mayfield brooks
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing. brooks is the 2021 recipient of the biennial Merce Cunningham Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, a 2021 Bessie/New York Dance and Performance Award nominee for their experimental dance film, Whale Fall and a 2022 Danspace Project Platform artist. They were a 2022-3 Hodder Fellow at Princeton University and the 2024 Alma Hawkins Visiting Chair at UCLA with the World Arts and Cultures/Dance program. They enjoy living by the sea.
Photo: Cherylynn Tsushima
Alicia Grullón
Alicia Grullón is a Bronx-based artist whose work critiques the politics of presence in political, environmental, and social spheres through image-making, performance, and social practice. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions at venues like The Bronx Museum of the Arts, BRIC, El Museo del Barrio, and Columbia University. Grullón has received grants from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs and Franklin Furnace Archives. As an activist, she co-organized the People’s Cultural Plan, addressing housing, displacement, cultural funding, and labor equity. She has participated in residencies at NYU’s Hemispheric Institute, the Center for Book Arts, and the Bronx Museum’s AIM program. Her work has been reviewed in outlets like Hyperallergic and The New York Times. Grullón is the recipient of the 2019 Colene Brown Art Prize, a 2020-2022 Walentas fellowship, and is a 2024-2025 Mellon Initiatives Community Fellow at The New School.
Ania Freer
Ania Freer is an Australian-Jamaican artist, filmmaker, cultural researcher, and curator based between New York City and Jamaica. Working in installation, film and curating, Ania uses oral histories to explore identity through themes of resistance, labour, folklore, craft traditions, race and class. Her films work to disrupt imperialist narratives and recenter marginalized voices.
Ania’s installations have been exhibited at galleries and institutions including the National Gallery of Jamaica and her short film “Strictly Two Wheel” won Best Documentary Short at Trinidad and Tobago Film Festival. She has received fellowships and residencies from the Caribbean Film Academy, New Local Space Kingston, Lighthouse Works, Art Omi, Ox-Bow and Artist in Residence in Everglades (AIRIE). She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology and Film Theory from the University of Sydney.
Photo: Ali Anderson
Mary Mattingly
Mary Mattingly is a Brooklyn-based artist. Mattingly co-builds sculptural ecosystems that prioritize water, food, and shelter amidst the climate crisis. She is a recipient of support from the Guggenheim Foundation, A Blade of Grass, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Art Matters Foundation. Her work has been featured at The Bronx Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, Museo National de Belles Artes de la Habana, and profiled in the New York Times and Art21. In 2016, she led ‘Swale,’ a floating food forest in New York’s harbor, providing foraging access and challenging city regulations. This led to NYC Parks’ first edible park, a 7-acre ‘Foodway’ in the Bronx. In 2021, with +MoreArt and different watershed communities, Mattingly launched the ‘Public Water’ campaign, highlighting NYC’s drinking watershed and access disparities. ‘Public Water’ also included a sculpture that cleaned water in Prospect Park, Brooklyn.
Photo Credit: Rebekah-Schott
Shanzhai Lyric/Canal Street Research Association
(Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky)
Canal Street Research Association was founded in 2020 in an empty storefront on Canal Street, New York’s counterfeit epicenter. Delving into the cultural and material ecologies of the street and its long history as a site that probes the limits of ownership and authorship, the association repurposes underused real estate as spaces for gathering ephemeral histories, mapping local lore, and tracing the flows and fissures of capital. They have operated out of empty storefronts and office buildings, on sidewalks, and most recently from a basement under Canal Street. The fictional office entity is maintained by Shanzhai Lyric (Ming Lin and Alex Tatarsky), a poetic research and roving archival unit that take inspiration from 山寨 (shanzhai or counterfeit) goods to examine how bootlegs use mimicry, hybridity, and permutation to both revel in and reveal the artifice of global hierarchies.
Photo: Max Lakner