2023–2024 A.I.R. Fellowship Welcome Event
Thursday, September 28, from 6:30–8:00 PM
A.I.R. Gallery
Please join us on September 28 at 6:30pm for the 2023–2024 A.I.R. Fellowship Welcome Event. This year’s fellows are Mimi Bai, Roberta Dorsett, Allison Halter, Xinyi Liu, Funto Omojola, and Denisse Griselda Reyes.
The fellows will give short presentations about their work, followed by an hour-long reception. Light refreshments will be provided.
To learn more about this year’s fellows, click here.
This event is free.
Mimi Bai was born in Xi’an, China, and is based in Brooklyn, NY. Her practice encompasses sculpture, drawing, and film and her work draws connections between labor, assimilation, camouflage, and survival as both a lived reality and fantasy. Bai has presented work at Artists Space, the Boston Center for the Arts, BRIC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her films have screened at Rooftop Films, the Rockaway Film Festival, and the Maryland Film Festival. Bai was a SIP Fellow at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop as well as a NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow for Interdisciplinary Work and a recipient of two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants. She has been an artist in residence at organizations including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, the Saltonstall Foundation, and the Santa Fe Art Institute. Bai attended the Whitney Independent Study Program and is a graduate of Alfred University (MFA Sculpture) and Wesleyan University (BA Sociology).
Roberta Dorsett is an African-American photographer from the South Bronx. She earned her B.A. in Studio Art at The City College of New York with a concentration in photography. Roberta currently works as a Photography Laboratory Technician at City College. In her project Intimate Moments, she documents her family, countering the reductive representation of black people showcased in mass media. Dead Horse Bay Brooklyn investigates the abandoned bay and the environmental damage caused by industrialization from the 1850s. Frameless is a collaboration with photographer Clarissa B. Aponte that focuses on abstraction using film in non-traditional ways. Roberta’s recent work, Sleepwalking, is influenced by horror and slasher films, both of which combine an idyllic setting and possible danger. Roberta is a 2020 recipient of the En Foco Photography Fellowship. Recent group shows include En Foco Photography Fellowship Exhibition: Reflection, This Memory, NY, and Analog Film Photography Association Group Exhibition: Monochrome: Angst, Ambiance, Abstraction, FL.
Allison Halter (she/her) is a conceptual artist and witch based in New York. Working primarily in performance and video, Halter’s time-based practices create opportunities for viewers to radically shift their experience of temporality and deprioritize the productivity demands of late-stage capitalism. Halter’s projects have been exhibited nationally at Fruitlands Museum (MA), Echo Park Film Center (CA), Basilica Hudson (NY), Walker Art Center (MN), Knockdown Center (NY), Rapid Pulse International Performance Art Festival (IL), Artists’ Television Access (CA), Experimental Film Festival Portland (OR), and internationally at Galerie im Körnerpark (DE), Titanik Galleria, (FI), and MUU Performance Voyage (FI).
Xinyi Liu works with mulberry paper and washcloth, which resonate with the thin and silky quality of human skin. She creates works that metaphorically mimic the processes of treating wounds to heal. Through her “medical” manipulation, they become her “second skin.” Like a doctor, she does surgeries for her work. She received her BA and BFA from Cornell University and her MFA from Columbia University. The artist’s work has been exhibited at the Visual Arts Center, Nantucket, MA; Salón Acme, Mexico; Lenfest Center for the Arts, New York, NY; Half Gallery, New York, NY; ChaShaMa, New York, NY; CAFA Art Museum, Beijing; CAA Art Museum, Hangzhou; China Printmaking Museum, Shenzhen; EDA Art Space, Shenzhen; Olive Tjaden Gallery, Ithaca, NY; John Hartell Gallery, Ithaca, NY; Mann Library Gallery, Ithaca, NY; Palazzo Santacroce, Rome; Euroasian Art Gallery, Paris; Jugendkunstschule Pankow, Berlin.
Funto Omojola is a Nigerian-American poet, performer, and visual artist based in New York. They are a 2022-2023 Emerge-Surface-Be Fellow with the Poetry Project, a Cave Canem Fellow, and a 2023-2024 A.I.R Fellow. Funto holds an MFA from the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College and is the founding editor of ẹwà journal, an online literary journal that publishes work exclusively by immigrant writers. Their first book, components of a child’s destiny & there’s a party in the canopy & i make an oil painting of a bribe, is forthcoming from Nightboat Books in 2024.
Denisse Griselda Reyes (they/them, b. 1993) is an interdisciplinary artist and filmmaker. They collage nostalgic materials to reconstruct a personal mythology and historical assemblage of their Salvadoran history, employing humor and hyperbole as performative strategies to process the grief and absurdity that comes with recreating transhistorical subjects. The drama of these collected narratives unfolds in videos, films, poems, paintings, and performances as their alter-ego, Griselda. They received an MFA in Visual Arts (New Genres) from Columbia University and a BA in Art History from Wesleyan University. Their films have premiered in Berlin and New York, and they have been nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Grant (2022) and awarded the "Hot Film in the Making" Roy W. Dean Film Grant (2020). Their work has been exhibited at White Columns (2023), A.I.R. Gallery (2021), NoBudge Films (2022), The Wallach Art Gallery (2020), Lenfest Center for the Arts (2021), Artforum (2020), Velvetpark Media (2022), MODA Critical Review (2020) and internationally. They currently live and work in Brooklyn, NY.