Yoshie Sakai creates characters that respond to and negotiate contemporary social issues of cultural identity, gender roles, and familial and personal relationships. As a subtly transgressive undercover cultural agent, she exposes the absurdities of manipulative...
Samira Yamin's practice contends with the position of the diasporic subject as both object and viewer of representation. In the studio she engages in the slow, ethical labor of cultivating a critical and dynamic relationship to photographs of war, a practice of...
Autumn Knight's interdisciplinary work primarily falls within performance, text, video, and social practices that address notions of race, gender, identity, psychotherapy, place, labor, humor and art access in a Black American context. Performance, which is at the...
SaraNoa Mark's practice examines traces left by time, in landscapes and in collective memory. Their practice is founded in the construction of memory and the notion that objects tell stories that memory cannot retain. Carving is at the core of their practice, in...
Brooks Turner's work begins in research. Since 2018, he has encountered thousands of documents, objects, and photographs across various archives, seeking forgotten stories of anti-fascist resistance. He then digitizes these fragments of the past, recontextualizing...
Drawing from her own story, with a loving yet tumultuous working-class upbringing at its heart, Elizabeth Alexander works to unpack the social, cultural, and psychological pressures within American domesticity. Raised to see the possibility in found or unwanted...
Laura Nova is an artist, educator and activist who lives and works on New York’s Lower East Side, creating festive, absurdist spectacles that unite generations and diverse communities. The first Public Artist in Residence to be embedded in New York City’s Department...
Morel Doucet's work delves into the complex intersections of cultural identity, migration, and environmental justice, particularly within the context of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. Through ceramics, illustrations, and prints, he explores narratives of vulnerability...
Shirin Towfiq is an interdisciplinary artist working with an emphasis on installation, sculptural photography, textiles, and printmaking. Drawing from her positionality as a second-generation Iranian refugee, her artwork explores the complexities of belonging and...
Margaret Jacobs' artistic practice highlights Indigenous botanicals which hold cultural, personal and familial importance. As a metalsmith, her technical process intermingles modern steel fabrication techniques with traditional blacksmithing techniques. Her life has...
Miatta Kawinzi is a Kenyan-Liberian-American multi-disciplinary artist working with multimedia sculptural installation, still and moving images, the voice and body, gesture, language, objects, space, and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity,...
Sarah Zapata employs labor-intensive processes such as handweaving, rope coiling, latch hooking, hand tufting, and sewing to explore intersecting theories of gender and ethnicity within pre-colonial histories and techniques. Making work with meditative, mechanical...
Melissa Ling's artistic practice explores fragmentary glimpses that reside within nature – the in-between spaces that we see but often do not notice. In her drawings, she negates the seeming futility of singular mark-making to explore how small notions fester into...
Through mixed media sculptures, installations, large scale drawings, and print-based media, Nyeema Morgan's interdisciplinary art practice critically examines dominant cultural narratives and their ways of empowering and marginalizing identities. Her work draws upon...
April Banks is an artist and creative strategist working across visual art, social practice and exhibition design. Her practice sits intentionally between image, space, and experience. Time traveling through historical archives and memories, her recent work questions...
Mark Delmont is a first generation Jamaican Haitian artist based in Carol City, Miami. With more than a decade of experience in mechanical contracting, he is a self-taught artist working with textiles to create dramatic portraiture of black iconography (inspired by...
Diana Shpungin's practice encompasses an obsessive heart-strong conceptual framework - the pencil mark behaving as a compulsive act, denoting repair, frugality, and empathy across identity lines. Duality is an essential element of her work, always seeking a balance...
Dawn Weleski's art practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by repurposing restaurants, underground brawls, revolutionary protests, domestic labor, and political offices as transformative social stages. Much of their 24-year...
Noa Yekutieli (b. 1989, California, US) is a self-taught multidisciplinary artist working between Tel Aviv, Israel, and Los Angeles, California. In her work, Yekutieli combines various craft techniques including manual paper-cutting, hand-woven textiles, and...
Jared Thorne's project seeks to photograph every remaining Planned Parenthood facility in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Alongside the images will be written testimonials from people who work at the healthcare facilities. Upon completion, he plans to...
Stephanie Woods' work fuses a relationship between fiber and digital technology to examine performative behavior and the cognitive effects of forced cultural assimilation. Her research surveys the psychological impact of intergenerational trauma, the politicization of...
Felandus Thames creates vessels able to contain beauty and trauma at an equilibrium. His work functions in the way that Black music is endowed by, but not the sum of, Black joy, pain, and suffering. Thames is invested in the residue of memory decoupled from nostalgia...
Cara Despain's work navigates issues of land use—often using the legacy of romantic landscape depictions as a lens—as it relates historically to settlement, expansion, oppression, resource exploitation, and the development of the military-industrial complex in the...
Nhi Vo's work transforms writing into drawing, revealing languages as patterns and definitions as gestures. Laborious repetitions are interrupted by the imperfections of handwritten text, overriding the parameters of mechanical reproduction. These handwritten...
Panteha Abareshi's work is rooted in her existence as a chronically ill/disabled body existing with multiple medical illnesses, at the root of which is sickle cell zero beta thalassemia, a genetic blood disorder that causes debilitating pain and bodily deterioration...
Mutating between analog and digital, Leo Castañeda's work renders worlds where landscapes, technology, and entities all share sentience and interconnection. Through paintings, video, and sculpture, and more, the work traverses sci-fi gaming environments inspired by...
Charisse Weston's work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal folds, collapses, and returns of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. Interweaving sculpture, sound, video, and photography with black experience as text, she explores...
Rashaun Rucker's practice serves as an archive of Black culture as it intersects with myth vs. reality. In his series American Ornithology, Rucker records the lives of black men and the heavy challenge they face with racial bias and cultural conditioning. The series...
Latoya Hobbs creates mixed-media works that seamlessly marry traditional painting and relief printmaking techniques on a single surface. These hybrid works employ the use of pattern, color, and texture to provide a visceral experience that is both universal and...
Evolving out of Los Angeles’ underground scenes, Ronald Athey is a self-taught artist who started making performance and sound work in 1981. In the 90s, when his work became identified with his HIV status and the ongoing pandemic, Athey’s live work toured...
Natalie Marie Ball has developed her studio practice using visual archives, history, gesture, materiality, and personal experience to create painted textiles, and sculptures as Power Objects. Her art is offered as proposals of refusal to complicate an easily affirmed...
Adriana Corral’s interdisciplinary, research-based practice explores memory, loss, human rights abuses, and unwritten histories. Often working across international borders, she probes state and national archives for primary documents and collaborates with historians,...
Pamela Council makes sculptures, performances, dedications, and jokes that transform materials, people, and institutions. Using an Afro-Americana camp aesthetic which she calls BLAXIDERMY, objects are set into motion in unique ways, exploring how we soothe, protect,...
Yasmine Nasser Diaz’s multidisciplinary practice navigates overlapping tensions around religion, gender, and third-culture identity. Born and raised in Chicago to parents who immigrated from the highlands of southern Yemen, her work often reflects personal histories...
June Edmond’s abstract paintings explore how color, repetition, movement, and balance can serve as conduits to spiritual contemplation and interpersonal connection to her African-American roots. The psychological construct of skin color or tone through pattern and...
Anja Marais’ work encompasses a hybrid of disciplines that include: photography, sculpture, mixed media collage, assemblage, and film. Born and raised in South Africa, but of French Huguenots refugee ancestry, Marais’ work explores themes of displacement and cultural...
Through an interdisciplinary investigation of organizing systems (social systems, institutional structures, power relations, scientific theories, emotional frameworks), Jennifer Moon’s work entangles life with art to reveal how these systems are inscribed,...
Rowan Renee’s use of images interrogates how sexual bodies are gendered, victimized, policed and punished. Working with photographic, printmaking and sculptural techniques, Renee produces and appropriates images that intervene on issues of authorship, the...
Jessica Segall is a multidisciplinary artist working in sculpture, performance and video. In her work, she presents acts of endurance and builds tools for survival in a precarious time. Travels to hostile climates inspire her work, which is designed to unpack ideas of...
As a citizen of the Seneca Nation of Indians, Marie Watt engages Indigenous knowledge to forge new relationships and remember connectedness. Encountering a John Singer Sargent portrait portraying a dog with an unfurled tongue, Watt remembers the Seneca creation story...
Miami-based Gonzalo Fuenmayor’s precise drawings continually explore themes of cultural hybridity and identity politics. His recent body of work examines ideas of dislocation and exoticism through a series of large-scale charcoal and pastel drawings. Cross-cultural...
Isolated in the island of Eastport, Maine, Anna Hepler works in ceramics, crocheted wire, soft sculpture, collage, etching, and virtually any other medium pulled into her creative orbit.[1] Hepler has worked with air to create non-static sculptures, restless with...
Indigenous to Peru and adopted into a working-class transracial family, Tarrah Krajnak is a photo-based artist whose early experience established her ongoing artistic preoccupation with forgotten landscapes, orphanhood, exile, race, origins, and the way these...
Jan Mun is a media artist that creates social sculptures working with digital and living media. The landscape has become her framework to unfold stories about others and herself by using a combination of artistic and scientific processes that manifest in the form of...
Antoine Williams’ practice is an investigation of power, perception, semiotics, and fear as they relate to institutional inequities. Influenced by sci-fi literature from such authors as Octavia Butler and H.P. Lovecraft, Williams has created a mythology, concerning...
Brooklyn-based Debi Cornwall is a conceptual documentary artist who marries empathy and dark humor with systemic critique while interrogating American state power in the post-9/11 era. Cornwall’s methodology requires exhaustive research and sensitive negotiation for...
Los Angeles-based Mariah Garnett’s work, primarily film, video and installation, exists somewhere in the intersection between appropriation, documentary, and narrative fiction. She often orbits around a subject rather than directly representing it, employing multiple...
Brooklyn-based Yannique Hall explores intimacy, the interior, and the private through family, home, and relationships. Hall describes her work as a constant search for the familiar—a search for place. The series “Growing Pains” belongs to a growing narrative on the...
Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on how the power of the built environment shapes our relationships and experiences. His practice invites a critical perspective and a sense of openness into the places where we live....
Victoria Fu's artwork reflects on the status of the moving image and conditions of spectatorship in today's digital age. The artist writes, "My moving image installations exploit, exaggerate and simulate optical effects of light and space as meditations on sight,...
As an artist-archivist, Kameelah Janan Rasheed often creates work with found objects, textual fragments, orphaned audio, and other historical residue excavated from sources ranging from flea markets to institutional archives to dumpsters. Ms. Rasheed writes, "Haunted...
Faheem Majeed often looks to the material makeup of his South Shore neighborhood in Chicago and surrounding areas as an entry point into larger questions around civic-mindedness, community activism, and institutional racism. As part of his studio practice, the artist...
Elizabeth Tubergen's sculptures appear to function as singular, formed images in space, referencing notions of the universal through borrowed monumental, architectural, domestic, and athletic forms. At the same time, these objects follow the logic of...
Reinventing maps and architectural spaces has been a focus of Christine Gedeon's work, who was born in Aleppo in 1973, and immigrated to the US in 1976. Writing about her string sculpture, entitled, "Syria..as my mother speaks" the artist describes "an interactive...
Through her sculpture, performance, installation and video, Anna Tsouhlarakis is helping to create a new vocabulary within the dialogue of Native American art. She is interested in building conceptual connections between seemingly disparate subjects and combining them...
Zoe Sheehan Saldana fabricates functional, handmade, faithful duplicates of mass-produced objects. She then releases her creations into environments where they risk going unnoticed. The artist writes, "I hope that the objects and experiences I create provoke...
Shadi Harouni follows the absurd and surreal ways in which form and experience are manipulated in politics. The artist's experience of post-war/revolution Iran (as an Iranian and a Kurdish Jew) and the Islamic Republic’s uncertain relationship to music, fashion,...
Dread Scott works in a range of media: performance, installation, photography, video, screen-print and painting. The thread that connects his work is an engagement with sharp social questions confronting humanity and a desire to push formal and conceptual boundaries....
Carolina Caycedo’s art practice moves beyond the bounds of the studio, gallery and institution and extends into the realm of the social, where she explores systems of movement and exchange, and processes of assimilation and resistance. With her work, the artist seeks...
Liz Glynn creates sculptures, large-scale installations, and participatory performances using epic historical narratives to explore the potential for change in the present. Her practice seeks to embody the dynamics of growth, decay, and renewal by evidencing process,...
Through the discrete placement, rearrangement, embellishment, and replication of everyday objects in various sites, Karyn Olivier tries to shift our experience of the familiar. Ms. Olivier writes, “This manipulation reveals the malleable and unfixed nature of objects...
Gabe Kenney creates elaborate installation and performance works that combine carefully arranged and selected printed matter like scientific illustrations, diagrams, digital prints and graphic wall patterns with objects of aging technology, whiteboards, organs,...
Kristin Cammermeyer develops site-specific installations in varied locations and contexts. A recent transplant to Los Angeles, she will use the direct artist grant from Harpo to familiarize her self with the city by procuring contiguous sites of production throughout...
Alicia Eggert’s artwork focuses on the relationship between language, image and time. Her work often moves, changes, deteriorates, and in some cases, even dies. “Language is one of my primary sculptural materials. Words are like found objects - they are easily...
Jack O’Hearn is interested in material objects and their affect on one’s memory and imagination. He writes, “my work is inspired by my fascination with history, extreme poverty, childhood fantasies, & tales of life beyond the periphery. These subjects share a common...
Scott Goss is a multimedia artist who creates experiential environments to explore the subconscious and bring dimension to this dreamlike place. He writes, “In mundane everyday activities, we find time to enter into our thoughts, so we can contemplate, plan, wonder,...
Heather Hart is interested in how legends form and how invention and intuition gets mixed in along the way to fit current cultural needs. She thinks of her artwork as oracles that reflect these stories and belief systems. As Ms. Hart explains, “an oracle is something...
Calum Walter’s films and videos are rooted in a process of observation and accumulation. Through constant documentation of sound and image, he adds to a growing personal database of material. Over time this ‘data’ begins to reveal characteristics and patterns,...
Sarah Rara works with video, film, photography, and performance and is a contributing member of the band Lucky Dragons. A direct artist grant from the foundation will assist the artist's development of a new body of work entitled “The Pollinators,” which focuses on...
Megan and Murray McMillan have been collaborating since 2002. They make interdisciplinary projects that incorporate video, installation, performance and photography. They often start their process by building large sets in their studio or on location. That set then...
Emily Mast received a direct artist grant from the foundation in 2013 and is planning to apply the funds toward the development of a new series of performances based on the “scenic poems” of Joan Brossa (1919-1998), a little known Catalan artist and writer. Brossa’s...
For the past twenty years, Neil Goldberg has been making video, photographic and sculptural work that documents the cadences of everyday experience and the dynamics of mortality. Harpo Foundation is pleased to provide Mr. Goldberg with a direct artist grant to assist...
An accomplished artist, Donna Dennis has been creating ambitious sculpture and installation work since the early 1970's. In support of her impressive body of work and to assist her production of new work, the foundation provided Ms. Dennis with a direct artist grant...