And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23
The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Annual Artist-in-Residence Exhibition Opens at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens, on November 16, and features works by Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston.
NEW YORK, NY, September 28, 2023—In the fifth iteration of a multiyear collaboration between the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1, the Studio Museum will present its annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition at MoMA PS1. On view from November 16, 2023, to April 8, 2024, And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23 will feature new work by the 2022–23 cohort of the Studio Museum’s foundational residency program, artists Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti), Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD), and Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX)
And ever an edge explores the relationships between histories of displacement and Black methods of resistance. Working across sculpture, painting, installation, and performance, these artists use familiar and found materials to highlight that which is often overlooked. Considering the architectures of the built and natural environments, the artists examine the precarities of navigating space, and the restorative act of making and claiming space. The works in this exhibition thus challenge us to consider how we see, feel, and move through the world.
Jeffrey Meris reworks, fuses, and retools architectural materials and everyday objects to create works that explore how material can function as a mode of storytelling. The multimedia sculptures and two-dimensional works featured in the exhibition imply the presence of a body while asking the viewer to confront their relationship to the physical form. Through exploring the capacity of objects to serve as an index of care, Meris’s practice negotiates fractured yet tender relationships to the built world and the tools and practices we engage to tend to it and ourselves.
Devin N. Morris’s immersive installation evokes the parks, streets, and places of dwelling found in and around Harlem. The work collapses the distinction between public and private space as experienced through the urban landscape. By using discarded objects, Morris participates in the practice of collecting as a form of care, sustaining the life of an object by reinscribing it into imaginative new forms. In doing so, Morris asks us to consider the complex intimacies revealed by the detritus of our lives.
Charisse Pearlina Weston uses glass as a conceptual framework for exploring the precarity of Black life when confronted by sociopolitical tactics of surveillance and architectural containment. The folds, breaks, and bends that occur through the process of making this work, as well as inscriptions of barely visible texts and digitally abstracted photographs onto their surface, challenge the legibility of the translucent material. Through this practice, Weston explores withholding and Black interiority as acts of resistance.
In celebration of the opening of And ever an edge, a roundtable discussion with the artists in residence, Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston, will be held at MoMA PS1 on November 18, 2023, at 4:00 pm. Moderated by Yelena Keller, Assistant Curator, the roundtable features each artist speaking about the work they created over the course of the residency program. This program is free and open to the public as part of MoMA PS1’s Open House.
And ever an edge: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2022–23 is organized by Yelena Keller, Assistant Curator, the Studio Museum in Harlem; and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Exhibition research and support is provided by Sheldon Gooch, the Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA Joint Curatorial Fellow.
MoMA PS1 support for And ever an edge is generously provided by the Tom Slaughter Exhibition Fund and the MoMA PS1 Annual Exhibition Fund.
Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti; lives and works in New York) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with the relationship between materiality and larger cultural and social phenomena. The work is greatly informed by the artist's upbringing in the Bahamas. Across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing, Meris’s work considers ecology, embodiment, and various lived experiences, while healing deeply personal and historical wounds. Meris earned an AA in arts and crafts from the University of the Bahamas in 2012, a BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in 2015, and an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris has exhibited at the Newcomb Art Museum, New Orleans (2023); Amon Carter Museum, Texas (2023); the Aldrich Museum, Connecticut (2023); Lehman Maupin, New York (2022); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2021); White Columns, New York (2021); the Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany (2017); and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, the D'Aguilar Art Foundation, and Mestre Projects, all in Nassau, Bahamas (2012, 2017, 2021). Meris is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum (2019); a NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020); a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program artist in residence, Brooklyn (2021); and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Awardee (2023). Always Jeffrey never "Jeff."
Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD; lives and works in New York) aims to challenge the tropes of American domestic prosperity through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings consisting of found objects, photographs, writings, and videos. His works present innocent and kind recollections of memories within surreal landscapes and elaborate, draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on interactions between friends, romantic partners, and family. Morris’s process of making is driven by improvisation and responding to changing environments where space, kinship, social interrogation, and available materials are explored and reflected.
Recent exhibitions include solo presentations On Paper, Deli Gallery, New York (2021); and Play Too Much, Baby Company, New York (2019); group exhibitions, Minotaur's Daydream, Semiose, Paris (2023); Ways of Being, Collaborations, Copenhagen (2022); No Place, PPOW, New York (2020); The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021); and Potemkin/Body, Lubov, New York (2018). Morris was also included in Portrait of an Unlikely Space curated by Mickalene Thomas and Keely Orgeman, Yale Art Gallery, New Haven (2023) and Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage, Frist Museum, Nashville, (2023). He was featured in the New Museum’s MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas: Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project (2018), and the two-person show, Inside Out, Here, La Mama Gallery, New York (2018).
Morris is the founder of 3 Dot Zine, a publication and public forum for marginalized concerns. He hosted the Brown Paper Zine and Small Press Fair with the Studio Museum in Harlem in 2018 and created a site-specific installation at Printed Matter's 2018 NY Art Book Fair at MoMA PS1. His solo show at Terrault Contemporary was listed in Artforum as the “Best of 2017,” and Time named him as one of “12 African American Photographers You Should Follow” in 2017. Morris received the 2019 New York Artadia Award.
Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a conceptual artist and writer whose work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal curls, layerings, and collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. She deploys the fold, concealment, and repetition within her practice as tactics of conceptual abstraction, which posits Black interior life as a central site for Black resistance. She holds a BA in art history from the University of North Texas; a MSc in Modern Art: History, Curating and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art; and an MFA in studio art, with critical theory emphasis, from the University of California, Irvine. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (2019–20).
Weston has exhibited in group shows at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2020); Jack Shainman Gallery, New York (2022, 2023); and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022). She exhibited in solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center, New York (2020); Project Row Houses, Houston (2014, 2015); Recess, Brooklyn (2021); and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University, Houston (2021). Weston presented her first solo museum exhibition at the Queens Museum, New York, in October 2022. She has received awards and fellowships from Artadia Fund for the Arts (2015); the Dallas Museum of Art (2014); the Dedalus Foundation (MFA Fellowship, 2019); the Harpo Foundation (2021); the Graham Foundation (2021); and the Museum of Arts and Design (Artist Fellow, 2021). In 2021, she was awarded the Burke Prize by the Museum of Arts and Design. She was a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate School in Fall 2022. Weston is a 2022 Jerome Hill Fellow (Jerome Foundation) and is a 2023-24 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University.
About the Artist-in-Residence Program
The Studio Museum’s foundational Artist-in-Residence program gives emerging artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent an unparalleled opportunity to develop their practice in an eleven-month residency and offers audiences the chance to view this work in an annual culminating exhibition. Alumni of the program, who now number nearly 150, include some of today’s most significant and innovative artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jordan Casteel, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Titus Kaphar, Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas, and Kehinde Wiley.
The artists in residence for 2023–24 are sonia louise davis, Malcolm Peacock, and Zoë Pulley.
The Artist-in-Residence program is funded by the Glenstone Foundation. Additional support for the Artist-in-Residence program is provided by The American Express Kenneth and Kathryn Chenault Sponsorship Fund; National Endowment for the Arts; Joy of Giving Something; Robert Lehman Foundation; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Anonymous; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation; the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust; and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional funding is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and New York State Council on the Arts.
About the Studio Museum in Harlem
Founded in 1968 by a diverse group of artists, community activists, and philanthropists, the Studio Museum in Harlem is internationally known for its catalytic role in promoting the work of artists of African descent. The Studio Museum is now constructing a new home at its longtime location on Manhattan’s West 125th Street. The building—the first created expressly for the institution’s program—will enable the Studio Museum to better serve a growing and diverse audience, provide additional educational opportunities for people of all ages, expand its program of world-renowned exhibitions, effectively display its singular collection, and strengthen its trailblazing Artist-in-Residence program.
While closed for construction, the Museum’s groundbreaking exhibitions, thought-provoking conversations, and engaging art-making workshops continue at a variety of partner and satellite locations in Harlem and beyond. For more information, visit studiomuseum.org.
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About MoMA PS1
MoMA PS1 champions art and artists at the intersection of the social, cultural, and political issues of our time. Providing audiences with the agency to ask questions, access to knowledge, and a forum for public debate, PS1 has offered insight into artists’ diverse worldviews for more than 40 years. Founded in 1976 by Alanna Heiss, the institution was a defining force in the alternative space movement in New York City, transforming a nineteenth century public schoolhouse in Long Island City into a site for artistic experimentation and creativity. PS1 has been a member of New York City’s Cultural Institutions Group (CIG) since 1982 and affiliated with The Museum of Modern Art since 2000.
Hours: MoMA PS1 is open from 12 to 6 p.m. Thursday, Friday, Sunday, and Monday, and 12 to 8 p.m on Saturday. Closed on Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day.
Admission: $10 suggested admission; $5 for students and senior citizens; free for New York State residents and MoMA members. Free admission for New York State residents is made possible by The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation. Tickets may be reserved online at mo.ma/ps1tickets.
Visitor Guide: Discover even more from PS1 with the Bloomberg Connects app. Read wall text, hear directly from artists, and uncover the building’s history with this multimedia visitor guide. This digital experience is made possible through the support of Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Directions: MoMA PS1 is located at 22-25 Jackson Avenue at 46th Ave in Long Island City, Queens, across the Queensboro Bridge from midtown Manhattan. Traveling by subway, take the E, M, or 7 to Court Sq; or the G to Court Sq or 21 St Van Alst. By bus, take the Q67 to Jackson and 46th Ave or the B62 to 46th Ave.
Information: For general inquiries, call (718) 784-2084 or visit momaps1.org
Sasha Cordingley
The Studio Museum in Harlem
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332.867.0085
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