Frederick Bamfo

LARKIN DAWN FELLOWSHIP

Ghana

Frederick Bamfo lives and works in Ghana where he is redefining modern art, architectural landscape, and textiles through his multidisciplinary art forms. Bamfo obtained his MFA from KNUST, Kumasi in 2014. He studied Fashion Design and Textiles from KTU, Kumasi. His work has been exhibited in many countries including China and the United States. In 2021, he won the prestigious AAmA Award for Cultural Ecology Contribution in Hangzhou, China. Bamfo’s work questions issues around slavery, spatiality, materiality, and geopolitics of the 21st century.

Dennis RedMoon Darkeem

United States

My work is inspired by creating community and reflects the many connections between people, history, and environment. As a mixed media and multidimensional artist, I make experiential works that engage, enlighten and educate. My practice involves building layers of new and old experiences to form new narratives.

I use installations, photography, sculpture, drawing, painting, sound, and performance as vessels for conveying and balancing the ideas of transformation, generation, and honor. My aesthetic is inspired by my Indigenous Yamassee Yat’siminoli and African-American cultural heritage, and I incorporate traditional craft customs, storytelling, history, and ancient connections to earth and water into my work.

Through my work I strive to build community and create transformative spaces where diverse groups of people can become engaged and inspired through art and conversation.

Oscar Debs

FRANCIS J. GREENBURGER FELLOWSHIP FOR MITIGATING RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC CONFLICT

Lebanon/Norway

Oscar Debs was born in El-Mina, Lebanon. He has an MFA from the Trondheim Academy of Fine Arts. His practice is the arc produced at the intersection between 2 carbon torches of a motion picture projector. On the positive pole he aims to autobiographicize his hometown. On the negative pole is a quest to find the embodiment of entropy in the moving image: via dilation/compression of time, or the entropy that a vampire projects on the mirror. His works were exhibited in Beirut, Trondheim, Bangkok, and the National Fall Art Exhibition, Oslo (2021).

Jonatan Habib Engqvist

Sweden

Critic-in-Residence

Jonatan Habib Engqvist is a curator, author, and occasional teacher who has worked extensively with residencies and several experimental artistic projects. Previously curator at Moderna Museet and project manager at IASPIS, Engqvist has curated over 50 exhibitions on four continents including several international biennales and festivals. He is editor of the Swedish journal Ord&Bild and his writing has been published widely in books and catalogues around the world in several languages.

Moko Fukuyama

Japan/United States

Moko Fukuyama is a multidisciplinary Japanese artist based in Brooklyn. Fukuyama has received grants, residencies, and commissions from Jerome Foundation, MacDowell, Yaddo, Stoneleaf, Recess, The Shed, The Kitchen, Franconia Sculpture Park, Socrates Sculpture Park, and more. Her recent exhibitions include Streaming Surface at Smack Mellon, and On The Ground, organized by River Valley Arts Collective at Al Held Foundation. In 2022, she was the Studio Honoree of International Studio Program (ISCP) and was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

Lilian Garcia-Roig

THE MILTON AND SALLY AVERY ARTS FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP

Cuba/United States

Lilian Garcia-Roig is a Cuban-born, Texas-raised artist living and working in Tallahassee, Florida, known for her large-scale, on-site landscape paintings. Awards include a 2021 Guggenheim Fellowship, Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, Blackwell Prize, State of Florida Individual Artist Fellowship, and a M-AAA/NEA Fellowship. Residencies include Skowhegan, Joan Mitchell Center, MacDowell, and the Ludwig Foundation of Cuba. She has shown across the United States in shows such as Relational Undercurrents and the Florida Prize and has work in the permanent collection of PAMM.

Tomoko Inagaki

Japan

Tomoko Inagaki’s work explores life and death, nature and artificiality, as well as femininity through the medium of video installations with elements of performance. After graduating with a BA in Fine Art in London, Inagaki returned to Japan. Recent solo exhibitions include shows at CAS (Osaka, 2020), The Third Gallery Aya (Osaka, 2020), and the Kyoto Art Center (2013). Group exhibitions include Kawakyu Museum (2022), Casablanca Biennale (2017), and WROUGHT (Sheffield, 2016). Inagaki has attended residencies in Canada, France, and Germany.

Soukaina Joual

Morocco

Soukaina Joual is a Moroccan multi-disciplinary artist born in 1990, graduated from the National Institute of Fine Arts in Tetouan, Morocco in 2011. Her work showcases an interest in how one’s body can translate and reflect various tensions, dynamics, and differences. She usually focuses on the body from different perspectives: how it changes, its interaction with personal identity, and how it can also become a site to engage in important ideological debates. Soukaina Joual is 1/5 of the artist group K-OH-llective.

Sandra Carol Lapage

Brazil

Sandra Lapage, a Pollock-Krasner Foundation and Repaint History Artist Fund grantee, received her MFA from Maine College of Art in 2013 and has participated in exhibitions in Brazil, Europe, Asia, and the United States, including recently at Bienal de Arte Digital (Rio de Janeiro) and Galerie Salon H (Paris). 

Twice the recipient of the Odyssée grant, Sandra has attended residencies at the Fondation Château Mercier, NARS Foundation, MASS MoCA, Monson Arts, Château de Goutelas, and Bogliasco Foundation, and was a visiting artist at Tyler School of Art and Maine College of Art.

Mucyo

Burundi/Rwanda

Mucyo is a Rwandese/French contemporary visual artist. He developed his own unique style based on “the bleaching process” on textile. He makes pictorial experiences by drawing inspiration from urban art and African culture. In incisive and percussive graphic design, he draws faces, moments of life, and personalities on dark fabrics, burned by bleach, accentuating the “Vintage” effect.

Mina Nasr

Egypt

Mina Nasr is an Egyptian visual artist and researcher based in Cairo. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally across North America, Europe, and Asia, including Kunstverein Leipzig, George Washington University, Centre Cívic Ateneu Fort Pienc, Akiyoshidai International Art Village, and Kunst(Zeug)Haus. He has been part of numerous art residency programs, including MeetFactory (Prague), Pier-2 Art Center (Kaohsiung), Jiwar (Barcelona), Mosan Art Museum (Boryeong-si), and RoteFabrik (Zürich).

Altynai Osmoeva

LARKIN DAWN FELLOWSHIP

Kyrgyzstan

Altynai Osmoeva creates new, often experimental forms in her work as a multimedia artist. Osmoeva is free in her exploration and expression of ideas in furniture, textiles, fashion, light, video, and installations. She questions how traditions and cultural heritage can translate into the present through contemporary art. Often collaborating with crafts masters, her modern experimentations exist between textiles, sculptures, and installations. Nomadic culture, philosophy, and minimalistic aesthetic serve her as inexhaustible sources of inspiration.

Javier R. Perez-Curiel

EREMUAK FELLOWSHIP AT ART OMI

Basque Region of Spain

Javier R. Pérez-Curiel has a background as a DJ in clubs and festivals, alongside being a musician. Six years ago, he felt the need to explore other artistic fields. These experiences have been key for him in approaching other artistic languages, mainly sculpture. In 2019 he attended a workshop led by Itziar Okariz and Jon Mikel Euba where his approach to his art process changed. Now he is wondering: how can actions embody the present, while simultaneously creating a representation of presence?

Lia Porto

Argentina

Lia Porto, born in Patagonia, Argentina, lives and works in Buenos Aires. She explores domestic spaces entangled with the natural world. She has participated in several exhibitions in Argentina, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Spain. Porto received the Janet Bass Award for Creativity and Innovation at Fiberart International 2022, Third Prize at the 109 Salón Nacional de Artes Visuales, and First Prize Acquisition at the III Salón Nacional de Pintura Vicentín. She was also awarded fellowships from the Sacatar Foundation in 2023 and the I-Park Foundation in 2022.

Juliane Shibata

MCKNIGHT FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP

United States

Juliane Shibata is a ceramic artist and educator from Northfield, Minnesota. She was awarded a 2021 McKnight Artist Fellowship for Ceramic Artists, the Tile Heritage Prix Primo award at the 23rd Annual San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, and received First Place in the 62nd Arrowhead Regional Biennial. Her work has been included in the 2019 Blanc de Chine International Ceramic Art Award exhibition in Beijing and is in the permanent collection of Northern Arizona University’s Art Museum and the Brown-Forman Collection.

Gemma Smith

ART OMI AUSTRALIA COMMITTEE FELLOWSHIP

Australia

Gemma Smith is an Australian artist whose abstract paintings and sculptures explore the interaction between color and surface, intention and chance. Since 2000, Smith’s work has featured in more than 100 exhibitions and she has produced several public artworks. Her work can be found in major museum collections throughout Australia. Smith has exhibited regularly with Sarah Cottier Gallery (Sydney) since 2006 and Milani Gallery (Brisbane) since 2008.

Harold D. Smith Jr.

CHARLOTTE STREET FOUNDATION FELLOWSHIP

United States

Harold Smith is a multidisciplinary artist based in Kansas City. His work focuses on exploring the simultaneously complementary and contradictory narratives that Black men must navigate, externally and internally, to survive and flourish in America. Smith retired from teaching in 2021 after 36 years.

Painting and mixed media are his primary mediums. He also writes fiction and has created documentary films which he calls “abstractumentaries”.

Christopher Stackhouse

United States

Critic-in-Residence

Christopher Stackhouse is an artist, curator, teacher, poet, essayist, and independent critic. He is author of a volume of poems Plural (Counterpath Press). He is co-author of image/text collaboration Seismosis (1913 Press), featuring his drawings with text by writer/translator John Keene. His writing has appeared in – Hambone, American Poet, The Journal of the Academy of American Poets, Pfeil Magazine, Modern Painters, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail, among others. Recent credits include The Basquiat Reader: Writings, Interviews, and Critical Responses edited by Jordana Moore Saggese, and The Wayland Rudd Collection: Exploring Racial Imaginaries in Soviet Visual Culture edited by Yevgeniy Fiks. Stackhouse serves as an advisory board member at FENCE magazine and a contributing editor at BOMB magazine. He teaches in the Department of Art, College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State University.

Nicolina Stylianou

Cyprus/Finland

Nicolina Stylianou is an artist and independent curator working at the intersection between performance, sound, and sculpture by creating objects (body-sculptures) and situations (performances, happenings) whose configuration is activated with the use of the human body. The spectrum of her interest lies in the absurdity of existence and the in-betweenness of bodies, objects, things, spaces, networks, and subjects as states of transition, transformation, and noise.

Sameer Tawde

AMERICAN DREAM FELLOWSHIP

India

Sameer Tawde is a visual artist currently based out of Mumbai, India He has a multidisciplinary practice in photography, video, sculpture, and installation and his work has been exhibited in solo and group shows in India and internationally at museums, photography biennials, and film festivals. His work largely involves a fictional approach centering humor and play, which is always interlaced between the parallel worlds of the real and the imaginary.

Malaika Temba

United States

Malaika Temba is a Tanzanian-American textile artist based in NY. She grew up in Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the U.S. Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design, where she has also taught as an Adjunct Professor. Her work has been featured at Art Paris, Expo Chicago, and the MET Gala. Solo exhibitions include those at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, and at Galerie Lilia Ben Salah in Paris. Temba is a Pérez Award recipient and a 2023 Bandung Resident.

Ivana Tkalčić

ART OMI FELLOWSHIP FOR AN ARTIST LIVING AND WORKING IN CROATIA

Croatia

Ivana Tkalčić is a multimedia artist and art researcher who holds both a Master’s degree in Economics (2012) and a Master of Fine Arts (2016) from the University of Zagreb. She gained recognition through participation in numerous exhibitions both as an independent artist and as part of group shows and biennales. Her work has been well-received both in her local community and internationally, earning multiple awards and nominations.

Maria Lucia “Lulu” Varona

Puerto Rico/United States

Maria Lulu Varona, born and raised in Puerto Rico, lives and works between New York City and the island. She learned embroidery techniques from her grandmother growing up, now applying them to make works addressing contemporary conditions. She currently studies theater and visual arts at the University of Puerto Rico. Varona’s work is currently on view as part of no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, curated by Marcela Guerrero,at The Whitney Museum of American Art. She has  participated in numerous art residencies. 

Martin Vongrej

ART OMI AND KUNSTHALLE PRAHA FELLOWSHIP

Slovakia

In the year when Tschernobyl exploded, A.D.1986, Martin Vongrej was born in Slovakia. In 2003, convinced by the exhibition of Stano Filko, he decided to continue and dedicate his life to visual art. In 2012 Vongrej received a Master of Fine Arts from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bratislava. Despite negative experiences with private galleries and artscene of the periphery, he still continues to live as an artist. Vongrej presented his work at Manifesta 8, ReMap 3 (Athens), and Biennale Matter of Art (Prague) and in the group exhibitions Orient at the Bunkier Sztuki Gallery of Contemporary Art (Kraków) and The Art of Diminished Difference at House of Arts Brno.

Syed Hussain

Pakistan

Syed Hussain was born in Quetta, Pakistan and graduated with a major in Indo-Persian miniature painting from the National College of Arts, Lahore. His work mainly deals with the identity issues, and the socio-political displacement of the Hazara communities of Afghanistan and Pakistan. He has showcased works nationally and internationally, including his solo show Under the Same Sky at O Art Space (Lahore). Hussain attended the Maktab Miniature Painting School Residency at QUAD (Derby).

Farhad Nikfam

Azerbaijan

Farhad Nikfam is an Azeri painter raised at the crossroads of post-Soviet, South Caucasian, and Iranian cultures, yet influenced by a romanticized image of the western world of the 1990s and 2000s. Nikfam discovers and explores new worlds, where all of these elements coexist. Inspired by the freedom of primitivism, as well as by industrial design, he creates new forms of daily life – angular and naive at the same time.

Eddy Ochieng

Kenya

Eddy Ochieng is a hyperrealist artist known for creating lifelike pieces that depict everyday scenes and diverse subjects with meticulous detail. His ability to create a sense of movement and energy in his work has gained him popularity, with exhibitions in Kenya, South Africa, the United States, and Australia. Collectors and key art players have taken notice of his work, which has been collected by art enthusiasts worldwide. Eddy continues to push the boundaries of hyperrealism and hopes to have an impactful career through his art.