Introducing the 2021–22 Artists in Residence

The Studio Museum in Harlem is thrilled to announce Cameron Granger, Jacob Mason-Macklin, and Qualeasha Wood as the newest members of the Studio Museum's celebrated artist-in-residence community. They will receive institutional and material support from the Museum from October 2021 through September 2022.

This next cycle of the program will be the second in which the artists in residence will begin remotely, ensuring the health and safety of themselves and Studio Museum staff. Despite this necessary precaution, the program will continue to offer the artists in residence institutional guidance and professional development, facilitate studio visits with the Museum’s curatorial team and relevant art professionals to support the artists as they work during the continuing pandemic, and provide research backing, all leading up to a culminating exhibition.

For the fourth year in a row, the annual culminating exhibition will take place at MoMA PS1. Presented in fall 2022, the exhibition will be part of the multi-year partnership between The Studio Museum in Harlem, The Museum of Modern Art, and MoMA PS1.

Cameron A. Granger (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH; currently based in Columbus, OH) came up in Cleveland, Ohio, alongside his mother, Sandra, inheriting her love of soul music and habit of apologizing too much. A video artist, Granger uses his work both as a site for memory-making and a means to strategize new ways of remembrance in this age of mass media. His recent projects include “Everybody's got a little light under the sun,” a free food and short film program made in collaboration with Willowbeez Soul Veg and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and “The Get Free Telethon” a twenty-four-hour livestream community fundraiser for Columbus groups Black Queer Intersectional Collective, Healing Broken Circles, and Columbus Freedom Coalition, sponsored by Red Bull Arts. A 2017 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Granger has exhibited his work at The Bemis Center, Omaha, NE (2021); Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York (2019); and Platform Rf, Vaasa, Finland (2019).

Jacob Mason-Macklin’s (b. 1995, Columbus, OH; lives and works in Queens, NY) work explores the collision between the image and material. Utilizing archival images and personal forms, Mason-Macklin investigates new modes and subjects in an attempt to channel a current that is raw, murky, and desirous. His practice has been driven by a fascination with media from the Soul Power era in the United States. Distorting screenshots of Soul Train set designs, stills from Blaxploitation films, and cover art for mid-twentieth century R&B and funk albums such as James Brown’s Hell (1974) and Marvin Gaye's I Want You (1976), Mason-Macklin uses slashing, cutting, and undulating brushstrokes to create a standoff between the corporeal and the imaged in order to simultaneously embrace and unsettle motifs of libido and violence typified in counterculture iconography. Mason-Macklin is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work has been exhibited at Page (with Ryan Huggins), New York (2021); Interstate Projects, New York (2020); No Place Gallery, Columbus, OH (2020); and Jeffrey Stark Gallery (with Cudelice Brazelton), New York (2017).

Qualeasha Wood (b.1996, Long Branch, NJ; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) combines traditional craft and contemporary digital materials inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, queer craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars. Their work engages questions of the place, purpose, and hope for the nonontological Black queer female body. Wood holds a BFA in printmaking from the Rhode Island School of Design and an MFA in photography from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. In 2021, they were invited to create a trunk for Louis Vuitton’s two hundredth birthday. Wood has exhibited at Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021); CANADA, New York (2021); Kendra Jayne Patrick for Metro Pictures, New York (2021); the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, WI (2020); NADA Miami Beach at Kendra Jayne Patrick, Miami (2020); New Image Art, Los Angeles (2020); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); and Gluon Gallery, Milwaukee, WI (2019).