Studio Museum in Harlem Selects Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston as the 2022-23 Participants in its Artist-in-Residence Program; Major Gift from Glenstone Foundation Endows the Signature Program
NEW YORK, NY, October 13, 2022—The Studio Museum in Harlem today announced the 2022–23 participants in its renowned Artist-in-Residence program, recognized around the world for having advanced the work of generations of outstanding artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent.
Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston have been chosen as the program’s newest cohort, joining a creative community that has grown over the past half-century to have more than one hundred fifty alumni, including some of the most celebrated artists working today. From October 2022 through September 2023, the new artists in residence will receive institutional and material support, including studio space, opportunities for ongoing interaction with Studio Museum curators, professional development guidance, and a culminating exhibition.
Thelma Golden, Director and Chief Curator of the Studio Museum, also announced that the Artist-in-Residence program has received an endowment gift generously contributed by Glenstone Foundation, which will provide a base of funding in perpetuity.
Golden said, “We’re excited to welcome Jeffrey Meris, Devin N. Morris, and Charisse Pearlina Weston to the distinguished roster of our Artist-in-Residence program, which has defined the Studio Museum almost since our inception and redefined the culture through our alumni’s achievements. We are also deeply grateful that Jeffrey, Devin, and Charisse are the first cohort to benefit from the endowment that Glenstone Foundation has established for the program. This endowment ensures that we can continue—after more than five decades of doing so—providing institutional support for working artists, developing leading scholarship around their practices, and presenting their work to new audiences.”
Emily Wei Rales, Director and Co-Founder of Glenstone Museum, said, “It’s hard to overstate the impact of The Studio Museum in Harlem’s Artist-in-Residence program, which has been a powerful incubator for so many artists who have gone on to transform our culture. In keeping with Glenstone’s dedication to creative breakthroughs that redefine the course of art history, we are honored to offer long-term support to this special program that is an institution unto itself. We look forward to seeing the achievements of this year’s cohort and those of many more exciting artists in residence in years to come.”
Additionally, the culminating exhibition of the 2021–22 cycle of the program, It’s time for me to go: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2021–22, featuring the artists Cameron Granger, Jacob Mason-Macklin, and Qualeasha Wood, will be presented this fall at MoMAPS1 as part of a multi-year partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.
Jeffrey Meris (b. 1991, Haiti) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice engages with the relationship between materiality and larger cultural and social phenomenon. Working across sculpture, installation, performance, and drawing, Meris’s work considers ecology, embodiment, and various lived experiences while healing deeply personal and historical wounds. Meris earned an AA in arts and crafts from the University of the Bahamas in 2012, a BFA in sculpture from the Tyler School of Art in 2015, and an MFA in visual arts from Columbia University in 2019. Meris has exhibited at Matthew Brown, Los Angeles (2022); Lehman Maupin, New York (2022); James Cohan Gallery, New York (2021); White Columns, New York (2021); Luggage Store Gallery, San Francisco (2020); Halle 14, Leipzig, Germany (2017); and the National Art Gallery of the Bahamas, the D’Aguilar Art Foundation, and Mestre Projects, all in Nassau, Bahamas (2012, 2017, 2021). Meris is a Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture alum (2019); an NXTHVN Studio Fellow, New Haven (2020); and a Sharpe-Walent as Studio Program artist in residence, Brooklyn (2021).
Artist Devin N. Morris (b. 1986, Baltimore, MD; lives and works in Brooklyn) is interested in abstracting American life and subverting traditional value systems through the exploration of racial and sexual identity in mixed media paintings, photographs, writings, and videos. His works present innocent and kind recollections of memories within surreal landscapes and elaborate, draped environments that reimagine the social boundaries imposed on interactions between friends, romantic partners, and family. Morris’s process of making is driven by improvisation and responding to changing environments where space, kinship, social interrogation, and available materials are explored and reflected.
Recent exhibitions include solo presentations On Paper, Deli Gallery, New York (2021) and Play Too Much, Baby Company, New York (2019); group exhibitions No Place, PPOW, New York (2020); The Skin I Live In, Lyles and King, New York (2021); and Potemkin/Body, Lubov, New York (2018). Morris was also included in The Aesthetics of Matter, the first New York City–based curatorial project by Deux Femme Noires: Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont (2018). He was featured in the New Museum’s MOTHA and Chris E. Vargas: Consciousness Razing—The Stonewall Re-Memorialization Project (2018), and the two-person show, Inside Out, Here, La Mama Gallery, New York (2018).
Morris is the founder of 3 Dot Zine, a publication and public forum for marginalized concerns. He hosted the Brown Paper Zine & Small Press Fair with The Studio Museum in Harlem in 2018 and created a site-specific installation at the MoMA PS1 2018 NY Art Book Fair. His solo show at Terrault Contemporary was listed in Artforum as the “Best of 2017,”and Time named him as one of “12 African American Photographers You Should Follow” in 2017. Morris received the 2019 New York Artadia Award.
Charisse Pearlina Weston (b. 1988, Houston, TX; lives and works in Brooklyn) is a conceptual artist and writer whose work emerges from deep material investigations of the symbolic and literal curls, layerings, and collapses of space, poetics, and the autobiographical. She deploys the fold, concealment, and repetition within her work as tactics of conceptual abstraction, which posits Black interior life as a central site for Black resistance. She holds a BA in art history from the University of North Texas; a Modern Art: History, Curating and Criticism MSc from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art; and an MFA in studio art, with a critical theory emphasis, from the University of California, Irvine. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program (2019–20).
She has exhibited in group shows at Contemporary Art Museum, Houston (2020); Jack Shainman Gallery’s The School, New York (2022); and the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York (2022). She exhibited in solo exhibitions at Abrons Art Center, New York (2020); Project Row Houses, Houston (2014, 2015); Recess, Brooklyn (2021); and the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University, Houston (2021). She will present her first solo museum exhibition at the Queens Museum, New York, in October2022. She has received awards and fellowships from Artadia Fund for the Arts (2015); the Dallas Museum of Art (2014); the Dedalus Foundation (MFA Fellowship, 2019); the Harpo Foundation (2021); the Graham Foundation (2021); and the Museum of Art and Design(Artist Fellow, 2021). In 2021, she received the Museum of Art and Design’s 2021 Burke Prize. She will be a Fields of the Future Fellow at Bard Graduate School in fall 2022.
About the Artist-in-Residence Program
The Studio Museum’s foundational Artist-in-Residence program gives emerging artists of African and Afro-Latinx descent an unparalleled opportunity to develop their practice in an eleven-month residency and offers audiences the chance to view this work in an annual culminating exhibition. Alumni of the program, who now number nearly one hundred fifty, include some of today’s most significant and innovative artists, including Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jordan Casteel, Lauren Halsey, David Hammons, Maren Hassinger, Titus Kaphar ,Simone Leigh, Kerry James Marshall, Julie Mehretu, Wangechi Mutu, Mickalene Thomas ,and Kehinde Wiley. The Artist-in-Residence program is made possible by Glenstone Foundation. The program is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts; New York State Council on the Arts; Doris Duke Charitable Foundation; Jerome Foundation; Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; and by endowments established by the Andrea Frank Foundation, the Jacob and Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Trust, and Rockefeller Brothers Fund. Additional support is generously provided by The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs.
About The Studio Museum in Harlem
Founded in 1968 by a diverse group of artists, community activists, and philanthropists, The Studio Museum in Harlem is internationally known for its catalytic role in promoting the work of artists of African descent. The Studio Museum is now constructing a new home, designed by Adjaye Associates in collaboration with Cooper Robertson, at its longtime location on Manhattan’s West 125th Street. The building—the first created expressly for the institution’s program—will enable the Studio Museum to better serve a growing and diverse audience, provide additional educational opportunities for people of all ages, expand its program of world-renowned exhibitions, effectively display its singular collection, and strengthen its trailblazing Artist-in-Residence program. While closed for construction, the Studio Museum is working to deepen its roots in its neighborhood through in Harlem, a dynamic set of collaborative initiatives. The Museum’s groundbreaking exhibitions, thought-provoking conversations, and engaging art-making workshops continue at a variety of partner and satellite locations in Harlem and beyond. For more information, visit studiomuseum.org.
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