Announcing the 2026-2027 Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residents
The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program (SWSP), one of New York City's most competitive art residency programs, today announced the 2026-2027 cohort of incoming resident artists, along with the recipients of two prestigious honors: the Philip Pearlstein Painter Distinction and the 2025-2026 Irving Sandler Prize. Selected from a national pool of 2,059 applicants, seventeen artists have been awarded year-long, rent-free studio spaces in DUMBO, Brooklyn. Residents are chosen annually by a jury of distinguished contemporary artists.
Additionally, the Sharpe-Walentas Artist Advisory Committee welcomed Annabel Thompson, co-founder of Public Assembly and founder of Sugar Sugar!, Domino Square's summer festival of experimental performances, alongside Ellen Altfest, Phong Bui, Matthew Deleget, Deborah Kass, and Jennifer Packer, as well as program alumni Tara Donovan and Didier William.
The recipients of the 2026-2027 SWSP residency are: Alisa Sikelianos-Carter, Anne Gilman, Beverly Fishman, David Shrobe, Davis Arney, E.E. Ikeler, Emily Janowick, Isaiah Davis, Jonathan Sanchez Noa, Khalif Tahir Thompson, Lee Maxey, Louis Block, Madjeen Isaac, Mariel Rolwing Montes, Olivia Jia, Satpreet Kahlon, Takuji Hamanaka.
"DUMBO has been a home for artists for decades, and the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program exists to keep that legacy alive and thriving,” said Ariel Willmott, Director of Cultural Affairs at the Walentas Family Foundation. “Every year, watching a new cohort of exceptionally talented artists walk through these studio doors is genuinely exciting. This neighborhood has always been a place where art happens, and these artists are a big part of why it stays that way."
Residents are chosen annually by a jury of distinguished contemporary artists. This year's 2026-2027 jury was composed of current SWSP Artists Advisory Committee members Matthew Deleget, Phong Bui, and Didier William ‘12, and SWSP alumni Josephine Halvorson ‘09, and William Villalongo ‘05.
“I’m honored to join the Artist Advisory Committee alongside such an inspiring group of artists and cultural leaders,” said Annabel Thompson, co-founder of Public Assembly and founder of Sugar Sugar! “The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Cohort has long played a vital role in sustaining New York’s artist community and I am excited to support the next generation of residents as they shape new conversations through their practices.”
Residents of SWSP benefit from a range of community-driven opportunities, including participation in the public DUMBO Open Studios event each April and organized studio visits by curators, museum and gallery professionals, writers, and critics, all alongside rent-free studio space. A full list of current and former residents is available at www.thestudioprogram.com.
SWSP also announced Sarah Bedford as the recipient of the 2024-2025 Irving Sandler Prize. Established in 2019 by Irving Sandler, the $2,500 prize honors a program alumnus whose vision reflects Sandler's commitment to the "intentions, visions, and experiences" of artists. Additionally, Madjeen Isaac of the incoming 2026-2027 cohort has been awarded the Philip Pearlstein Painter Distinction, which identifies an outstanding representational painter and ensures that a non-abstract painter receives a residency each year, in recognition of Pearlstein's commitment to referential art.
DUMBO has long been one of New York City's most storied creative neighborhoods, its converted warehouses and industrial lofts providing artists with the kind of expansive, affordable space that has historically been essential to artistic production. For decades, the neighborhood has attracted painters, sculptors, photographers, and performers drawn to its unique combination of architectural character and waterfront proximity and it has served as a proving ground for generations of artists who have gone on to shape the broader cultural conversation. That creative identity remains very much alive today, sustained in part by programs like SWSP that ensure working artists continue to have a home in DUMBO.
SWSP reaffirms the Walentas family's dedication to fostering artistic excellence and sustaining New York City's cultural landscape. By providing time, space, and community to an exceptional group of artists, SWSP continues to honor its mission of advancing the creative practices of emerging and established voices alike. The Philip Pearlstein Painter Distinction and the Irving Sandler Prize deepens that commitment further preserving influential artistic legacies while championing the diverse perspectives shaping contemporary art today.
Artist Bios
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter
Alisa Sikelianos-Carter (she/her) is a Black, Queer mixed-media artist from upstate New York, born in Boynton Beach, Florida. Her practice is grounded in ancestral reverence, intuitive research, and visual theology. Guided by animism, mythopoetics, shadow work, and spiritual inheritance, she explores the psychic landscapes of the self alongside metaphysical terrains of connection and the unseen. Her work engages grief, loss, vulnerability, and transformation as emotional and energetic currents that inform how perception shifts and how time is felt in the body.
Anne Gilman
Anne Gilman is a Brooklyn-based artist whose large-scale drawings and multidisciplinary projects map information, thought, and emotion. Her dense scrolls show lines of extemporaneous text interspersed with drawn sections that reference personal and global challenges she observes as she works.
She has exhibited nationally and internationally with solo and group exhibitions in Cuba, Mexico, Paris, Berlin, and throughout the United States. Her most recent solo show, rendering / abrading / redacting / repairing at Five Myles Gallery in Brooklyn was curated by Seph Rodney with an essay by him included in the exhibition catalog.
Gilman’s work has been featured in Hyperallergic, Art Spiel, Bomb Magazine, Vasari21, Guernica Magazine, and Publishing Perspectives, and is in the collections of The National Museum of Women in the Arts, The Brooklyn Museum, New York Public Library, Azerbaijan Museum, The Library of Congress, The British Library, and the MoMA Archives, Library and Research Collection. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, The Edward Albee Foundation, Chenven Foundation, The Cultural Space Studio Program in Dumbo/Brooklyn, and The Brooklyn Arts Council Re-grant from the Department of Cultural Aairs. She was awarded the title of Professor Emerita in Fine Arts from Pratt Institute in 2024.
Beverly Fishman
Beverly Fishman is an artist who adopts the language of abstraction to explore the body, issues of identity, and contemporary culture. Her career-long investigation draws upon medical imaging, pharmaceutical design, and the history of modernist painting. She is the recipient of many awards, including the National Academy of Design Academician Award; an Anonymous was a Woman Award; the Hassam, Speicher, Bes, and Symons Purchase Award, from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship; a Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award; an Artist Space Exhibition Grant; and an NEA Fellowship Grant, among others
Fishman’s work has been the subject of over forty-five solo exhibitions at galleries in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Thessaloniki, Chicago, St. Louis, Los Angeles, and Detroit. It has also been shown at the Chrysler Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Toledo Museum of Art, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among others. Her work is represented in many collections including the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University; the Mint Museum; the Cranbrook Art Museum; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art; the Maxine and Stuart Frankel Foundation for Art, the Pizzuti Collection; and many corporate collections. Her work has been reviewed in numerous art magazines, newspapers, and scholarly publications, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Brooklyn Rail, Artforum, Huffington Post, Modern Painters, Artnet Magazine, Wallpaper, NY Arts Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and Art in America. Between 1992 and 2019, she was Artist-in-Residence and Head of Painting at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. Fishman is represented by Miles McEnery Gallery, New York, NY, and Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA.
David Shrobe
David Shrobe creates multi-layered portraits and assemblage paintings made in part from everyday materials that he finds in multiple geographies, but especially from around his familial home in Harlem. He disassembles furniture, separating wood from fabric and recombines them as supports for collage, painting, and drawing. Through these various modes of production, his work brings notions of identity, history, and memory into question while challenging conventions of classical portraiture. Fragments depict each figure to offer an uncanny outline that exerts a presence of being. Shrobe produces new narratives, fragmented and nonlinear, that feel intimate and personal without being anchored to a specific time or place.
Shrobe (b.1974, New York) holds an MFA (2013) and BFA (2009) in painting from Hunter College. He is an alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014) and was a Joan Mitchell Artist Teaching Fellow. Recent solo exhibitions include moniquemeloche, Chicago, IL; Steve Turner Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Thierry Goldberg Gallery, New York, NY; and Jenkins Johnson Gallery, San Francisco, CA. Notable group exhibitions include Multiplicity: Blackness in Contemporary American Collage which originated at the Frist Art Museum, Nashville, TN in 2023, and traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX (2024) and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. (2024); Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art, Brooklyn Museum, NY (2024-present); Steven Zevitas Gallery, Boston, MA (2024); Charles Moffett Gallery, New York, NY (2024); CFHILL Art Space, Stockholm, Sweden; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY; the Bronx Museum, NY; and When Langston Hughes Came to Town at the Nevada Museum of Art (2025-2026). Shrobe’s work is currently included in the group exhibition From Now: A Collection In Context at the Studio Museum in Harlem, NY (2026-present).
Shrobe’s work is held in the permanent collections of The Brooklyn Museum, NY; The Dean Collection; The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; The Birmingham Museum of Art; The Block Museum at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL; Union College, Schenectady, NY; Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon, Eugene, OR; NSU Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, FL; The University of Arizona Museum of Art, AZ; University of Chicago, Booth School of Business Collection, IL; and Pierce & Hill Harper Arts Foundation, Detroit, MI. Shrobe lives and works in New York, NY.
Davis Arney
Davis Arney draws from stock imagery, advertising, personal photographs, and memory to create paintings that hover between the mimetic and the uncanny. His work engages historical modes of painting as a means to examine contemporary issues of illusion, value, and taste, often through a quasi-autobiographical lens.
He earned a BA from the University of Colorado in 2014 and an MFA from Boston University in 2021, for which he received a full-tuition merit scholarship. In 2024, he was awarded a grant from the FST StudioProjects Fund and was nominated for the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant in 2023. He is also a three-time recipient of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant (2019, 2021, 2023).
Arney work has been featured in The Brooklyn Rail and New American Paintings, among other publications. He has exhibited at venues including Halsey McKay (Brooklyn and East Hampton, NY), My Pet Ram (New York, NY), Pio Pico (Los Angeles, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Brooklyn, NY), Trestle Gallery (Brooklyn, NY), Greene House (Brooklyn, NY), Alpha Gallery (Boston, MA), Dairy Arts Center (Boulder, CO), and Miami University (Oxford, OH). From 2024 to 2026, he was a member of the artist-run gallery Below Grand in New York.
E.E. Ikeler
E.E. Ikeler (b.1986) received a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2008 and an MFA from Yale School of Art in 2016. They’ve had solo exhibitions at Essex Flowers (New York, NY), Specialist (Seale, WA), Je Bailey Gallery (Hudson, NY), Mulherin (Toronto, Canada), and Kent Place (Summit, NJ). They’ve also exhibited at PFA Gallery (Washington, DC), EFA Project Space and 1969 Gallery (Both New York, NY). Ikeler’s work has been reviewed by the New York Times and the Washington Post. They live in Queens, NY.
Emily Janowick
Emily Janowick (b. Murray, KY) builds monumental sculptures and architecturally curious sound installations that shift physical and emotional perception through playful intervention. Janowick received a BFA from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, TN, an MFA from Hunter College in New York, NY, and attended Yale Norfolk in 2012.
She has held solo exhibitions at Foyer Gallery in Los Angeles, International Waters in Brooklyn, NY, and Parent Company and Kate Werble Gallery in New York. Their work has been written about in The New York Times, ARTNews, Two Coats of Paint, and Hyperallergic, among others.
Group exhibitions in New York include Kate Werble Gallery, Foreign and Domestic, International Objects, Ortega y Gasset, A.I.R. Gallery, and Hesse Flatow East. She was an Artist In Residence at Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, New York in 2025 and the Spring 2026 Windgate Fellow at Purchase College in Purchase, NY. Janowick is represented by Kate Werble Gallery in New York City. They live and work in Queens, NY.
Isaiah Davis
Isaiah Davis is an American artist specializing in sculpture and video. His welded steel forms, grief-laden and pushing against the logic of enclosure, and his videos, interrogating the social codes of Black masculinity, together inhabit a practice of resisting capture.
His welded steel forms, contrasting the industrial with the organic, the container with the absence, alongside his videos interrogating performances of Black masculinity, engage a sustained exploration of fugitivity. His practice employs conceptual strategies to resist capture and assimilation by dominant systems, connecting to lineages of refusal and subcultural histories in which control and dispossession were met with insurgent imagination.
Davis received his MFA from Columbia University and BFA from Cooper Union. He’s exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, Participant Inc., Kings Leap, and Kasmin (all New York), and was a 2023 recipient of the Rema Hort Mann Foundation Emerging Artist Award.
Jonathan Sánchez Noa
Jonathan Sánchez Noa is a Cuban-American artist working with installation, papermaking, and sculpture. He earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2020, and aended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. He was a fellow at The Bronx Museum AIM Program and resident at Santa Fe Art Institute, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Aslan Foundation Loghaven, Dieu Donné, LMCC Arts Center, Artists Alliance Inc, Pra>FORWARD, Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts, and Oak Spring Garden Foundation.
His work has been exhibited at Voloshyn Gallery, Kiev, Ukraine; Liste Art Fair Basel, Switzerland; ARCO Madrid, Spain; The Bronx Museum, NY; Print Center New York, NY; Sugar Hill Museum, NY; Marianne Boesky Gallery, NY; Cleve Carney Museum of Art, IL; The Clemente Center, NY; and Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark among others.
Khalif Tahir Thompson
Khalif Tahir Thompson (born 1995) completed his BFA at Purchase College, New York and MFA in Painting /Printmaking at Yale School of Art. Recent solo exhibitions include the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, North Carolina and Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg, Paris and Dubai.
Thompson was selected for Kehinde Wiley’s Black Rock Senegal residency, Senegal; the Yaddo Artist Residency, Saratoga Springs, New York; and AAF/Seebacher Fine Arts Prize, Salzburg, Austria. Collections include The Rubell Museum, Saint Louis Art Museum, Missouri; Pérez Art Museum Miami; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington D.C. khaliftahirthompson.com
Lee Maxey
Lee Maxey makes paintings, drawings, and books that dwell on paranoia as atmosphere, the hum beneath the surface of American life. She traces connections between early religious indoctrination and adult conspiratorial paern-seeking. Maxey received her BFA from the University of Central Arkansas, AR (2011) and her MFA from Boston University, MA (2016). Selected solo and two-person exhibitions include Gallery 12.26 (Solo, Dallas, TX, 2025, 2023), Olympia (Solo, New York, NY, 2024, 2021), and Yutaka Kikutake Gallery (Two-Person, Tokyo, Japan, 2023). A solo presentation of Maxey’s work at NADA Miami (2022) was selected for the Curated Spotlight by Joeonna Bellorado-Samuels. Maxey was an Artist in Residence at NARANJO 141 (Mexico City, Mexico, 2024), the Hercules Studio/Art Program (New York, NY, 2019), and the Fire Island Artist Residency (Fire Island, NY, 2018). Maxey teaches painting at Brooklyn College.
Louis Block
Louis Block (b. 1995, Cambridge, MA) is a painter based in Brooklyn. His work has been shown in New York, Jersey City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Annapolis, Chicago, and Venice. His writings and interviews with artists have been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Border Crossings, Hyperallergic, and Full Bleed Journal, among others. He holds a BFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art and was the recipient of a 2025 Fellowship at the Edward F. Albee Foundation in Montauk, NY. Block lives and works in Brooklyn.
Madjeen Isaac
Madjeen Isaac is a first-generation Haitian-American artist whose practice is rooted in home, diaspora, (be)longing, and environmental impact. Isaac reimagines and hybridizes landscapes, pulling from elements of her hometown, Brooklyn, and her ancestral homeland, Haiti. Central to Isaac’s work is exploring the “lakou,” a communal yard or third space born out of the Haitian Revolution, which she re-envisions as ever-evolving sites shaped by environmental and systemic occurrences. Through dream-like, nostalgic portals, she imagines worlds where access and autonomy are reclaimed, rooted in resistance, revolution, and collective care.
Mariel Rolwing Montes
Mariel Rolwing Montes is a painter from Brooklyn, New York. She earned her BFA from Parsons The New School for Design in 2017 and received her MFA in Fine Arts from Hunter College in Spring 2025.
Her work has been included in two solo shows: Good Heavens (2025) with Blade Study in New York and A Tablecloth at High Altitude (2024), an online solo show with Hyacinth Gallery. Recent group exhibitions include Ver La Oscuridad (2025), presented with Crísis Gallery in Lima. Recent publications include New American Paintings. She has shown work in group exhibitions in New York, Lima, Mexico City, and Copenhagen.
Olivia Jia
Olivia Jia (b.1994, Chicago, IL) is a Philadelphia-based artist and occasional arts writer. She received a BFA from the University of the Arts, Philadelphia in 2017. Honors include the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2015 and the President’s Award at the University of the Arts.
Recent solo exhibitions include Garden Path, 12.26, Dallas, TX (2026); Nocturnes, BANK, Shanghai, China (2025); Mirror stage, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2025); Nine Motifs, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2023); Perimeter, Margot Samel, New York, NY (2023); and Ex Libris, Workplace, London, UK (2022). Selected group shows include: Solar Music / Lunar Revel, Uner & Liu, New York, NY (2025); Inside, Fleisher/Ollman, Philadelphia, PA (2025); Thank you, I’m rested now. I’ll have the lobster today, thank you, Pangée, Montreal, Canada & Margot Samel, New York, NY, (2024); With yourself, Gaa Projects, Cologne, Germany (2024); Apricity, 12.26, Dallas, TX (2023); Untold Stories: Six Women Artists in Conversation, Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art & Storytelling, New York, US; The Blue Hour, Workplace, London, UK (2023); and To be a giant and keep quiet about it, Margot Samel, New York, NY and Yee Society, Hong Kong (2022). Jia's work is in the collections of the Brooklyn Museum, New York; Palm Springs Art Museum, California; The Bunker in West Palm Beach, Florida; the H+ Museum in Suzhou, China; and the Zuzeum Art Center in Riga, Latvia.
Satpreet Kahlon
Satpreet Kahlon is a Panjabi-born artist based in Brooklyn. She received a full-fellowship to pursue her MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 2019.
In addition to her studio practice, which has been featured in Hyperallergic and Artforum, she co-founded and co-ran an Indigenous arts organization that supported 400 artists with over $2m of opportunities and rematriated 1.5 acres of greenspace that was slated for development during her tenure from 2017-2023. For this work, she was named one of the Most Influential People in Seattle by Seattle Magazine in 2019 and was a 2022 Roddenberry Fellow for “new and innovative strategies to safeguard human rights and ensure an equal and just society for all.”
Satpreet’s practice has been supported by Headlands Center for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Arts, The Rauschenberg Foundation, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, The Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Vermont Studio Center, the RISD Museum, 4Culture, Henry Art Gallery, the Magnum Foundation, Brown University, and others.
In January 2025, she was awarded the Foundwork Artist Prize, an annual international juried award “to support outstanding artistic practices."
Takuji Hamanaka
Takuji Hamanaka (b. 1968) creates mosaic-inspired works on paper in which interlocking sections of monochrome color form dimensional, polychrome compositions. Adapting the traditional bokashi technique of Japanese woodblock printing to a contemporary practice, Hamanaka prints multiple sheets with subtle color gradients and assembles them into intricate, organic structures that evoke lattices, prisms, and shifting spatial planes. His work explores the perceptual and conceptual tensions between color and its absence, materiality and illusion, and the grid as both a formal and metaphorical device, often suggesting a dialogue between natural forms and geometric abstraction.
Hamanaka was born in Hokkaido, Japan, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. He served his apprenticeship at The Adachi Institute of Woodcut Prints in Tokyo, Japan.
Recent solo exhibitions include Geary Contemporary, Millerton, NY; Kristen Lorello, New York, NY; cfSHE Gallery, Tokyo, Japan; and Owen James Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. Selected group exhibitions include the International Print Center, New York, NY; McKenzie Fine Art, New York, NY; and Kentler International Drawing Space, Brooklyn, NY.
He is the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, three NYFA Fellowships, an Adolph & Esther Gottlieb Foundation Grant, and a MacDowell Fellowship, among others. His work is included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Fleming Museum of Art, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT; and Whitman College, Walla Walla, WA, among others.