Announcing the 2024 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Awardees
The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2024-2025 award of a year-long rent-free studio space in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
The recipients for 2024 are Sarah Bedford, Melissa Brown, Michael Candy, Mark Joshua Epstein, Pap Souleye Fall, Tatiana Florival, Justin Rui Han, Ellie Krakow, Beck Lowry, Leonardo Madriz, Kristen Mills, Rachelle Mozman Solano, Anne Neely, Sagarika Sundaram, Andina Marie Osorio, Mariana Ramos Ortiz, and Phyllis Yao.
These 17 artists were selected from a competitive pool of 1,874 applicants by a jury comprising of Ellen Altfest, Jennifer Packer, Matthew Day Jackson, Keltie Ferris, and Virginia Overton. The residency provides rent-free studio space for a period of one year, lasting from September 2024 through August 2025, with an open studios weekend to be scheduled for Spring 2025.
2025 Phillip Pearlstein Painter and Irving Sandler Prize
Justin Rui Han is the recipient of the 2025 Philip Pearlstein Painter accolade. A dedicated member of the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Artist Advisory Committee, Philip Pearlstein co-founded the Marie Walsh Sharpe Space Program (now known as the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program) in 1991 alongside Chuck Close, Janet Fish, Irving Sandler, and Robert Storr. Ronald Hall was the first recipient of this distinction in 2021, followed by David Atkin in 2022, which will identify an outstanding representational painter and ensure that a non-abstract painter be awarded a residency annually in recognition of Pearlstein’s ongoing commitment to referential art.
This year's recipient of the Irving Sandler Prize is Andrew Woolbright. Founded in 2019, the $2,500 prize is awarded annually to program alumni who share Irving’s concern for the “intentions, visions, and experiences” of artists.
Artist Bios
Sarah Bedford
Sarah Bedford’s (b. 1969, Roundup, MT) semi-abstract, nature-based paintings explore the intersection between ecology and personal mythology by re interpreting floral imagery into new visual hybrids. Her recent exhibitions include: A Certain Slant of Light at Mrs. ’23 and upcoming summer ‘24 at Vitrine Bermondsey, London. Having shown in numerous group shows domestically and abroad, she also co-curated Flower Craft at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York in ‘22. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union 1993, attended the Skowhegan Residency 1997, and has been awarded grants and fellowships from the National Academy of Design and The Lower East Side Print Shop. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY and is currently represented by Mrs. www.sarahbedford.com
Melissa Brown
Melissa Brown (b.1974) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her paintings explore what is otherworldly about mundane events and collage representational techniques such as stencil, impasto and screen printed digital photography. Her works often use iPhone pictures as a point of comparison between recorded memory and lived experience. Recent solo and two person exhibitions include Two Pair and Windows and Bars at Derek Eller Gallery, West Coast Paintings at Anat Egbi in Los Angeles, Thrift Store Find at Andrew Rafacz Gallery in Chicago, Fountain, Melissa Brown and Jamie Bull at Dodd Gallery. www.melissabrown.tv
Michael Candy
Michael Candy is an artist whose work reflects the socio-political currents of contemporary technologies. Acting as a witness to the nature of cybernetics and digital culture, Candy positions the viewer in a physical and moral confrontation with issues challenging post-industrial society. His works often emerge as social experiments or ecological interventions, catalyzing audience experiences as environments are transformed through light and movement. This diverse practice mediates the liminal realm the digital age imposes on the physical world. Candy has been involved in many international exhibitions and residencies, notably: Water, (GOMA, Brisbane), Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art, (AGSA, Adelaide), Ars Electronica Festival, (Linz, Austria), The Kathmandu Triennale (Kathmandu, Nepal), The Forum of Sensory Motion (Athens, Greece), The Instrument Builders Project + Hackteria Lab (Yogyakarta, Indonesia), and Hawapi (Huepetuhe, Peru).
www.michaelcandy.com
Mark Joshua Epstein
Mark Joshua Epstein received an MFA from the Slade School of Fine Arts (London, UK), and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University (Boston, MA). Selected solo and two-person shows include: Turley Gallery (Hudson, NY), Asya Geisberg Gallery (NY, NY), Ortega y Gasset Projects (Brooklyn, NY), SPRING/BREAK Art Show (NY, NY), Handwerker Gallery at Ithaca College (Ithaca, NY), Vane Gallery (Newcastle, UK), Demo Project (Springfield, IL), and Biquini Wax Gallery (Mexico City). Selected group shows include: Geary Contemporary (Millerton, NY), Gaa Gallery (Provincetown, MA), Marquee Projects
(Bellport, NY), TSA New York (Brooklyn, NY), Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington (Arlington, VA), Collar Works (Troy, NY), Good Children Gallery (New Orleans, LA), Monaco (St Louis, MO), Beverly's (New York, NY) and Des Moines Art Center (Des Moines, IA). Epstein has been an artist-in-residence at the British School at Rome (Rome, Italy), the Fine Arts Work Center
(Provincetown, MA), Vermont Studio Center (Johnson, VT), Millay (Austerlitz, NY), Jentel Foundation (Banner, WY), Macdowell (Peterborough, NH), Saltonstall Foundation (Ithaca, NY), and the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center (Nebraska City, NE), amongst other places. His work has appeared in publications such as Chronogram, Hyperallergic, Whitewall, Two Coats of Paint, New American Paintings, Art Maze Magazine, and Dovetail. www.markjoshuaepstein.com
Pap Souleye Fall
Pap Souleye Fall is a Senegalese-American artist who explores the transmedia potentials of sculpture, installation, performance, cosplay, digital media, and comics. Much of their work reflects their growing up within an African Diaspora. Being of two worlds, Fall realized that through art he had the ability to construct his own. As such, he became fascinated with the ways art could be embedded in everyday life, activating common materials and encounters to explore themes such as diaspora, post-apocalypse, Utopia, identity, notions of masculinity, Africanisms, and Afro-futurism.
www.papsouleyefall.com
Tatiana Florival
Florival (b.1996) is an NYC-based artist/filmmaker. She creates short films, video sculptures, and paintings that investigate, and at times propose explanations for, intangible phenomena in our everyday lives. She holds a BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design, and has exhibited her work at Baxter St at the CCNY, Ortega y Gasset Projects, Studio 9D, Kunstraum Gallery, the Bijou Theater, and Expose Gallery. She has had residencies at Baxter St at the CCNY, MASS MoCA, Alfred University, and BRIC. She has received awards such as the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grant, and the 2022 Fellowship for Black and Indigenous Artists at the Studios at MASS MOCA.
www.tatianaflorival.com
Justin Rui Han, Philip Pearlstein Painter
Justin Rui Han (b. 1999, Rochester, NY), 2024 Sharpe-Walentas Phillip Pearlstein Painter, is a Brooklyn-based artist working from direct observation, film stills, and archival prints and manuscripts, responding both to distant histories of exchange and contemporary apparatuses of control. He structures beings, objects, and architecture into unlikely congregations, each work detailing a system that aspires towards autonomous function. Han received a BFA in Painting from Rhode Island School of Design and a BA in Archaeology from Brown University. He has participated in residencies through Vermont Studio Center and The Here and There Collective, and his first solo exhibition, Shatter Zones, opened in London at The Artist Room in February 2024.
www.justinrhan.com
Ellie Krakow
Ellie Krakow is an interdisciplinary artist who works with sculpture, drawing and photography. She is currently making abstracted figurative sculptures that combine bodily representation with forms inspired by the tools and architectures of medical intervention. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Marinaro, Below Grand, Goodyear Gallery at Dickinson College, NURTUREart, and Cuchifritos; and in group shows at venues including Simone Subal Gallery, 1/9unosunove, Field Projects, Thierry Goldberg, Kingston Sculpture Biennial, and the Pula Film Festival. She has participated in residencies at Skowhegan, Yaddo, Abrons Arts Center, Shandaken: Stormking, and The Swimming Hole Foundation. Parallel to her studio practice, Krakow's texts have been published in Precog, VECTOR, Lookie-Lookie, and Drain Journal; and her curatorial projects have been shown at The Whitney Museum of American Art, NURTUREart, and Mazmanian Gallery at Framingham State University. Krakow earned her MFA from Hunter College and her BA through study at Yale University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
www.elliekrakow.com
Beck Lowry
Beck Lowry (b. 1980, New Haven, Connecticut) has exhibited in New York at Headstone Gallery, Elijah Wheat Showroom, Art Miami, Select Fair, and Volta, and in Los Angeles at Klowden Mann. Their work has been featured in Maake Magazine and New American Paintings, and reviewed in Artforum. Lowry has completed residencies at Millay Arts and Interlude and their work has been acquired by numerous private art collections and is part of the collection at Gateway Community College in New Haven, CT. Lowry holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Economics and a Certificate in African Studies from Smith College. Lowry lives and works in Connecticut.
www.beccalowry.com
Leonardo Madriz
Leonardo Madriz (b. 1987, Louisiana) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Working across methods of filmmaking, painting, sculpture, installation, and creative writing, he makes material assemblages and expanded cinema in which short films are projected onto minimalist structures of domestic architecture. Observational vignettes and filmic abstraction shift across objects and boundaries. Presenting personal narrative framed by external forces, his work speaks to notions of place as home, migration and assimilation, relationality, disillusionments of the American Dream, and the inner states of belonging.
www.leonardomadriz.com
Kristen Mills
Kristen Mills is an interdisciplinary visual artist hailing from Upstate New York. Her work engages a variety of strategies: video, installation, comedic performances, and teaching in an ongoing investigation into what makes something believable. As a part of her studio research, she has been an artist in residence at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Sculpture Space, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and MacDowell. Mills gained her first museum show at the Delaware Contemporary, in 2017, with her collaborative project, Sister Spaceship. She has also held solo exhibitions at PRACTICE Gallery in Philadelphia, PA; Ortega y Gasset Projects in Brooklyn, NY; and upcoming this fall at Turley Gallery in Hudson, NY. www.millskristen.com
Rachelle Mozman Solano
Mozman Solano is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim award in 2024 and the recipient of a Colen Brown Art Prize and the Rema Hort Mann Foundation award in 2022. In 2021 she had a solo exhibition, All These Things I Carry with Me, at South Bend Museum, South Bend, IN. In 2020 Mozman released her monograph, Colonial Echo with Kris Graves Projects. In 2019 she had a solo exhibition, Metamorphosis of Failure at Smack Mellon, Brooklyn, NY. Mozman has been awarded residencies at LMCC workspace, Smack Mellon, Baxter St at CCNY, and Light Work. Mozman has been awarded the NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, the NYC Film and Media Grant from the Jerome Foundation and others. Her work has been published in Aperture, Vogue, Contact Sheet, Presumed Innocence, Exit and numerous other publications. Mozman is a Fulbright Fellow, and has exhibited at The Lumber Room, Portland, OR, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AK, El Museo del Barrio, New York, the National Portrait Gallery at Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C, the Americas Society, New York, New York, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Albuquerque, New Mexico, The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York, New York, the Chelsea Museum, New York, New York, The DeCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Lincoln, Massachusetts, the Museum of Latin American Art, Long Beach, California, the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art, Long Branch, New Jersey, Festival de la luz at the Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires, Argentina the Instituto Cultural Itau, São Paulo, Brazil, the Friese Museum, Berlin, Germany, the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile, Museo Nacional de Artes Visuales, Montevideo, Uruguay, Centro Cultural de España, Mexico City, Mexico, Festival Biarritz, Biarritz, France, as well as the IX Bienal de Cuenca, Ecuador.
www.rachellemozman.com
Anne Neely
Anne Neely is a painter who divides her time between Boston, Massachusetts and Jonesport, Maine. She has been a finalist for the Prix de Rome and twice a finalist for the MASS Cultural Council Fellowship. Her work has been shown in galleries and museums in New York City, New England, the West Coast and Ireland. Since 2000 her work has focused on Climate Change and in 2014 she had a solo exhibition at the Museum of Science, Boston entitled Water Stories, one of the first exhibitions of its kind about water issues in this country. Neely’s work can be found in the collections of The Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, The Farnesworth Museum, Rockland, Maine, Grunwald Center for Graphic Arts, UCLA, CA, The McNay Museum, San Antonio, TX, The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Boston, MA, The National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, The Portland Museum of Art, Portland, Maine, and The Whitney Museum, New York, NY among others. She also writes about painting. Anne Neely was affiliated for over a decade with the Lohin Geduld Gallery, NY,NY (now closed) and is currently with The Elizabeth Moss Galleries in Portland and Falmouth Maine.
www.anneneely.com
Sagarika Sundaram
Sagarika Sundaram (b. 1986, Kolkata, India) creates sculpture, relief works and installation using raw natural fiber and dyes. Drawing on natural imagery, the work meditates on the impossibility of separating the human from the natural, suggesting the intertwined nature of reality. Sundaram’s work has exhibited at the Bronx Museum of the Art, NY; Al Held Foundation with River Valley Arts Collective, Boiceville, NY; the Moody Center for the Arts at Rice University, Houston, TX; British Textile Biennial, Liverpool, UK; the Chicago Architecture Biennial and Nature Morte gallery, New Delhi, India. In 2024 her debut solo exhibition at Palo Gallery, NY was reviewed by Roberta Smith in the New York Times. Her work has been featured by ARTnews, PBS and Artnet News. Sundaram graduated with an MFA in Textiles from Parsons / The New School, NY. She studied at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad and at MICA in Baltimore. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Pratt Institute.
www.sagarikasundaram.com
Andina Marie Osorio
Andina Marie Osorio is a Nuyorican artist from the Bronx. Osorio's practice utilizes photography and image based installations to examine themes of domestic space and lineage in relation to her Puerto Rican heritage and her queer identity. Osorio was one of 50 artists to participate in the 2020 ForFreedoms AWAKENING Billboard Campaign. Her work has been shown at the LES Gallery at The Clemente and has been featured in Musee Magazine and Port Magazine. She is a recipient of the City Artist Corps Grant of New York City, the DRABL Artist Grant, and
Artists-in-Residence at The Center for Photography at Woodstock. Osorio holds a BFA in Photography and Related Media from Fashion Institute of Technology and an MFA in Photography from Yale School of Art.
www.andinamarie.com
Mariana Ramos Ortiz
Mariana Ramos Ortiz (b.1997 | Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers the structural and temporal qualities of sand as they pertain to themes of occupation, permanence, and protection in the context of Puerto Rico’s ongoing colonial realities. They graduated in 2019 from the University of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras with a BA in Humanities and received an MFA in 2021 from the Rhode Island School of Design. They have attended residencies at MASS MoCA, Kala Art Institute, Wassaic Project, Brown University, el depósito, CALA Alliance & Beta-Local, among others. www.marianaramosortiz.com
Phyllis Yao
Phyllis Yao (b.1994, Queens, NY) holds a BFA in painting from the Rhode Island School of Design. She most recently held a solo exhibition at MARCH and has previously shown at the Chinese American Arts Council (CAAC)/Gallery 456 (New York, NY) and Hales Gallery (New York, NY), among others. She has been an artist-in-residence at Lijiang Studio (Yunnan Province, China) and Shandaken: Storm King (New Windsor, NY). She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.
www.phyllisyao.com