Rebekah Crisanta de Ybarra a.k.a. Lady Xøk (Maya-Lenca tribal citizen) is a Twin Cities-based multi/interdisciplinary artist, musician, and culture bearer whose work is rooted in Indigenous Futurisms. Performing as Lady Xøk, she creates multimedia light and shadow installations for immersive experimental storytelling mixing electric and Mesoamerican instruments. She co-founded Electric Machete Studios, a Latinx Art + Music cultural production house. Past works include Dimensions of Indigenous in 2016 at Intermedia Arts; Petroglyphs and Borders as part of the inaugural 2018 artist-in-residence at The M–Minnesota Museum of American Art; Star Girl Clan in 2018 at In the Heart of the Beast PuppetLab Fellow; Decolonial Maya Constellation Maps in 2019 at Minnesota Center for Book Arts as part of the Jerome Mentorship Fellow; and ongoing installation performances developed in part by Redeye Theatre, New Native Theatre, Monkeybear’s Harmolodic Workshop, Catalyst Arts, ArtShanty and current residency with New York-based theatre La MaMa. www.rebekahcrisanta.com

Fellowship Statement

My experimental interdisciplinary social practice (visual art, music, theatre, dance, literature, and puppetry) seeks to shift consciousness around immigration, borders, exodus and interconnectedness of Indigenous Peoples of the Americas and shared and erased ancient histories of collective liberation. Rooted in Indigenous Futurisms, Lenca cosmovision of Managuara, Latinx artesenias of Mesoamerica, and liberation theology of El Salvador, I am interested in the intersection of Low Art, High Art and the Nepantla in-between spaces where God, ancestors, timelessness, and dreams live. I explore the threads of connection between the seen and unseen worlds. I work from a generative space of meditation, ancestor whispers, play, and somatic response. I use transdisciplinary methods to reconstruct into living form Lenca archeology, to document and reimagine my people’s unwritten ancient history for a new future where Central Americans in exodus, First Americans, have a basic human right to migration on Turtle Island, a land travelled for millennia.

Photo by Valerie Oliviero

Delina White is a Native apparel designer, beadwork artist and Indigenous materials jewelry maker. She is a member of the Pillager Band of Minnesota Chippewa and resides on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. She mixes traditionally indigenous materials with her original designed fabrics, including fabrics from around the world found among the woodland peoples through centuries of trade. She uses her art to communicate the values and beliefs of the Anishinaabeg, as an intergenerational cultural knowledge learner from her grandmother. Delina was recognized as one of Six MN Star Tribune’s 2019 Artists of the Year, for her work with the Hearts of Our People, a landmark exhibition as the first major thematic show to explore the artistic achievements of Native women. Her Woodland Scarf placed 2nd in USA Today’s “10 Splurge-worthy Gifts of 2020,” and was named, “2020 Artist in Business Leadership Fellow” by the First Peoples Fund.

Fellowship Statement

Artists provide inspiration to make change, protect, and thrive in a better world. I use fashion as a narrative to assert rights for equity, protect our sacred sites and environment, and to show cultural pride as sovereign nations. We all use fashion to make a declaration of opinion, attitudes and outlook on life. My goal is to continue advocating the importance of arts programming throughout Minnesota and beyond, to tap into the talents and grow business skills of Native artists and work with families engaging the youth in creative placemaking for better, healthier communities. It is my responsibility to preserve the ancestral knowledge and share to advance what artists envisions for themselves and our communities. This fellowship will provide support that will allow me to study apparel as a catalyst to wider approaches of learning, research and creative exploration to truly become an asset of my community and nation.

Photo by Ivy Vainio

Witt Siasoco (he/him) is a community-based visual artist living and working in Minneapolis, MN. His work actively engages the intersection of the arts and civic process through a variety of roles—as artist, graphic designer, and arts educator.

In recent years Siasoco was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Arts Access grant and the Metropolitan Regional Arts Council’s Next Step Fund. He has had residencies at the Kulture Club Collaborative, Pillsbury House and Theater, and Minnesota Museum of American Art. Siasoco was selected as a CreativeCitymaking artist, a collaboration between artists and urban planners to develop innovative approaches for addressing the long-term transportation, land use, economic, environmental, and social issues facing Minneapolis.

Fellowship Statement

My studio practice is rooted in creating art in public space that catalyzes civic dialogue and collective action. Throughout my career, I have created many community-engaged projects including This Home is Not for Sale, a collaboration with Poetry for People and recipient of an Americans for the Arts' Public Art Award; Drawing on Rice Street, a large-scale painting installation distilling over 200 conversations with Frogtown residents; and Carry On Homes Northeast, an installation focused on immigrant participation in the Census 2020. With my experience as a public artist and lifelong skater I brought together Juxtaposition Arts and City of Skate to create JXTA's Skateable Art Plaza, a youth designed, multi-purpose public space in North Minneapolis. Recently, I finished a large-scale mural for the Creative Enterprise Zone and created a new work for the City of Minneapolis’ Public Service Center.

Photo by Dan Huseby

Joiri Minaya (1990) is a Dominican-United Statesian multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City, who focuses on destabilizing historic and contemporary representations of an imagined tropical identity. Minaya attended the Escuela Nacional de Artes Visuales in Santo Domingo (2009), Altos de Chavón School of Design (2011) and Parsons the New School for Design (2013). She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Guttenberg Arts, Smack Mellon, the Bronx Museum’s AIM Program and the NYFA Mentoring Program for Immigrant Artists, Red Bull House of Art, the Lower East Side Printshop and Art Omi. She has received awards, fellowships and grants from Artadia, the BRIC’s Colene Brown Art Prize, Socrates Sculpture Park, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Rema Hort Mann Foundation, the Nancy Graves Foundation, amongst other organizations. Minaya’s work is in the collection of the Museo de Arte Moderno and the Centro León Jiménes in the Dominican Republic.

Fellowship Statement

My work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas.

It’s about reconciling the experience of having grown up in the Dominican Republic with living and navigating the U.S.A. and the global North, using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as fertile ground for creativity. I’ve learned there is a gaze thrust upon me which “others” me. I turn it upon itself, mainly by seeming to fulfill its expectations, but instead sabotaging them, thus regaining power and agency.

Through various visual disciplines, my work questions historic and contemporary representations of black and brown womanhood in relation to an imagined tropical nature, questioning ideas projected onto these identities and spaces from a feminist and decolonial position. I’m interested in the body, landscape, discourse, framing, (in)visibility, opacity, hybridity.

Catherine Meier creates drawings, animations, and large-scale installations of earth, sky, and horizon – of vast, open landscapes. Large in scope, her projects develop through time spent deep listening and giving attention to specific locations. She holds a BFA from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, and an MFA from the University of Michigan Ann Arbor. Her work has been shown in museums, galleries, and film festivals as well as in the very land that gives rise to her work. Meier’s project Standing Witness, site: Sage Creek, a hand-drawn animation that records the temporality and vastness of the land, was a featured project in Creative Capitals’ online web forum On our Radar. She has held place-oriented residencies at Badlands National Park and Cedar Point Biological Station. Meier received a McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, Minnesota State Arts Board and Arrowhead Regional Arts Council grants, and the Jacob K. Javits Fellowship for graduate study. Meier lives with her family near the North Shore of Lake Superior.

Fellowship Statement

I work to describe in visual artistic form the human encounter with vast, open landscape. My drawings, animations, and installations speak to the intricate, beautiful, and unseen understandings of land and place.

A settler descendent, I grew up in a small town at the eastern edge of the Nebraska Sandhills, and for seven years I worked as a truck driver hauling cattle throughout the Great Plains. While my personal and family history is tied to the Plains, my work is not based in nostalgia—it originates from a deep physical, mental, and emotional need to move in and through open land. My interest extends beyond visceral, personal need into a deep and abiding engagement with the history, culture, and environmental concerns of these large but delicate grasslands. I am deeply rooted in rural working class experience, and I find inspiration and guidance from contemporary Indigenous scholars, artists, and activists, the study of place and language, and environmental activism.

My work has become the story of time told through the language of place.

Miatta Kawinzi is a multi-disciplinary artist and educator of Liberian and Kenyan heritage. Raised in the southern U.S.A. and based in New York City, her work engages themes of hybridity, diaspora, and belonging. She received an MFA in Studio Art from Hunter College and a BA in Interdisciplinary Art & Cultural Theory from Hampshire College. Her work has been presented in spaces including the Studio Museum in Harlem, BRIC, MoMA PopRally, the Museum of the Moving Image, and IFC Center. Past residencies include POV Spark in partnership with the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History & Culture (NYC, DC, and Venice, Italy), Red Bull Arts Detroit (Detroit, MI), the Cité internationale des arts (Paris, France, with Lower Manhattan Cultural Council), Beta-Local (San Juan, Puerto Rico), the Bag Factory (Johannesburg, South Africa), and the Bemis Center (Omaha, NE). She received the 2018 Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant administered by Queer|Art.

Fellowship Statement

Born in Nashville, TN to a Liberian mother and Kenyan father, I grew up moving through various geographic, cultural, and linguistic spaces, which informs my interest in hybridity and layered imagery and content. I work with still and moving images, the voice and body, language, objects, space and sound to explore practices of re-imagining the self, identity, and culture through abstraction and poetics. Recent work traces a performative and experimental impulse through sculptural sound and video installation.

During the Fellowship, I will expand my ongoing research and creative production though historical, contemporary, and speculative relationships between the U.S. and Liberia - the West African republic founded in the 1800s with formerly enslaved Black people returning to the continent from the Americas and newly occupying positions of power. This project explores questions around hierarchy, Indigeneity, multiplicities and complexities of Blackness, cultural fragmentation, and the deep and steady yearning for the reparative.

Photo courtesy the artist

Ayana Evans is a New York City-based visual performance artist. All of her video, lithography, screen-printing, watercolor mono-prints, installations, and projection extends from her performance work. She received her MFA in painting from Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. Evans has performed at El Museo del Barrio, The Barnes Foundation, The Bronx Museum, Newark Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, The August Wilson African American Cultural Center, the Queens Museum and countless public locations for her guerilla-style performances. Her international work includes shows at FIAP performance festival in Martinique, Tiwani Contemporary in London, and Ghana’a Chale Wote festival. Evans was a 2018 Fellow at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art, 2018 NYFA Fellow, and 2019 Savage Lewis Fellow with Art on the Vine. Her recent press includes The New York Times, Bomb Magazine, ArtNet, New York Magazine’s The Cut, Hyperallergic, and CNN. Evans is currently an adjunct professor at Brown University.

Fellowship Statement

I am a NYC-based performance artist, who grew up on the South Side of Chicago. The sensibilities of both locations heavily influence my work with the body, race relations, and gender bias. My on-going performances/public interventions include: Operation Catsuit, I Just Came Here to Find a Husband, and a new series of collaborative works with artists of diverse backgrounds. These performances map how my body is perceived and treated as it operates in artistic and social spheres. Roberta Fallon, co-founder of Artblog, describes me as, “One part Wonder Woman, one part agent provocateur.” And writer Seph Rodney of Hyperallergic and The New York Times wrote: “I have seen [this] artist actually stop traffic on the Bowery in downtown Manhattan in 2016, where, in a floor-length lace gown, a dollar-store tiara and full makeup, she placed a chair in the street to do chair dips — risking her life. She survived. The halted drivers honked in confusion, consternation or encouragement.” During this residency I will continue the Operation Catsuit series via experimental film and costuming.

Photo by Makonnen

Lizania Cruz is a Dominican participatory artist, designer, and curator interested in how migration affects ways of being and belonging. Through research, oral history, and audience participation, she creates projects that highlight a pluralistic narrative on migration. Cruz has had her work supported through Create Change fellow at the Laundromat Project (2018-2019), Agora Collective Berlin (2018), Design Trust for Public Space (2018), Recess Session (2019), IdeasCity:New Museum (2019), Stoneleaf Retreat (2019), Robert Blackburn Workshop Studio Immersion Project (SIP) (2019), A.I.R. Gallery (2020-2021), BRIClab: Contemporary Art (2020-2021), and Center for Books Arts (2020-2021).

Fellowship Statement

For the past two years, I’ve been conceptualizing a piece titled Citizen Clock that looks at the path to citizenship, as well as, work around the legal process of migration. The Jerome Foundation fellowship will provide the support to develop this work and to collaborate with fabricators to bring this idea to life. It will also provide a space to expand my participatory practice into more conceptual objects that archive these processes. I’m excited to be part of this community and learn from all the different fellows.

Photo by Manolo Salas

Joseph Buckley (he/him) is a Black British Sculptor living and working in New York City. Recent solo shows include Letter from the Home Office at Lock Up International in London; Cousin Table at Cuchifritos, NYC; Traitor Muscle at Art in General, NYC; and Brotherhood Tapestry at The Tetley in Leeds, England. Recent group projects include I don't Know Whether The Earth is Spinning or Not... at the Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (for the VII Moscow International Biennale for Young Art); and Cellular World: Cyborg-Human-Avatar-Horror, at the Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (for Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art 2018).

Fellowship Statement

I have found myself preoccupied with the mechanics of objectification and dehumanization, and with a continuum I perceive that goes ‘corpse—slave—human—statue—sculpture’ and back again.

I am interested in the way that systems of abuse replicate themselves, at different scales, across our society. On the topic of replication, I am heavily invested in mold-making and plastic casting: I am interested in the connotations of industrial production, and the violence such industry implies.

Of late, I have been trying to work towards the topics of fascism and its contemporary manifestations. Some of my sculptures are of fascists and are ‘about’ fascism but, gendered as they are, they have also served as a way to focus my thinking surrounding the eternal font from which fascism metastasizes: a swollen, toxified, and entitled masculinity... a boil on my soul’s ass I must continuously lance and drain.

Photo by Jenny Hung

Leslie Barlow (she/her) is an artist and educator working in Minneapolis, MN. Barlow uses figurative oil painting to share stories that explore the politics of representation, identity, otherness, and race. Barlow earned an MFA from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (2016) and BFA from the University of Wisconsin- Stout (2007). Recent support of Barlow’s work includes: 2019 20/20 Springboard Fellowship, 2019 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, and several Minnesota State Arts Board grants. She currently teaches at the University of Minnesota, helps run the organization MidWest Mixed, is a member of the mural collective Creatives After Curfew, and she also supports emerging artists as the Director of Studio 400.

Fellowship Statement

I am interested in examining and reimagining our relationship to our racial identities through healing our collective understanding of belonging and what it means to be family. My life-size oil paintings serve as both monuments to community members and explorations into how race entangles the intimate sphere of love, family, and friendship. Working within the tradition of figurative painting provides a platform and space to challenge the norms and hierarchy of who is painted, what stories are amplified, and by whom. The work is created from places of vulnerability, nuance, community conversation, and personal experience. What results from my work is not the desire to simply have dialogue, but to manifest the power of images. My current body of work-in-progress is 3 years in the making. Titled Within, Between, and Beyond, it combines painting and video documentary and will be exhibited in 2021 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.

Photo by Ryan Stopera