NXTHVN’s Visiting Artist Program is designed to enrich our arts ecosystem by inviting world-class artists to be in dialogue with our fellows, apprentices, and broader New Haven community. The Visiting Artist has a deeper engagement with our organization by spending an extended amount of time at NXTHVN, through multiple visits, to interact with fellows in their studios, lead a workshop of their choosing with our fellows, facilitate a session for our high school apprentices, and give a talk that is open to the public.

NXTHVN is thrilled to announce Awilda Sterling-Duprey as the winner of the Visiting Artist Prize. In partnership between NXTHVN and Untitled Art, this prize debuted at the 2023 edition of the Miami Beach art fair, awarding Sterling-Duprey with a $15K stipend and two-month residency as NXTHVN’s 2024 Visiting Artist, as well as the chance to exhibit at the gallery for its fall programming.

From September 28 to November 24, a solo presentation, Awilda Sterling-Duprey: Aesthetics of dis-order, will be on view in NXTHVN’s gallery. In conjunction with the exhibition, a public performance featuring her “…blindfolded” work is set to premiere on Saturday, October 26. For this performance, Sterling-Duprey will be in dialogue with local New Haven musicians providing improvisational jazz and bomba acoustics while she allows her body to feel and translate the music into rhythmic bodily movements articulated into bright pastel markings, lines, and textures onto black construction paper. 

Aesthetics of dis-order is the first exhibition to focus on Sterling-Duprey’s exploration of abstraction from the 1970s to present. Included works range from paintings and drawings, to newly recovered archival and ephemeral materials. Highlights in the exhibition include Sterling-Duprey’s 35mm (Kodak Ektachrome E100 Film) slides that present her study of abstraction in the natural and ubiquitous environments of San Juan, along with visual records of her earliest abstract studies created on cardboard. Sterling-Duprey’s exploration of abstraction has resulted in an intuitive and electric corporeal response; most notable in her “…blindfolded” performances. 

ABOUT AWILDA STERLING-DUPREY:
Awilda Sterling-Duprey (b. 1947- San Juan, PR) is an experimental, independent, and multidisciplinary artist that works and lives in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Sterling-Duprey’s work explores identity, gender, diaspora, language, and migration, challenging conventional notions of cultural, national, and gendered boundaries. Her work intertwines marginalities of self-representation and resistance, confronting the silencing and invisibilizing of Afro-Caribbean women. Working with multidisciplinarity and feeding from Yoruba Caribbean traditions, Sterling-Duprey transgresses the boundaries between drawing, painting, and performance through a decolonizing practice that challenges conventions in Puerto Rican fine arts traditions.

She is a founding member of Pisotón, the first experimental dance collective in Puerto Rico. Recent group exhibitions include Puerto Rico Negrx, curated by Marina Reyes Franco & María Elena Ortíz, Museo de Arte Contemporaneo (MAC), San Juan, PR; no existe un mundo poshuracán: Puerto Rican Art in the Wake of Hurricane Maria, curated by Marcela Guerrero, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Whitney Biennial: Quiet as It’s Kept, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, US; Cimarronas: artistas negras y afrodescendientes, Museo Casa Escuté, Carolina, PR; Untitled II, Kilometro 0.2, San Juan, PR.

NXTHVN is pleased to announce Mickalene Thomas as the inaugural artist for the Visiting Artist Program. Thomas will be at NXTHVN in the fall with our fellows and apprentices to conduct studio visits, facilitate workshops and have a public talk in conjunction with her exhibition Mickalene Thomas / Portrait of an Unlikely Space, which she cocurated, and is currently on view at the Yale University Art Gallery. We are thrilled to welcome Mickalene to the NXTHVN!

ABOUT MICKALENE THOMAS

Mickalene Thomas was born and raised in New Jersey and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY. One of the most influential artists in the world today, her innovative practice has yielded instantly recognizable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages within contemporary visual culture. She is known for her elaborate paintings composed of rhinestones, acrylic, and enamel. Not only do her masterful mixed-media paintings, photographs, films and installations command space, they occupy eloquently while dissecting the intersecting complexities of black and female identity within the Western canon. Outside of her core practice, Thomas is a Tony Awards nominated co-producer, curator, educator and mentor to many emerging artists. While embarking on her own monumental solo shows, she simultaneously curates exhibitions at galleries and museums. Thomas’s work has become an undeniable force within the contemporary art world and an indispensable inspiration to younger generations of artists. In addition to an Honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the New York Academy of Art (2018) and a United States Artists Francie Bishop Good & David Horvitz Fellow (2015), she has been awarded multiple other prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022); Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022); Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022); Glass House 15th Anniversary Artist of the Year (2022); Yale School of Art Presidential Visiting Fellow in Fine Arts (2020); Legend in Residence Award, Bronx Museum (2020); Pauli Murray College Associate Fellow at Yale University (2020); Appraisers Association of America, Award for Excellence in the Arts, (2019); Meyerhoff-Becker Biennial Commission at Baltimore Museum of Art (2019); Visionary Award, Pioneer Works (2019); She is the founder of the Art is Forward foundation, co-founder of the Pratt>FORWARD ‘Artist in the Market’ incubator for post-graduate students, and serves on the Board of the Trustees for the Brooklyn Museum and MoMA PS1.