September 13, 2022
JAMAICA ART SOCIETY NAMES 2022–23 FELLOWS TO EXPANDED PROGRAM
Eight artists and curators tapped for the nine-month professional development initiative.
The Jamaica Art Society (JAS) is thrilled to announce its 2022–23 class of In Focus Fellows - an international group of eight emerging to mid-career artists, curators, and writers who will participate in the second edition of JAS’s nine-month mentorship program, which fosters professional development, leadership, and cultural exchange in addition to spreading awareness of Jamaica’s rich visual-art legacy around the globe.
The 2022–23 fellows are artists Katrina Coombs, Zachary Fabri, Timothy Yanick Hunter, Zinzi Minott, Oneika Russell, and Shoshanna Weinberger, and writer-curators Petrina Dacres and Gervais Marsh. All are Jamaican or of Jamaican descent. This year’s class size of eight is up from six in the inaugural 2021 fellowship, an increase that responds to strong demand for the program.
“We are excited to bring another talented group of fellows into the program and look forward to continuing to build a strong network of leaders who are confident in their practices, empowered in their ability to be change-makers, and committed to sharing their knowledge and expertise.” said JAS founder Tiana Webb Evans.
Each 2022–23 fellow will receive a $2,500 stipend for participating in the program, and was selected by a jury of leading arts professionals: Rosie Gordon-Wallace, the founder of the Diaspora Vibe Cultural Arts Incubator; independent curator Diana Nawi, co-curator of the 2023 “Made in L.A.” biennial; and Kingston, Jamaica-based artist Phillip Thomas.
The In Focus Fellowship program is committed to helping emerging leaders learn from, and partner with, key figures in the global art industry, with the aim of contributing to Jamaica’s art ecosystem and expanding its visibility. The 2022 program will include a series of workshops, a retreat, and an archival project which concludes the program. Past participants include artists Simon Benjamin, Camille Chedda, Leasho Johnson, Jasmine Thomas-Girvan and, curator Jheanelle Brown and writer-curator Rianna Jade Parker.
JAS is proud to collaborate on the In Focus Fellowship program with the following Cultural Partners, many of whom are returning for the second year: Art at a Time Like This, Artnet News, Association of Art Museum Curators, BRIC Arts, Brooklyn Museum, David Zwirner, 52 Walker, Hyperallergic, Independent Curators International, National Gallery of Jamaica, New Museum, and The Armory Show.
ABOUT THE FELLOWS
Katrina Coombs, who was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica, is an artist who holds an MFA in creative practice from the Transart Institute via the University of Plymouth. Coombs has a passion for fiber and an understanding of the sensitivity of threads and fabric, which she uses to bring unique designs and sculptural forms into being. Her practice employs fiber and the body as she engages the role and existence of women, the M(0)ther, and I. Her work has been featured in numerous exhibitions, locally and internationally. Her first U.S. solo exhibition, “I M(O)ther: Threads of the Maternal Figure,” is on view at the Sarasota Art Museum of Ringling College in Florida through October 2, 2022. Coombs also engages the Jamaican and international art scenes as a mentor and independent curator through the art initiative Blaqmango, organizing exhibitions and residencies locally, as stepping stones for artists to develop. She lives and works in St. Andrew, Jamaica.
Oneika Russell attended the Edna Manley College in Kingston, Jamaica, where she completed a diploma in painting and subsequently studied at Goldsmiths College in London in the Centre for Cultural Studies. While at Goldsmiths, Oneika began to develop her deep interest in integrating the practice of painting with new media. She has also completed the doctoral course in Art at Kyoto Seika University in Japan, concentrating on animation in contemporary art. Russell is currently a lecturer across the fine art and visual communication departments at the Edna Manley College.
Dr. Petrina Dacres is an educator and curator of contemporary Caribbean and African Diaspora art and visual culture. She is head of the art history department at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts in Kingston, Jamaica. Her research particularly focuses on the art and politics of memory in the Caribbean, memorials, and monuments. Dr. Dacres is a founding member of Tide Rising Art Projects, an organization that supports and promotes contemporary Caribbean art and film, where she serves as resident curator and education director. She has organized exhibitions at the Clemente Soto Vélez Cultural & Educational Center in New York, the National Museum, Jamaica, the National Gallery of Jamaica, and the International Studio and Curatorial Program in New York, where she was the 2022 Jane Farver Curatorial Fellow.
Zachary Fabri is a Jamaican/Hungarian interdisciplinary artist engaged in lens-based media, language systems, and public space, often complicating the boundaries of studio research and social practice. Based in Brooklyn, his studio practice yields work that includes drawing, photography, video, performance, and installation. Fabri is the recipient of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Award, the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art, the New York Foundation for the Arts fellowship, and the BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize. His work has been exhibited at Art in General, the Studio Museum in Harlem, El Museo del Barrio, the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, the Barnes Foundation, and Performa. He has collaborated on projects at the Museum of Modern Art, the Sharjah Biennial, and the Pace Gallery. In 2021, he exhibited at the Ludwig Museum in Budapest, Hungary, and completed a solo project at Recess in Brooklyn, and in 2022 he had a one-person show at the CUE Art Foundation in New York.
Timothy Yannick Hunter is a multidisciplinary artist and curator. Hunter’s practice employs strategies of bricolage to examine non-neutral relationships relating to Black and Afro-diasporic experiences as well as concurrent strategies of decolonization. His approach alternates between exploratory and didactic, with a focus on the political, cultural, and social richness of the Black diaspora. His work often delves into speculative narratives and the intersections of physical space, digital space and the intangible. Hunter received his BA from the University of Toronto, and he has been artist-in-residence at the Art Gallery of Ontario and PADA Studios in Barreiro, Portugal. He was included in the 2022 Toronto Biennial of Art, and longlisted for the 2022 Sobey Art Award. He has exhibited nationally and internationally at Cooper Cole, Toronto; Gallery 44, Toronto; A Space Gallery, Toronto; 92Y, New York; Art Gallery of Guelph, Ontario; and PADA Studios; among others. Hunter lives and works in Toronto.
Gervais Marsh is a writer, scholar, and curator whose work is deeply invested in Black life, concepts of relationality, and care. Their artistic and curatorial work and writing are rooted in Transnational Black feminist theory. They are a Ph.D. candidate in performance studies at Northwestern University, and their dissertation explores the generative possibilities of difficult intimacies through the work of several Black queer visual and performance artists. Their writing has been published in ARTS.BLACK, Musée Magazine, Sixty Inches from Center, Sugarcane Magazine, and PREE: Caribbean Writing, among others. They are an editor for Ruckus Journal. Recent curatorial projects at the Hyde Park Art Center in Chicago include Heather Brammeier’s “Maybe Never,” A.J. McClenon’s “Notes from VEGA,” and Robert Paige’s “Patterns of Progress.” They grew up in Kingston, Jamaica, a home that continues to shape their understanding of self and their relationship to the world.
Zinzi Minott’s work focuses on the relationship between dance, bodies, and politics, exploring how dance is perceived through the prisms of race, queer culture, gender, and class. She is specifically interested in the place of Black women’s bodies within the form. As a dancer and filmmaker, she seeks to complicate the boundaries of dance, seeing her live performances, filmic explorations, and objects as different but connected manifestations of dance and body-based outcomes and inquiry. Zinzi is interested in ideas of broken narrative, disturbed lineage, and how the use of the glitch can help us to consider notions of racism that one experiences through the span of a Black life. She is specifically interested in telling Caribbean stories and highlighting the histories of those enslaved and the resulting migration of the Windrush Generation.
Shoshanna Weinberger, who was born in Kingston, Jamaica, received her MFA from the Yale University School of Art and her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Living and working in Newark, New Jersey, Weinberger makes work that references her Caribbean-American background and that explores the complexity of heritage and the psychology of peripheral identity. She considers herself a visual anthropologist, cataloging and surveying these experiences that ultimately question notions of assumed beauty norms and identity through ongoing serial works that result in paintings, drawings, collage, mixed media, and sculptural installations. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally in numerous invitational group and solo exhibitions. She is a five-time participant of the Jamaica Biennial and has had recent solo shows at Trestle Gallery, Brooklyn; Long Gallery, New York; and Wave Hill, the Bronx. A recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant and the 2020 Newark Artist Accelerator Grant, among others, she completed a two-year appointment as the McMillan Stewart Endowed Chair in Painting at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 2021 and will be artist-in-residence at the McColl Center in Charlotte, North Carolina, this fall. Her work is in public collections including the Newark Museum of Art, the Margulies Collection in Miami, the AC Kingston Collection in Jamaica, and the Sheldon Museum of Art in Lincoln, Nebraska.