Visiting Artist Lecture Series Fellows

Yu-Wen Wu’s work lies at the interconnections of art, science, social, and cultural issues and the natural world. Themes in her work include time, transformation, global migration, and storytelling. Born in Taipei, Taiwan, her experiences as an immigrant are central to her artwork creating an intersection of personal narrative and global discourse. In migration, multi-layered transcultural identities develop associating place, cultural practices and what it means to belong. She uses materials as metaphors to express emotions, memories, and the multifaceted experience of the diaspora. Recent bodies of work engage materials associated with her Asian heritage such as tea, porcelain, and gold. She often uses organic materials reflecting on our relationship with the natural world and our environment. Her diverse body of work includes drawing, sculpture, site-specific video installations, community-engaged practices, and public art.

Wu recently installed the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Facade (Boston) where she was the 2024 artist-in-residence and was a 2023 recipient of the James and Audrey Foster Prize at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston. Her work has been featured at Taipei Dangdai, James Cohan Gallery New York and Praise Shadows Art Gallery in Brookline, MA.

She has received prominent public art commissions, including Lantern Stories (2020 and 2022) commissioned by the Greenway Conservancy, Lantern Stories San Francisco (2022). Institutional collections include Boston Public Library, Harvard Art Museums, ICA/Boston, MIT List Visual Art Center, Princeton University Art Museum. Her shows have been reviewed in New York Magazine, Boston Globe, Artnet News, BOMB Magazine, and Bloomberg Businessweek, among others.

Izzy Barber is from Gowanus, Brooklyn. She received her MFA from the New York Studio School in 2017 and received a Bachelor’s Degree in Studio Arts and Human Rights from Bard College in May 2011. She currently lives and works in Queens, NY. She paints from life.

Brigitta Varádi is a multimedia artist who delves into tradition, craft, and the everyday rituals of working life. She investigates themes of sustainability and cultural heritage through a combination of research, material experimentation and community engagement. Interweaving notions of fine art and craft, labor and heritage, Brigitta focuses the attention on the importance of traditions in an age of mass production and the global economy.

Brigitta examines the disappearing traditions and daily activities of small, secluded communities around the world: her grandmother mopping up her kitchen floor several times a day, the “liberty” tea made by inhabitants of New York State, the marking system of the dwindling community of shepherds in Ireland and the breuccio, a piece of red silk sewn into a sachet to hold coarse salt, shared between women to protect from evil spirits, in rural Italy.

One of Brigitta’s latest project MARKINGS gathers together and explores the different marks used by farmers to identify their sheep in the North West region. With the use of traditional techniques and a system of marks used by shepherds, her works examine the mechanics of remembering and reminding. Creating a dialogue with farmers and place the project also opens on to a broader reflection concerning the signs and forms of identification humans use to identify animals, plants and territories.

eri king received her Bachelor of Fine Arts in Studio Art and Art History from the University of Las Vegas, Nevada, in 2011 and her Master of Fine Arts in Painting from Hunter College in 2018. She currently lives in Brooklyn, NY. King is one half of the collaborative art duo Eridan, alongside NY-based artist Daniel Greer, and is a member-curator at Field of Play Gallery in Brooklyn, NY.

From 2011 to 2014, she was the co-founder and curator of the artist-run spaces 5th Wall Gallery and Project Space in Las Vegas. She has had solo exhibitions at Winchester Cultural Center Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (2013); Miranda Kuo Gallery, New York, NY (2016); Shiro Oni Studio, Gunma, Japan (2017); Catskills Gallery, New York, NY (2021); and ASAP Gallery, Las Vegas, NV (2024).

Her work has been featured in numerous group exhibitions, including Lined & Torn at the Marjorie Barrick Museum (2024), Off the Grid, 5-50 Gallery, NYC (2024), The Big Duck, Carracci Art Gallery, NYC (2022), Spring/Break Art Show in NYC (2021, 2023, 2024), Financial Times’ Global Boardroom, UK (2020), the London Biennale in Nevada (2012, 2020), and the Every Woman Biennial (2019), among others. Her work is part of the permanent collection at the Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Nyugen E. Smith is an artist living and working in Jersey City, NJ. His practice revolves around the construction of narrative through the prism of Black cultural identity. The manifold ramifications of European colonialism across the African Diaspora serve as the foundation upon which his practice is constructed. Smith adopts a rhizomatic methodology, characterized by its non-linear and interconnected approach, as a means of conceptualizing and realizing creative expression. Guided by the metaphorical roots of this colonial legacy, Nyugen is interested in the dynamic interplay between various thematic nodes, including architecture, language, performance, ritual, trauma, DNA memory, climate change, and migration. These thematic nodes are woven into the fabric of his practice. The inherent poetry of their relational dynamics guides the creation of the work. 

Central to his practice is an emphasis on the utilization of pre-existing materials, the body, and play, within the art-making process. Nyugen holds a BA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History, Norway, Frist Art Museum, Blanton Museum, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, among others. Nyugen is the recipient of the Creative Capital Award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, Dr. Doris Derby Award, New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.

Flaviu Cacoveanu, whose artistic discourse simultaneously embraces – from a performative perspective – language, photography, installation, ready-made objects, or sculptures, and it mainly occurs at a point where these media intertwine. His profoundly intuitive process is sensitive to the interplay between the elements and materials he carefully selects. 

The artworks are born within his cell phone – which has in the meantime become not only a living space or an extension of reality but outright the artist’s studio – in the shape of sketches or short story-type videos, advancing slices of reality which, taken out of the context, are endowed with new meanings. Therefore, his works are brought to the attention of the public as “notifications” inviting viewers to do a double take and look more closely at the details, which reveal the poetry inherent in the everyday. Through seemingly nonchalant, yet sharp and humorous observations he highlights traces left by unnoticed inhabitants of the city, often insects, discarded items of consumption and various random acts which all compile a portrait of the artist as a reflection of his environment. 

Flaviu Cacoveanu, born 1989 in Cluj, Romania, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His works have been exhibited amongst others at Parliament Gallery in Paris (FR), Lutnita Gallery in Chisinau (MD), Liste Art Fair 2024 in Basel (CH), Baronian Gallery in Brussels (BE), NADA Villa Warsaw in Warsaw (PL), Art Brussels 2023 in Brussels (BE), Art Au

Centre 2023 in Liege (BE), ART-O-RAMA 2022 in Marseille (FR), The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (RO) and at the Art Encounters Biennial 2021 in Timisoara (RO). 

Florencia Escudero was born in Singapore in 1987 and grew up in Mendoza, Argentina. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Escudero received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2012 and a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. Her works have been exhibited at Kristen Lorello, Aldrich Museum, Instituto Cervantes, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Mrs. Gallery and Rachel Uffner Gallery among other venues. She was a 2016 year-long Artist in Residence at the Loisaida Center, New York, NY, and has also completed residencies at Collarworks, Troy, NY; Art Farm, Marquette, NE; and Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, WA. Works by Escudero have been discussed in Editorial Magazine, Aether Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, The American Reader, Cultured Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She is an editor and founder of Precog Magazine.