Artist-in-Residence

Sable Elyse Smith (b. 1986, Los Angeles) is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and educator whose practice considers memory and trauma, working from the archive of her own body to mark the difference between witnessing and watching. “To see,” she writes, “is unbearable.” Her work has been presented at institutions including MoMA PS1, the New Museum, and Recess Assembly. It has also been seen through Artist Television Access in San Francisco and at Birkbeck Cinema in collaboration with the Serpentine Galleries. Sable Elyse Smith: Ordinary Violence is on view at the Queens Museum through February 18, 2018. Her writing has been published in Radical Teacher, Selfish Magazine, Studio, and Affidavit, and she is currently working on her first book. Smith has received awards from Creative Capital, Fine Arts Work Center, the Queens Museum, Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, the Franklin Furnace Fund, and Art Matters. She recently served as a visiting critic at Columbia University and is currently a visiting artist in at Virginia Commonwealth University. She lives and works in Richmond, Virginia.

Xaviera Simmons (b. 1974, New York, NY)

Lives and works in New York, NY

2005    Whitney Museum Independent Study Program, New York, NY

            Maggie Flanigan Studio, 2-Year Actor Training Conservatory, New York, NY

2004    BFA, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY

Tschabalala Self (b. 1990, Harlem) makes syncretic use of painting, printmaking, and assemblage to explore ideas surrounding the Black female body. Constructed with a combination of sewn, printed, and painted materials, Self’s exaggerated depictions of bodies traverse a variety of artistic and craft traditions. The physiological and psychological characteristics of her figures also reflect Self’s personal desire to articulate cultural attitudes and realities as they relate to race and gender. She writes, “The fantasies and attitudes surrounding the Black female body are both accepted and rejected within my practice, and through this disorientation, new possibilities arise.” Her work has been included in solo and group exhibitions at Tramway in Glasgow, the New Museum, and Art + Practice, among others. Self received her BA from Bard College and her MFA from Yale University. A 2017 recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant, she lives and works in New York and New Haven.

Born in 1984 in Les Cayes, Haiti

Born 1985 in Hamburg, Germany

Born 1984, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Lives and works in New York, NY
2012 MFA, Yale University School of Art, New Haven, CT
2007 BFA, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA 

Born 1987, Columbia, MD
Lives and works in New York, NY
014 MFA, Yale University, New Haven, CT
2010 BFA, Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, New York, NY