We are excited to introduce the Cycle 16 of TAC Artist in Residence: Quinci Baker, Fay Ku, Josué Morales Urbina, Leo Pontius, Malaika Temba, Mark Fleuridor, Rose Malenfant, and Faviola Lopez-Romani.
The next nine months will be an exciting journey of artistic development for our AIR Cycle 16 cohort. The residents will delve into a full curriculum of technical classes, textile history and conservation and professional development that include weekly meetings, critiques, workshops and field trips, and engage with a wide network of professionals working within the textile arts field.
Learn more about the residents below and stay tuned to see their journey during the residency!
Quinci Baker is a mixed-media artist from Prince George’s County, Maryland. Her works blend personal and cultural archives with various craft and repurposed materials in an exploration of collective memory, loss, and imagination. Baker earned her MFA in Painting and Printmaking from the Yale School of Art in 2022 and her BFA from The Cooper Union School of Art in 2017. Her work has been exhibited at The Hole, NYC; Jeffrey Deitch Gallery in NYC; Jenkins Johnson Projects in Brooklyn, NY; Mehari Sequar Gallery in Washington, DC; and Keijsers Koning in Dallas, TX. Notable residencies include Shandaken: Storm King in New Windsor, NY, and SOMA Summer in San Rafael, Mexico. Baker was recently named the 2024 Emma Bernstein Fellow at A.I.R. Gallery in Brooklyn, NY. She lives and works in NYC.
Fay Ku is a Taiwan-born, Brooklyn-based artist whose works on paper are figurative, psychological and narrative.
Based in the New York Metropolitan area, Josué Morales Urbina is an award-winning installation and sculpture artist, whose work primarily explores transcultural displacement. Among frequent themes that arise in his art are a pervading sense of foreignness and the impermanence of memory, which he examines via contemplative abstract installations. These works are composed of a broad range of materials, including ordinary household objects such as, drinking straws, coffee beans, toasted white bread, and rubber bands. The questions of foreignness in Morales Urbina’s work are rooted in his being born in Guatemala City, Guatemala, and having lived across the United States as a “third culture kid” (an individual raised in a culture other than their parents'). Yet, as much as he creates to engage audiences in such explorations, Urbina’s artmaking has also afforded him the self-discovery that he, ultimately, creates art “to build a home for myself; my art practice is my home.” Among Morales Urbina’s notable achievements as an artist are his solo and group exhibitions in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Oregon, and Texas. An alum of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, he has completed artist residencies at the Vermont Studio Center, La Napoule Art Foundation’s Résidence d'Artiste Internationale, Centrum in Washington state, GoggleWorks, and Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. In 2023, he was recognized as a Sculpture Finalist by the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and was most recently awarded the 2024 Jersey City Arts Council Individual Artist Fellowship. Morales Urbina also holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Texas at San Antonio, with a minor in Art History and Criticism.
Leo Pontius (they/he) is a community-taught interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn. Their work is an exploration of healing and transmutation through process-based pieces that incorporate sculpture, weaving, painting, and found objects.
They have a degree in Religious Studies from Naropa University. Over time, their spirituality evolved into a fascination with the ineffable, which found expression through art. During their residency at the Textile Arts Center, they hope to use traditional textile techniques to create sculptural forms from unconventional materials.
They have an ongoing garment upcycling project called Petrichor Dyed, in which they hand dye one of a kind pieces to extend their lifespan. To learn more about that project, please visit www.petrichordyed.com
Malaika Temba (b. 1996, Washington, D.C.) is a Visual Artist based in New York. Temba creates textile works that honor the lineage of the diaspora’s aunties and femmes, addressing the responsibility, time, attention and patience expected of these laborers, comforters, nurturers, and providers. She wields fabric—an oft-overlooked material conflated with gendered notions of softness—as a resilient and unbreakable format to confront labor standards and global trade. Having grown up across Saudi Arabia, Uganda, South Africa, Morocco, and the United States, her lens and creative processes embrace globalization and intercultural connection by shining light on all of its intricacies.
Temba graduated with a BFA in Textiles from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2018. In 2021, she was honored as the recipient of the YoungArts Jorge M. Pérez Award and since then, she has been selected for significant residencies: Art Omi (2023, NY), MASS MoCA (2023, MA), Bandung Residency, MoCADA + A4 Arts Alliance (2023, NY) and Silver Art Projects (2024, NY). Temba has had solo exhibitions with Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami (2021; 2024; Miami, FL), Lilia Ben Salah Gallery (2023; Paris, France), and Gaa Gallery (2023, Cologne, Germany). She has participated in group exhibitions with Allouche Gallery (2021, NY), The Yard (2021, NY) and Mindy Solomon in collaboration with Albertz Benda (2022, LA). Her work has been collected by various public and private collections, including the collections of Jorge M. Pérez and Beth Rudin DeWoody.
Mark Fleuridor explores personal histories through painting, quilting, collage and patternmaking. Featured exhibitions include a Solo Show at YoungArts in Miami Fl, duo booth presentation at Future Fair NY with Anna Zorina Gallery, and a group show at Crisp-Ellert Art Museum. Mark Fleuridor has completed artist residencies at institutions such as Art Omi in Ghent, NY; Anderson Ranch Arts Center in Aspen, CO; Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, VT; and Oolite Arts in Miami, FL. Fleuridor is a recipient of the Knight Arts Champions Award 2022 and also a recipient of the Oolite Arts Ellies Award 2020 for his Public Art project “Being Held”. Fleuridor was also a visiting lecturer at multiple institutions including Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM), and Museum of Contemporary Arts (MOCA) North Miami. Fleuridor holds a BFA in Painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
Rose Malenfant is a multidisciplinary artist, educator and curator from New York, based in Brooklyn. Her sculptural practice is material and process oriented, centered in cycles of the body and environment. Rose uses a variety of techniques and materials including nylon pantyhose, bioplastic, silicone, gravity and time.
Her work has been exhibited by galleries throughout New York and internationally including El Barrio Art Space, Atlantic Gallery, the Factory LIC, Black Brick Project and Arts Letters and Numbers. She has received awards from The Art Students League of New York and the International Society of Experimental Artists. Rose is a member of the Textile Study Group of New York, an alumni of The Alternative Art School and SUNY New Paltz where she studied Visual Art and Visual Arts Education..
Rose was a recipient of Beam Center’s Artist in Residency Program on Governors Island where she continues to work as a project designer mentoring young artists through hands-on collaborative projects.
Rose is also curating upcoming exhibitions "Semi-Permeable" at Living Skin, Brooklyn, New York and "Propagation- Suspended Roots" at Studio 9D New York, New York.
b. New York, 1995
faviola (she, they them, ella, elle), is a time based artist, educator, and horticulturist investigating intimate architectures of quotidian life and possibilities for growing hospitable infrastructures. Faviola works in textiles and digital media to create instances of détournement to interrogate the violent hegemony of sight and form within the project of modernity to create intuitive narratives.