A Close Look At: A sustained becoming: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2026

Derriann Pharr’s Squinching my eyes shut and wishing real hard (Honey’s Dream) by Maria Wilson, Robert Rauschenburg Curatorial Fellow

Squinching my eyes shut and wishing real hard (Honey’s Dream)(2026) is a swirling double portrait of two female figures caught in a gust of motion and color. Mythological and otherworldly, the forms dissolve into Pharr’s typical landscape of fluid, organic contours that belie clear boundaries between the women and their environments. Although seemingly pulling apart, the figures that flank each side of the composition are drawn together by a translucent portal-like spiral of red, yellow, and purple at the center of the composition. The “windblown” quality creates a sense of sweeping motion and a feeling of push and pull, which are meant to represent Pharr’s relationship to nature, her family and lineage, and spirit and body. The fluidity and dissolution of a clear human form is essential to Pharr’s figurative practice, her understanding of the body as “a mythology,” and her embrace of the past and future.

Through her portraiture, Pharr emphatically rejects the harmful, rigid lessons society teaches women about their bodies, lessons she remembers internalizing as a child. The overlapping compositions, swirls, rich colors, and hyperfusions of human and nature gesture toward a greater bodily freedom and liberation and emphasize Pharr’s construction of identity as a site of constant complexity and reinvention. Pharr resists naturalistic representation to present the body as a “shell” of safety or a personification of armor, using painting to imagine the multifaceted ways identity can exist outside of the visual and historical constraints of society.

Pharr’s understanding of the body’s relationship to nature and the landscape only deepens this fluidity. Growing up in Alabama, Pharr spent much of her childhood playing outdoors with cousins and siblings, fascinated by the natural world and its creatures. Pharr thus sees nature, like the body, as a vessel for memory, liberation, and possibility, where histories accumulate, resurface, and intersect. In Squinching my eyes shut and wishing real hard (Honey’s Dream), the body and landscape dissolve as the figure and nature merge into the same protective space, creating a “reliquary” for one’s internal and external worlds and one’s past and present.

Squinching my eyes shut and wishing real hard (Honey’s Dream) also marks a material turn, with Pharr affixing patterned fabrics directly onto the perimeter of the canvas. Challenging the frequent dismissal of bright color, pattern, and textile work as “low brow,” Pharr embraces the craft forms that surrounded her upbringing. This gives new weight to the key aspects of healing and care that she says have been integral to her development as an artist. As Pharr says, regarding the textiles, she wanted the work to read as “a personal space I’ve tended to, a space I created and left myself at.”

Simonette Quamina’s Once in a blue moon by Cam McEwen, former MoMA and Studio Museum Curatorial Fellow

To create Once in a blue moon (2026), Simonette Quamina submerged multiple sheets of BFK Rives printmaking paper into an indigo ink solution, hand-dyeing the pages. She then cut and adhered those sheets together to make the surface for her composition.
Quamina worked exclusively in hues of black, white, and gray for several years. During her Studio Museum residency, she explored color in her practice, inspired by Japanese shibori indigo dyeing processes and Japanese sashiko stitching techniques. The techniques were developed by workers in Japan’s Edo period (1603–1868) who dyed and stitched patterns onto used textiles. Quamina was drawn to this process in which old scraps of cloth become made anew; nothing goes to waste.

The artist’s dyeing process became a starting point for Once in a blue moon. She then sketched the outlines of her composition in graphite, as she typically does for her works made on white paper. Quamina noticed that the graphite reacted differently to the dyed paper, so she smoothed the paper’s surface with sandpaper and then sketched her composition with pastels instead of graphite.

On the viewer’s left, the artist renders a young girl holding a broom, with only her legs and torso visible within the scene. To the girl’s right, two potted Chinese money plants rest on boards of wooden flooring. To her left, an empty pot and a large barrel. A chain-link fence hems in the area where the scene takes place. The scene’s location, although ambiguous, resembles an outdoor space adjacent to a home, like a porch or garden. At the bottom of the composition, a body of water, perhaps a pond or fountain, reflects the figure, plants, and fencing upon its surface.

Quamina’s depiction of this scene plays with spatial and narrative ambiguity, a frequent occurrence in the artist’s work. Her compositions are often inspired by her dreams, mixed with family stories and childhood memories of time spent across Canada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Guyana, and the United States. Once in a blue moon comes from Quamina’s “Kingfisher’s Dream” series, which depicts surreal, dreamlike scenes as seen through the eyes of animals, like birds or cats. Quamina also includes a subtle reference to her grandmother: a trail of prayer beads that winds across the picture plane, adding to the otherworldly environment of the work.

The chain-link fence, although it may appear sketched, was made by cutting and pasting paper covered with pastel drawing on top of the page. For the money plants’ leaves, Quamina hand-printed textural markings onto dyed indigo paper using a woodcut technique. She then cut out the shapes of the leaves and collaged them on top of the work’s surface. Upon close looking, each section of Once in a blue moon reveals unexpected details in technique and imagery.

Subtle variations of texture and shades of blue, black, and gray come together in the work, layered through drawing, printing, and collage. Viewing Once in a blue moon requires attention and slowing down, inviting audiences to consider artistic process and its connection to narrative.

Taylor Simmons’s Two Brothers by Pelumi Sokunbi, Public Programs Fellow

When you step into the studio of artist Taylor Simmons, you find yourself surrounded by photo references pulled from video stills, found images, and photographs taken by Simmons often depicting life in Black spaces, both exterior and interior. To the left of his studio doors hangs a work in progress of two men standing back-to-back, titled Two Brothers (2026). The reference image for this painting is pulled from an Instagram page that documents the inner worlds and interior spaces of gang-affiliated individuals. The page comprises images of Black male gang members across the United States that were created during the early age of digital media, or digitized from photo-graphic prints. The gang members often made these images with the intention of presenting themselves as intimidating and formidable.

In the uncropped source image Simmons pulls from, a group of men, who are part of the same gang affiliation, stand side by side. The reference image that hangs on the wall of Simmons’s studio is cropped and hones in on two men. Here, Simmons is interested in their pose. Although the two men he focuses on aren’t facing each other, both of their left hands suggest a sort of signaling toward one another to say, “I am with you” or “he is with me.” In this gesture, combined with standing back-to-back, the two men project notions of care, support, and cherishment. Simmons uses the canvas as a site of translation to present these men in a humanizing way that rejects standard narratives. The work instead focuses on the relationships present.

In the painting, Simmons replaces the gang sign, used to show pride, held up by one of the men in the reference image, with a hand signal often enacted by Jesus Christ in biblical art. In icono-graphic paintings, such as Salvator Mundi (c. 1499–1510) by Leonardo da Vinci, Jesus can be seen holding up his right hand in a manner dubbed “the gesture of benediction,” which spells out the abbreviation for Jesus Christ in Greek (IC XC). The three raised fingers are said to symbolize the Holy Trinity, and the thumb and ring finger represent the duality of Jesus and his relationship with both earthly and heavenly worlds.

Through this reference, Simmons nods to the ways Jesus was seen as a “criminal” by the Roman government, while later being venerated. Simmons extends multiplicity to the men in his painting through this adaptation of their gestures, ostensibly canonizing these men whose livelihoods are often overlooked or minimized to a singular representation. By using the canvas to illustrate a variety of image references, Simmons is constantly merging spaces and moments in time, from referencing found images of Black subjects in different cities, to historical references and textures, to colors that reflect the energy of urban environments. In doing so, Simmons uses the canvas as a site of possibilities, allowing his figures to meet each other through the interior and exterior of their lives and the spaces they inhabit and beyond, even reaching spiritual realms.