BRIC is pleased to highlight the four recipients of our BRICworkspace visual artist residency program for Fall 2017. BRICworkspace provides professional, practicing artists with free studio space, a stipend for materials, and visits with curatorial staff from BRIC and other local institutions, and an open studio event. The residency program is now in its fourth year and is open to artists who live, work, or were born in Brooklyn. This fall's residents include Jonathan Allen, Tusia Dabrowska, Maria Hupfield and Josephine Messer. These artists all share studio space at 505 State Street, a satelitte residency location generously donated by Alloy.

JONATHAN ALLEN is a Brooklyn-based artist whose work focuses on painting, collage, video and performance. He earned his BA from Columbia College, Columbia University in 1997. Allen’s paintings are mixed-media, layered, complex compositions that use abstraction to evoke structures and societal forces. Allen’s most recent solo exhibition was at FiveMyles, Brooklyn as part of the BRIC Biennial: Volume II in December 2016. Allen often collaborates with poets and performers and is currently working on a series of subway ad interventions, Interruptions, which you can see on his Instagram page(@jonathanallenstudio). He is on the Programming Committee of VoCA, regularly curates at Repair The World NYC in Crown Heights, and is the On-Site Assistant (since 2013) at Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Arts Center on Governors Island.  

Born in Poland, TUSIA DABROWSKA is a Brooklyn-based artist who uses video, performance and writing to respond to the visual deprivation she experienced as a child growing up in 1980s Poland; channeling the visual pleasures she associated with the United States. Dabrowska received a BA from The New School, NY; a Masters from Trinity College Dublin, Ireland; and an MFA from NYU. Her work has been shown at Glasshouse and Open Source Gallery, both in Brooklyn; Print Screen Fest, Israel; Black Mountain College, Black Mountain, NC;  Great Wall of Oakland, Oakland, CA; The Americas Film Festival of New York, New York, and Fuse Factory, Ohio; among others. Dabrowska is an Asylum Arts alumna; she has received grants from the Puffin Foundation and others. 

MARIA HUPFIELD is a Brooklyn-based artist living in Crown Heights and member of the Anishinaabek Nation at Wasauksing First Nation, Canada. Her work consists of hand-sewn industrial felt sculptures—a mash-up combination of contemporary everyday references and place based knowledge informed by her lived experience and dynamic ancestry—activated via live performances. Maria’s traveling solo exhibition, The One Who Keeps on Giving, opened the 30th Anniversary of The Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at SITE Santa Fe, NM; The James Gallery, NY; The Bronx Museum of the Arts, NY; and at BRIC as part of the BRIC Biennial: Volume II. She is currently workshopping Electric Prop and Hum Freestyle Variations for Studio Views: Craft in the Expanded Field exhibition at the Museum of Arts and Design, NY and DoublePlus at Gibney Dance. Hupfield is an alumni of the Artist In the Marketplace program at The Bronx Museum of the Arts and was awarded a Painters & Sculptors Grant from the Joan Mitchell Foundation. 

JOSEPHINE MESSER is a Brooklyn-based artist, born in Santa Monica, CA, who refers to herself as a process painter. She earned her MFA from Yale University in 2017. Messer’s paintings are created by an accumulation of poured gestures over time, and she makes her own paint with pigment and Urethane. Messer’s work has been included in exhibitions at Western Exhibitions, Chicago; Fredericks & Freiser Gallery, New Release Gallery, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation, all in NY.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE BRICWORKSPACE RESIDENCY AND APPLY FOR UPCOMING SESSIONS >>