AIM Convening 2025: Artist Professional Development
Organized & Facilitated by the 2024 AIM Fellows
Saturday, February 8 • 12:30 PM – 5:00 PM
At The Bronx Museum (1040 Grand Concourse)
For Artists in NYC • FREE! • Optional RSVP
EVENT SCHEDULE:
You are welcome to attend all of the activities or drop in for one particular part of the event. We recommend staying for as much of the afternoon as possible to get the most out of this program.
12:30PM—Event Check-In Begins
12:30–5PM—Virtual Art Share (Submit Your Work To Be Included)
1–2PM—”AWAKEN” Soundbath with Toisha Tucker
1–3PM—One-On-One Artist Career Advisory Sessions (Registration is Full)
2–2:30PM—Tea Blending Workshop & Vision Board Crafting
3–4PM—Demystifying Grant Applications Panel Discussion with Heather Bhandari, Felicity Hogan, Melissa Levin, & Saya Woolfalk
4–5PM—Reception Catered By La Morada with Beverage Sponsorship by Sool, Sanzo, & TALEA Beer Co.
About the AIM Convening
As part of The Bronx Museum’s flagship AIM Artist Fellowship—an annual career accelerator program for the most promising artists based in NYC—the AIM Convening is a day of professional development and community-building activities open to all artists who would like to participate.
Specifically, the Convening is designed to impart vital advice to artists that can help them succeed in a competitive and difficult-to-navigate industry. It also seeks to create space and opportunity for NYC artists to connect with one-another and build community.
MORE DETAILS:
The 44th AIM Fellowship Cohort created this website of artist resources to accompany the 2025 AIM Convening.
Virtual Art Share
1:00 – 3:00 PM
SUBMIT YOUR WORK>>
The Bronx Museum's 2024 AIM Fellow Cohort invite any interested artists to submit one of their artworks to our virtual art share for the 2025 AIM Convening. These artworks will be projected in a slideshow throughout the event.
Artwork submissions are due by February 2 at 11:59PM.
"AWAKEN" Sound Bath
1:00 – 2:00 PM
RSVP>>
Come experience "AWAKEN," a sound bath led by artist Toisha Tucker.
Tucker will facilitate an immersive hour-long aural journey that is restorative and energizing.
Bring whatever will make you most comfortable for this full-body experience, including yoga mats, blankets, or pillows.
1-On-1 Artist Career Advice
1:00 – 3:00 PM
REGISTRATION IS FULL*
With 2024 AIM Fellows Ricki Dwyer, Diana Guerra, Delvin Lugo, & Motohiro Takeda: "With years of experience in the field and the prestigious Bronx Museum AIM fellowship under our belt, we’re here to guide you toward what’s next in your art career!"
*We may be able to accommodate walk-ins, but cannot guarantee it.
Tea-Blending Workshop & Vision Board Crafting
2:00 – 2:30 PM
RSVP>>
During this segment of the Convening, you’ll have the opportunity to assemble your own tea bags.
After learning about the healing properties of various loose leaf tea and herbs including sencha green, peppermint, lavender, dandelion root, rose petals, and assam black, you’ll have the opportunity to produce your own desired combinations. Enjoy a meditative moment and steep your tea in the Museum or take your blends home to savor later.
At the crafts table, you’ll have the opportunity to sketch & outline your hopes, dreams, and plans for 2025.
Organized by 2024 AIM Fellows lauren mcavoy, Jodie Lyn-Kee Chow, & Asia Stewart.
Demystifying Panel Discussions Panel Discussion
3:00 – 4:00 PM
LEARN MORE & RSVP>>
Demystifying Grant Applications is a panel discussion that seeks to offer clarification on the grant application process for artists: How do you determine how much funding to ask for? What is the most common mistake you see on grant applications? What makes a proposal stand out from the others? The panel will conclude with Q&A with the audience.
The panel features Felicity Hogan, Director of Learning at the New York Foundation for the Arts; Melissa Levin, Program Officer at Jerome Foundation & Independent Curator; and Saya Woolfalk, Artist & 2009 AIM Fellowship Alumna, with moderation by Heather Bhandari, Program Director at the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Demystifying Grant Applications was organized by 2024 AIM Fellows Hedwig Brouckaert, Juyon Lee, & Laurel Richardson.
THE 2024 AIM COHORT
This Convening has been collectively organized by The Bronx Museum’s 2024 AIM Fellows: Skip Brea, Hedwig Brouckaert, Jordan Cruz, Ricki Dwyer, Bryan Fernandez, Diana Guerra, DeepPond Kim, Juyon Lee, Delvin Lugo, Jodie Lyn-Kee Chow, lauren mcavoy, Laurel Richardson, Asia Stewart, and Motohiro Takeda.
Skip Brea
"My works examine the sadistic entanglements that make up our visual culture, language, and world history. By using a combination of digital illustration and painting tools, I weave, stitch, and mesh together paintings of our past that precede copyright laws with pieces of contemporary information to create a new unified image...."
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Hedwig Brouckaert
"As a teenager, I fantasized about hijacking commercial billboards–erasing their distorted messages of desire and identity– by painting them over. As an artist, advertising, and mass media imagery have been a primary material in my drawings, sculpture, and installation projects..."
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Jordan Cruz
"My interdisciplinary practice honors nostalgia as a radical emotional celebration of diasporic Puerto Rican identity and resistance. Through research and archival examinations of family lore, spiritual practices, and block culture, I create installations using votive wax sculptures to represent tools of cultural endurance..."
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Ricki Dwyer
"My practice investigates the poetics of self-construction. From the lens of a transgender experience, my work speaks to untangling a personal inner truth from the collective voices of community and culture. Much of my work plays with the power dynamics of an exterior gaze as it shapes or attempts to define one’s identity..."
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Bryan Fernandez
"Bryan Fernandez (b. 2000 New York, NY) is an artist from Washington Heights, New York—whose artistic practice centers around the Visibility of marginalized communities of his Cultural Background. As an Afro-Dominican, he observed his demographic’s lack of authentic representation in white media..."
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Diana Guerra
"My work takes the personal archive as a starting point to explore notions of home and a sense of belonging as a Latine immigrant in the United States. Through photography, film, and new media, I focus on the complex duality that shapes our immigrant identities..."
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DeepPond Kim
"I use clay to explore the body. Humans are born from dust and return to dust when they die. Clay is the perfect material for creating physical bodies. I like the natural, organic color of clay, which minimizes the need for additional tones..."
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Juyon Lee
"In an attempt to materialize such ungraspable things as time and the human relationship to time, my work explores the idea of transience and ephemerality through physical materials. To achieve this process, I arrange functional and nonfunctional objects in absurd relationships..."
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Delvin Lugo
"Delvin Lugo’s figurative paintings explore themes of chosen family and home within LGBTQ+ community in the Dominican Republic and NYC diaspora. His narratives capture moments where friends are engaged in simple pleasures like a poetry reading, dancing, a lover’s embrace, sharing a meal."
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Jodie Lyn-Kee Chow
"My personal and artistic journey reflects a rich tapestry of cultural, historical, and migratory experiences. The intersection of the African diaspora, European colonialism, and Chinese migration in my origin story provides a unique perspective on identity and heritage..."
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lauren mcavoy
"lauren mcavoy is an artist/sculptor coming from New Orleans, Louisiana. They are a collaborator and queer labor organizer with a background in welding/fabrication, blacksmithing, and foundry. Focused on collective connection, they are passionate about non-hierarchical mutual aid, anti-colonial land access/stewardship, and embodied healing practices..."
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Laurel Richardson
"My work journeys through thoughts and stories of the past, present, and future. I am charting my family lineage, collective histories, and cultural memory of the African Diaspora while also questioning the visibility, value, and historical representations of bodies of color, particularly Black women. I do this while reflecting on ideas of emergence, power, and resilience..."
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Asia Stewart
"I am interested in facilitating moments of sensation, connection, and communication through the visceral and vicarious elements of performance and their afterlives as photographs, videos, sculptures, and installations: all traces of my physical self. Their materiality and texture encourage the simple act of feeling..."
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Motohiro Takeda
"In recent years, our relationship with the natural world has been overshadowed by excess, spectacle, and technology. My work resists this tendency in favor of slowing down the speed of contemporary life to a human, tangible scale to re-establish our interconnectedness with the cosmos, our immediate environment, and the time that transcends human existence..."
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ABOUT THE AIM FELLOWSHIP
The Bronx Museum’s AIM program is singular among artist fellowships in conceit, longevity, and impact. The program began in 1980 and has since served more than 1,200 artists.
AIM is not a studio fellowship. Instead, it is designed to be a career accelerator for the most promising artists who are based in any of the five boroughs of New York City—including, but not limited to, the Museum’s own borough of The Bronx. The AIM Fellowship is designed to equip artists with the practical knowledge and skills necessary to succeed in the art world today.
Fellows are selected for the program through a competitive open-call application process and awarded a nine-month practicum led by a distinguished faculty of experts covering finance, law, media management, and writing, among other subjects vital to maintaining and growing a successful career as an artist.
With an over 40-year history, the Fellowship continues to grow lasting community and support networks amongst artists based in NYC.
As of 2024, the AIM program culminates in an artist-designed and led public convening in which the Fellows will share their newfound knowledge and skills with a wider audience of creatives, thereby establishing the alum as thought leaders and experts in their own right.
The Bronx Museum further uplifts its AIM artists through a dedicated biennial exhibition that showcases work from their respective studio practices.
Past AIM Fellows include artists Diana Al-Hadid, Firelei Báez, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Abigail DeVille, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Lucia Hierro, Glenn Ligon, Sarah Oppenheimer, Michael Richards, Jacolby Satterwhite, and Saya Woolfalk.