The Studio Museum in Harlem announces the artists in residence for 2014–15: Sadie Barnette, Lauren Halsey and Eric Mack, as well as the appointment of Amanda Hunt as Assistant Curator. Since its founding in 1968, the Studio Museum has held a strong commitment to nurturing and advancing the careers of both visual artists of African descent and curators and arts professionals committed to these artists. “Through its residency program, the Studio Museum continues its ardent support of emerging artists,” says Director and Chief Curator Thelma Golden. “This year’s artists carry on this long and storied tradition by adding their unique voices and vision to the forty-six-year history of this important program. Similarly, the Museum has always been a home for the curators who advocate for these artists. As such, we are incredibly excited to welcome new Assistant Curator, Amanda Hunt, to our institution.”

The Artist-in-Residence program was conceived at the Museum’s founding in 1968 and has supported more than one hundred graduates who have gone on to highly regarded careers. Every year, the Museum offers eleven-month studio residencies for three emerging artists. Each artist is granted a free studio space on the Museum’s third floor, a $20,000 fellowship and a $1,000 materials stipend. The program is designed to serve emerging artists of African and Latino descent, working across all media, locally, nationally and internationally. At the end of the residency, an exhibition of the artists’ work is presented in the Museum’s galleries.

About the artists

Sadie Barnette was born in Oakland, California in 1984. Barnette is interested in the consumerism, economics and quotidian aspects of West Coast hip hop culture. Her photographs, installations, performance, drawings and zines explore the material culture of California hip
hop through the aesthetics of Minimalism. She holds an MFA from University of California, San Diego (2012), where she was the Thurgood Marshall College artist-in-residence, and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (2006). Barnette has exhibited extensively in California and her work was featured in Fore at the Studio Museum in 2012.

Lauren Halsey was born in Los Angeles, California in 1987. She holds an MFA from Yale University (2014) and a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (2012). Halsey recently completed a residency at Skowhegan and is the recipient of an Alice Kimball English Travelling Fellowship (2013) and a Beutner Family Award for Excellence in the Arts (2011). She creates site-specific installations or “kingdoms,” built environments inspired by the speculative nature of Funk with materials ranging from crystals and LEDs to lasers, iridescents and more.

Eric Mack was born in Columbia, Maryland in 1987. He holds an MFA from Yale University (2012) and a BFA from The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art (2010). Working with textiles and other utilitarian objects such as pegboard and fans, Mack explores abstraction and gesture in the artistic fields of painting and fashion. He has exhibited nationally and abroad, including at the Studio Museum in the 2012 exhibition Fore.

About Amanda Hunt

Amanda Hunt comes to the Studio Museum from LA><ART, where she served as Curator since 2011. Hunt’s curatorial practice to date has had a focus on large-scale public and performative works. At LA><ART, Hunt worked to organize the Pacific Standard Time Public Art and Performance Festival with the Getty Research Institute in 2012, which included exhibitions by Bruce Yonemoto and John Outterbridge, and Made in L.A. 2012, co-produced with the Hammer Museum. She also curated Steffani Jemison: Same Time (2013), the artist’s first solo exhibition in LA, as well as public art commissions by Anna Sew Hoy (2014) and Carter Mull (2013), and performance by EJ Hill (2014). In March, Hunt curated Portland2014, Oregon’s statewide biennial. Hunt received an MA in Curatorial Practice from California College of the Arts and a BA in Art History from Clark University. A Philadelphia native, Hunt says, “I’ve truly enjoyed being a part of the close-knit West Coast creative community, but I am thrilled to be returning to New York to serve the vital and expanding mission of the Studio Museum under Thelma Golden’s leadership.”

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