ISCP TalkDecember 7, 2021, 4-5pm
Resilience of the Spirit: Joiri Minaya, Lauren Kelley and Devin N. Morris in Conversation Moderated by Dana Robinson
For this event, three New York-based artists will discuss how their art connects to healing and spirituality. Joiri Minaya, Lauren Kelley and Devin N. Morris, who were a part of ISCP’s 2020 Vision Fund residency, will be joined by artist and organizer Dana Robinson as moderator. This program will be presented on Zoom and will include closed captioning and live American Sign Language. A Q&A with the audience will follow.
Register for a secure zoom link here, and tune in on Tuesday, December 7 at 4pm EST.
Lauren Kelley is a storyteller employing a wry wit when surveying notions of emotional excess. Her approach to animation combines clay-mation with a collection of tan, plastic toys to stylistically evoke the children’s television programs of the artist’s youth. Her jittery, low-tech ideas take place amongst Technicolor dioramas; a plush backdrop in contrast to the flaccid storylines of a discontented cast of innocent characters.
Joiri Minaya’s work is a reassertion of Self, an exercise of unlearning, decolonizing and exorcizing imposed histories, cultures and ideas. She reconciles the experiences of growing up in the Dominican Republic and navigating the United States and the Global North, using gaps, disconnections and misinterpretations as ground for creativity.
Devin N. Morris collapses memory and space to envision delicate new realms of existence. Informed by his upbringing in Baltimore and his personal experiences as a queer man of color, his work often portrays semi-fictive characters who exchange acts of kindness and care within surreal domestic settings. Extending his practice of collage into physical assemblage and sculpture, Morris creates site-specific environments that refract the domestic interior and subvert traditional values and social boundaries.
Dana Robinson is a Brooklyn based multimedia artist whose work often addresses Black visual culture as it connects to leisure, love and social mobility. Since the beginning of the pandemic, Robinson has been using her skills as a painter and designer to raise money for groups like the Black Brooklyn Queer Fund and Black Trans Rent Relief. She earned her BFA in Design from Florida State University and her MFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York. Conversations of Dana Robinson’s eclectic collection have been covered by publications such as Vice, Ain’t-Bad, NY Mag’s Vulture, and It’s Nice That. She has three upcoming solo shows in 2022 at AIR Gallery, Haul Gallery in Brooklyn, and Fuller Rosen Gallery in Portland. She is currently a fellow at AIR Gallery and will be in residence at Wassaic Project in 2022.
After reviewing its own 25-year history, while also taking stock of the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black, Latinx and Indigenous communities in part as a result of local and global histories of systemic racism, ISCP initiated the Vision Fund in Spring 2020 to increase the participation of exceptional artists of color in its residency program. The fund amplifies ISCP’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, strengthening and deepening our work of supporting BIPOC artists.
This program is supported, in part, by National Endowment for the Arts, Hartfield Foundation; New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council; New York City Council District 34; New York State Council on the Arts and the New York State Legislature; Stavros Niarchos Foundation (SNF); The Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation; Teiger Foundation; Willem de Kooning Foundation; and William Talbott Hillman Foundation.
Participating Residents
