BRIC Announces the 2020 BRIC Media Arts Fellows
Nine Visual Artists Have Been Selected to Participate in the 2020 BRIC Media Arts Fellowship
2018 BRIC Media Arts Fellowship screening. Image courtesy of BRIC.
(BROOKLYN, NY — December 17, 2019) BRIC, a leading presenter of arts and culture programming is pleased to announce the nine artists selected to participate in the 2020 BRIC Media Arts Fellowship. This year-long program is dedicated to providing professional Brooklyn-affiliated visual artists with free access to equipment, classes, and studio/editing facilities. The selected artists also receive critical feedback from visiting curators and critics, as well as from BRIC curatorial and technical staff. The Fellowship culminates in a screening of the individual works created over the twelve month period, free and open to the public on BRIC’s Stoop. Nine fellows have been selected for the 2020 Media Arts Fellowship: Jonathan Gonzalez, Sareh Imani, Melissa Joseph, James McCracken, T. Autumn Newcomb, Elizabeth Orr, Carrie Elston Tunick, Tanika Williams, and Hanwen Zhang.
The BRIC Media Arts Fellowship brings together artists who have a strong desire to explore video and audio as distinct mediums or as part of an interdisciplinary approach to art-making. Participating fellows are provided essential technical skills and professional development tools to enact their creative vision. This year’s fellows were selected by a two-part committee, a panel of past BRIC Media Arts Fellows and a committee of BRIC staff members.
Every year, BRIC hosts a series of residency and fellowship programs that enable artists of all disciplines the opportunity to use BRIC’s resources to further develop their craft and careers and present their bold work. For more information and a full list of BRIC’s artist opportunities, visit https://www.bricartsmedia.org/artist-opportunities.
About the 2020 BRIC Media Arts Fellows:
Jonathan Gonzalez is a performance artist whose work explores the intersections of black non-being, the non-human, and economies of creative production on a damaged planet. Their work exists at the intersections of performance and collaborative interdisciplinary practices.
Sareh Imani is a multidisciplinary artist who works with a wide range of disciplines, including sculpture, installation, performance, and video. Her practice dwells between her individual studio work and her collaborative projects in non-gallery spaces. Imani’s work explores the reparative potential of art and science, intimacy and distance, instructions and poetics.
Melissa Joseph is an artist whose practice addresses the idea of what it means to be human and to be fragile. She creates work dedicated to mending and healing some of the seemingly persistent failures of civic and social infrastructure. Joseph is interested in connecting people through shared memories and experiences.
James McCracken uses photography, sculpture, video, printmaking, and found objects to create a narrative that reframes his experiences with systems of control and opens new possibilities of reform. His work often explores the trappings of our cultural identities and the vestiges of communities that he has lived in. He uses his camera to create lyrical photographic essays, and his visual storytelling addresses themes of political and social justice, along with investigations of family, religion, community, and the home.
T. Autumn Newcomb is a multidisciplinary media and performance artist. She uses color, humor, and optimism to celebrate diversity and promote self love through a variety of mediums including video, soft-sculpture, illustration and glass.
Elizabeth Orr is an artist whose work combines video installation, performance, and text. Her subject matter evolves from an interrogation into methodologies of thought and representation, oriented towards an understanding of the history of philosophy through a queer feminist perspective.
Carrie Elston Tunick is a multimedia artist who explores manifestations of love and sanctioned violence in the public consciousness through videos, prints, and paintings. Her practice is primarily driven by her video works which pulls from world events both historical and contemporary, pop culture, politics, and environmental disasters for subject matter.
Tanika Williams employs the use of narrative prose, video, performance, and installation to explore black women’s transfer of generational knowledge and transmission of embodied family archives. She designs liturgical rites to uplift the voices and expertise of marginalized black women and give authority to their autobiographical expressions in the production of knowledge. Her work is influenced by Afro-Caribbean aesthetics of magic and mystical phenomena.
Hanwen Zhang is an artist and filmmaker. Zhang’s practice is based on still and moving images, supplemented by performance, digital technology, and writing. Derived from observation in his personal experience, his work examines the status of individual existence in contemporary society, as well as its relationship with space, image, memory, and ideology.
ABOUT BRIC
BRIC is a leading presenter of cultural programming in Brooklyn. BRIC presents and incubates work by artists and media-makers who reflect the diversity that surrounds us. BRIC programs reach hundreds of thousands of people each year. Their main venue, BRIC House in Downtown Brooklyn, offers a public media center, a major exhibition space and project room, two performance spaces, a glass-walled TV studio, and artist workspaces. Some of BRIC’s acclaimed programs include the BRIC Celebrate Brooklyn! Festival held each summer in Prospect Park, a renowned contemporary art exhibition series, and two distinct media initiatives: Brooklyn Free Speech, Brooklyn's public access initiative, and BRIC TV, a community TV channel and digital network. BRIC also offers arts and media education and other vital programs at BRIC House and throughout Brooklyn.
PRESS CONTACT
Marcella Zimmermann Danellys Wong
Vice President, Cultural Counsel Account Coordinator, Cultural Counsel
marcella@culturalcounsel.com dw@culturalcounsel.com