Welcome June Artists-in-Residence!
Meet this month’s artists-in-residence!
Residency session: June 18 - July 14, 2025
This month we welcome a new cohort of ten artists to the Studios at MASS MoCA.
Mark your calendars for the open studios on Thursday, July 10, 5 - 7pm
kathryn ramey
roslindale, massachusetts
Kathryn Ramey (1967), Vancouver, WA / USA. A Guggenheim and Creative Capital fellow with an MFA in film and a PhD in anthropology who has made over a dozen films and installations, contributed numerous articles to anthologies and journals and written the essential text “Experimental Filmmaking: BREAK THE MACHINE” (2015). Her films operate at the intersection of experimental analogue processes and ethnographic research and are characterized by hand-processing, optical printing, and animation. She has screened at several festivals such as Toronto, Ann Arbor, TriBeca, Ji.hlava, and 25fps, among others.
Becci Davis
providence, rhode island
Becci Davis (she/they) is a mother and artist who finds inspiration in nature, archives, memory, and connection to place. Born and raised in Georgia, she now calls Providence, Rhode Island home. Becci’s research-based practice explores personal and familial geographies by gathering still and moving images, documents, objects, sound, and oral narratives. These archival elements are transformed through layering, juxtaposition, sequencing, and manipulating materiality. This process results in monuments of duality: objects, images, and time-based media merging past and present, nature and artifice, pride and anger, joy and grief, memory and recorded history, evidence and critique. Becci was the recipient of the RI Humanities’ Public Humanities Scholar Award in 2021 and the RISD Museum Artist Fellowship in 2018. Currently, she teaches in Brown University’s Department of Visual Art.
Nandi Comer
detroit, michigan
Nandi Comer is an award-winning poet and essayist. She served as the 2nd Poet Laureate of the state of Michigan, 2023-2025. She is the author of American Family: A Syndrome (Finishing Line Press) and Tapping Out (Triquarterly), which was awarded the 2020 Society of Midland Authors Award and the 2020 Julie Suk Award. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, a Callaloo Fellow, an Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, and a 2019 Kresge Arts in Detroit Fellow. Her poems and essays have appeared in Green Mountains Review, The Offing, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, The Journal of Pan African Studies, and others. She is the co-director of Detroit Lit.
Jamie Lehrhoff Levine
South orange, new jersey
I make art to impact the larger world beyond the fine art world. If my art won’t in some small way change the world, then why should I make it? From the time when I began making textiles and sculpture forty years ago at Syracuse University, to the manufacture of genetic hybrids that I created while at the Bio Art Lab at SVA, to the painting and sculpture I am doing now -- directly related to Monarch Butterfly migration and preservation -- I create work with a high degree of craftsmanship and a message. All of my material practice is intentionally labor intensive. Whether I am working with silicone, which I apply in transparent layers until it mimics real skin, or cast bronze, or applying individual hairs to a 12-foot sculpture, I am prolific and obsessed with attention to detail. I received an Excellence in Jewelry Award from Montclair State University, a Research Project from the BMW Guggenheim Lab that resulted in impactful programming at the intersection of urban ecology and architecture with ecological-artist collective SPURSE, and have participated in numerous group exhibitions regionally as well as overseas in London, Berlin, and Montecastello, Italy.
Katherine Simóne Reynolds
southern illinois
Slippage
Anti-articulation
Overhealing
Katherine Simóne Reynolds’ feels you looking, and at times enjoys it. Her practice investigates emotional dialects and psychogeographies of Blackness within the Black Midwestern landscape, conversations on the “non”, and the importance of “anti-excellence”. Her work cautiously attempts to physicalize emotions and experiences by constructing works that include photo based works, film, choreography, sculpture, and an anxious writing practice. Utilizing Black embodiment, vulnerabilities and the interior alongside her own personal narrative as a place of departure has made her question her own navigation of ownership, inclusion, and authenticity within a contemporary gaze. She draws inspiration from Black glamour, residue, the Black church while interrogating the notion of “authentic care”. Her practice deals in Blackness from her
own perspective and she continuously searches for what it means to produce “Black Work”.
Reynolds has exhibited and performed within many spaces and institutions including the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, Museum of Modern Art New York, SculptureCenter, and the Graham Foundation. She has exhibited in national and international group and solo shows and has spoken at The Contemporary Art Museum of Saint Louis, The Saint Louis Art Museum, and the Black Midwest Initiative Symposium at University of Minnesota. She was also the 2022 Fellow at The Graham Foundation. Alongside her visual art practice She has embarked on curatorial projects at The Luminary, SculptureCenter, and exhibitions for Counterpublic 2023. She has also mounted two exhibitions for The Stanley Museum of Art, and The Clyfford Still museum this past winter.
Sofía Gallisá Muriente
san juan, puerto rico
Sofía Gallisá Muriente is a visual artist whose practice claims the freedom of historical agency, proposing mechanisms for remembering and reimagining. Her works employs text, image and archive as medium and subject, exploring their poetics and politics. She has been a fellow of the Cisneros Institute at MoMA, the Smithsonian Institute and the Puerto Rican Arts Initiative. Her work has been shown recently in Documenta Fifteen, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Cooper Hewitt Museum, Proxyco Gallery, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, and El Kilómetro gallery. From 2014 to 2020, she co-directed the artist-run organization Beta-Local in San Juan. She was awarded the Latinx Artist Fellowship in 2023 and the United States Artist Fellowship in 2024.
Artist photo by Erika P Rodriguez
Daniel Pabon Velazquez
san juan, puerto rico
Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, I am a visual artist and teacher, formally working in figurative painting and other media since 2016. My exploration of memory, spurred by personal experiences with death and decay, examines its intersections between the individual and the collective within photographic images, manifesting in painting, sculpture, installations, and photography.
I completed my Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts with a concentration in painting at the Escuela de Artes Plásticas y Diseño de Puerto Rico in 2020. As part of my studies, I received a scholarship in 2018 to attend a semester at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD, where I took advanced courses in painting research and critical theory. In 2019, I participated in the Independent Studies Program at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Puerto Rico, where I exhibited and presented my research.
As an emerging artist, I’ve had my work shown in multiple exhibitions across the island as well as the US, having just recently had a solo show last fall 2023 and a duo last spring 2024. Beyond my artistic practice, I have worked in various areas of the visual arts field, including as a studio assistant and collaborator with multiple renowned artists as well as continuously teaching painting and drawing for almost a decade since 2015. Currently working on an upcoming solo project on photography and painting for early 2026.
Sasha-Kay Nicole
austin, texas
Sasha-Kay Nicole (She/Her, b. 1995) is a conceptual artist from Downtown Kingston, Jamaica. Through photography and performance, Sasha-kay employs self-portraiture as a means of escaping reality, while exploring the nuanced, liminal state of Black femme existence. Leaning on the cultural traditions and mysticism inspired by the history of spiritual activism of Haitian Vodou and Jamaican Obeah and Revivalism, she is crafting a decolonized (visual) syntax that embodies the essence of Black femme spirit.
Sasha-Kay holds an MFA in Studio Art from the University of Texas at Austin and an Honours BFA in Interdisciplinary Studies from Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica (2021). She has exhibited widely, including notable shows like "The Face of Us at the National Gallery of Jamaica (2023), "Contours of the Interior" at VisArts Center (2023), and the impactful "Sighting black girlhood project" at New Local Space Kingston (2022). She is currently an American Association of University International Fellow and a recipient of the 2024 Prince Claus Seed Award for her socially engaged work.
heryk tomassini
bayamón, puerto rico
I'm a trans-disciplinary artist who creates work focuses in installation, sculpture, photography, painting and drawings. My work intersects between architecture and space in relation to displacements and transits in cultural history, memory, and migration. I use symbolism, iconographies and/or objects that represent the socio-economic layers and arguments of my cultural history of colonial extractions, and alliances. Also, I incorporate discarded materials as a mode of salvages and juxtapositions, to break the framing of a disempowered island, and to channel a new history of representation and exchange of the conditions of living in the Caribbean Island of Puerto Rico.
Navin Norling
atlanta, georgia
In his ongoing practice, Navin Norling examines classic Americana imagery and assembles miscellanea out of popular culture signifiers, sayings, folklore, and materialism. Both humorous and incisive, the painting-filled installations of Navin Norling juxtapose American cultural stereotypes, pop iconography, issues of race, gender, class, power, and economics. In his works, content-rich icons such as Moors, Black Power figures, consumer logos, blackface women, cheap signage, graffiti, and celebrities are layered one upon another in paintings that are stacked and hinged on the walls as charms. These pieces of rural debris tumble into the gallery space, creating a distinctly American cacophony. Drawing on a wide range of experiences, Norling's installations become a culmination of personal culture, and at times, a commentary on issues of power, class, geography, capitalism and inequality.
