Welcome November Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: November 12 — December 8, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Casey Hayward
Stoneham, massachusetts
Casey Hayward is a visual artist and University Professor. At Bentley University he teaches students from all walks of life to harness their creativity through works of visual and time-based media.
In his own practice, Hayward has an abiding passion for discovering and (re)presenting the “beautiful ugly.” With layers of materials, printed images, and paint, he situates his photography in conversation with found materials. Castoff plywood, shipping pallets, mattresses, and more become foundations for visual combinations in unexpected ways. His pieces evoke an affinity with forgotten signage, billboards, and fliers–initially pasted up to attract attention and desire but eventually faded and degraded into blight. Time hews new, unintended aesthetics that invite reflections we might not otherwise have. Cracks, rot, rust, and other byproducts of entropy speak to the temporary nature of art and all things.
To Hayward, there is no singular way of appreciating his representations, much as there is no single use for his found objects. Deciphering where the object ends, and the imagery begins is part of the challenge and (at times the whimsy) in Hayward’s work.
Garrick Imatani
Portland, oregon
Garrick Imatani is an interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, performance, and print. His work seeks relief, seduction, and resistance away from ontologies rooted in lack, loss, and extraction. Imatani has exhibited or performed in public libraries, city archives, on the street, and with institutions, including Blaffer Art Museum (Houston), Triumph Gallery (Moscow), Art in General (NYC), ICA at Maine College of Art, Ditch Projects (Springfield, OR), Chachalu Tribal Museum (Grand Ronde, OR), Oregon Contemporary, Portland Art Museum, and Portland Institute for Contemporary Art. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Ucross Foundation, Djerassi, and Ragdale; and, has been awarded grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, Oregon Arts Commission, Maine Arts Commission, and Percent for Art. Imatani holds an MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University and is a professor in the MFA in Visual Studies program at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Yehimi Cambrón Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist born in Michoacán, Mexico, and raised in Atlanta, Georgia. Atlanta's Civil Rights Movement legacy offered a springboard for activism that helped Cambrón navigate living in an anti-immigrant state while undocumented. This spirit of resistance informs her practice as she explores her lived experience and its thread in the movement toward collective liberation.
Cambrón's practice is an expression of undocumentedness that draws from her family's lineages of labor. Her work intertwines the labor of love in fiber methods that persist after crossing the border and the self-taught labor of furniture production that sustains her family today and has enabled them to thrive on their own terms.
Through intergenerational and matriarchal modes of making, Cambrón reclaims discarded materials from her family's furniture projects. By transforming remnants of textiles, vinyl, and leather into portraits, abstracted works, and installations, she generates various pathways to navigate in and out of visibility. This agency to visually code-switch is a critical tactic in her work as she confronts the state violence imposed on undocumented people. Reclaiming discarded materials through crocheting, sewing, and netting gives her a loving way to hold her community's precarity while subverting the ways this country animalizes and criminalizes them.
Cambrón earned a B.A. in Studio Art from Agnes Scott College (2014) and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2025) as a 2023 fellow of the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. She has had solo exhibitions at the University of South Carolina's Upstate Art Gallery (2022) and Oglethorpe University Museum of Art (2023). She has exhibited at the High Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and exhibited and curated at the Atlanta Contemporary Art Center. Cambrón is currently based in Chicago, IL, as an Artist-In-Residence at the Chicago Artists Coalition.
Merryn Omotayo Alaka
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Merryn Omotayo Alaka (b. 1997, Indianapolis, Indiana) is a Nigerian and American artist whose work spans across sculpture, installation, performance, and fiber practices. Her interdisciplinary sculptural practice incorporates metal fabrication, bronze casting, fiber, found objects, sound, and ready-made materials. Using materials and objects as a form of "allegory" or symbolism, Alaka examines the constructs and fluidness of blackness, time, memory, and history– ideas that have been shaped by societal structures and colonial histories. Alaka's creative practice explores how Black diasporic histories and traditions are preserved across generations, oftentimes working with materials and processes that serve as vessels for collective memory.
Alaka locates her work at the intersection of Black material culture, family archives, and West African mythologies. Reconstructing found and inherited objects and textiles such as Mercedes Benz car parts, Yoruba Agbadas, Nigerian leather mats, and African headrests along with stories true and imagined, she creates visual language and landscapes that make space for contemplation and meditation.
At its core, Alaka’s creative practice offers up a critical space for the sharing and exchange of narratives, histories, and futures that are in a constant state of flux.
Alaka graduated in 2025 with a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has exhibited work at institutions such as the Phoenix Art Museum, the Tucson Museum of Art, the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington. She was awarded the emerging artist grant from the Phoenix Art Museum in 2022. In 2023 she was the recipient of a fully funded scholarship from the School of the Art Institute where she was one of three graduating MFA students awarded the James Raymond Nelson Fellowship, an award intended to support artists artistic career and travel post graduation.
Sylvie Mayer
Pawtucket, Rhode Island
Sylvie Mayer creates layered paintings that consider interiority and impermanence. Preoccupied by thresholds and in-between states, she depicts transitional spaces that mediate between public and private. Informed by her childhood spent backstage as the daughter of a ballet dancer and teacher, she is interested in the dynamics of revelation and concealment in theatrical settings. Interior scenes are a frequent subject of her paintings, imagined as spaces of suspended time imbued with traces of their inhabitants. Mayer holds a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in Painting from Boston University.
Anahita Norouzi
Quebec, Canada
Anahita Norouzi is a multidisciplinary artist, originally from Tehran and active in Montreal since 2018. Her practice is research-driven, informed by marginalized histories, focusing on themes of resource extraction, colonialism, and the relationship between humans and land.
Articulated across a range of materials and mediums—including video, sculpture, installation, photography—her work challenges institutional authority by reclaiming personal narratives and collective memories embedded in archives, museum collections, and herbarium pages, ultimately dissecting how power operates through systems of classification, representation, and historical erasure.
Zhu Gaocanyue
Providence, rhode island
朱高灿月 Zhu Gaocanyue is a multidisciplinary artist working across photography, printmaking, installation, and artist books. Viewing images as a form of visual vocabulary, Zhu Gao uses photographic language to excavate the unseen—probing beneath surfaces to engage with the layered realities of people, objects, and histories. Their recent research explores shifting definitions of value and investigates how humans relate to non-functional objects, obsolete knowledge systems, and marginalized forms of labor.
Zhu Gao earned an MFA in Photography from the Rhode Island School of Design and has since expanded their practice through fellowships, exhibitions, and international book fairs. They received full fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center and The Studios at MASS MoCA, where they developed projects that integrated experimental image-making with archival research and expanded print-based practices. Their work has been exhibited internationally in China, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Italy, and has been featured in platforms and publications including PhMuseum, LensCulture, and The New York Times.
In 2024, Zhu Gao co-founded zug press with Zuya Yang—an independent publishing house dedicated to experimental approaches to fine art bookmaking and the expanded field of printed matter. zug press has participated in numerous book fairs, including ICP Photobook Fest, the Singapore International Photography Festival (SIPF), Press Play, Unbound Art Book Fair, Other Islands Book Fair, and Jersey Art Book Fair. Upcoming events include the Seoul Art Book Fair, Taipei Art Book Fair, etc.
Häsler Gómez
Richmond, virginia
Häsler Gómez (b. Guatemala City, Guatemala) is a writer and sculptor whose reductive work reorients the everyday to explore material, conceptual, and philosophical possibilities. By building entangled systems of unseen performance, sound, light, architectural intervention, language, and objects, he creates speculative spaces and encounters rooted in the inherent realities of materials, objects, and bodies. These gestures direct our attention for deep, empathetic looking, and to the possibilities held within space, material, and form. Ultimately recalibrating the way we look and by extension care, his practice impacts how we encounter one another, recognizing that these relations reflect broader systems of power and oppression in our culture at large.
His work has been exhibited widely, both nationally and internationally, including exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art (Richmond, VA), Espacio Cabeza (Guadalajara, MX), after / time (Portland, OR), Material Room (Richmond, VA), Coco Hunday (Tampa, FL), Heaven Gallery (Chicago, IL), Root Division (San Francisco, CA), Nuwu Art Gallery (Las Vegas, NV), The Holland Project (Reno, NV), Baitball Art Fair (Polignano a Mare, Italy), Other Places Art Fair (San Pedro, CA), Zygote Press (Cleveland, OH), Sky Lab Gallery (Columbus, OH), Aviary Gallery (Boston, MA), Carnation Contemporary (Portland, OR), Axis Gallery (Sacramento, CA), and Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY).
Gómez holds an MFA in Sculpture + Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University, a BFA in Sculpture and a BA in Psychology from the University of Nevada, Reno, and was a recipient of the 2025 Dedalus Foundation MFA Fellowship in Painting and Sculpture.
Carolina Bollaín y Goitia
Saltillo, Mexico
Carolina Bollaín y Goitia is a Mexican artist based in Saltillo, Coahuila. Her artistic practice, rooted in the desert landscapes of northern Mexico, weaves together art, ecology, and the symbolic dimensions of inhabiting. Through walking, archival research, and dialogue with communities and artisans, she explores sacred iconography and material culture, investigating how notions of the sacred are transformed when Western religious symbols are reimagined within arid ecologies.
Carolina creates textiles, sculptures, and ritual objects that integrate craft and ecology into a contemporary art language. Her work often involves processes such as working with candelilla wax, embedding stones into textiles, and learning traditional sarape techniques at the Escuela del Sarape de Saltillo. Projects such as Manta de piedras, Deseo ser paisaje, and Liturgia de candelilla reflect on the fragility and resilience of desert ecosystems while exploring the boundaries between body and landscape.
Kearra Amaya Gopee
Brooklyn, New York
Kearra Amaya Gopee (they/them) is an anti-disciplinary visual artist and facilitator from Carapichaima, Kairi (the larger of the twin-island nation known as Trinidad and Tobago), living on Lenape land (New York). Using video, sculpture, sound, writing, and other media, they identify both violence and time as primary conditions that undergird the anti-Black world in which they work: a world that they are intent on working against through myriad collective interventions. Their work has been exhibited at venues such as documenta15, The Kitchen, and at film festivals internationally. They have been awarded fellowships at MacDowell, the Leslie Lohman Museum, Queer|Art, and the Global Fund for Women. Previously, they have participated in residencies at Skowhegan, the International Studio and Curatorial Program, Headlands Center for the Arts, and NLS Kingston in Jamaica, among others. They have guest lectured at Emory University, Rutgers University, and the Caltech-Huntington Program in Visual Culture. Gopee was an Elaine G. Weitzen ISP Studio Program Fellow at the Whitney Museum Independent Study Program in 2024. They hold an MFA from UCLA with a concentration in Interdisciplinary Studio and a BFA in Photography and Imaging from New York University. They have been developing an artist residency and research platform titled a small place, after Jamaica Kincaid's book of the same name. Gopee has served as a researcher and developer for artist residencies and has worked in various capacities with the Artist Communities Alliance, Studio Rawls, and Sweat Variant, among others.
