2018/19 SHIFT RESIDENTS

Pradeep Dalal is a Mumbai-born artist based in New York. He is director of the Andy Warhol Foundation’s Arts Writers Grant Program. Most recently, his solo show “Copy/Scan/Print/Repeat” was displayed at Sala Diaz (San Antonio, TX). His photographs have been included in "Art is Love Made Public" at Galeria Arroyo de la Plata in Zacatecas, Mexico, “Compassionate Protocols” at Callicoon Fine Arts, “Strange Invitation" at Franklin Street Works, “Picturing Parallax” at San Francisco State University, "Vision is Elastic. Thought is Elastic" at Murray Guy, and “Reality/Play” at Orchard, among others. His photographs have also been published in TAKE on Art, BOMB, Grey Room, Blind Spot, Cabinet, and Rethinking Marxism. His artist book, Bhopal, MP, is an examination of an experimental museum in India that displays contemporary art alongside folk, tribal, and outsider art. An essay, “A Bifocal Frame of Reference,” was published in Western Artists and India. He is the co-chair of the Photography MFA at Bard College, and has taught at Pratt, ICP, Cooper Union, NYU, and CUNY, and serves on the Art Advisory Committee of Baxter Street at The Camera Club of NY. He holds an MFA from ICP/Bard College and a MArch from MIT.

Matthew de Leon aka Untitled Queen is a visual artist, drag queen, and graphic designer living and working in Brooklyn, NY. He creates elaborate, colorful handmade DIY costumes and sculptural body props that are used in intensely emotional and narrative performances. Through these means he twists and explores themes of vulnerability, gender, race, and self-empowerment. He was born in 1984 on Governors Island, New York. He is the recipient of the Brooklyn Nightlife Award for Drag Queen of the Year 2015. He has shown in group exhibitions at the University of Connecticut, Mixed Greens Gallery, The Kitchen, Boston Center for the Arts, Honey Ramka, and the Bureau of General Services-Queer Division, among others. 

Alicia Ehni is a multidisciplinary artist who uses pure geometry and pre-Columbian iconography to address territory concerns in shifting landscapes. Her art practice draws from personal and collective experiences of living in the Peruvian desert. Ehni explores sculptural forms through combining distinct and often mutually exclusive cultural references, like superstition, Pre-Columbian iconography and architecture. Using the poetic qualities of different materials, she creates multiple series of works. Ehni was born in Lima, Peru, studied art at Universidad Católica, Perú and Pratt Institute. Her solo exhibitions include Distant Coordinates ICPNA-Perú (2016), Reflexions in Stone, Galería Lucía de la Puente, Perú (2015) and Turning Stone, Frederico Seve Gallery/Latincollector, NY (2013). Ehni is also Program Officer at New York Foundation for the Arts (NYFA), the Editor of NYFA Immigrant Artist Newsletter, a contributing blogger for VoCA, NY Chapter Chair for Membership for ArtTable and a fellow of NALAC 2018 Leadership Institute.

Nung-Hsin Hu is a Taiwanese born NYC-based artist and an arts administrator. She currently works at the Queens Museum, primarily in managing the artist studio programs and engaging immigrant adults through educational programming. As a multidisciplinary artist, she has exhibited both in the U.S. and abroad, and has also received various grants including, the Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant, Queens Council on the Arts - New Work Grant, Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning – Van Lier Fellowship, and the Taiwan Ministry of Culture- the International Residency and Cultural Exchange Grant. She has also participated in international residencies at Casa das Caldeiras (São Paulo, Brazil), the Treasure Hills Artist Village (Taipei, Taiwan), the Lichtenberg Studios (Berlin, Germany), and the Arctic Circle Residency Program (Svalbard, Norway). Her current projects reflect the invisible challenges of dual identity circumstances (Artist and Administrator) through the lenses of inner physiological structures, while also giving visibility to the reality of artists who often play multiple roles as they navigate and fuel the arts community.

Patrick Rowe is an interdisciplinary artist, educator and arts administrator. Through long-term community-based projects, Patrick co-creates spaces for collaboration, active participation, and the exchange of cultural knowledge. In 2013 Patrick started Mobile Print Power (MPP), a multigenerational printmaking collective based out of Immigrant Movement International in Corona, Queens. MPP uses silkscreen printmaking and collaborative design in public space to engage communities and explore social and cultural situations. Since 2013 MPP has created over 30 public projects, published six books, and exhibited at museums and galleries including Interference Archive, Maine College of Art and Queens Museum. Patrick is currently Director of Education at The Bronx Museum of the Arts where he oversees a wide range of school, teen and family programs. In addition to his work at the museum Patrick is a visiting professor at Pratt Institute where he teaches interdisciplinary graduate courses that focus on the intersection of art, pedagogy and activism.

Maya Valladares is an artist and educator whose work explores the ways collaborative making can sustain human relationships. Situated within an anthropological understanding of textiles as objects that carry and convey embedded information, her artwork engages with themes of labor, exchange, knowledge transmission, and language. Maya worked in the museum education field for close to a decade, first at the Brooklyn Museum and later at the Met, working directly with artists to create hands-on visitor experiences that bring historical collections into dialog with contemporary art. She currently works as an Associate Director of the Parsons Making Center, with a focus on the textiles and sewing facilities. She holds a BFA from RISD, and an MA in cultural anthropology from Hunter College. Her daughter, who will be a primary collaborator in the Shift Residency, was born in 2014.

Annette Wehrhahn is Brooklyn-based artist (BFA, RISD, MFA Bard College). She works as the program coordinator in the MFA Art Writing Department at the School of Visual Arts where she also teaches in the Visual and Critical Studies Department. In 2010 she co-founded Soloway Gallery and has continued to curate exhibitions and act as a Gallery Director. Her work has been featured in local and international galleries including Safe Gallery in Brooklyn and Ceysson & Bénétière in Luxembourg. In her large-scale paintings Wehrhahn explores the experience of existing in a body from the inside out. In a recent New York Times review of the exhibition “Several Years Have Passed”, Will Heinrich writes, "two enormous unstretched paintings by Annette Wehrhahn, which combine cartoonish figurative outlines with storms of color to convey both grand ambition and intense ambivalence”.

About Shift

SHIFT Residency was launched in August 2010 to provide an unprecedented opportunity: peer support and studio space for artists who work in arts organizations. For these individuals, their livelihood isn’t just a day job, but a passion and responsibility, demanding high amounts of creativity, stamina, and sacrifice. SHIFT Residency honors these artists’ commitment to the art community with a unique environment to revitalize their studio practices. Each year, residents are selected through a competitive nomination process. Since its launch, SHIFT has accommodated over forty artists working in a growing range of media, from sound and installation to painting, performance, and social practice.