2015 Studio Program Artists Selected

08.14.15

The Queens Museum welcomes five new artists to the Studio Program: ruby onyinyechi amanze, Andrew Beccone, Ander Mikalson, Tuo Wang, and Bryan Zanisnik. Artists applied for a subsidized studio at the Museum, available for one year, with possible extension for a second year. In designating permanent real estate to the long-term development of new work on-site, as well as to creating a community of artists, the Queens Museum aims to support artists’ creative processes and professional development. These artists were selected by artist Steffani Jemison and curator Jess Wilcox in dialogue with Queens Museum senior staff.

Through the creation of an alternative multiverse, ruby onyinyechi amanze’s drawings explore cultural hybridity, play, nomadism and non-linear narratives. amanze earned a B.F.A., Tyler School of Art and a M.F.A., Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2012, she was a Fulbright Scholar to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. She currently teaches drawing at Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

Andrew Beccone, an artist, librarian, and musician, is the founder of the Reanimation Library. The library has been exhibited widely at venues around the world including Vox Populi (Philadelphia), SPACE (London), High Desert Test Sites (Joshua Tree), talcual (Mexico City), 98weeks (Beirut), the Museum of Modern Art, the Queens Museum, and Kunsthalle Osnabrück.

Ander Mikalson is a Queens-based artist working in sound and performance. Select solo projects include “Three’s Company for Eight Performers,” Churner & Churner, NYC; “Score for Two Dinosaurs,” Art, Design & Architecture Museum, Santa Barbara and Queens Museum, Queens (all 2014); “Score for a Dinosaur,” Temple Contemporary, Philadelphia (2013); and “Score for a Cyclone,” Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm, Sweden (2012).

Born and raised in Changchun, China, Tuo Wang currently lives and works in New York. Through his performative manipulation on individuals’ lived experiences and intervention in intellectual legacies, Wang’s practice attempts to examine the unreliable relationship between the contemporary human status, myth and cultural archive. Wang received his MA from Tsinghua University, Beijing, 2012 and MFA from Boston University, 2014, and has recently shown at National Taiwan Museum of Fine Arts, Taiwan, HVCCA, NY, TEN Multimedia Center, Tirana, Albania, Vox Populi, Philadelphia, Gezira Art Center, Cairo, Egypt, NARS Foundation, NY and Residency Unlimited, NY.

Bryan Zanisnik received an MFA from Hunter College and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. He has recently exhibited and performed in New York at MoMA PS1, Sculpture Center, and the Brooklyn Museum; in Philadelphia at the Institute of Contemporary Art and the Fabric Workshop and Museum; in Miami at the De La Cruz Collection; and in Los Angeles at LAXART. Zanisnik is included in Art21’s award-winning documentary series New York Close Up, has been a featured guest on the Leonard Lopate Show on National Public Radio and is a contributing writer at Triple Canopy.