6PM. Also on view in the main gallery space will be Esperanza Cortés: Canté Jondo/Deep Song and Viviane Rombaldi Seppey: Voice, with an exhibition reception on Saturday, September 28th, 6PM-8PM. The studios are located on the lower level of our building at 92 Plymouth Street in Dumbo, Brooklyn.

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 artists each year with a private studio, fellowship, and access to a fabrication shop and media lab. Smack Mellon convenes a panel of art professionals to select the artists from over 500 applicants. We host Open Studio events twice a year, as well as private visits from curators, critics and gallerists. 

Current artists in residence are Camel Collective, Rachelle Dang, Jes Fan, Chantal Feitosa, Stephanie Germosen, Gina Goico, and work exchange artist Jocelyn Chase. Anthony Graves and Carla Herrera-Prats have worked together as Camel Collective since 2010. Camel Collective conducts research on labor, the politics of affect, and the history of artist collectives. Together they think through the contradictions of contemporary labor and the myths of cultural production, and use this investigation to create performance, video, sculpture, and photography. Rachelle Dang’s work considers the implications of colonial legacies, looking specifically at European exploration of the Pacific in the late 18th century. Interested in the visual language of the Scientific Revolution, Dang traces the relationship between the rise of modern science and the expansion of empire to reveal the complex and layered narratives that fictionalize our understanding of the past and present. 

Jes Fan is deeply engaged in object-making, with a particular investment in glass as a transformative material. Fan has been suspending melanin in glass globules that act as imaginary organs, intimately scaled to the body. It grants the melanin a life of its own, leaving us to deliberate how tangible this simple pigment is and what an outsized role in racial identity—and thus racial construction, colorism, and racism—it accommodates. Chantal Feitosa is a Brazilian American artist from Queens, New York. Her process shifts between new media, collage, and social practice to address themes of racial bias, beauty standards, and belonging. In her work, she often replicates systems of childhood education and play through performance and object-making. 

Stephanie Germosen creates work that she calls “skins of experience” (Piel de Experiencia), using extremely tactile materials to communicate the urgency of remembering in conditions of displacement. These objects are transformed into souvenirs that recall the experiences of Germosen’s childhood and Latin American identity. Gina Goico’s work navigates her dual cultural background, embodying the spaces she inhabits in both the Dominican Republic and the United States. In the process, she has come to create a diverse body of work ranging from collage to installations, ink drawings and performance.

Each year, Smack Mellon convenes a panel of arts professionals to select the artists from more than 500 applicants. The panelists who selected the 2019-2020 Studio Artists were: Marcela Guerrero, Assistant Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art; Kalia Brooks Nelson, New York based curator and writer and Adjunct Professor in the Photography and Imaging Department in the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University; and Gabriel de Guzman, Curator and Director of Exhibitions, Smack Mellon. Preliminary panelists were former Smack Mellon Studio or Exhibition artists: Claudia Bitran, Joan Linder, Rudy Shepherd, aricoco (Ari Tabei), Dannielle Tegeder, and Juana Valdes.

The 2019-2020 program began July 1, 2019 and continues through June 15, 2020. Our upcoming application process for 2020-2021 opens September 3rd and the deadline will be November 1st. All six of the artists selected for the studio program receive a fellowship. If funding is awarded from The Edward and Sally Van Lier Fund of the New York Community Trust, Gina Goico, Chantal Feitosa, and Stefanie Germosen will receive Van Lier Fellowships. Please visit our website to review Studio Program eligibility. 

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.