PRESS RELEASE Announcing CPW’s 2022 Artists-in-Residence
Kingston, NY – CPW is pleased to announce its 2022 artists-in-residence (AIRs). A total of 10 residencies were awarded to artists and writers working in photography and related media: Genesis Baez, William Camargo, Ryan Cardoso, Steven Molina Contreras, Eli Farinango, Claudia Ruiz Gustafson, Sarah May, Cheryl Mukherji, Elias Williams, and Daniella Zalcman.
These AIRs stand out through the clarity of their creative voices and their commitment to expanding the dialogue around race, identity, and diversity within the context of social justice, which is at the heart of this critical program.
Artists were selected by a panel including Aldeide Delgado, founder and director of Women Photographers International Archive (WOPHA), Kris Graves, artist, publisher, and former 2020/2021 AIR, and Qiana Mestrich, photography-focused interdisciplinary artist and writer.
CPW’s artists-in-residence each participate in four-to-six-week residencies. They receive honoraria, housing, access to CPW’s digital imaging lab, a library of and photo-related publications, as well as critical and technical support. Located a mile from the hamlet of Woodstock, our artist house provides private bedrooms and ample shared living spaces, as well as a large, shared studio workspace equipped with a large-format printer, scanners, and iMac computers among other equipment. Created in 1999, CPW’s residency program is unique in its longstanding commitment to diversity within the field of photography, and its criticality to the contemporary discourse on photography.
Every year, the applications are of such high quality that the finalists are chosen by the slimmest of margins and this year has been no exception. CPW wants to extend a full-hearted thank you to all who applied.
CPW’s Artist-in-Residence Program receives support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York State Council on the Arts with support from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature, the Milton and Sally Avery Foundation, the Gunk Foundation, and Canson Infinity. Special thanks go to the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation for their continued support. In addition, the purchase of CPW’s artist house was made possible through the extraordinary generosity from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, the Thompson Family Foundation, Howard and Ellen Greenberg, Dennis Gatto and his children Greg and Katha, and generous donations from over 100 individual donors.
Want to help? To make a donation in celebration of this special program, please click here. DID YOU KNOW? WOODSTOCK AIR has repeatedly been listed amongst the top residency programs in the U.S. See the list of the 20 top residencies on BlouinArtInfo. Or visit Format Magazine for the top photo residencies internationally. To learn more about WOODSTOCK AIR, click here.
Genesis Baez (Brooklyn, NY)
Genesis Baez is an artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Born in Massachusetts, Baez was raised in both the Northeast United States and Puerto Rico. She has exhibited her work internationally, most recently in London, Madrid, and New York. She holds an MFA in photography from Yale University, where she was awarded the John Ferguson Weir Award for excellence within the School of Art, and the Critical Practice award. She is a 2019 alumni of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and holds a BFA in photography with honors from MassArt in Boston. Her work has been recently published in Aperture and New York Magazine. Baez currently teaches photography at the Pratt Institute.
William Camargo (Anaheim, CA)
William Camargo is an arts educator and photo-based artist born and raised in Anaheim, California. He is currently the Chair of the Heritage and Culture commission in Anaheim and a lecturer in photography at the University of California San Diego. Camargo attained their MFA from Claremont Graduate University and BFA from Cal State Fullerton. He is the founder and curator of Latinx Diaspora Archives, an archive Instagram page that elevates communities of color through family photos. He uses photography, installation, public interventions, and archives to address issues of gentrification, and Chicanx/Latinx histories in a city. Camargo uses counter-narratives that amplify and extirpate hegemonic structures to local city histories, which was not taught in his public education in the city he grew up in.
Ryan Cardoso (Brooklyn, NY)
Ryan Cardoso is a visual artist on the east coast working in photography and filmmaking. His mode of image-making depends on the analog process of shooting film. His work centers on the portrait and the importance of how an image can stand as a relic, archive, and heirlooms of the mundane black. His work has gone on to reach a diverse range of different outlets. Cardoso’s work has been exhibited in both solo and group exhibitions with his most recent show being a public exhibition funded by Art & City Life exhibiting flag banners on street corners in celebration of Providence. Thanks to the Interlace Project Grant, Ryan is currently working on his latest project A Different Type of Church. Set to release in the summer of 2022, A Different Type of Church is a documentary with its lens on the black queer community and the private moments of dance and leisure as a way of self-healing. Ryan continues to play with his relationship to visual storytelling and sharing his perspective as a black gay male.
Steven Molina Contreras (Brooklyn, NY)
Steven Molina Contreras (b.1999, San Salvador, El Salvador) received his BFA in Photography from the Fashion Institute of Technology. Molina Contreras works with photography to engage with themes of migration, sacrifice, and divinity. He does this by collaborating with his family on pictures in the United States and El Salvador. His work has been published in Aperture Magazine, Light Works Contact Sheet, and Humble Arts Foundation. He was an artist-in-residence at Light Work, in Syracuse, NY for 2021. He has lectured at Standford University; Pratt University; Bard; the School of Visual Arts; the Fashion Institute of Technology; Baltimore City Community College; and Marble Hill Camera Club. He lives and works in New York.
Eli Farinango (New York, NY)
Eli Farinango is a Kichwa artist and visual storyteller, born in Kichwa territory, Quito, Ecuador, and raised in Turtle Island, Canada. Through her practice, she explores the vastness and beauty of the healing journey making intentional space to reclaim ancestral memory through the image. In her documentary work, she advocates for human rights, environmental justice, and collaborative processes. She holds an Honors BA in Political Science and Latin American Studies from the University of Toronto and a graduate certificate from the International Center of Photography in the Documentary Practice and Visual Journalism Program. Her long-term project, Runa Kawsay, received the 2021 Women Photograph Grant and was recently exhibited in Photoville in New York. Her latest project, Yana Achik, received the Illuminatives X Indigenous Photograph “Indigenous Futures” grant. She is a member of Women Photograph, Diversify Photo’s UPnext, 400 Years collective, and Indigenous Photograph She is currently based Lenapehoking (New York City).
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson (Framingham, MA)
Claudia Ruiz Gustafson is a Peruvian Latinx visual artist based in Massachusetts whose practice engages photography, assemblage, poetry, and artist bookmaking. Her work is mainly autobiographical and self-reflective; her cross-cultural experience and Peruvian heritage deeply inform her artmaking. Gustafson’s latest projects explore the stories of her Peruvian ancestors and aspects of her immigrant and liminal experiences. In her latest ongoing body of work Mi País Imaginado (My Imagined Country), she is in dialogue with historical extractivist events, reframing and recontextualizing those narratives within a contemporary gaze while exposing the mechanisms of the imperialist machine that made them possible. Currently, Gustafson is a curator and participating artist of the traveling exhibition Crossing Cultures: Family, Memory and Displacement, a multi-media project made up of artwork created by multi-cultural artists reflecting on identity and diaspora. She holds a BA in Communications, Comunicación para el Desarrollo, from Universidad de Lima, and a Professional Photography Certificate from Kodak Interamericana de Perú.
Sarah May (Salt Lake City, UT)
Sarah May is a biracial, Indigenous, and Latina artist, curator, and storyteller based in Salt Lake City, Utah. She holds a BFA in Photography and Digital Imaging from the University of Utah and a MA in Community Leadership with an Emphasis in Art and Culture from Westminster College. Reflecting on the collective human experience, May uses cyanotype, film photography, and writing to explore the intricacy of narrative through imagery and text. Her current work represents her journey of linking personal ancestry and a cyclical and evolving identity as it manifests in the intertwining of destiny and healing.
www.sarahmayartandphotography.com
Cheryl Mukherji (Brooklyn, NY)
Cheryl Mukherji (b. 1995, India) is a visual artist and writer based in Brooklyn, New York. In her current work, Mukherji explores the idea of origin and inheritance, which is embedded in the figure of her mother and her presence in the family album, using photography, text, and video. Mukherji is the finalist for the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition 2022 at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, and a selected participant at the New York Foundation for the Arts’ 2021-22 Immigrant Artist Mentoring Program. Cheryl was a 2021 Workspace Resident at Baxter Street at CCNY, New York where she also hosted her debut solo exhibition ‘Wanted Beautiful Home Loving Girl’ in January 2022. Cheryl holds an MFA in Photography from ICP-Bard College, 2020.
Elias Williams (New York, NY)
Elias Williams is a photographer born, raised, and working in New York City. Through alternative approaches to documentary photography, he celebrates historically underrepresented communities in reference to his lived experiences. Williams is a contributing photographer to Bloomberg Markets, NPR, National Geographic, The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Wall Street Journal among others. Williams was a participant in the Magnum Foundation Photography and Social Justice fellowship and World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. He also received The Bronx Recognizes Its Own award and the Lit List award.
Daniella Zalcman (New Orleans, LA)
Daniella Zalcman is a Vietnamese-American documentary photographer based in New Orleans, LA. She is a 2021 Catchlight Fellow, a multiple grantee of the National Geographic Society and the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a fellow with the International Women’s Media Foundation, and the founder of Women Photograph, a nonprofit working to elevate the voices of women and nonbinary visual journalists. Her work tends to focus on the legacies of western colonization, from the rise of homophobia in East Africa to the forced assimilation education of Indigenous children in North America. Her ongoing project, Signs of Your Identity, is the recipient of the Arnold Newman Prize, a Robert F Kennedy Journalism Award, the FotoEvidence Book Award, the Magnum Foundation’s Inge Morath Award, and part of the Open Society Foundation’s Moving Walls 24. Daniella is a proud member of the Authority Collective and Diversify Photo, a co-founder of Indigenous Photograph, a co-founder and creative director of We, Women, and a co-author of the Photo Bill of Rights. She graduated from Columbia University with a degree in architecture in 2009.
Images from left to right: Saywa Farinango, 2020 by Eli Farinango, Anaheim OG, 2022 by William Camargo, Untitled from the series Signs of Your Identity by Daniella Zalcman