2024 Emerging artist grant recipients
Addison Bale
Addison Bale is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work is embedded in the language of the city - both its physical structures and the written and spoken words that shape daily life. Working at the intersection of linguistics and visual arts, Bale explores how language functions as both a conceptual element and a material used in their practice.
“By codifying text-like gestures into how I paint, or through collage, where poetry and other written media are inlaid to the surface image, my practice has become about tracing abstract narratives through fragments of the self and how it’s shaped by the social and aesthetic locality,”
New York’s constantly moving urban landscape plays a key role in Bale’s work, where the physical and social environment of the city lay the blueprint as sources of inspiration.
This interdisciplinary approach connects Bale’s work to a lineage of New York artists, David Wojnarowicz, Jenny Holzer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Martin Wong, who blurred the boundaries between documentation and intervention.
Bale’s Website
Carlos Franco
Carlos Franco is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of our perception of material, digital environments, and modern socio-political narratives. His work engages in a process of creolization blurring the boundaries between media and reality to investigate how meaning is infused into materials.
“When does a word become a chemical process in our brain?”
This question, which preoccupied Carlos in his youth, serves as the groundwork of their practice. Through immersive installations, experimental video, and interactive media, they examine how we consume, interpret, and manipulate information in both physical and digital landscapes.
Franco's Website
Chukwumaa
Chukwumaa is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, performance, and sound to explore the intersections of E-waste, Igbo divination, and post/colonial technologies of transatlantic crossings. Their work interrogates the migratory patterns of both objects and people, tracing the complex realities of Black diasporic belonging and dispossession.
As a second-generation Nigerian-American, Chukwumaa engages with the alienation and distance they feel from their family still living in Nigeria, considering how these dynamics are shaped by social, cultural, and economic oppression. Their work often takes place in interstitial spaces, where sound technologies such as public address systems, telephony, and digital transmissions extend voices across geographies, implicating publics that overlap and clash due to colonization and gentrification.
A crucial component of Chukwumaa’s practice is the material afterlife of technology. In their sculptural investigations, post-consumer electronics and E-waste are imbued with histories of migration and displacement. Much like Black bodies that have traversed transatlantic routes - whether through forced displacement or contemporary migration - these discarded objects retrace those paths, forming a haunting parallel between human and technological circulation.
During a return to Nigeria after thirteen years away, Chukwumaa observed firsthand the ways in which technological culture in urban and rural Nigeria reshaped their understanding of digital afterlives. Nigerian cellphone culture, for example, becomes a site of both survival and innovation, revealing alternative narratives of technological use beyond Western paradigms.
“Sounds are less composed than they are shaved, screwed together, leaned against the wall, smothered, ironed flat, processed, jammed, and washed out by other signals. No sound exists without friction.”
On technological migration and Black diaspora, Chukwumaa says “Before, during, and after their use, these products travel similar routes as Black bodies—whether migrating to survive the results of colonization and gentrification or forced across the Atlantic as literal products.”
Chukwumaa's Instagram
Coral Saucedo
Coral Saucedo is a sculptor whose work transforms overlooked objects and everyday materials into poetic compositions. Growing up in Mexico City, they were shaped by an environment where improvisation and imagination arise from necessity, a mindset that carries through their practice today. By collecting, constructing, recreating, and recontextualizing, Coral’s work recontextualizes familiar materials, revealing the ways in which labor, infrastructure, and everyday interactions shape our world.
“Concrete, steel, dust, lights, noise, plastics, pigeons, poop, spit, textures, signals, trash—this section of public space became an endless pit of poetic compositions.”
Coral’s sculptures integrate abstraction, personal and poetic symbols. Found objects sourced from urban landscapes or domestic spaces - raw materials - become structural elements in works that challenge the functionality of objects and question systems in collapse. Whether studying the layered textures of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Under the BQE, 2022) or transforming an archive of hinge imagery into a sculptural meditation on passage and containment (Goce entre el gozne, 2024), Coral’s work finds meaning in the overlooked and resonance in the discarded.
Saucedo's Website
Ian Ha
Ian Ha creates paintings and prints that push the boundaries of traditional formats, transforming surfaces into multidimensional spatial illusions. In an era saturated with digital imagery and virtual spaces, their work asks: How can analog forms speak to a digitally-burned-out world? Using nested shapes, cut-out book covers, and repurposed objects, Ian crafts paintings that extend beyond the canvas, blurring the lines between painting, installation, and object.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
Time and memory are central themes in Ian’s work. Their process mirrors the way memories accumulate, erode, and resurface - much like the way paint is layered, masked, torn away, and reassembled over years.
From aimless walks through the city to careful documentation of overlooked objects, Ian’s creative practice is based in observation. Found textures, fleeting moments, and discarded materials shape their compositions, forming a dialogue between the past and present.
Ha's Website
Janine Iverson
Janine Iversen creates paintings that are both puzzles and performances - fractured narratives in which humor, poetic contradiction, and optical illusionary meet and mix. Janine’s work plays with language, signs, and symbols, questioning how meaning is constructed and how images exert influence.
“I repeated the clock shape so much that its codes fell apart and reformed according to chance, whim, or mood. The clock-face morphed into a portal, an eye, and eventually a pattern of eyes, which challenged my gaze to rest and expand.”
A fascination with time runs through Janine’s paintings, particularly through the recurring motif of the clock. First appearing in drawings made during pregnancy, the faceless clocks evolved into portals, eyes, and rhythmic patterns - challenging perception and defying linear temporality. Their paintings fold past and present into a space where signs disassemble and reconfigure, where symbols act but do not instruct, and where meaning exists in a state of flux.
Iverson's Instagram
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers’ work grapples with the impossibility of healing as a linear process, questioning the language, structures, and frameworks that attempt to impose order on grief, trauma, and care. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, instructional formats, and personal experience, their practice navigates the contradictions of self-help - both as an earnest attempt at coping and as an inadequate substitute for collective care.
Kaela’s ongoing project Eastern Aphasia Caress (EAC) reimagines aphasia assessment materials as an elegy for their mother’s cognitive decline due to late-stage brain cancer. Inspired by clinical language yet deeply personal, EAC transforms diagnostic tools into sites of memory, longing, and touch—asking what it means to hold onto language as it slips away.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
In parallel, Workbook for the Year of the Metal Rat interrogates the flawed premise that if we “do the work,” healing will follow. Through imagined therapeutic worksheets, projections, and paintings, Kaela constructs and dismantles the idea of structured recovery, exposing the tension between desire for mastery and the reality of perpetual unraveling.
Chamber's Website
Leeza Meksin
Meksin's Website
Marta Lee
Marta Lee’s still life paintings navigate the space between figuration and abstraction, layering crayon and paint to render the textiles, figurines, boxes, record sleeves, and everyday ephemera they collect. Each object becomes an anchor for memory, transforming personal and cultural histories into vibrant compositions that speak to race, sexuality, and identity.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
Raised by a Chinese father and an American mother, Marta has long been immersed in the complexities of cultural negotiation. Growing up in Washington before moving to East Tennessee, their experience of queerness in a conservative environment sharpened their awareness of ambiguity - an awareness that permeates their work. Objects are never just objects; a ferry seat cushion holds the weight of memories, a foil paint jar lid becomes a portal to something else. Marta’s compositions balance deep personal significance with an openness that invites connection and conversation.
“A pride flag can be stitched from fabric, but also from memory—objects arranged, colors balanced, a quiet assertion of self.”
Lee's Website
Sam Linguist
Sam Linguist's work exists at the threshold of painting and sculpture, creating ceramic paintings suspended within space by steel structures that recall industrial environments - oil drilling machinery, moon towers - images ingrained in Sam’s mind from growing up in rural Texas. These pieces challenge the stability of traditional painting, balancing between durability and fragility - fired to withstand the elements yet vulnerable to shattering if disturbed.
The ceramic surfaces, scuffed and layered with marks, accumulate memory like city sidewalks, evoking both permanence and impermanence. The steel frameworks - rootless and shifting in perspective - mirror the precariousness of the paintings they hold, transforming utilitarian forms into theatrical infrastructures.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
More than images, these works are acts of accumulation. Sticks gathered from Prospect Park become fractured, reassembled, and painted into skeletal patterns reminiscent of Join or Die. Marks appear as the collected residue of experience—graffiti on a boxcar, stray hairs on a studio floor, a faded parking lot stripe. By refusing fixed narratives, Sam interrogates the function of objects and images, questioning what is held onto, what erodes, and what survives.
Linguist's Website
Addison Bale
Addison Bale is a painter and interdisciplinary artist whose work is embedded in the language of the city - both its physical structures and the written and spoken words that shape daily life. Working at the intersection of linguistics and visual arts, Bale explores how language functions as both a conceptual element and a material used in their practice.
“By codifying text-like gestures into how I paint, or through collage, where poetry and other written media are inlaid to the surface image, my practice has become about tracing abstract narratives through fragments of the self and how it’s shaped by the social and aesthetic locality,”
New York’s constantly moving urban landscape plays a key role in Bale’s work, where the physical and social environment of the city lay the blueprint as sources of inspiration.
This interdisciplinary approach connects Bale’s work to a lineage of New York artists, David Wojnarowicz, Jenny Holzer, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Martin Wong, who blurred the boundaries between documentation and intervention.
Bale’s Website
Carlos Franco
Carlos Franco is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the intersection of our perception of material, digital environments, and modern socio-political narratives. His work engages in a process of creolization blurring the boundaries between media and reality to investigate how meaning is infused into materials.
“When does a word become a chemical process in our brain?”
This question, which preoccupied Carlos in his youth, serves as the groundwork of their practice. Through immersive installations, experimental video, and interactive media, they examine how we consume, interpret, and manipulate information in both physical and digital landscapes.
Franco's Website
Chukwumaa
Chukwumaa is a multidisciplinary artist working with sculpture, performance, and sound to explore the intersections of E-waste, Igbo divination, and post/colonial technologies of transatlantic crossings. Their work interrogates the migratory patterns of both objects and people, tracing the complex realities of Black diasporic belonging and dispossession.
As a second-generation Nigerian-American, Chukwumaa engages with the alienation and distance they feel from their family still living in Nigeria, considering how these dynamics are shaped by social, cultural, and economic oppression. Their work often takes place in interstitial spaces, where sound technologies such as public address systems, telephony, and digital transmissions extend voices across geographies, implicating publics that overlap and clash due to colonization and gentrification.
A crucial component of Chukwumaa’s practice is the material afterlife of technology. In their sculptural investigations, post-consumer electronics and E-waste are imbued with histories of migration and displacement. Much like Black bodies that have traversed transatlantic routes - whether through forced displacement or contemporary migration - these discarded objects retrace those paths, forming a haunting parallel between human and technological circulation.
During a return to Nigeria after thirteen years away, Chukwumaa observed firsthand the ways in which technological culture in urban and rural Nigeria reshaped their understanding of digital afterlives. Nigerian cellphone culture, for example, becomes a site of both survival and innovation, revealing alternative narratives of technological use beyond Western paradigms.
“Sounds are less composed than they are shaved, screwed together, leaned against the wall, smothered, ironed flat, processed, jammed, and washed out by other signals. No sound exists without friction.”
On technological migration and Black diaspora, Chukwumaa says “Before, during, and after their use, these products travel similar routes as Black bodies—whether migrating to survive the results of colonization and gentrification or forced across the Atlantic as literal products.”
Chukwumaa's Instagram
Coral Saucedo
Coral Saucedo is a sculptor whose work transforms overlooked objects and everyday materials into poetic compositions. Growing up in Mexico City, they were shaped by an environment where improvisation and imagination arise from necessity, a mindset that carries through their practice today. By collecting, constructing, recreating, and recontextualizing, Coral’s work recontextualizes familiar materials, revealing the ways in which labor, infrastructure, and everyday interactions shape our world.
“Concrete, steel, dust, lights, noise, plastics, pigeons, poop, spit, textures, signals, trash—this section of public space became an endless pit of poetic compositions.”
Coral’s sculptures integrate abstraction, personal and poetic symbols. Found objects sourced from urban landscapes or domestic spaces - raw materials - become structural elements in works that challenge the functionality of objects and question systems in collapse. Whether studying the layered textures of the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway (Under the BQE, 2022) or transforming an archive of hinge imagery into a sculptural meditation on passage and containment (Goce entre el gozne, 2024), Coral’s work finds meaning in the overlooked and resonance in the discarded.
Saucedo's Website
Ian Ha
Ian Ha creates paintings and prints that push the boundaries of traditional formats, transforming surfaces into multidimensional spatial illusions. In an era saturated with digital imagery and virtual spaces, their work asks: How can analog forms speak to a digitally-burned-out world? Using nested shapes, cut-out book covers, and repurposed objects, Ian crafts paintings that extend beyond the canvas, blurring the lines between painting, installation, and object.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
Time and memory are central themes in Ian’s work. Their process mirrors the way memories accumulate, erode, and resurface - much like the way paint is layered, masked, torn away, and reassembled over years.
From aimless walks through the city to careful documentation of overlooked objects, Ian’s creative practice is based in observation. Found textures, fleeting moments, and discarded materials shape their compositions, forming a dialogue between the past and present.
Ha's Website
Janine Iverson
Janine Iversen creates paintings that are both puzzles and performances - fractured narratives in which humor, poetic contradiction, and optical illusionary meet and mix. Janine’s work plays with language, signs, and symbols, questioning how meaning is constructed and how images exert influence.
“I repeated the clock shape so much that its codes fell apart and reformed according to chance, whim, or mood. The clock-face morphed into a portal, an eye, and eventually a pattern of eyes, which challenged my gaze to rest and expand.”
A fascination with time runs through Janine’s paintings, particularly through the recurring motif of the clock. First appearing in drawings made during pregnancy, the faceless clocks evolved into portals, eyes, and rhythmic patterns - challenging perception and defying linear temporality. Their paintings fold past and present into a space where signs disassemble and reconfigure, where symbols act but do not instruct, and where meaning exists in a state of flux.
Iverson's Instagram
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers
Kaela Mei-Chee Chambers’ work grapples with the impossibility of healing as a linear process, questioning the language, structures, and frameworks that attempt to impose order on grief, trauma, and care. Drawing from psychoanalytic theory, instructional formats, and personal experience, their practice navigates the contradictions of self-help - both as an earnest attempt at coping and as an inadequate substitute for collective care.
Kaela’s ongoing project Eastern Aphasia Caress (EAC) reimagines aphasia assessment materials as an elegy for their mother’s cognitive decline due to late-stage brain cancer. Inspired by clinical language yet deeply personal, EAC transforms diagnostic tools into sites of memory, longing, and touch—asking what it means to hold onto language as it slips away.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
In parallel, Workbook for the Year of the Metal Rat interrogates the flawed premise that if we “do the work,” healing will follow. Through imagined therapeutic worksheets, projections, and paintings, Kaela constructs and dismantles the idea of structured recovery, exposing the tension between desire for mastery and the reality of perpetual unraveling.
Chamber's Website
Leeza Meksin
Meksin's Website
Marta Lee
Marta Lee’s still life paintings navigate the space between figuration and abstraction, layering crayon and paint to render the textiles, figurines, boxes, record sleeves, and everyday ephemera they collect. Each object becomes an anchor for memory, transforming personal and cultural histories into vibrant compositions that speak to race, sexuality, and identity.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
Raised by a Chinese father and an American mother, Marta has long been immersed in the complexities of cultural negotiation. Growing up in Washington before moving to East Tennessee, their experience of queerness in a conservative environment sharpened their awareness of ambiguity - an awareness that permeates their work. Objects are never just objects; a ferry seat cushion holds the weight of memories, a foil paint jar lid becomes a portal to something else. Marta’s compositions balance deep personal significance with an openness that invites connection and conversation.
“A pride flag can be stitched from fabric, but also from memory—objects arranged, colors balanced, a quiet assertion of self.”
Lee's Website
Sam Linguist
Sam Linguist's work exists at the threshold of painting and sculpture, creating ceramic paintings suspended within space by steel structures that recall industrial environments - oil drilling machinery, moon towers - images ingrained in Sam’s mind from growing up in rural Texas. These pieces challenge the stability of traditional painting, balancing between durability and fragility - fired to withstand the elements yet vulnerable to shattering if disturbed.
The ceramic surfaces, scuffed and layered with marks, accumulate memory like city sidewalks, evoking both permanence and impermanence. The steel frameworks - rootless and shifting in perspective - mirror the precariousness of the paintings they hold, transforming utilitarian forms into theatrical infrastructures.
“I envision the painting surface not merely as a two-dimensional plane but as a dynamic object capable of transcending traditional hanging formats.”
More than images, these works are acts of accumulation. Sticks gathered from Prospect Park become fractured, reassembled, and painted into skeletal patterns reminiscent of Join or Die. Marks appear as the collected residue of experience—graffiti on a boxcar, stray hairs on a studio floor, a faded parking lot stripe. By refusing fixed narratives, Sam interrogates the function of objects and images, questioning what is held onto, what erodes, and what survives.
Linguist's Website