Open Call Participating Artists

Thirty-two Open Call artists, September 2018. © Scott Rudd Events/The Shed. Photo: Scott Rudd.

Fifty-two emerging artists will inaugurate The Shed’s Open Call commissioning program in spring 2019.

Saint Abdullah is the sound project of Mohammad (back row, eighth from left) and Mehdi (front row, kneeling, first on left), Iranian Canadian brothers based in New York City. For Open Call, they are developing a project entitled where do we go, now?

Tariq Al-Sabir (middle row, seated, first on left) is a composer, vocalist, music director, and producer based in Harlem. Al-Sabir works in musical performance and will present the world premiere of the multimedia song cycle #UNWANTED for Open Call.

Justin Allen (back row, third from right) is a New York City-based writer and performer. For his Open Call performance, he will continue ongoing work on social dynamics within mosh pits and the history and influence of hardcore punk.

Haley Elizabeth Anderson (front row, third from left) is a visual artist and writer working in Brooklyn. For Open Call, she is developing Gulf Tones, a film, photography, and audio installation that weaves together interviews, auditions, and quotidian moments captured from various camera tests and street casting sessions in and around the Gulf Coast.

Troy Anthony (not pictured) is a composer, director, and actor living and working in New York City. He is currently developing Antioch Mass, a staged choral work, for Open Call.

For Open Call, New York City-based historian Caitlin Blanchfield (back row, seventh from right) and architect Farzin Lotfi-Jam (middle row, seated, third from left) are developing Modern Management Methods, an ongoing survey and visualization project that x-rays iconic buildings to ask what the concept of universal value means for modern architecture.

Kim Brandt (not pictured) is an artist living in Queens. She works in choreography and is developing Corners for Open Call.

Maia Chao (middle row, seated, fourth from left) is an artist living in Brooklyn who works across video, performance, sculpture, and social practice. For Open Call, she will collaborate with her sister to develop a short film based on scenes between sisters in film history.

Daniel Chew and Micaela Durand (both not pictured) are collaborators who live in New York. Their work critiques how we access each other through screens and how our bodies are implicated in this exchange. For Open Call, they are working on a film.

Onyedika Chuke (back row, sixth from left) is an artist and archivist born in Onitsha, Nigeria. For The Shed’s Open Call, Chuke will utilize modes of collective protest, meditation symbols, and historical sculptural forms to create a large-scale indoor fountain.

Gabriela María Corretjer-Contreras (back row, third from left) is an artist living in Washington Heights, Manhattan. They work in clothing, textiles, installation, and performance. Their Open Call commission is Llevatelo To’ No Me Deje Na, an interactive multimedia installation exploring the history of invasion and exploitation of Puerto Rico, as well as living in the diaspora.

nicHi douglas (front row, second from left)  is a Brooklyn-based performer, choreographer, director, playwright, and activist. For Open Call, douglas is developing (pray), an exploration of spirituality and religion as they pertain to the Black female experience.

The Extrapolation Factory, a design-based research studio for participatory futures studies founded in 2012 by Elliott P. Montgomery and Chris Woebken (both not pictured), is located in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The studio develops experimental methods for collaboratively prototyping, experiencing, and impacting future scenarios. Its project for Open Call is entitled Metro Test Zones.

Avram Finkelstein (back row, first on left) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He works in mixed media and is developing a jacquard fabric billboard entitled Untitled, 1972 for Open Call.

Fana Fraser (front row, fourth from left) is a performer and performance-maker living in New York City. Her work is rooted in a contemporary Caribbean aesthetic and framed by narratives of women’s erotic agency, desire, and sexuality in the Caribbean. She is developing a new work for Open Call.

Moko Fukuyama (middle row, seated, fifth from left) lives and works in Brooklyn. She has a quasi-documentary approach to filmmaking, using real-life stories and adapting them to more fantastical cinematic and sculptural scenarios. Her work for Open Call is entitled A Kind of Pain.

Ebony Noelle Golden (not pictured) is a performance artist, scholar, and culture strategist based in Manhattan. Golden collaborates with community members, cultural institutions, and creatives to co-create and stage site-specific rituals and live art installations and will develop her project wash’d// for Open Call.

Yulan Grant (not pictured) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist from Kingston, Jamaica. Grant is interested in the role that hybrid practices play in art making. They are developing BUSS DEMON CHOAT for Open Call.

Vicente Hansen and Mat Muntz (both not pictured) are developing When we took the fire, an evening-length performance of music and movement, for Open Call. Muntz is a Brooklyn-based bassist and composer, and Hansen is a New York City-based drummer and composer.

Prince Harvey (not pictured) is an artist, musician, and producer based in Brooklyn best known for recording his first album in an Apple Store. For Open Call, he is producing an album of songs in opposition to anti-queer rhetoric in Caribbean popular culture.

Hugh Hayden (back row, second from right) lives in Harlem. His work explores ideas of belonging to a social landscape through a lens of camouflage and natural materials. He works in sculpture and salvaged wood and is developing First Apartment for Open Call.

Madeline Hollander (not pictured) is a New York City-based artist who works with performance and video to explore how human movement and body language negotiate their limits within everyday systems of technology, intellectual property law, and daily ritual. Hollander’s Open Call project is entitled Preview.

Maryam Hoseini (not pictured) and Phoebe d’Heurle (back row, seventh from left) are artists living and working in Brooklyn. Their collaborative work troubles the boundaries between fixed genres and set authorship. For Open Call, they are developing She Models for Her, a project that conceptually reframes the work of the artist Suzanne Valadon.

The Illustrious Blacks (Manchildblack, not pictured; Monstah Black, front row, fifth from left) are a duo living and working in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. They work in music, dance, theater, and fashion and are developing A Union of Kings, a multidisciplinary stage show, for Open Call.

It’s Showtime NYC! (not pictured) is the largest street dance company in New York City. Founded in 2015 in the Bronx, IST aims to challenge the criminalization of dance and add recognition and value to this art form created by and celebrating people of color. IST will present Demistify 2.0 for Open Call.

Ayesha Jordan (not pictured) is a multidisciplinary performance artist living in Manhattan. For Open Call, she is developing Shasta Geaux Pop: The Return Remixed, which uses the pop star as a lens to critique media, politics, and cultural conditioning.

Tahir Carl Karmali (front row, kneeling, eighth from left) is a Brooklyn-based visual artist born and raised in Nairobi, Kenya. He began his practice as a painter and photographer before developing an interest in sculpture. His Open Call project is entitled Lotus.

Richard Kennedy (not pictured) is an artist living and working between Brooklyn and Hudson, NY. They work in curation, composition, and choreography and are developing their opera HIR for Open Call.

Sam Lavigne (not pictured) is an artist based in Brooklyn whose work deals with data, automation, and surveillance. He works in digital technologies, and his Open Call project is entitled Training Poses.

Maya Lee-Parritz (back row, first from right) is a dancer and choreographer living and working in New York City. She is developing a new work entitled The Whole Instrument Shakes for Open Call.

Kyle Marshall (back row, sixth from right) is a dancer and choreographer residing in Jersey City, NJ. His dance company, Kyle Marshall Choreography (KMC), takes the dancing body as a site for celebration, an igniter of social change, and a container of history. KMC’s work for Open Call will explore mass demonstrations, capitalism, and white supremacy.

Asif Mian (back row, fifth from left) is a visual artist who lives in Brooklyn and works at the intersection of sculpture, video, and performance. Mian is developing Spectral Decoy for Open Call.

Troy Michie (back row, fourth from left) lives and works in Brooklyn. He is developing the installation Foreground as Background for Open Call.

#MIPSTERZ (not pictured) is a multidisciplinary arts collective living and working in Brooklyn, Queens, and Boston, MA. They create music, film, and illustration and are developing their first open-space display, Colonized Dreams and Marginalized Beats, for Open Call.

Tyler Mitchell (not pictured) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn. He works in photography and film and is developing an autobiographical series of photographs exploring the dualities and contradictions of growing up black and middle class in the American South for Open Call.

Neil Padukone (not pictured) is a Jackson Heights, Queens-based guitarist and composer who blends jazz, funk, flamenco, rock, Indian, and Latin music into his work. For Open Call, he is developing his project Salsa Masala, an Indo-Latin fusion band in which he plays guitar, sitar, and oud.

Kelsey Pyro (Kelsey Van Ert, not pictured) is a Brooklyn-based producer, singer-songwriter, and educator who creates acoustic and electronic compositions and performance pieces. She is developing Makadewiiyaasikwe, a musical composition infused with film and African American and indigenous storytelling, for Open Call.

daaPo reo (not pictured) is an artist living in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He works in mixed-media textiles and is developing KUYE’N KEGBE KEGBE, POSSESSION OF STOLEN GODS, a mixed-media textile installation, for Open Call.

Farideh Sakhaeifar (front row, seventh from left) is a Brooklyn-based artist and educator born in Tehran, Iran. Sakhaeifar’s work ranges from photography to installation and sculpture. For Open Call, she is creating Halabja, 1988, a multichannel video installation with sound and music.

Rachika Samarth (back row, fifth from right) resides in Brooklyn. She creates soundscapes from synthesized and multi-instrumental music samples, and presents her music live in a light-and-scrim installation alongside found and personal video. Her project for Open Call will expand that arrangement into an immersive explorable environment.  

Based in Lefferts Gardens, Brooklyn, jazz pianist Richard Sears (back row, second from left) is collaborating with videographer Clara Cullen (not pictured), composer and sound designer Ethan Braun (not pictured), and architect and visual artist Yael Ginosar (not pictured) for Open Call. They are creating a new work that expands improvisational techniques to include electronics, video, and design.

Alice Sheppard (not pictured) is a disabled dancer and choreographer working out of New York City’s East Village. For Open Call, Sheppard is developing a movement history of barbed wire in America with Kinetic Light (not pictured), her collective of disabled artists.

Harold ‘Fyütch’ Simmons (front row, sixth from left) is a musical artist, content creator, and educator who currently lives and works in the Bronx. For Open Call, he is composing and performing original music and developing Level Up Showcase, a live concert series that puts aspiring young artists and musicians on stage with veteran performers.

Analisa Teachworth (middle row, seated, seventh from left) is a digital media and installation artist living and working in New York City whose practice encompasses a wide range of digital and physical mediums. Her work for Open Call is entitled Tribute Pallet.

Christopher Udemezue (Neon Christina) (middle row, seated, second from left) is an artist living and working in Bushwick, Brooklyn. He works in photography, performance, video, and painting and is developing Yard Mi Dey, Yard Mi Run From for Open Call.

Mariana Valencia (not pictured) is a dance artist who lives in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Her Open Call project is entitled ILEANA.

Jon Wang (not pictured) is an artist based in New York City. They work in film and video and are developing a queer erotic thriller for Open Call.

Julia Weist (back row, tenth from left) is an artist living in New York City who works with digital technologies and systems of circulation. For Fiction Plane, her Open Call commission, she will work with network television production companies to investigate the creation, representation, and distribution of fictional space.  

Kiyan Williams (back row, fourth from right) is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Manhattan who creates live performance, sculpture, video, and text informed by autoethnography and archival research. For Open Call, they will develop a new performance work.

Nia O. Witherspoon (middle row, seated, sixth from left) is a theater-maker, vocalist, composer, and cultural worker living and working in Brooklyn. She is developing The Dark Girl Chronicles for Open Call.

Thanushka Yakupitiyage (back row, ninth from left) is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist, DJ, cultural organizer, and activist. She works in electronic music production and is developing a sound and video installation exploring migration for Open Call.

Yatta Zoker (YATTA) (not pictured) is an interdisciplinary artist, digipoet, and musician living and working in Brooklyn. YATTA is developing a multimedia show entitled MANIA, which investigates the relationship between psychotic ruptures and ideas of normalization, for Open Call.