It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22

NEW YORK, November 4, 2022—The Studio Museum in Harlem’s annual Artist-in-Residence exhibition will be on view at MoMA PS1 from November 17, 2022, to February 27, 2023. Part of an ongoing collaboration between the Studio Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1, It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22 will feature new work by the 2021–22 cohort of the Studio Museum’s foundational residency program, artists Cameron Granger (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH), Jacob Mason-Macklin (b. 1995, Columbus, OH), and Qualeasha Wood (b. 1996, Long Branch, NJ).

With practices spanning new media, painting, and textiles, this year’s cohort explores the relationships and tensions among physical, digital, and psychic space. The title phrase, “It’s time for me to go,” proposes the gallery space as a site of both departure and arrival and the act of making as both a release and an embrace.

Cameron Granger’s immersive installation explores how architecture, geography, and community function as containers for memories. The video works on view honor his late grandmother and serve as a remembrance of the house she lived in, and the memories made in community within it.

Drawing from personal recollections and pop culture sources, in a series of eight new oil paintings on linen, Jacob Mason-Macklin examines the history of painting as a means of capture, and thus a technology for imaging. Inspired by the streets of Harlem, Mason-Macklin utilizes the medium to wrestle with the boundaries between looking and seeing, tracing the subtle collapse of public versus private that occurs where sidewalks and streets become gathering sites charged with human interaction in a shared space.

Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars, for the exhibition, Qualeasha Wood blurs distinctions between craft and fine art in textile-based works that confront and reclaim the experience of existing on the internet as a Black femme. In displaying tapestries and tuftings, she makes room for weaving practices historically looked upon as “women’s work,” thus exalting the talent and labor necessary for their creation, and paying homage to the ancestry of tactile creative production across a Black historical lexicon.

It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22  is organized by Yelena Keller, Assistant Curator, The Studio Museum in Harlem, and Jody Graf, Assistant Curator, MoMA PS1. Exhibition research is provided by Simon Ghebreyesus, The Studio Museum in Harlem and MoMA Curatorial Fellow.

Support for It’s time for me to go at MoMA PS1 is generously provided by the Tom Slaughter Exhibition Fund and the MoMA PS1 Annual Exhibition Fund.

Cameron A. Granger (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH; currently based in Columbus, OH) is Sandra’s son and came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous, careful archival practices of his grandmother, Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt the histories of his communities, redacted by Empire, into new, not just potential, but inevitable futures. His recent projects include “Everybody's got a little light under the sun,” a free food and short-film program made in collaboration with Willowbeez Soul Veg and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and “The Get Free Telethon” a twenty-four-hour livestreamed community fundraiser for Columbus groups Black Queer Intersectional Collective, Healing Broken Circles, and Columbus Freedom Coalition, sponsored by Red Bull Arts. A 2017 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Granger has exhibited his work at The Bemis Center, Omaha, Nebraska (2021); Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York (2019); and Platform Rf, Vaasa, Finland (2019).

Jacob Mason-Macklin (b. 1995, Columbus, OH; lives and works in Queens, NY) examines how painting in the age of social media, post-camera and after the Patriot Act, functions as a tool for looking and surveillance. With slashing, cutting, and undulating brushstrokes, Mason-Macklin distorts and repurposes archival images and recollected imagery in an attempt to simultaneously embrace, explore, and unsettle motifs of libido and violence as typified in counterculture iconography. Currently, Mason-Macklin uses personal and collected imagery, inspired by his observations in Harlem, to make paintings that imagine scenarios wherein the public and private collapse—questioning the point at which looking becomes surveillance, and the implications of acts of seeing.  

Mason-Macklin is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Mason-Macklin has had two-person and solo exhibitions including Ryan Huggins and Jacob Mason-Macklin, Page, New York (2021); Soul Procession, Interstate Projects, New York (2020); PURE HELL, No Place Gallery, Columbus, Ohio (2020); and BOUNTY, Jeffrey Stark Gallery (with Cudelice Brazelton), New York (2017).

Qualeasha Wood (b.1996, Long Branch, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a textile artist whose work contemplates Black female embodiment. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars, Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. Wood navigates both an internet environment saturated in Black femme figures and culture and a political and economic environment that holds this embodiment at the margins. Like the vast majority of her peers, Wood has operated multiple digital avatars since preadolescence. For her, intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a contemporary exploration of Black American femme ontology. 

 Wood has exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); Art Basel Miami Beach with Kendra Jayne Patrick, Miami (2021); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021); CANADA, New York (2021); the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, Wisconsin; NADA Miami Beach with Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York (2020); Kendra Jayne Patrick for Metro Pictures, New York (2020); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); New Image Art, Los Angeles (2018); and Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts (2020).

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 2022–23 are Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston.

The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program is supported by the Glenstone Foundation; The American Express Kenneth and Kathryn Chenault Sponsorship Fund; National Endowment for the Arts; Joy of Giving Something; Robert Lehman Foundation; New York State Council on the Arts; 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 support has been provided by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.

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 preparing to construct a new home, designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, 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 currently closed for construction, the Studio Museum is working to deepen its roots in its neighborhood through inHarlem, a dynamic set of collaborative initiatives. The Museum’s groundbreaking exhibitions, thought-provoking conversations, and engaging artmaking 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 forty 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 12:00 pm to 6:00 pm Thursday through Monday, and until 8:00 pm on Saturdays. 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.

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