RESIDENT AND VISITING ARTISTS: FACULTY SUMMER 2025

Dineo Seshee Bopape, Sandra Gamarra, Liz Magic Laser, Guadalupe Maravilla, and Anna Tsouhlarakis are invited to spend the nine-weeks intensive Program of 2025 living in residence with Skowhegan's Participants. Mike Cloud, Miguel Gutierrez, Trajal Harrel, Emily Jacir and Shimabuku join as Visiting Artists and will spend one week with the group during the summer.

Although each Resident and Visiting Artist has a unique background and practice, they all have a deep understanding of dominant discourses and propose alternative approaches to healing and rewriting history, avoiding binary oppositions and encouraging a transversal dialogue.

The transdisciplinary practice of Guadalupe Maravilla is rooted in activism and healing. Guadalupe's work is autobiographical, referring to his unaccompanied and undocumented migration to the United States during the Salvadoran Civil War. He explores how the systemic abuse of immigrants manifests physically within the body, reflecting on his own battle with cancer. 

His work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain; the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Olso, Norway; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, NY, among others. His work has been included in recent group exhibitions such as uMoya: The Sacred Return of Lost Things, Liverpool Biennial, Liverpool, UK; soft and weak like water, 14th Gwangju Biennale, Gwangju Metropolitan City, South Korea. Maravilla's work is currently included in the 12th Göteborg International Biennial for Contemporary Art: forms of the surrounding futures, Gothenburg, Sweden and the 35th Bienal de São Paulo.

Liz Magic Laser is a multimedia video and performance-based artist from New York City. Her recent work explores the efficacy of new age techniques and psychological methods active in both corporate culture and political movements.

Liz’s work has been shown at venues such as Luxembourg + Co., NY, 2024; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2023); Pioneer Works, Brooklyn (2023); ICA Boston (2023); Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen (2022); Guggenheim Museum, New York (2021); MUDAM The Contemporary Art Museum of Luxembourg (2021) and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2018). Her work has received critical acclaim in publications such as Text zur Kunst, Artforum, The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Frieze, and Art in America.

Sandra Gamarra was born in Lima. She utilizes painting in a figurative way to conceptually cross-examine art and its mechanisms. Based on appropriations, her work acts as a mirror that displaces exhibition formats, alters the circulation of images, subverts the ownership of culture as well as the narrative between art and its viewer. Within this field of research, her Peruvian background adds a sincretic gaze where pre-columbian, colonial and western cultures collide. Some of her recent exhibitions recontextualize art genres such as landscape, self-portrait or still life.

She has participated in collective exhibitions as the 29th Sao Paulo Biennial; the Italo-Latin American Pavillon (IILA) of the 53rd Venice Biennial; the 9th and 16th Cuenca Biennial; Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin and the Kunstlerhaus, Vienna. She recently participated with her project “Pinacoteca Migrante”  at the 60th Venice Biennial. In 2002, due to the lack of a contemporary art institution in Lima, she created LiMac, a fictitious museum. Since then, LiMac has produced collections, exhibitions, publications, an architectural projects. and its website (www.li-mac.org).

Anna Tsouhlarakis is Greek, Creek, and an enrolled citizen of the Navajo Nation. Since the beginning of her career, she has challenged the aesthetic and conceptual expectations associated with Native American art. She works in a variety of mediums, including sculpture, installation, video, and performance

Anna’s work has been part of national and international exhibitions at venues such as NEON Foundation in Athens, Greece; White Frame in Basel, Switzerland; Rush Arts in New York; the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art; the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts; the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art; the National Museum of the American Indian; the National Portrait Gallery; MCA Denver. She is a Creative Capital Award recipient for 2021. Other awards include fellowships from the Harpo Foundation, the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, and most recently, a SOURCE Studio Corrina Mehiel Fellowship and a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship.

Photo by Joanna Eldredge Morrisey.

“Dineo Seshee Bopape was born in the year of the golden rooster, 1981 on a Sunday. If she were Ghanaian, her name would be Akosua/Akos for short. 

During the same year of her birth, there were perhaps 22 recorded Atlantic Ocean hurricanes and 4 Indian Ocean cyclones close to Mozambique. The Brixton riots took place; Machu Picchu is declared a heritage site; Chairman Mao’s wife is sentenced for anti-revolutionary speech; a series of apparitions of The Virgin Mary commence to a group of schoolgirls in Rwanda; Winnie Mandela’s banishment orders are renewed for another 5 years; Swiss women gained legal recourse against unequal pay through a referendum in Switzerland, the song “endless love” is popular on the airwaves; Umkhonto We Sizwe performs numerous underground assaults against the Apartheid state. Across Beirut, Israeli warplanes bombard Palestinian Liberation Organization; the Boeing 767 makes its first air flight, In Chile, the Water Code is established, separating water ownership from land ownership; In Ukraine, the titanium “Motherland” statue was erected honoring Soviet victory over the Nazis; Zaire is the premier producer of the world’s cobalt, Greece is struck by three earthquakes over a period of 11 days; the Slave trade is officially abolished in Mauritania…there’s a mass migration of cranes from the usual 13500 cranes to 21500, It is said that right whales born in that year, are taller than right whales born since. Other concurrent events of the year of her birth, and of her lifetime, are perhaps too many to fully know; Some things continued, some transformed, some shifted, others ended(?) some began… The world’s human population was then apparently at around 4.529 billion... today she (Bopape) is one amongst 8.1 billion - occupying multiple adjectives.”

Photo by Orpheas Emirzas.

Mike Cloud is a Chicago based artist whose work is situated in the expanded field of painting and image making. He dissects photographic and painterly forms, introducing text and content in a way that breaks legibility and creates new understandings. For Mike, painting is an object within a weirder cultural system of objects, motifs, symbols, and forms.

Mike is an Associate Professor, and Director of Graduate Studies in the department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University in Illinois and his solo exhibitions include Called Ahead, 2024 at Fahrenheit Madrid, Spain; Tears in Abstraction, 2019 and Bad Faith and Universal Technique, 2014 at Thomas Erben Gallery, New York; The Myth of Education, 2018, Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago; and Special Projects: Mike Cloud, 2005, MoMA PS1, New York.

Miguel Gutierrez is an artist and professor living between New York and Los Angeles. His work creates empathetic, irreverent, and reflective spaces that prioritize attention to unraveling normative belief systems. His influences include queer club performance, dance spectacles, gay melancholy, somatic practices, resistance movements, phenomenology, and artists he admires. He is also fascinated by how capital interacts with art making, a topic he explored in his podcast Are You For Sale? 

Recent performance work includes Super Nothing, a dance blueprint for queer survival, and a music project called sueño. His work has been presented internationally for over twenty years in venues such as Festival D’Automne in Paris, On the Boards, Wexner Center for the Arts, Walker Center for the Arts, New York Live Arts, and Festival Universitario in Colombia. He is a Guggenheim Fellow, a United States Artists Fellow, and a recipient of a Foundation for Contemporary Art award. He is an Associate Professor of Choreography and Vice Chair of the MFA program in the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance at UCLA. 

Photo by Ian Douglas.

Trajal Harrell's earlier works explored and blended the tradition of voguing and early postmodern dance. In his actual research, Trajal also incorporates theoretical and formal elements from butoh dance as well as early modern dance. He weaves together the different dance histories and places the body at the center of his research connecting notions of time, historical imagination, and transcultural references.

He was the house director at Schauspielhaus Zurich and currently he is the founder and artistic director of Zurich Dance Ensemble. Trajal presented his work at ​The Whitney Museum, New York; Festival d'Automne, Paris; Schauspielhaus Zurich; Triennale, Milano; Roma Europa Festival; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Tanz im August, Berlin; Berliner Festspiele; Pulitzer Art Foundation, St. Louis: ICA Boston; Munich Kammerspiele; Serralves Museum, Porto; MUDAM, Luxembourg; Holland Festival, Amsterdam; Kunsthalle Zurich; Fondation Cartier, Paris; Sao Paulo Bienal; Lafayette Anticipations, Paris​; Gwangju Biennale; Impulstanz Festival, Vienna between many others.

His work​ Judson Church is Ringing in Harlem (Made-to-Measure)/Twenty Looks or Paris is​ Burning at The Judson Church (M2M), has the distinction of being the first dance commission of​ MoMA PS1. In 2024​, Harrell ​w​as awarded the Silver Lion of ​The Venice Biennale of Dance.

Emily Jacir's poetic, political, and biographical work investigates silenced histories, exchange, translation, transformation, and resistance. Jacir has built a complex and compelling oeuvre through a diverse range of media and methodologies that include unearthing historical material, performative gestures and in-depth research. She investigates personal and collective movement through time and space and its implications for the physical and social experience. Drawing on rituals such as dances, processions and games, the artist charts how space, collectivity, and memories are claimed.

Emily has been actively involved in education in Palestine since 2000 and is deeply invested in creating alternative spaces for knowledge production internationally. She has been honored for her work internationally, including an honorary doctorate from NCAD in Dublin, Ireland, 2023; an American Academy of Arts and Letters prize, 2023; the Andrew W. Mellon Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, 2015; and the Alpert Award, 2011; Hugo Boss Prize, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2008; Golden Lion, Venice Biennale, 2007­. She founded Dar Yusuf Nasri Jacir for Art and Research in Bethlehem.

Shimabuku lives in Naha, Okinawa and works around the world. His site-specific works are related to the places and the lives and cultures of the people living there. His performances, films, sculptures, and installations challenge the relationship between creatures and humans by establishing new languages and communication channels.

Shimabuku has participated in many major international exhibitions, including the 57th Venice Biennale, 2017; 14th Lyon Biennale, 2017; 12th Havana Biennale, 2015; 9th Taipei Biennale, 2014; 11th Sharjah Biennial, 2013; the 27th São Paulo Biennial, 2006; the Liverpool Biennial, 2006; and the 11th Biennial of Sydney, 1998. His recent solo exhibitions include Centro Botín, Santander, Spain, 2024; Museion: Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Bolzano, Italy, 2023; Wiels Centre for Contemporary Art, Brussels, Belgium, 2022; National New Museum of Monaco, Monaco, 2021; Credac Contemporary Art Centre of Ivry, France, 2018, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 2014 and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, U.K., 2013.

Photo: Exhibition for the Monkeys, 1992.