Artists in Residence 2021–22 Roundtable

Cameron A. Granger (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH; currently based in Columbus, OH) is Sandra’s son and came up in Cleveland, Ohio. Inspired by the rigorous, careful archival practices of his grandmother, Pearl, Granger uses his work as a means to quilt the histories of his communities, redacted by empire, into new, not just potential, but inevitable futures. His recent projects include “Everybody's got a little light under the sun,” a free food and short-film program made in collaboration with Willowbeez Soul Veg and the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio; and “The Get Free Telethon” a twenty-four-hour livestreamed community fundraiser for Columbus groups Black Queer Intersectional Collective, Healing Broken Circles, and Columbus Freedom Coalition, sponsored by Red Bull Arts. A 2017 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Granger has exhibited his work at The Bemis Center, Omaha, Nebraska (2021); Ortega y Gasset Projects, New York (2019); and Platform Rf, Vaasa, Finland (2019).

Jacob Mason-Macklin (b. 1995, Columbus, OH; lives and works in Queens, NY) examines how painting, in the age of social media, post-camera and after the Patriot Act, functions as a tool for looking and surveillance. With slashing, cutting, and undulating brushstrokes, Mason-Macklin distorts and repurposes archival images and recollected imagery in an attempt to simultaneously embrace, explore, and unsettle motifs of libido and violence as typified in counterculture iconography. Currently, Mason-Macklin uses personal and collected imagery, inspired by his observations in Harlem, to make paintings that imagine scenarios wherein the public and private collapse—questioning the point at which looking becomes surveillance, and the implications of acts of seeing.

Mason-Macklin is a 2016 alumnus of the Yale-Norfolk Summer School of Art and a 2019 alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Mason-Macklin has had two-person and solo exhibitions including Ryan Huggins and Jacob Mason-Macklin, Page, New York (2021); Soul Procession, Interstate Projects, New York (2020); PURE HELL, No Place Gallery, Columbus, Ohio (2020); and BOUNTY, Jeffrey Stark Gallery (with Cudelice Brazelton), New York (2017).

Qualeasha Wood (b.1996, Long Branch, NJ; lives and works Brooklyn, NY) is a textile artist whose work contemplates Black female embodiment. Inspired by a familial relationship to textiles, craft, Microsoft Paint, and internet avatars, Wood's tufted and tapestry pieces mesh traditional craft and contemporary technological materials. Wood navigates both an internet environment saturated in Black femme figures and culture and a political and economic environment that holds this embodiment at the margins. Like the vast majority of her peers, Wood has operated multiple digital avatars since pre-adolescence. For her, intuitive combinations of analog and cybernetic compositional processes make for a contemporary exploration of Black American femme ontology. 

Wood has exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2021); Hauser & Wirth, New York (2022); Art Basel Miami Beach with Kendra Jayne Patrick, Miami (2021); Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London (2021); CANADA, New York (2021); the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, Wisconsin; NADA Miami Beach with Kendra Jayne Patrick, New York (2020); Kendra Jayne Patrick for Metro Pictures, New York (2020); Cooper Cole, Toronto (2019); New Image Art, Los Angeles (2018); Gaa Gallery, Provincetown, Massachusetts (2020).