SAT 05.11.24 2:30–4PM
The First AIM Convening is a day of professional development activities for artists. As part of the program, artists Kraig Blue, Abigail DeVille, and Bang Geul Han are giving a talk about their respective career paths as well as answering questions from the audience. All who are interested in these artists and the topic are welcome to attend this free event.
About the Panel Artists
Kraig Blue
Kraig Blue is an award winning multimedia visual artist and musician. He is a born and bred native New Yorker from The Bronx. His sense of adventure and artistic evolution led him across the country, deciding to create new roots in Los Angeles, California from 2005 to 2015, until his return home in 2016. California was an extremely productive experience, among many accomplishments he became the recipient of The Gibson GuitarTown Sunset Strip sculpture project(2010), recorded with multiple musicians, performed at the NAAM, and began surfing with The Black Surfers Association.
He received his BFA (2015) at the Laguna College of Art & Design in figurative sculpture, painting, and drawing, and his MFA in Studio Art from The City College of New York (2019). He is the recipient of two Conner Scholarship awards and in 2018 the Therese McCabe Conner Travel Fellowship to research altar construction within the Afro-Cuban religion of Santeria throughout Cuba. In 2021 he has received two prestigious awards, The Bronx Recognizes Its Own (BRIO) for artistic excellence and The New York Foundation of The Arts City Artist Corp grant.
K.A. Blue is a published illustrator, arts educator, photographer, musician, and fine artist; exhibiting in New York, Washington, DC, New Orleans, Vermont, and Southern California. His most recent artistic endeavor is exploring multimedia sculptor using found materials as metaphors to explore complex socially constructed ideologies and paradigms; creating multilayered assemblages as altars to become vehicles for contemplation and dialogue.
He’s worked with The Bronx Museum of Art, The Guggenheim, and currently the Brooklyn Museum in conjunction with their criminal justice diversion program Project Reset and the Gallery Studio Programs. In 2021 he is an awardee of the Bronx River Art Center’s Artist Studio Program (ASP)
Abigail DeVille
Abigail DeVille recently opened her first museum survey Bronx Heavens at The Bronx Museum. DeVille’s solo exhibition Light of Freedom organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy traveled to the Momentary at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville and the Hirshhorn Museum Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC (2020-22). Other commissions and solo museum shows include The American Future, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art; Lift Every Voice and Sing (amerikanskie gorki), ICA Miami; Empire State Works in Progress, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; No Space Hidden (Shelter), ICA LA; and Only When It’s Dark Enough Can You See The Stars, The Contemporary, Baltimore. Recent group shows have been held at the Swiss Institute, Pioneer Works, Wave Hill, Socrates Sculpture Park, 601Artspace, El Museo del Barrio, CAMH, The Bronx Museum, The 55th Venice Biennale, and The Studio Museum in Harlem, where DeVille was a 2013-14 Artist in Residence.
Bang Geul Han
Born and raised in Seoul, Korea, in 1978 and based in the US since 2003, Bang Geul Han’s work has been shown in venues including The Bronx Museum of the Arts, Queens Museum, NURTUREart, A.I.R. Gallery, The 8th Floor at The Shelley and Donald Rubin Foundation, Smack Mellon in New York City, and Centro Internazionale per l’Arte Contemporanea in Rome. She is a recipient of a number of artist residencies and fellowships, including Creative Capital Award, Artist in the Marketplace program at the Bronx Museum of the Arts, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program, A.I.R. Fellowship, MacDowell Fellowship, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and Center for Emerging Visual Artists in Philadelphia, PA. Han received her MFA (2005) in Electronic Integrated Arts from NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY, and her BFA (2002) in Painting from Seoul National University in Korea. Han's work has been reviewed and featured in 4Columns, Art Papers, Art in America, The AMP, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Brooklyn Rail. Han received her MFA (2005) in Electronic Integrated Arts from NYSCC at Alfred University in Alfred, NY and BFA (2002) in Painting from Seoul National University in Korea. Han lives in Brooklyn, NY and teaches at the College of Staten Island CUNY.
About the Artist Organizers
This talk was organized by five artists who completed The Bronx Museum’s flagship AIM Fellowship program in 2023: Dario Mohr, Misra Walker, Ami Park, Maya Jeffereis, & Jonathan Sanchez Noa*.
The 2024 AIM Cohort collectively created The First AIM Convening, which, in addition to the artist career talk, features appointments for portfolio reviews as well as a reception with a free limited-edition publication of resources for artists.
The other artists in the 2023 AIM Cohort are Syd Abady, Mickey Aloisio*, Roni Aviv*, Walter Cruz, María Elena Pombo*, Coral Saucedo Lomelí*, Daniel Shieh*, & Huidi Xiang*.
*Artists who currently have work on view at the Museum in Part Two of the exhibition Bronx Calling: The Sixth AIM Biennial.
Dario Mohr
Dario Mohr is a New York City based interdisciplinary artist. Born in 1988, Mohr received a BFA from Buffalo State College (2010), an MFA from The City College of New York (2019) and an Advanced Certificate in Art Education (2021). He combines nostalgic personal objects of varying heights with found materials to form shrines. These occupy the space in varying ways, leaning against walls, hanging from the ceiling, and existing as free standing sculptures with an architectural aesthetic. They also contain altars with organic offerings, symbolically designating them as devotional objects. Although created from a personal vantage point, the work functions publicly to open the audience’s perspective to ways they can reimagine nostalgic objects as symbols for memories, people, and experiences that can take on a spirituality of their own when revered in a way that is decontextualized from religion. He is also the founder and Director of AnkhLave Arts Alliance, Inc. which is a non-profit for the recognition and representation of people of color, particularly indigenous communities around the world.
Misra Walker
Misra Walker (1992) Bronx, NY, is a community organizer, educator, and interdisciplinary artist working in sculpture, installation, and video. In 1971 Marvin Gaye implored the world: “What’s going on? OoOoO, What’s going on?” Walker carries this question with her, asking after Gaye, what IS going on? How can we understand our present material conditions if we don’t have the tools to analyze our past? Her work seeks to bring the inseparability of the present from the past to glimpse a possible future of liberation from capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. Walker received her BFA from Cooper Union in 2015 and her MFA from Rutgers Mason Gross School of the Arts in 2022.
My work is for and made possible by:
The workers that cut fresh sugarcanes and bag fronto leaves
To the comrades who jump over turnstiles
To the folks that have multiple tongues
To the lands that inspire revolutions
Ami Park
Ami Park, born in Seoul, Korea, is an artist based in New York. Being genuinely interested in the universe as the source of all things, she believes thoughts, emotions, and objects hold different vibrations at a specific frequency and in a particular direction and are all interconnected. Her work explores the vibrations between human minds and things into a theme of self-awareness, identity, and perception. This relationship, conceptualized as a spiritual link, is expressed in fiber materials such as yarn and rope. This approach exists across all mediums in her practice; painting, drawing, and mixed media.
Her work has been shown at The KuBe Art Center, Chashama, New York Live Arts, and MoMA Poprally x The Andrew Freedman Home, among others. Her recent recognitions are by the Bronx AIM Fellowship (2023), the Puffin Foundation (2022), and NYFA Immigrant Artist Program (2022). She holds BFA in Fashion Design from the Parsons School of Design.
Maya Jeffereis
Maya Jeffereis' work work in video, performance, and installation seeks to expand upon overlooked histories and archival gaps through counter and personal narratives, offering both critical perspectives and speculative possibilities.
Jeffereis’ work has been shown in the United States and internationally, including the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Queens Museum, New Britain Museum of American Art, among others. Jeffereis is a recipient of the A.I.R. Gallery Fellowship and Cisneros Initiative for Latin American Art. She has been a participant in Asia Art Archive in America and an artist-in-residence at Lower Manhattan Cultural Center (LMCC), Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, and SOMA Mexico.
Jonathan Sanchez Noa
Jonathan Sánchez Noa earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts from The Cooper Union in 2020, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2023. Recent exhibitions of his work include Once at Cleve Carney Museum of Art, Chicago, IL (2023); Rastros en el tiempo at The Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center, New York, NY (2022); and Kunstnernes Efterårsudstilling at Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Copenhagen, Denmark (2021). Sánchez Noa was a 2023 AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum.
About the AIM Fellowship
The 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.
AIM Fellows—selected for the program through an annual competitive open-call application process—are 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. The Fellowship also builds lasting community and support networks amongst artists based in NYC.
Image: AIM Artists exhibiting in Part Two of The Sixth AIM Biennial. Photo by Argenis Apolinario.
