AIM Convening 2025: Artist Professional Development
Saturday, February 8
12:30 PM – 5:00 PM
FREE!
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.
Artists will have the chance to engage in one-on-one consultations, hear about funding opportunities, and get advice from industry experts on building a sustainable career as well as enjoy socializing, refreshments, and more.
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.
2024 AIM COHORT
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.