Sharmistha Ray, May - June 2026

Sharmistha Ray in the Pool Room. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Sharmistha Ray (they/them) is a visual artist and Estella Loomis McCandless Assistant Professor of Art at Carnegie Mellon University. Their artistic practice uses modes of abstraction to explore imagery related to Hindu and Buddhist cosmologies, the patterning and ornamentation of South Asian crafts, and sacred architecture in relationship to global modernisms and queer futurity. Working primarily in painting and drawing, they have also made work in sculpture, artist books, and animation.

In addition to their solo work, they co-founded the spiritualist feminist art collective Hilma’s Ghost which acts as a collaborative model for research, artistic production, pedagogy, and community.

Ray’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions and projects internationally at The Guggenheim, New York, NY; The Shepherd, Detroit, MI; The Museu de Arte de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tucson, AZ; Palm Springs Art Museum, Palm Springs, CA; The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, CT; Galería RGR, Mexico City, Mexico; Nature Morte, New Delhi, India; Secrist|Beach, Chicago, IL; and others. Public projects include a permanent 600 square foot glass mosaic installed inside Grand Central Station, New York, NY.

Visit Sharmistha’s website here.

Dahn Gim, May - June 2026

Dahn Gim in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Dahn Gim works through material transformation, altering and reassembling repurposed objects and personal archives to navigate shifting boundaries between familiar and unfamiliar, known and unknown.

After completing her MFA from UCLA, she has exhibited internationally at venues including Somerset House (UK), Post Territory Ujeongguk and DDP (South Korea), Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Hammer Museum, PST ART: Art & Science Colide, Human Resources, Steve Turner Gallery (LA), Currents New Media (Santa Fe), Rochester Art Center, and Hair and Nails Gallery (Minneapolis/New York City).

Gim is a recipient of the 2026 Minnesota State Arts Board’s Creative Individual Grant, 2025 MRAC Artist Impact Grant, and the 2024 McKnight Visual Artist Felowship. Born in Busan, South Korea, and raised in Toronto, Canada, she is currently based in Minneapolis, MN.

Visit Dahn’s website here.

Strata: 2016-19 (2024), 4.5 x 4.5 x 98", Legal documents

This residency opportunity was made possible through the generous support of the McKnight Foundation and Artist Communities Alliance.

About the McKnight Artist & Culture Bearer Fellowships Program

Founded on the belief that Minnesota thrives when its artists and culture bearers thrive, the McKnight Foundation’s arts and culture program is one of the oldest and largest of its kind in the country. Support for individual working Minnesota artists and culture bearers has been a cornerstone of the program since it began in 1982. The McKnight Artist & Culture Bearer Fellowships Program provides annual, unrestricted cash awards to outstanding mid-career Minnesota artists in 15 different creative disciplines. Program partner organizations administer the fellowships and structure them to respond tothe unique challenges of different disciplines. Currently, the foundation contributes about $2.8 million per year to its statewide fellowships. For more information, visit mcknight.org/artistfellowships.

About ACA

Artist Communities Alliance (ACA) is the international service organization for artist residency programs and artist-centered organizations. For 35 years, ACA has centered artists and artist residencies, providing them with tools, knowledge-sharing, resources, and frameworks to create and sustain inclusive, accessible, just, and joyful environments. We work to unite people and inspire the field.

About the McKnight Foundation

The McKnight Foundation, a Minnesota-based family foundation, advances a more just, creative, and abundant future where people and planet thrive. Established in 1953, the McKnight Foundation is deeply committed to advancing climate solutions in the Midwest; building an equitable and inclusive Minnesota; and supporting the arts and culture in Minnesota, neuroscience, and global food systems.

Soulaf Abas, May - June 2026

Soulaf Abas in the Surf Point Library. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Soulaf was born and raised in Damascus, Syria. In 2008 she received her Bachelors of Fine Arts from Indiana State University. Then, she returned to Syria and taught art at the Arab European University. She also spent some time translating books and articles in Arabic and English.

In 2010, Soulaf returned to Indiana State University to get her masters in Fine Arts. After she received her MFA in painting in 2013, she taught part time at Indiana State University. Soulaf went back to visit her family in Damascus-Syria in the summer of 2012, a year after the revolution began. Upon her return from Syria, she started creating images in painting and printmaking that depicted what she’d experienced. She continues to explore the effects of loss and trauma in her oil painting and printmaking works.

Her work was exhibited nationally and internationally. She also received multiple residencies and awards for her work like the Social Justice Residency in Santa Fe, NM, and multiple ELCE Grants from Indiana State University. Soulaf lives and works in Terre Haute, Indiana with her partner, dogs, cat, and many plants.

Visit Soulaf'’s website here.

Matt Marble, April 2026

Matt Marble in the Split Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Matt Marble (b. Meridian, Mississippi, 1979) is an artist, author, and media producer whose work explores the intersections of art and spiritual imagination through archival research, curatorial storytelling, and creative practice. He is the director of the American Museum of Paramusicology and the author of Buddhist Bubblegum, as well as the creator of the podcasts Secret Sound and The Hidden Present.

His projects examine metaphysical influences in American music history and the creative lives of overlooked or unconventional artists, ultimately underscoring the vital freedom of the imagination—creative, personal, and collective—and a resistance to dogma and oppressive forces. His own art often incorporates idiosyncratic influences from metaphysical philosophy as well as his archival work.

Marble’s work has been presented internationally in exhibitions, publications, recordings, and public programs. He holds a PhD in Music Composition from Princeton University, a B.A. in Speech & Hearing Sciences from Portland State University, and a black rattlesnake from his dreams.

Visit Matt’s website here.

"Unknowable Music" (2023), acrylic painting by Matt Marble

Yatika Starr Fields, April 2026

Yatika Starr Fields in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Yatika Starr Fields is a multi-disciplinary artist with an emphasis in painting, based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. A member of the Osage, Cherokee, and Muscogee Nations, Fields grounds his work in Indigenous identity while pushing the boundaries of contemporary Native art. His dynamic, color-saturated compositions often blend figurative elements with cultural and historical motifs, inviting viewers to explore layered narratives and find personal connections. Through this interplay, Fields creates a space for dialogue, one that bridges individual experience with shared memory and collective history.

Fields practice has taken him around the world, collaborating with institutions and museums to expand perspectives on Indigenous art in contemporary contexts. After graduating from high school in Stillwater, Oklahoma, he attended the Art Institute of Boston and spent a decade living and working in New York City. From 2017 to 2023, Fields was a Tulsa Artist Fellow, a residency that allowed him to deepen his studio practice and explore new materials and methodologies.

His work responds to the political and cultural terrains of today, while remaining rooted in the vitality, beauty, and resilience of Indigenous worldviews. With a distinctive visual language that honors movement, complexity, and cultural continuity, Fields challenges assumptions about Native art and amplifies the narratives of contemporary Indigenous life through a vibrant and evolving lens.

View Yatika’s work here.

Jory Drew, April 2026

Jory Drew in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Jory Drew is an artist and educator whose multidisciplinary practice explores how identity, memory, and social histories shape the possibilities of intimacy, kinship, and care within Black and queer life. Working across sculpture, installation, video, and performance, Drew examines the residues of systemic inequality while imagining alternative networks of support and survival. His work often reuses everyday materials — housing debris, domestic artifacts, and archival fragments — to reconstruct personal and collective narratives that challenge cultural erasure. Through these gestures, Drew turns vulnerability into a space of resistance, envisioning worlds in which Black life is centered, legible, and loved. Drew (b. 1992, Austin, TX) is a graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (BFA, 2015) and the University of California Los Angeles (MFA, 2025) and has recently exhibited at Art/Space 114 (Los Angeles, 2026), KITA Gallery (Los Angeles, 2025), and Murmurs (Los Angeles, 2023).

Visit Jory’s instagram here.

Rachel Gloria Adams, February - March 2026

Rachel Gloria Adams in the Split Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Rachel Gloria Adams is a multidisciplinary artist living in Portland, ME. Adams has developed a vibrant, graphic pattern-based visual language filled with references to the natural world and motherhood that posses an heirloom quality. Her work takes form by way of quilting, painting, design and murals.

She moved to to Maine in 2005 to pursue her BFA from the Maine College of Art and Design. She has gone on to exhibit artwork at the Portland Museum of Art, Space Gallery, Center for Maine Contemporary Art and Dowling Walsh. She has attended residencies at Speedwell, Pace House and is an Indigo Arts Alliance David C Driscoll Fellow. Her work has been acquired by the Farnsworth Museum and Portland Museum of Art. In addition to her studio practice, Adams has been commissioned to create murals for several institutions including the Children’s Museum of Portland, Farnsworth Museum and Worcester Art Museum.

Visit Rachel’s website here.

Olivia Berke, February - March 2026

Olivia Berke in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Olivia Berke is a New York City based artist. Her practice is centered around using everyday materials as portals to the imagination and finding wonder in the ordinary and unseen. Much of the material Olivia uses is either gifted or recovered, and so, each piece operates as a record of the time, place, and people involved in its creation. Ranging in scale, material, and process, Olivia seeks to create work that offers a moment in which an unfamiliar encounter can become something intimate. Her work has been a part of several group exhibitions, most recently at The Sheerly Touch-Ya/Shisanwu Warehouse in Glendale, Queens and Voltz Clarke Gallery in New York, NY. 

Visit Olivia’s website here.

Dream Paintings, 2024

James Eric Francis Sr., February - March 2026

James Eric Francis Sr. in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

James Eric Francis Sr., a member of the Penobscot Nation, is a multifaceted artist whose work is deeply intertwined with his roles as a historian, cultural preservationist, and tribal leader. His art, which includes painting, photography, filmmaking, and graphic design, is a powerful exploration of the relationship between Maine Native Americans and the landscape, viewed through an indigenous lens.

As a visual artist, Francis creates work that is both historical and deeply personal. He often uses his art to challenge dominant historical narratives and to assert the resilience and continued presence of the Penobscot people. A prime example is his painting "We Walk On; Eternally," where he recreates a genocidal 1755 proclamation from Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Spencer Phips calling for the extermination of the Penobscot people. Across this document, he stamps in blood-red letters the Penobscot word for "we walk on; eternally," a powerful statement of survival and a plea for a new, respectful relationship with the people of Maine.

Francis's painting often incorporates intricate techniques, such as his dot paintings, which he began after being inspired by the methodical process of flint knapping. These paintings, such as "Welcome Home," pay homage to the natural world and Penobscot traditions, often celebrating the return of salmon to the Penobscot River. His work also delves into Penobscot legends and cosmology, as seen in his painting "The Great Penetrating Arrow," which tells the story of how all animals and people sprang from an ash tree shot by the hero Gluskabe. This piece, like much of his art, emphasizes the Penobscot belief that humans are on the same plane as all other living creatures.

His artistic practice extends to photography, filmmaking, and graphics. He co-produced the documentary *Invisible*, which examines racism faced by Native Americans in Maine and the Canadian Maritimes. His photography often takes the form of time-lapses, capturing the beauty of the Maine landscape—from the Penobscot River to Mount Katahdin—and its connection to his ancestors. Francis’s work as a graphic artist and filmmaker further supports his mission to revitalize and preserve Penobscot culture, with his oral history projects bringing to life historical pictures and community stories.

In addition to his creative work, Francis is a renowned curator. He has curated exhibits on Penobscot history at institutions such as the Bangor Museum and Center for History, the Abbe Museum, and Harvard University. His curatorial work, like his art, aims to "re-indigenize" historical landscapes and challenge the absence of Native American narratives in historical depictions.

Francis is working on a graduate degree of the University of Maine's Intermedia Masters of Fine Arts program, and his work as an artist is inextricably linked to his lifelong commitment to cultural preservation and education. He serves as the Director of Cultural and Historic Preservation and Tribal Historian for the Penobscot Nation and is a co-founder and Chair of Local Contexts, an initiative to help Indigenous communities manage their cultural heritage and intellectual property. Through his art and his many professional roles, James Eric Francis Sr. provides a unique and vital perspective on history, place, and the enduring power of Indigenous culture.

Visit Francis’s Instagram page here.

Victoria DelValle, January - February 2026

Victoria DelValle in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Victoria “thirteenvic” DelValle (b. 2000) is a Diasporican illustrator, painter, and designer based in Boston, MA. Her practice began in spoken word poetry, performing at Louder Than a Bomb, Brave New Voices, and the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University.

She later returned to visual art, earning a BFA from NYU Tisch School of the Arts in 2022 and pursuing further education at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. Her foundation in writing and performance informs her visual concepts and approach to arts education.

In 2023, she debuted her first solo exhibition, Lost Grief, at Nubian Square Open Studios for the Arts (NOSA). She continued gaining momentum through fellowships with Dunamis, Artists for Humanity and the Arts & Business Council of Greater Boston, and was awarded the Mass Cultural Council’s Grant for Creative Individuals in 2025.

Raised within Boston’s social justice–centered youth arts programs, she values mentorship and the transformative power of creative expression. As a consultant for the City of Boston and Boston Centers for Youth & Families (BCYF), DelValle co-facilitated BCYF Creates, a pilot initiative expanding access to arts programming across the city.

Through her work with young people and her roots in community storytelling, DelValle continues to shape an art practice that is both experimental and personal. She engages accessible, site-specific materials in response to her environment, embracing improvisation as both method and message. Her work reflects the layered realities of cultural memory, emotional inheritance, and transformation—navigated through a diasporic lens. Blending elements of street art, expressionism and surrealism, she invites viewers to confront fear, embrace absurdity, and find wonder within the unfamiliar. Through play, she softens the line between beauty and the grotesque, making difficult truths approachable and encouraging social growth.

Visit Victoria’s website here.

Kyle Downs, January - February 2026

Kyle Downs in the Split Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Kyle Downs is an artist that lives in Bowdoinham, ME. Downs received an MFA in sculpture from the Ohio State University, his BFA from Maine College of Art, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2014. Downs’ work has been included in exhibitions nationally including: Socrates Sculpture Park (NY), Cultural Arts Center (OH), and the Center For Maine Contemporary Art (ME). Downs has taught classes at The School of the Alternative (Black Mountain, NC), Denison University (OH), and Columbus College of Art and Design (OH).

Visit Kyle’s website here.

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos, January - February 2026

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Shey 'Rí Acu' Rivera Ríos (they/them) is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural worker who uses social practice, visual art, and performance to create immersive worlds of magic and liberation. Born and raised in Borikén (Puerto Rico), Rivera has created home and set deep roots in Providence, RI, land of Narragansett and Wampanoag peoples. Rivera is founder of Studio Loba, a production house and consulting firm for cultural projects. They have 15 years of experience in the arts and culture sector, with a specialty on arts and culture for community development and civic engagement. Rivera is committed to art as a catalyst for social change and honoring community lived experience as the knowledge that can help us craft more just and generative futures. Last year, Rivera was selected for Providence Commemoration Lab (2024-25), a one year residency of social practice to engage residents of Providence in reimagining commemoration at the former Columbus Square. Rivera is known for their deeply rooted community engaged work that fosters cultural repair and civic imagination.

Visit Shey’s website here.

Rozalinda Borcilă - October-November 2025

Rozalinda Borcilă at Surf Point’s Wild Knoll Foundation Garden. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Rozalinda Borcilă is a Romanian artist, researcher, and activist based in Chicago. She is interested in tracing the ways colonial violences coalesce around material extractions and flows of capital, in institutional grammars and forms of possession -- but also around modes of feeling, modes of relation, and everyday experiences of being in place. Her current projects focus on glacial landscapes and wetland development sites. Borcilă has exhibited internationally in the U.S., Europe, South Africa, and the Occupied Territories of Palestine. She is the recipient of numerous awards including a Newberry Library Research Fellowship, 3Arts Award, Illinois Artist Fellowship, Chicago Filmmakers Grant, and Art Matters Award. She is active in migrant solidarity and border abolition struggles and is a core member of NoShelter, an activist media project exploring migrant child detention in the U.S. and the efforts to dismantle it. She works in museums, universities, art centers, community spaces, squats, and in the streets.

Visit Rozalinda’s website here.

Shona Masarin, October - November 2025

Shona Masarin in the Pool Room Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Shona Masarin is a Pennsylvania-based Australian filmmaker and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores perception, abstraction, and the construction of visual worlds. Working primarily with large-format photography, moving images, and experimental analogue film processes, she creates abstracted landscapes and dimensional spaces where scale, materiality, and form remain ambiguous—inviting viewers to question what they see and how they experience it. Her work meditates on the relationship between natural and artificial environments, memory and physical presence, and the merging of inner and outer landscapes. Masarin’s films and installations have been presented at festivals and art spaces including the Melbourne International Film Festival and galleries in New York, with support from the Australia Council for the Arts, the Ian Potter Cultural Trust, and the Jerome Foundation.

Visit Shona’s website here.

Jackie Milad - October-November 2025

Jackie Milad in the Hallam Studio. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Jackie Milad (Baltimore City, 1975) is a U.S.- based artist whose mixed-media abstract paintings and collages address the history and complexities of dispersed cultural heritage and multi-ethnic identity. She has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions nationally and internationally. Select exhibitions include The Walters Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), The Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore, MD), Academy Art Museum (Easton, MD), Weatherspoon Art Museum (Charlotte, NC), The Mint Museum (Charlotte, NC), Arthur Ross Gallery University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, PA), and Harvey B. Gantt Center (Charlotte, NC).

In 2024 Jackie Milad became a Creative Capital Grantee and the inaugural Robert W. Deutsch Foundation's Alumni Rubys Artist Grantee. Milad is a multi-year recipient of the Individual Artist Grant from Maryland State Arts Council. In 2019 she was named a Janet & Walter Sondheim Prize Finalist and a Robert W. Deutsch Foundation Ruby Grantee. In 2022 Jackie received the Municipal Art Society of Baltimore City Travel Prize to conduct in-depth research on the Egyptian antiquities held at the British Museum and Petrie Museums in London. Her work is included in several public collections, including, The Baltimore Museum of Art, Academy Art Museum, Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Library, Robert W. Deutsch Foundation, and the Pizzuti Collection. Milad received her BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University, and her MFA from Towson University. She is currently represented by SOCO Gallery in Charlotte, NC. And Pentimenti Gallery in Philadelphia, PA.

Visit Jackie’s website here.

Christina Schmid - October-November 2025

Christina Schmid at the Surf Point library. Photo by Kerry Constantino.

Christina Schmid is a writer who thinks with art and experiments with prose. Her arts writing unfolds at the intersection of journalism, scholarship, and creative non-fiction. Through art, her work engages with the ways cultural narratives shape experiences and encounters, delves into ethics, the politics of immigration, feminism, queer ecology, practices of belonging, and wherever else art takes her. As a writer, she is interested in the materiality of text, haptic criticism, and the ways art can embody, archive, and generate ideas. Her essays and reviews have been published online and in print, in anthologies, journals, zines, artist books, and exhibition catalogs. She works at the University of Minnesota’s Department of Art in Minneapolis where she teaches contemporary art, critical practice and theory. She has been a finalist for the Rabkin Prize in Art Writing and the Andy Warhol Foundation's Award for Short Form Arts Writing. She is a recipient of a MN State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant for Creative Prose.

Lilian Garcia-Roig - September-October 2025

Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuban-born, Texas-raised Latinx artist living and working in Tallahassee, Florida where she is a distinguished Professor at FSU. She is most known for her perceptually based, large-scale, “all-day” cumulative paintings that formally interweave the illusionist possibilities painting with its abstract material nature. On a personal level, her on-site works have been about negotiating the complex propositions of sense of place & belonging which influence the construction of identity. In 2021, she was named a Guggenheim Fellow. Other significant awards include the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Blackwell Prize in Painting, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, M-AAA/NEA Fellowship, and Kimbrough Award (Dallas Museum of Art). Residencies include Skowhegan, Joan Mitchell Center, MacDowell, Art Omi, and Millay. Garcia-Roig has shown extensively across the U.S. including at the National Museum of Women in the Arts and in exhibitions such as “Relational Undercurrents”, the “Florida Prize”, and the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Visit Lilian’s website here.

Efrat Klipshtein - September-October 2025

Photographer: Lena Gomon

My artistic practice spans installations, performances, and two-dimensional works. The materials I work with are diverse and include: from everyday materials ; electrical cables, brooms, aluminum foil, plasticine, paper clips to botanical materials, wood sculptures and glass castings. My work ranges from the formal formulation of shapeless physical spaces to the transformation of everyday objects, into poetic realms. The transformation that the objects undergo in my works distances them from the original form but preserves their identity. much like the transformations that heroes of journeys undergo in literary epics who set out but never return home the same person they left. In recent years, my work has traced the elements of the road; the lines of the routes, the depressions and cracks in the road, these elements that we are blind to, or simply prefer to avoid or stay away from. These take on form and substance in my work and become measurements of the desire for a destination. My work expresses the attempt to stabilize and preserve the element of movement already contained in the stopping, in memory and failure; the persistent preoccupation with the elements of the road blurs the destination until it is absorbed. I believe that there is no destination, there is only the material - a road, and the road grows bigger as its crevices accumulate.

Hosted in partnership with Artis.

Visit Efrat’s website here.

Em Rea - September-October 2025

Em Rea (they/them) transforms discarded and found materials into improvisational sculptures, assemblages, drawings, paintings, and portals to future worlds. A disabled, queer, and trans artist living in Lenapehoking (presently known as Philadelphia) their work explores themes of collapse, repair, disposability, and care. They encourage contemplation of our relationship with our environment, the transient nature of the objects we use, and the objectification of any being on this sentient earth.

Carly Sheehan - September-October 2025

Carly Sheehan (b. 1992, Massachusetts) is a painter and educator based in Seattle. She holds an MFA in Painting from the Yale School of Art (2020) and a BFA in Art Education and Painting from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design (2014). Sheehan is a full-time lecturer in the Painting, Drawing, and Printmaking Department at the University of Washington. Her work has been exhibited in grassroots and artist-run spaces including Triangle Projects and North Loop West in Los Angeles. And most recently, a solo show at Specialist Gallery in Seattle. In 2024, she joined the artist team at Specialist, where she contributes to organizing exhibitions.

Visit Carly website here.