INTRODUCING SSB AWAY’S 2021 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
What We Value, We Cultivate and Nurture.
We are honored and humbled by the range and excellence of the more than 90 creators who applied for an SSB Away residency. At SSB the artist always comes first and we’ve added additional dates in both Abiquiu and Tuscany in order to accommodate just a fraction of the brilliant and engaged people who shared their vision and their work.
Valuing the art of liberation, SSB is pleased to support visionary artists and activists who are looking to the future—to uplift, to evoke the magical wildness in us, and to extend our understanding of creative alternatives for positive change in ourselves, our communities, and our world.
Susan Morgan / Abiquiu
For more than 30 years, Susan Morgan has written about art, design, and cultural biography. Her ongoing engagement with publications—their context, appearance, and multiplicity of voices and opinions—has evolved from the hands-on production of a publicly funded alternative-art magazine to becoming a regular contributor featured in journals and mainstream publications. Susan’s recent achievements include a comprehensive essay about 32 diverse artists commissioned for Murals of La Jolla; presenting “Diving into the Archives” at California Institute of the Arts, a paper that examines shifts in archival research; and producing “Looking at a Picture, Illustrating an Idea,” an essay and podcast about architect R.M. Schindler. During her SSB AWAY residency, Susan plans to further develop her project on writer Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant and her unpublished illustrated manuscript produced in New Mexico from 1935–36, One Hundred Wildflowers of the Pueblo Country with Tewa Indian Names and Uses—a cross-cultural, intergenerational collaboration intended to document and preserve material culture, indigenous language, and the ceremonial uses of native plants.
Sola Bamis / Abiquiu
Sola Bamis is a Los Angeles-based actor, writer, performance artist, filmmaker, and photographer. As the imaginative, resourceful, and outspoken daughter of Nigerian immigrants—conscientiously raised to value community, and heavily influenced by African storytelling—Sola’s work centers around the internal lives of Black and third-world women, with an emphasis on methods of survival in a landscape marred by neoliberalism, big tech, and xenophobia. Sola’s experimental-theater training at the California Institute of the Arts, professional experience as an interdisciplinary artist, extensive study of Black women’s literature, and distinct style of social-media engagement have given way to a pivotal moment in her artistic practice. She has chosen to exclusively, authentically, and unapologetically tell and enact the stories of Black women and girls. Named a 2021 Soul Center Distinguished Fellow, her short film The Event was named a 2018 official selection of the BlackStar and San Francisco Black Film festivals. Sola is currently working on a multipart solo-performance piece that uses comedy to chart the ways in which white supremacy serves as a deterrent to Black life, fulfillment, and self-esteem.
Tony de los Reyes / Abiquiu
Tony de los Reyes is a painter and printmaker living in Los Angeles, California. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Annenberg Space for Photography have shown his work, and he has been featured in the University of Gothenberg’s PARSE Journal. During the past year, his paintings and works on paper have been concerned with the stretches of borderlands in the high and low desert between Jacumba, California and Mexicali, Mexico. The work acts as a highly subjective site documentation that calls into question common notions of recording, analyzing, and conjecturing controversial territories surrounding the U.S.-Mexico border. Tony plans to use the time granted by SSB AWAY to complete a series of printed works on paper that combine photographic documentation with inert, site-specific materials derived from a 120-mile stretch of borderland. The resulting images will serve as a remembrance of the quiet beauty that remains in spite of the immense anxiety and trauma of the border.
Delbert Anderson / Abiquiu
Based in Farmington, New Mexico, Delbert Anderson is a Diné jazz-trumpet artist, composer, educator, and community leader. Founding the Delbert Anderson Trio and the band DDAT, the artist weaves Diné melodies into sound through the study and incorporation of Navajo Spinning songs—ultimately preserving them in a contemporary way. As jazz instructor at San Juan College, Farmington, New Mexico, Delbert developed the Native American Music Program, a crash course in music business and musical performance. Delbert contributed to the establishment of the San Juan Jazz Society, which helped incorporate music into the Farmington community, ultimately influencing the city’s recognition as a New Mexico Arts & Cultural District in 2018. Anderson won the 2019 Native Launchpad award from the Western Arts Alliance Advancing Indigenous People (AIP) program; the 2018 Trumpet Consortium Scholarship from the University of Colorado, Boulder; the 2018 Connie Gotsch Arts Foundation award; and a recent Chamber Music America award. Delbert plans to spend his time in Abiquiu developing a tribute to Don Cherry, practicing spiritual reflection, and considering how his work can be used to positively combat cultural inequity.
Elijah McKinnon / Abiquiu
Hailing from Chicago, artist and activist Elijah McKinnon’s work sits at the intersection of healing, wellness, race, sexuality, gender, new media, and storytelling. Their work explores themes of space-making, liberation, and resilience. They are currently building a social practice to create space for BIPOC and LGBTQ+ people to engage in rest, cultivate a culture of health, and heal from generational trauma and other systems of oppression. McKinnon’s achievements include pursuing a sober lifestyle to gain liberation, clarity, and purpose; receiving the 2020 Leaders for a New Chicago award from the Field Foundation of Illinois and MacArthur Foundation; and commiting to creating impact-driven initiatives during a year filled with so much loss, pain, and turmoil. McKinnon plans to use the time at SSB AWAY to continue designing a residency program in Owerri, Nigeria, for multidisciplinary LGBTQ+ artists of the diaspora—intending to promote rest and regeneration for high-functioning mid-career creators at the intersections of activism, visual arts, and storytelling.
Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu / Abiquiu
Living and working between New York and Los Angeles, Nana Yaa Poku Asare-Boadu is a performance artist who weaves a movement vocabulary of dance, speech, and video that complements and challenges histories of improvisation. Deviating just so from dance-contact, Asare-Boadu considers how improvisational forces explore the self and relational entities both animate and inanimate. This repertoire of movement tests the possibilities of sensuality, with Asare-Boadu meandering between stoic and seductive postures that navigate how affect, audience, and architecture inform the physics of the Black female body. She has presented work at New York’s Dream House and BRIC, the Dallas Museum of Art, and Los Angeles’ Soho House. During her residency, Asare-Boadu will explore a new performance informed by performance-studies professor Fred Moten’s instigation of “feeling through others—a feel for feeling others feeling you.” Implicating her relationship as a black woman with her audience, she sees this performance as a constant negotiation of artist Lorraine O'Grady's charge: "If the female body in the West is obverse and reverse, it will not be seen in its integrity—neither side will know itself—until the not-white body has mirrored herself fully.”
Hakeem Furious / Abiquiu
Hakeem Furious is a literary performance artist based in Denver, Colorado. Furious’ work is a representation of his Black American male experience and the decolonization process and healing within himself and his community. He has used his creative practice to help organize open mics and showcases for the community to gather and speak, and to facilitate and host workshops for writing, performing, and the spirituality of spoken word. “I have dedicated myself to the art of the spoken word because it’s as if theater and creative writing came together and had a baby,” he says. Furious also works as an arts administrator, using his pen to help nonprofits write curricula and grants, design and facilitate programs, and advocate in the intersections of mental health and integrated health care. He completed the WESTAF Emerging Leaders of Color Professional Development program and released his first manuscript titled Dinner with The Ego and i. During the SSB AWAY residency, Furious plans to continue work on his second manuscript, I’m a terrible person and I know It, an exploration of the dualistic cosmology of good and bad, dark and light, and implicit and explicit.
Mariel Roberts / Tuscany
Composer, performer, and improviser Mariel Roberts is a classically trained cellist with a master’s degree in contemporary performance. Working both acoustically and with live electronics and fixed media, her work has been categorized as contemporary classical, experimental, avant-garde, electro-acoustic, and free improvisation. Mariel recently released her fourth solo recording of her own improvisation-based pieces for solo cello and live electronics, and completed a collaborative piece with sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard (DSK) that utilizes field recordings made along the border wall between the United States and Mexico. Mariel will use her SSB AWAY residency to work on a new solo-piano piece commissioned by New York-based pianist Conor Hanick, regarded as one of his generation’s most inquisitive interpreters of classical and contemporary music. The impetus is to create a musical environment that highlights the desperate condition of immigrants in detention centers at the U.S.-Mexico border. The piece will be created using recordings taken from within and outside the Imperial Regional Detention Facility (ICE) in Calexico, California. The pianist's performance material will be derived largely from the field recordings to create a modified aural impression of the acoustic environment captured in the facility. Photo: Peter Gannushkin
Tomas Moniz / Tuscany
Based in Oakland, Tomas Moniz considers himself a hybrid writer—of multiple genres and mixed race—resulting in a strange amalgamation of story and truth, prose and poetry, writing for the page and performance. His debut novel, Big Familia, received a starred Kirkus review and is a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Tomas says, “I love to explore ideas about how to live an authentic and just life through writing.” He was 2020 Artist Affiliate for Headlands Center for Arts; his novella All Friends Are Necessary was selected for publication by Mason Jar Press. Publishing zines about race, identity, and pop culture as well as countless articles on radical parenting, feminism, and social justice—addressing intimacy, sexuality, and the beauty of language through writing—Tomas infuses his prose with the vitality of performance and poetry. Awarded the SSB AWAY Tuscany residency, Tomas will continue work on a novel tentatively titled Rey Rediscovers. In this work, he is looking to embrace the contradictions of making family and choosing family while addressing issues of masculinity, patriarchy, Chicanx roots, and self-inflicted and culturally-ingrained colonization.
