Exhibition celebrates NARS Foundation’s international art residency

With spring on the horizon, Sunset Park continues to engage community in creative ways. The New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation’s International Artist Residency and Curatorial Fellowship programs support emerging and mid-career artists through studio-based residencies and exhibitions. This season’s cohort features 13 artists in an exhibition opening Feb. 27. After months of creating community together, the artists-in-residence are eager to share what they’ve been conjuring up all winter.

Curatorial Fellow Courtney Zoa Brown set the theme for this season’s exhibition. Studying art history in university and working with organizations such as the Brooklyn Arts Council and abroad, Brown aims to continue creating community art spaces that foster collective dialogue across the urban diaspora.

“I’ve always wanted to connect artists with other artists. I just love connecting people I think are similar just to learn from each other,” Brown said.

Brown’s inspiration for the exhibition is the power of memory and honoring that in community, especially considering Sunset Park’s shared roots. “Everybody brings those memories with them. And one of the big themes of the show is thinking about memory as embodied, as something that is physical within you,” Brown said.

Sunset Park remains a source of inspiration for many artists working across material and thematic mediums, bringing diverse perspectives to the cityscape.

Calling many places home, including New Jersey, Mexico, and the Philippines, artist Sabrina Herbosa Reyes has enough memories to last lifetimes. Raised by an immigrant mother in the United States, life wasn’t always easy, but Reyes constantly saw signs of love all around her. She expresses that in her work through varied materials drawn from home and the Sunset Park community.

“I’m really interested in space ... why certain spaces have this very profound presence of spirit. That’s why I’m really interested in materials,” Reyes said.

From alchemizing metal and concrete to paint and piña leaves, the materials help Reyes highlight her Filipina American heritage and the matriarchal relationships that contrast generational hardship with ever-present love and care. That focus, alongside residency support, allows her to keep developing work that feels most authentic to who she is.

“Home can be everywhere. And I think that’s why we yearn to preserve those little moments,” she said.

The same is true for artist Arom Ju, who focuses on the relationship between digital and physical space. Ju joined NARS while transitioning from a previous career as an illustrator into multidisciplinary work, where she explores escapism and seemingly mundane moments turned magical. Ju will “make sketches on her iPad” and then “try to mimic the digital language as much as possible” to produce prints, getting playfully colorful and whimsical in the process.

After moving from San José to Sunset Park just weeks ago, Ju said she initially found it challenging to meet colleagues with the same interests.

“It was hard to find artists and have artist friends,” she said. “But now when I’m stuck with something or even when I get some critical feedback, I can share with the other artists and they are supportive and sometimes very inspirational.”

“It was meaningful for me to meet different people here,” she added.

Connecting with other artists has helped spark Ju’s work as she continues discovering more about herself and the world around her.

For artist Christopher Jordan, the residency provides space to continue work addressing displacement in Black communities. Growing up in Tacoma, Washington, in the 1990s, Jordan witnessed neighborhood demographics rapidly shift as longtime residents started leaving.

“As buildings were demolished and other things were painted over, I started trying to find a different way to still connect with my community,” he said.

A source of inspiration was the salvage yard next to his childhood home, where he imagined what he could create with scraps as community members and stewards of the yard moved away. Jordan now uses window screens and textiles on canvas to further explore themes of displacement.

“I started using the screen in this way of lifting paintings off of things and seeing how they change when they move, and to me, it became a metaphor for the experience of Black people. Being relocated from place to place and how that process disrupts, but also how we carry that history into the new spaces that we go to,” he said. “We have these fragments of history that we live in and that we carry with us. It’s the thing that I’ve been really inspired by, through all that.”

Brown hopes visitors take a personal inventory of memory and place. “I want people to think about history in themselves, even thinking about how they came to Sunset Park [or] their commute. Just thinking about the things around them,” Brown said.

The exhibition, titled Lick Dirt, Kiss Bone, opens Feb. 27 from 6 to 8 p.m. and runs through March 17 at NARS Foundation, 201 46th Street, 4th Floor.