Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Virtual Open Studios

Iranian artist, writer, and folder Yasi Alipour currently lives in Brooklyn and wonders about paper, counting, and silence. She received her MFA from Columbia University and is a faculty member at Columbia, Parsons and SVA, New York.

Combining her background in fashion design with sculpture, Patricia Ayres’s practice draws on themes of transgression and punishment. Using familial histories involving the structures and symbols of organized religion and the US penal system, Ayres analyzes how the body may be constrained physically and psychologically. Ayres holds an MFA from Hunter College, a BFA from Brooklyn College, and an Associate’s Degree from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Her work has been included in recent exhibitions at Koenig & Clinton Gallery, Thomas Hunter, and the International Print Center. She has participated in residencies at MASS MoCA, Takt Kunstprojektraum, and Sculpture Space (Utica).

Working in original and found imagery, objects, and video, Dana Buhl’s practice examines the connection between picture, image, and information with site-specific installations that lead viewers through a guided contemplation of invisible systems, both man-made and natural. Buhl holds an MFA from Columbia University, a BFA from Arizona State University, and was a resident of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Studio Program.

Dealing with icons and characters, Glenn Goldberg is a painter whose work expresses a dialogue with the decorative arts. Textiles, cloth, and patterns co-exist within his painting language, casting his most well-known subjects—birds, dogs, flowers, and cells—in scenes that embody complexity, awkwardness, and vibrancy. Goldberg studied at the New York Studio School and received his MFA from Queens College. He has been represented by Willard and Knoedler Galleries, and has received grants from the Edward Albee Foundation, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Arts. His work is included in the National Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum collections, among others.

Working at the intersection between storytelling, drawing, collage, and animation, Case Jernigan’s short films are composed of paper, drawings, and cutouts that have been digitally manipulated—imbuing his characters and storylines with an unsettling charm. He holds an MFA from the New York Studio School and a BA from the College of William and Mary. Jernigan has held residencies at The Center for Book Arts and the Saltonstall Foundation, screened work at The Santa Fe Film Festival and #11 Berlin, and is the recent recipient of a Screen Australia grant.

Artist, writer, and independent curator Tom McGlynn is based in the NYC area. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum of the Smithsonian. He is the director of Beautiful Fields, an organization dedicated to socially-engaged curatorial projects, and is also currently a visiting lecturer at Parsons School of Design, The New School. McGlynn’s work is interested in the morphing of commercial signage into cyphers of phenomenal experience—minimalist, abstract arrangements of color. He holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from the Ramapo College of New Jersey. Tom is an Editor-at-Large for the Brooklyn Rail.

Borrowing from art history, mythology, punk rock, and science fiction, Nicholas Moenich’s work creates eerie psychological spaces. His complex and personal formal language is situated between figuration and abstraction—creating paintings that simultaneously possess material presence and pictorial space full of sinister humor. Moenich holds an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art. He has exhibited at Underdonk, D’Agostino & Fiore, and Disturb the Neighbors.

Exploring the temporality of embodiment, Avery Nelson paints in bright, metallic palettes, and their work combines figurative, abstract, and symbolic visual language, examining the resulting contradictions, fragmentation, and tension of juxtaposing divergent forms of representation. Nelson received an MFA from Columbia University, a BA from Barnard College, and was a participant in the Norfolk Program at Yale University. Nelson’s work has been shown at Rubber Factory (NYC), The Ice House (Garrison), and The Lighthouse Works Gallery (Fishers Island), among others.

Exploring landscape as a site littered with scientific falsehoods, nonsense, and roads leading to nowhere, Jason Saager is a painter whose fantastical approach investigates the genre of landscape painting while incorporating contemporary ideas that challenge traditional understandings of the relationship between humans and nature. He earned an MFA from Hunter College and a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been exhibited at Washington Project for the Arts, Life on Mars Gallery, and Paul the Apostle Church in New York. Saager has been an Artist in Residence at Pioneer Works, as well as the International School of Painting, Drawing, and Sculpture in Montecastello di Vibio, Italy.

Working at the intersection of politics and theory, Mira Schor is an artist noted for her contributions to feminist art history. Her works center on the representation of language in drawing and painting, and her current work focuses on the experience of living in a moment of radical inequality, austerity, and accelerated time, set against the powerful pull of older notions of time, craft, and visual pleasure. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at the Hammer Museum, P.S.1, The Neuberger Museum, The Jewish Museum, and The Aldrich Museum. She is the recipient of awards from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Marie Walsh Sharpe, and Pollock-Krasner Foundations, as well as the College Art Association’s Frank Jewett Mather Award in Art Criticism.

Inspired by the architectural language of space, Don Voisine is an abstract painter whose oil paintings explore sculptural and spatial vocabularies, with a varied and reductive language of overlapping geometric shapes. Voisine studied at the Concept Center for Visual Studies, the Portland School of Art, and Maine College of Art. His long and noted career has included exhibits with the Center for Maine Contemporary Art, McKenzie Fine Art, and Spazio Isolo (Verona), and his with works are held in the collections of Yale University Art Gallery, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Portland Museum of Art, among others.

Artist, writer, and independent curator Phong H. Bui is Publisher and Artistic Director of the Brooklyn Rail, the River Rail, Rail Editions, and Rail Curatorial Projects. Among many other awards, Bui received The Dorothea and Leo Rabkin Prize for Arts Writers in 2017, was the recipient of an Honorary Doctorate from University of the Arts in 2020, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Award for Distinguished Service to the Arts in 2021.