MAD Summer 2017 Artist Studios Residents and Van Lier Fellow Announced

The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) announces the Summer 2017 session of its Artist Studios Program and Van Lier Fellowship. The selected artists, who will work in MAD's sixth-floor open studios from June through September, are Rachel Frank, Mariana Garibay Raeke, Tai Hwa Goh, Ilana Harris-Babou, Heidi Lau, Kathleen McDermott, and Christa Pratt. Harris-Babou is this session's Van Lier Fellow.

"All seven incoming residents have transdisciplinary practices, and approach materials in uncommon ways," said Cathleen Lewis, Vice President of Education and Programs at MAD. "This is sure to lead to enriching conversations between the artists and visitors."

Launched nine years ago by the Museum's Education Department, the Artist Studios Program assigns studio space to seven emerging to midcareer artists and designers for a four-month period, during which visitors to MAD are invited to observe and interact with the artists at work. A diverse committee of Museum staff members and outside professionals in the fields of art, craft, and design selects six residents to work at MAD one day per week, as well as one full-time Van Lier Fellow, whose fellowship is funded by the New York Community Trust. Introduced to the Artist Studios Program in 2016, the Van Lier Fellowship provides talented young people from historically underrepresented populations who are dedicated to a career in the arts with financial support and a dedicated studio at MAD for full-time use.

The MAD Artist Studios Program is both a platform for creativity and an innovative model of engagement that has served more than 140 artists and designers. The studios are open to the public; the residents welcome dialogue around concepts, materials, and processes, and visitors are encouraged to spend time in the studios exchanging ideas. This is an exciting chance for museumgoers to meet working artists, and a remarkable opportunity for the residents to actively participate in the public's engagement with their work.

During each Artist Studios Program session, some of the artist residents elect to host a MADmakes workshop. MADmakes is a drop-in, hands-on educational series that invites visitors to learn the artists' own methods and test their skills at art making and creative production. The series engages visitors in various techniques and ideas, facilitating greater understanding and appreciation of skill-based practices. Great for visitors of all ages, backgrounds, and interests, MADmakes workshops are free with Museum admission. They will take place as follows:

Thursday, June 15, 6 pm - Kathleen McDermott
Thursday, July 13, 6 pm - Mariana Garibay Raeke
Thursday, August 17, 6 pm - Tai Hwa Goh
Thursday, September 7, 6 pm - Rachel Frank

The Artist Studios Talk and Closing Reception will take place Thursday, September 14, at 6:30 pm.

Tuesday: Mariana Garibay Raeke
Media: Mixed Media Sculpture

Mariana Garibay Raeke is driven by an interest in the potential for transformation contained in matter, and the wide range of permutations that a specific material can assume. Her work challenges the processes and cultural systems that shape substances into objects with specific meanings, uses, and values.

While at MAD, Garibay Raeke will explore ways of shaping and giving form to clay and paper pulp with the aid of modifiable molds. The use of the same mold to cast a series of unique objects will reveal similarities and differences in form and color, with the aim of questioning and playing with the logic of mass production.

Garibay Raeke was born in Guadalajara, Mexico, and lives and works in Brooklyn. She received her MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University and her BFA in Painting/Visual Studios from California College of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited in New York and San Francisco, as well as in Mexico. For more information, please visit: www.marianagr.com.

Wednesday: Tai Hwa Goh
Media: Printmaking, Design, Installation

Tai Hwa Goh works with printmaking and installation. Her installations push the boundaries of traditional printmaking from two-dimensional images on paper to three-dimensional sculptural installations that transform space. Seeing the natural world and the human body as inextricably connected to each other, Goh uses tubes, pipes, and orbs that spew forth flowing strips of paper, suggesting cycles of the body, industrial machinery, and natural phenomena, as well as the unending processes of growth and decay.

During her residency at MAD, she will go beyond hand-pulled prints. Goh will recycle used materials-old t-shirts and jeans, lace, curtains, phonebook pages, gift wrap, magazines, wallpaper, old letters, old notebooks, etc. She will sew, glue, and transform these "found" prints to construct three-dimensional objects.

Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, Goh holds an MFA from the University of Maryland, as well as an MFA and a BFA from Seoul National University. She has been featured in US and international exhibitions. For more information, please visit: www.taihwagoh.com.

Thursday: Kathleen McDermott
Media: Multimedia Performance, Technology Design

Kathleen McDermott combines craft and sculpture techniques with open-source electronic experiments to build video-based narratives of a strange future. She takes a critical perspective on emerging and wearable technologies by creating electronics that are counterproductive, humorous, and uncontrollable. A recurring theme in her work has been the relationship between technology, the body, and personal and public space.

While at MAD, McDermott will explore the relationship between robots and protest. Popular conceptions of robots produce visions of metallic objects that are use-oriented, calculating, and driven by logic; but what about robots that appear to be expressive, useless, or illogical, or robots that fail to perform their intended functions? This investigation might relate to larger cultural attitudes toward work and productivity.

McDermott is pursuing a PhD in Electronic Arts at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. She has an MFA in Creative Media from City University of Hong Kong and a BFA from Cornell University. Her work has been exhibited internationally. For more information, please visit: www.kthartic.com.

Friday: Rachel Frank
Media: Mixed Media Sculpture, Performance

Rachel Frank uses sculpture, video, and performance to explore the tensions between the natural world and the manmade, the animal and the political, and the past and the present. Themes of environmentalism and social justice are examined through narratives focused on memory, natural history, extinction, and loss.

While at MAD, Frank will work on a series of sculptures and masks using fabric and other materials to address issues related to climate change and the Anthropocene. Expanding upon recent works focused on the environmental practice of rewilding, as well as her 2017 video project, Vapors, which featured performers wearing the masks of an extinct woolly rhinoceros and a woolly mammoth, Frank will continue to explore visions of our landscape's past and present and its sustainability into the future.

Born and raised in Kentucky, Frank received her MFA from the University of Pennsylvania and her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute. She has participated in numerous residencies and has exhibited her work internationally. For more information, please visit: www.rachelfrank.com.

Saturday: Heidi Lau
Media: Ceramic Sculpture, Paper Sculpture

Reconfiguring fragmented personal and collective memories, Heidi Lau makes collections of symbolic artifacts and zoomorphic ruins as materializations of the archaic and the invisible, taking inspiration from colonial architecture and tenement houses in Macau that have mostly been demolished or gentrified beyond recognition. In the process, she continuously reenacts the nonlinearity and materiality of the past, molding a tactile connection to the disappearing, impossible identity of home.

While in residence at MAD, Lau will be hand-building ceramic sculptures and experimenting with the suminagashi marbling process, which has an ancient history in hydromancy, to create ghost-like circular ink marks on the surface of her pieces.

Lau grew up in Macau, under Portuguese colonial and later Chinese rule. She currently lives and works in New York. The recipient of a BS in Studio Art from New York University, she has received numerous awards and exhibited extensively. For more information, please visit: www.heidilau.org.

Sunday: Christa Pratt
Media: Painting, Mixed Media

Christa Pratt's paintings use many variations of the color black to render, representationally and/or abstractly, herself and black women and femmes. She utilizes the freedom of modern paint materials/pigments and the process of painting as a method of creating community and self-awareness, as a spiritual outlet, and as a means to explore the simultaneous limitations and liberations of blackness and womanhood.

During her residency at MAD, Pratt will continue her meditations on the psychological effects of gender and race through her series of Planet paintings, as well as her ongoing series of black-on-black portrait paintings. She will be using beauty materials and modern paint technology to continue celebrating Womanism and the freedom in painting.

Born in the Bronx but raised in the South, she received her BFA in Painting from Pratt Institute. She has exhibited her work nationally. For more information, please visit: www.christapratt.tumblr.com.

Fellow (Full-Time): Ilana Harris-Babou
Media: Performance, Mixed Media Installation

Ilana Harris-Babou uses music videos, cooking shows, and home improvement television as material in an abject exploration of the American Dream. She works primarily in ceramic sculpture and video installation, and frames messy scenes with studio lighting and HD video in order to ask questions about intimacy, violence, and consumption.

While at MAD, she will continue working on a series of dysfunctional ceramics: fantastically distorted kitchenware and household tools that ask users to question their relationship to touch and utility. How might a three-foot spatula change the way we relate to flipping pancakes? This process will serve as inspiration for new performance and video works after the residency.

Harris-Babou received an MFA in New Genres from Columbia University and a BA in Art from Yale University. She has exhibited her work throughout the United States and Europe. For more information, please visit: www.ilanahb.com.

ABOUT THE MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN
The Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) champions contemporary makers across creative fields and presents the work of artists, designers, and artisans who apply the highest level of ingenuity and skill. Since the Museum's founding in 1956 by philanthropist and visionary Aileen Osborn Webb, MAD has celebrated all facets of making and the creative processes by which materials are transformed, from traditional techniques to cutting-edge technologies. Today, the Museum's curatorial program builds upon a rich history of exhibitions that emphasize a cross-disciplinary approach to art and design, and reveals the workmanship behind the objects and environments that shape our everyday lives. MAD provides an international platform for practitioners who are influencing the direction of cultural production and driving twenty-first-century innovation, and fosters a participatory setting for visitors to have direct encounters with skilled making and compelling works of art and design. The Museum will be celebrating its Diamond Jubilee 60th Anniversary this year.

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Image caption: Clockwise from top left: works by Heidi Lau, Christa Pratt, Kathleen McDermott, Tai Hua Goh,
Ilana Harris-Babou, Rachel Frank, and Mariana Garibay Raeke.

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Museum of Arts and Design · 2 Columbus Circle · New York, NY 10019 · USA