2022–2023 A.I.R. Fellowship Welcome Event
Thursday, October 27, 2022, from 6:30–8:30 PM
A.I.R. Gallery
Please join us on October 27 at 6:30pm for the 2022–2023 A.I.R. Fellowship Welcome Event. This year’s fellows are Elvira Clayton, Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang, Keli Safia Maksud, Amy Ritter, Anoushé Shojae-Chaghorvand, and Asia Stewart.
The fellows will give short presentations about their work, followed by a roundtable discussion moderated by Elizabeth Wiet, A.I.R. Director of Exhibitions and Fellowship.
To learn more about this year’s fellows, click here.
Light refreshments will be provided.
This event is free.
Elvira Clayton is a Harlem, New York-based artist originally from Houston, Texas. Her art encompasses a variety of media including installation, performance, sculpture, and printmaking. Clayton’s work has been exhibited in galleries throughout the U.S. as well as non-traditional exhibition spaces. As a member of the performance group Black Women Artists, she has performed at the New Museum and the Brooklyn Museum in New York and at Project Row Houses in Houston, Texas. Clayton was a 2021 Studio Immersion Project Fellow with the Robert Blackburn Printing Workshop. She has been an artist-in-residence at The Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies, Red Wing, MN and at Blue Mountain Center, Blue Mountain, NY. Her work has been featured in Killens Review, Glasstire, Callaloo Journal, and Artsy.net. She is a Laundromat Project Create Change Fellow and Commissioned Artist alum, and a four-time recipient of the Manhattan Community Arts Fund Grant.
Zoila Andrea Coc-Chang is a Chinese-Guatemalan interdisciplinary artist and educator who was raised in Miami. Her work interrogates the complexities and intimacies between and within Asia and Americas. Her practice plays with materials as a means of connecting migration and people's relationships with home, food, and their everyday lives. Coc-Chang received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale School of Art and her BA in Studio Art and Education Studies from Brandeis University. Her work has been included in exhibitions at Lycoming College Art Gallery, Williamsport, PA; Gallery 263, Cambridge, MA; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA; Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA; and the Pao Arts Center in Chinatown, Boston, MA.
Keli Safia Maksud is an interdisciplinary artist and writer working in sound, sculpture, installation, text, printmaking, and embroidery. Concerned with histories of colonial encounters and its effects on memory, Maksud’s practice favors the space of in-between and its threshold and works towards destabilizing received histories in order to expose fictions of the state. Maksud earned her BFA in Painting from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, a Diploma in Art and Curatorial Studies at the New Centre for Research and Practice, and an MFA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. Her work has shown at Salon 94 in New York, NY, Huxley Parlour in UK, the Bamako Biennial in Mali, National Museum of Contemporary Art – Seoul in South Korea, Galería Nueva in Spain, and the Biennial of Contemporary Art Sesc_Videobrasil in Brazil. Maksud has been awarded fellowships and grants from the Canada Council for the Arts (2018 and 2017), the Toronto Arts Council (2015), the Ontario Council for the Arts (2012 and 2014) the New York Foundation for the Arts (2021), and the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts (2022). Her writing has been published in OCULA Magazine, the Swiss Institute, LEAP Magazine, and A Space Gallery.
Amy Ritter grew up in Eastern PA in the rural town of Orefield. Her work is an exploration of her relationship to her identity vis-à-vis mobile homes and their interior landscapes. It stages her memories of growing up in a mobile home community—a place she left but still feels connected to. Her ongoing work of archiving these homes and neighborhoods gives shape to immersive installations and site-specific public sculptures. Ritter has shown her work nationally and has had numerous art residencies and fellowships. Ritter received her MFA from The Ohio State University, a BFA from Tyler School of Art, and attended Skowhegan in 2016.
Anoushé Shojae-Chaghorvand (b. 1991) is a New Jersey based artist who works primarily in kinetic sculpture. She creates spatial cinema in the form of sculptures, installations, and performances that capture the complexity, violence, and absurdity inherent in contemporary culture. She is partially interested in amusement in American culture, and how it runs parallel to tragedy.
Asia Stewart is a Brooklyn-based performance artist whose conceptual work centers the body as a living archive. After receiving degrees in the social sciences from Cambridge and Harvard University, she has sought ways to transform the language specific to studies of race, gender, sexuality, and diaspora into materials that can be felt and worn on the body. As a National YoungArts Winner in Musical Theatre and a former National Arts Policy Roundtable Fellow with Americans for the Arts, Stewart uses her past experiences on stage to inject her work with a heightened sense of theatricality. In 2020, Stewart concluded her first independent performance series, Graft, which attempts to capture the violence that constructions of whiteness and femininity wrought on Black bodies. Works from that series have been showcased at venues such as the Mercury Store, Untitled Space, NARS Foundation, Goodyear Arts, A.I.R. Gallery, Kellen Gallery, and Anthology Film Archives. One piece was also recently acquired by the Mint Museum in Charlotte, NC. Stewart is currently developing a new performance titled Fabric Softener, which explores intergenerational trauma and Black inheritance. She will begin to offer live presentations of this work in 2022 and 2023 with the support of the Brooklyn Arts Fund.