NC Emerging Artists in Residence
The NC Emerging Artist Residency provides emerging, North Carolina-based artists with a year of free studio space at Artspace, giving them time and space to explore their work in a supportive and thriving open studio environment. Artspace offers two residencies every year.
HBCU Artist Residency
This year-long residency focuses on recent graduates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) in North Carolina. Upon graduation students often lose resources, equipment, colleagues, and mentors. This HBCU Alumni Residency seeks to remedy those issues by extending the learning process and broadening the experience for recent graduates to build their career as a visual artist. There are more 4-year HBCUs in North Carolina than anywhere else in the country, and the Artspace HBCU Alumni Residency aims to highlight and support the many talented artists graduating from these culturally rich institutions. This career-stimulus residency for an emerging artist includes a private, rent-free studio for one year with 24-hour access within a collaborative environment with 30+ other professional artists and art administrators.
Summer Artist Residency
The Summer Artist Residency provides an established artist with a month-long studio opportunity to work on a specific project in Artspace’s Gallery 1 during the summer, culminating in an exhibition at the end of the month.
Universal Access Artist Residency
The Universal Access Residency is exclusive to artists who identify as having a disability. This residency is designed to be flexible and can be easily modified to accommodate different disabilities.
The residency was initiated in 2019 and was made possible through the actions of past Operations + Finance Manager, Megan Sullivan, who received The Betty Siegel Universal Access + the Arts Award; which recognizes the substantial achievements of Arts Learning Community for Universal Access members who complete all three years of the program. Sullivan chose to use the grant included as part of the award to fill a need in our community.
Ciara Stewart
Studio 202
CIARA ANAIS STEWART is a multidisciplinary artist and cultural worker, born and raised in Brooklyn, NY. In 2021, she received her BA in art with a concentration in studio art from North Carolina Central University.
My work pulls from personal, familial, and collective Black + Latinx histories. Through portraiture, I often use my figures to represent the themes of resistance and triumphs against oppression
Patrizia Ferreira
Studio 215
PATRIZIA FERREIRA received a bachelor degree in textile design from the Institute of Industrial Design in Montevideo, Uruguay and a Master of Science degree in textile design for prints from Philadelphia University (now Thomas Jefferson University). She is an artist and educator working in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Artist Statement
“As an artist my main objective is to be a vehicle to develop awareness around certain topics. Very close to my heart are issues regarding the environment and my own personal immigrant story as a South American woman in the United States.
In its purest sense my work aims to transcend our earthly constraints and attain a new dimension. In this dimension I experience balance, harmony, extreme beauty, peace, eternity.
My work is inspired by life and the idea that we are only a small part of a higher organism. I create art with this in mind. Nature is how I feel this higher being and, in my work, I am always striving to translate into images that which inspires me and connects me with this higher universe. While pursuing these higher values however there is a palpable struggle, a tension between different forces that coexist, and fight with each other.
Central to my work is the employment of the most paradoxical of all materials, Plastic. This choice isn’t casual, while it is one of the most successful of human inventions in the history of material science, its widespread use is one of the biggest contributors to the current state of our environment. Working with the plastic debris of our society, incorporating yarn, thread, fabric remnants, heirloom textiles, and found waste, I get to reconcile, to stitch, to patch, to mend the world around me. The tactile quality of fibers, its unique versatility allowing even untraditional materials to be turned into a textile, so long as they can be sewn or turned into fiber, provides me with an ideal medium to recreate nature. Stitching the materials that were made by the robot, a product of today’s consumerist society, and replacing it with the human hand, our most ancestral tool, is an invitation to reflect and give life to that which causes us death.
As an immigrant woman in the United States, I am in constant search for my “home”. I feel the need to dig into my past, to reinvent my homeland. This effort transports me to a land of legends, allegories, full of nostalgia and longing. The stories of women of the present and the past, in search of a better life and a better world, moving, adapting, are stitched into my work. Using embroidery, and stitching, the same techniques employed since the dawn of time, I get to carry their voices into the future. These techniques, a testament to our resilience, a way to craft resistance, provide me with a more intimate, quintessentially female language to express myself as I pursue to raise these materials and techniques to a wider sphere of discussion and awareness.”
Very close to my heart are issues regarding the environment and my own personal immigrant story as a South American woman in the United States…As an immigrant woman in the United States, I am in constant search for my ‘home.’ I feel the need to dig into my past, to reinvent my homeland…Using embroidery, and stitching, the same techniques [the women in my family] might have used in their households, I get to carry their voices into the future.
Anna Lee
Studio 215a
ANNA LEE is an experimental animator, illustrator, and musician creating multimedia films. She graduated from the NC State College of Design with a degree focused in digital animation and a minor in music, after which she spent a year working in the entertainment industry in Los Angeles, CA. She has since returned to North Carolina to pursue her own projects.
Though her background is in digital design, her personal work is full of tactile elements such as puppetry, weaving, collage, and experimentation with found materials. The juxtaposition of digital and analog elements in her work stems from a desire to articulate the discordance of having grown up while the internet evolved from novelty to necessity. As often as possible, her work incorporates original music in order to engage as many senses as possible through the confines of a digital experience.
By sharing her work online, she hopes to bring feeling and authenticity to a platform overrun with noise and capitalistic motivation. There is no precedent for existing in the age of the internet, but being human is about adapting to uncertainty. Being an artist is about responding to it.
By juxtaposing handmade components such as textiles and puppetry with computerized elements such as animation and videography, my work explores the cognitive dissonance of being human in an increasingly digital world.
Artist Statement
“I am a multimedia filmmaker examining the intersection of physical and digital media. By juxtaposing handmade components such as textiles and puppetry with computerized elements such as animation and videography, my work explores the cognitive dissonance of being human in an increasingly digital world.
As the evolution of the internet blurs the line between our virtual personas and our true identities, the divide between “traditional art” and “digital art” becomes simultaneously more apparent and more cumbersome to define. To be an artist today is to be in constant pursuit of authenticity amidst a deluge of AI generated imagery, social media fads, and rapidly changing technology. My intent is not to ignore the ubiquitousness of these trends, but to confront them.
The multimedia nature of my work ensures that each piece has both a physical and a digital existence; a body and a mind. When I share a piece on the internet, I consider that finalized digital file to be as much a piece of art as the handcrafted elements (puppets, animation frames, etc.) that went into creating that piece.
I intertwine these elements to suggest that the art we hang on gallery walls and the art we watch on screens are not as mutually exclusive as they are often portrayed. I am not satisfied with the narrative that the digital world spells doom for art as we know it, nor am I content to pretend that new technologies should be embraced without question.
It’s hard to say whether the physical elements of my work will outlive the digital ones, just as it’s hard to say whether our bodies or our virtual personas have more agency in modern society, but I believe our best bet is to embrace both.”
