STONELEAF RETREAT

2023 Art Mamas x STONELEAF Residency Recipients

We are thrilled to announce the 2023 Art Mamas Alliance and STONELEAF RETREAT artists-in-residence, chosen from over 180 applicants, are Nakeya Brown, Koyoltzintli, Andria Lo and Katherine Mitchell DiRico. *Haimy Assefa has deferred her residency to 2024.

This summer Nakeya Brown, Andria Lo and Katherine Mitchell DiRico will participate in the Group Residency and Koyoltzintli in the Family Residency. Each artist will be given an unrestricted stipend and a week to focus on themselves and their practice. 

This annual program is a partnership between Art Mamas Alliance, a supportive community for parents in the arts, and STONELEAF RETREAT, an artist residency and creative space for women and families. It is made possible by residency application fees, Art Mamas membership dues, and generous individual donors.

The artists' stipends for the group residency have been provided through an innovative partnership with the Sustainable Arts Foundation, for which we are extremely grateful.

We understand that the need for these parent-focused residencies are vast and it’s our hope to increase the support over the years. If you are interested in supporting these efforts, please donate here or reach out directly to hello@stoneleafretreat.com.

NAKEYA BROWN was born in Santa Maria, California in 1988. She received her Bachelor of Art from Rutgers University and her Master of Fine Arts from The George Washington University. Her work has been featured nationally in solo exhibitions at the Catherine Eldman Gallery (Chicago, IL, 2017), the Urban Institute for Contemporary Art (Grand Rapids, MI, 2017), and the Hamiltonian Gallery (Washington, DC, 2017); and in recent group exhibitions at ICP (New York, NY, 2022) Silver Eye Center for Photography (Pittsburgh, PA 2021), and The Katonah Museum of Art (Katonah, NY, 2021), among several others. She has presented her work internationally at Foto Wein (Vienna, Austria, 2022), Museum der bildenden Künste (Leipzig, Germany, 2018), and greengrassi (London, 2023). Brown’s work has been featured in Insecure, Time, New York magazine, Dazed & Confused, The Fader, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Vice. Her work has been included in photography books Babe, Girl on Girl: Art & Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, and MFON: Women Photographers of the African Diaspora.

My work uses the camera as a tool to invent “Black feminine space” that is crafted out of remembered experiences and the collective culture of womanhood. I create images that seek to broaden the interpretation of objects, how they "speak" to an audience, evoke shared moments in history, and elicit new meaning for both artist and viewer. I capture the visual materiality of Black beauty culture, self-care, hair rituals, and women's work by staging objects, mementos, and ephemera. These objects signify the little and widely known historical and present practices of Black women. Out of this way of seeing I craft my own kind of visual language depicting objects from prosaic interior spaces touched by Black women across generations. I consider my photographs a frame for world-building and tool to expand the space of enclosure faced by self-identified Black women.

ANDRIA LO is a California-based photographer specializing in still life, food culture, and portraiture. Raised in Alaska and Texas, she has a degree in Studio Art from the University of California Berkeley and now calls San Francisco Bay Area home. In 2020, she published her first book "Chinatown Pretty" along with writer and co-founder of the project, Valerie Luu. The series documents the street style and stories of elders in historic Chinatowns across North America. She continues to explore Asian American culture and themes throughout both personal and client work. The Wing Luke Museum, Wheaton College, San Francisco State University, Glass Rice, 41 Ross, and the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco are some of the venues that have exhibited her work. Her photos have also been published in WIRED Magazine, New York Times, Food & Wine, and Bon Appétit Magazine.

KOYOLTZINTLI, is an interdisciplinary artist, and educator living in the USA. She grew up on the pacific coast and the Andean mountains in Ecuador. She focuses on sound, ancestral technologies, ritual, and storytelling through collaborative processes and personal narratives. Intersectional theories and earth-based healing inform her practice. Nominated for Prix Pictet in 2019, her work has been exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, the United Nations, Aperture Foundation in NYC, and Paris Photo, among others. She has been an artist in residence in the US, France, and Italy and has taught at CalArts, SVA, ICP, and CUNY. She has received multiple awards and fellowships including the Photographic Fellowship at the Musée du Quai Branly in Paris, the NYFA Fellowship, and the IA grant by the Queens Council of the Arts. Her first monograph Other Stories was published in 2017 by Autograph ABP, and her work was featured in the Native issue of Aperture Magazine (no. 240). In 2021, her work was included in the book Latinx Photography in the United States by Elizabeth Ferrer chief curator at BRIC. In 2022 she was an artist in residence at Socrates Sculpture Park and she has been awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship by US Latinx Art Forum (USLAF).

My art is rooted in the land that shaped me and the stories it continuously tells. I claim the body as a space for narratives that defy categorization, that grow in the peripheries. I seek the animistic territories stored in the underground layers of the skin while also building a social practice that centers on storytelling and story keeping. I see the body as a vessel for the most primal creative force, and I know the necessity to dream inter-species and co-create with the earth. I am interested in the performative maps that the body stores, specifically in connection to ancestral technologies, ecology, sound and resilience, which I explore through a variety of mediums such as photography, performance, ceramics and sound objects. When I contemplate on the earth, I travel to the past and future simultaneously, and this act of contemplation, ignites my spirit.

KATHERINE MITCHELL DIRICO creates multimedia installations that investigate how we negotiate connectivity and sense perception in today’s networked world.  Select solo exhibitions include Praise Shadows Gallery, the Abigail Ogilvy Gallery, Boston, MA; Porcelynne Gallery, San Francisco, CA; and commissions by Google and HUBweek. Select group exhibitions include the Edinburgh College of Art, Scotland; Stockwell Studio, London, England; Transmediale Festival, Berlin, Germany; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; and the September Gallery, Hudson, NY.  Mitchell DiRico is a 2023 recipient of the Stoneleaf Residency in Eddyville, NY.  She holds a BA from Smith College and the University of Dakar, Senegal, and an MFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Tufts University.

DiRico’s work defies category, as it moves between and through disciplines and ideologies to explore the very nature of how we construct reality. When does something stop being one thing, and become another? What is real?  What is speculative? It is within this negotiation that her practice becomes apparent.  Generating propositions that are inherently multiple and shifting, DiRico pulls at the tensions of attachment— attachment to material, virtual, ecological, and even emotional—worlds.

Videos that are seemingly still, loop endlessly with a subtle glint, while reflective materials shift in and out of focus as viewers move around and through the work. Privileging a lens that prioritizes the subjective nature of our personal experience, the work navigates through digital and material, philosophical and spiritual, micro and macro, to explore the slippery nature of time and space therein. As such, her multimedia installations draw from and move through myriad genres: site-responsive installation, video projection, deep-time philosophies, performance, gifs, drawing, live feeds, screens and surfaces as portals, books, choreographic notation, anthropological inquiries, light. Forming a relational vocabulary in which the edges remain blurry, the work exists in a state that is viscerally recognizable, at once simultaneous, yet out of synch.

HAIMY ASSEFA deferred her residency to 2024. Assefa is an Ethiopian-born, award winning, Emmy-nominated documentary filmmaker. As a director and cinematographer, her filmmaking approach centers on the human experience, aiming to tell stories that are evocative, cinematic, poetic and unique, while also universal. Haimy is drawn to nuanced and untold stories that are often left out of the broader narrative. Based in Brooklyn, she has been integral to digital storytelling units at NBC News and CNN. Haimy received a masters in international affairs at The News School and has a bachelors in sociology.

I am currently developing a lyrical film about Tizita. Tizita is an Amharic word loosely translated to nostalgia. It is also an Ethiopian musical genre, after which my son is named. The word and genre conjure up distant memories of love and heartbreak. My film will be an artful exploration of personal and national memory nestled in the warm musical modes of Tizita.  

Below is a translation of one of my favorite Tizita songs:

"Outdoing yesterday, shouldering on today,

Borrowing from tomorrow, renewing yesteryears,

Comes tizita (nostalgia) hauling possessions"

(Translation by Dagmawi Woubshet)

Inaugural Art Mamas Residencies at STONELEAF

In support of Art Mamas Members in desperate need of a break from the daily grind to focus on their practice, themselves, or a specific project, Art Mamas Alliance and STONELEAF RETREAT created two inaugural residencies this year.

This summer, a Family and a Group Residency, will be held at STONELEAF RETREAT’s 22-acre property in Upstate New York where Art Mamas Members will be provided with time, space, and a modest stipend. 

Lehna Huie is the recipient of the first Art Mamas Family Residency and Aisha Tandiwe Bell, Lucia Cuba, and Joetta Maue will participate in the inaugural Art Mamas Group Residency.

This annual program is a partnership between Art Mamas Alliance, a supportive community for parents in the arts, and STONELEAF RETREAT, an artist residency and creative space for women and families, which is made possible by residency application fees, Art Mamas membership dues, and generous donations. 

LEHNA HUIE  is a multi-disciplinary artist, educator, and cultural worker of Jamaican heritage who was born and raised in New York City and is currently based in Baltimore, MD. She is an alum of Mount Royal's Interdisciplinary Arts program at the Maryland Institute College of Art 21’, where she was also a student at the Hoffberger School of Painting. Lehna was recently named an Artist Changemaker with the Global Fund for Women and was a participant of the Chautauqua School of Art Residency 21’. Lehna has had solo exhibitions at Meredith College - Gaddy Hamrick Art Center, The Newhouse Center for Contemporary Art, Clover’s Gallery and Flux Factory. She has participated in group shows at the Eubie Blake Jazz and Cultural Center, Colored Girls Museum, Puffin Foundation,  Raw Space, and beyond. Lehna has received multiple arts residencies and awards including the Space for Creative Black Imagination Makers and Research Fellowship, the Joan Mitchell Center, Snug Harbor Cultural Center, Groundswell Community Mural Project and Flux Factory. Her practice includes her work as a Legacy Specialist, preserving intergenerational artists archives and oral histories. She received her training through the Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating a Living Legacy Program. 

“My work is rooted in recovering evidence of my family’s ancestral legacies to better understand their lives and relationships to themselves and one another - through creating atmospheric portraits that document my lineage. Comprising fabric, projections, experimental printmaking, textile scraps and everyday objects, my mixed media compositions integrate cultural symbols, treasured stories, and family photographs - piecing together iterations of my evolving story keeping ritual. I honor my heritage through interdisciplinary research methods and expressions. My installation environments serve as both living shrines and alternative historical documents of the memory recovered in untold stories. I honor my relatives and ancestral guides through the possibilities of space and dimension. My works weave together multiple visual and experiential art forms as cultural vignettes rooted in an archival practice.” — Lehna Huie www.lehnahuie.com / @lehnahuie

AISHA TANDIWE BELL is inspired by the fragmentation of our multiple identities. Bell’s practice is committed to creating myth & ritual through sculpture, performance, video, sound, drawing & installation. Bell holds a BFA, & an MS from Pratt & a MFA from Hunter College. Has had artist residencies/fellowships at Skowhegan, Rush Corridor Gallery, Abron’s Art Center, LMCC’s Swing Space and Workspace, The Laundromat Project, BRIC , Wassaic Projects, Interlude & more. She has been a fellow with DVCAI on several International Cultural Exchanges (Jamaica 2012, Surinam 2013, Antigua 2014, Guadeloupe 2015 & 17). The Museo De Arte Moderno’s Triennial 2014, The Jamaica Biennial 2014 & 17, The BRIC Biennial 2016, The Venice Biennial 2017, MoCADA, The Rosa Parks Museum, CCCADI, Space One Eleven, Welancora Gallery & Rush Arts are a few spaces where Bell has exhibited her work. Currently a 2022 Dieu Donne Workspace artist in residence, she lives in Brooklyn with her husband & two children. 

“I am interested in the ways in which marginalized folks negotiate hostile environments, the mask we wear to get a (head). The shape-shifting, code-switching, exhausting, multiple consciousnesses, and chameleon-like face we (the peripheral intersectional folk) put forward to negotiate these spaces. My work explores multiple layers of this existence and the resulting cracked fragmentation of semi-fluid identity. I make figures out of clay, characters that push through the 2dimensional space into the 3rd dimension, a metaphor for awareness. I work with clay because it is malleable. I like the narrative of its transformation. “I am dirt. Mixed with water I am mud. Thirsty I am fragile. Burn me I am stone... break me I am fragment.” My most recent works are clay and paint on wood. They bring in elements from my scars series but also allow me to collage several narratives and mediums into one work.” — Aisha Bell https://superhueman.com / @superblakwoman

LUCIA CUBA is a Peruvian designer, textile artist, and scholar. Her work explores wearable forms as performative and political devices at the intersection of social justice and art, addressing public health, expanded fashion practices, and the study of non-western fashion systems. Cuba holds an MFA in Fashion Design and Society from The New School (NY) and a BSc in Social Psychology from Cayetano Heredia University (Lima). Her works have been exhibited at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, NY Museum of Arts and Design, Museo Amparo, Albuquerque Museum, BRIC, Fashion Space Gallery, Sur Gallery, among other local and international venues. Cuba received the United States Artists Fellowship in Design (2019), the Han Nefkens Award in Fashion (2014), and the Fulbright Scholarship (2010-12). She has been an Artist in Residence at the Textile Arts Center (2013), BRIC (2017), the Museum of Arts and Design (2017), and a Fellow of the Rockefeller Foundation's Bellagio Center Residency (2022). She currently works as a Full-Time Assistant Professor of Fashion Design at Parsons, and as an independent artist. 

“My practice is motivated by two main ideas. The first is that cloth and clothes are universal media, serving as recognizable devices that transcend written and oral language. As such, they provide an opportunity to be used as mediums to communicate, inform or denounce. When cloth and clothes are understood beyond the conventional grammar of fashion and they are instead conceived as cultural devices that can disrupt social spaces, other horizons for action start emerging, building counter-logics of design as a critical and transformative practice. The second idea is that health is a human dimension that has veered away from people and civic debate. I reflect on the politics of health and wellbeing at the global level, underlining the importance of agency, engagement, and collective meaning-making when reclaiming health as a human right. Combining art, design, and health is not simply an opportunity to raise awareness but also a chance to educate and impact human experiences through a global, universal, yet unexpected media: the kind we have to use every day and that can be shared between people, families, and communities.” — Lucia Cuba http://luciacuba.com / @luciacuba

JOETTA MAUE’s work has been exhibited with galleries and museums nationally & internationally. Including, but not limited to; the Arts Complex Museum, San Francisco Museum of Craft + Design, San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, MK Gallery & Institution in Britain, Duxbury Museum of Art, The Peabody Historical Society and Museum and the Masur Museum of Art. Maue’s work has shown in cities including; New York, L.A, San Francisco, New Orleans, Washington D.C., Boston, London, Edinburgh and Tokyo and with institutions; Harvard University, Arizona University, University of Rochester and Tufts University. Maue is a lecturer and an invited instructor at numerous esteemed institutions including New York University Gallatin School of Individualized Study, The Japan Society Museum in NYC, Fuller Craft Museum, Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts, MASS Art, UMASS, Lesley University, Northeastern University and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Her work and critical writing have been featured in numerous books. Joetta lives in New England with her family.

Art Mamas Alliance is a supportive community for parents in the arts, founded by Katy Donoghue and Helen Toomer in 2019. We didn’t realize how isolating being a parent could be. When we had our children, we looked around and wondered, where are our people? We didn’t hear discussions of motherhood among our creative and professional peers. So we decided to change that. Art Mamas Membership is always open and open to all! More information can be found here.