2022-23 Artists-in-Residence
We are delighted to announce the 15 artists who have been selected for solo or collaborative residencies at Tusen Takk from August 2022 through December 2023! Our second season brings a group of exceptionally talented people to an inspiring place to work in a variety of media including painting, monumental paperworks, photography, music composition, textile arts, and creative writing. The artists will work and live at Tusen Takk for between three and eight weeks, immersing themselves in the landscape of Northern Michigan. The projects the artists will explore while in residency vary from completing works already in progress for an exhibition or performance or a novel, to creating entirely new work. As much as a residency at Tusen Takk provides a time to make things, it’s also a time for the artists to step out of their daily lives and slow down, reflect, and regenerate in a place that is quiet and beautiful.
The 2022-23 residents are: Shruthi Rajasekar, Daniele Genadry, Jon and Cathy Cone, Debra Salopek, Juan Giraldo, Martha Tuttle, Leilehua Lanzilotti, Hong Hong, Jeremiah Chamberlin, Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez, Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer, and Katrina Bello.
The artists-in-residence were selected by a panel of distinguished jurors including: Johnny Coleman (Oberlin College), Brian David Mooney (Storymatic Studios, Brattleboro Literary Festival), Ellen McCulloch-Lovell (Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation), Leah Ollman (Regular Contributor, L.A. Times and Art in America), Geoffrey Peckham/Maggie Pavao/Patricia Melzer/Phillip Peckham/Linnea Geno (Tusen Takk Foundation), Misha Rai (Kenyon Review, Hamilton College), and Cynthia Van Maanen (Interlochen Arts Academy).
2022-2023 Artists-in-Residence
Photo by Roscoe Rutter
Shruthi Rajasekar is an Indian-American composer and vocalist exploring identity, community, and joy. Named by The Guardian as a composer "who will enrich your life,” Shruthi creates intersectional art reflecting her unique background in the Carnatic (South Indian classical) and Western classical idioms. Shruthi’s compositions are performed across the world and have been featured on Spotify's Official Classical Releases, BBC Radio 3, and YourClassical. In November 2021, her piece for the Royal Scottish National Orchestra Junior Chorus was premiered at the United Nations COP26. A graduate of Princeton University, she received a Marshall Scholarship for further study in ethnomusicology (SOAS, University of London) and composition (Royal Northern College of Music). Currently based in Minnesota, USA, Shruthi serves on the board of new music chamber ensemble Zeitgeist.
At Tusen Takk, Shruthi plans to examine the relationship between creative focus and spiritual meditation to make a sacred choral work embodying these two connected realms. Immersion in nature, solitude, and contemplation — markers of composing and faith — will be supplemented by studying texts of the Christian religion and learning the nuances of denominations and their practices. In the process, she will open herself to quieter spiritual emotions, like thankfulness and peace, as well as the ones that feel most vulnerable to her: rapture and release.
Daniele Genadry is an artist whose practice focuses on the relationship of painting and photography, which she uses to examine the potential of an image to generate its own temporality, and sensitize our perceptions. She studied at Dartmouth College, NH (BA 2002) and at the Slade School of Art, London (MFA 2008). She has been awarded residencies at the Bronx Museum, Anderson Ranch Art Center, Fondazione Ratti, Frans Masereel Centrum, and was a fellow at the British School at Rome (2013-14), the Bogliasco Foundation (2019) and Camargo Foundation (2021). Recent solo exhibitions include Staring in Place, In Situ Gallery, Paris; Slow Light at the Beirut Art Center; and Recomposing Light at Centre Intermondes, La Rochelle. Her work has been exhibited at MUCEM, Sursock Museum, Sharjah Biennial 13, Biennial del Sur, SMBA and the Bronx Museum. Genadry lives and works in Beirut and teaches at the American University of Beirut.
At Tusen Takk, Daniele’s project consists of beginning a new body of work that engages directly with the surrounding landscape (Lake Michigan) and expands on her current research of light movements and the animation of sight. She plans to work on paintings, drawings and prints that examine light through a sustained and repeated view of the Lake. She will consider works of certain modern artists (Monet, Signac, Bonnard) whose paintings’ proposed new ways of seeing and capturing nature in their time, as well as more contemporary works, such as paintings by David Hockney, Lois Dodd, Alex Katz among others, in order to reflect on how current visual modalities and technologies affect our way of looking at and engaging with the world.
Jon and Cathy Cone
Jon Cone is a Master Printer, photographer, developer of technology, and educator. He and his wife Cathy Cone, founded Cone Editions Press in 1980. In the 1980s, Cone printed large scale serigraphy, intaglio, monoprint, photogravure, and relief prints in a painterly style. He opened Cone Editions Gallery in NYC in 1987 to show the publications of their studio including the computer printmaking he began pioneering and by the early 1990s, Cone would develop the first archival inkjet inks. Cone has collaborated with painters Norman Bluhm, Stanley Boxer, Wolf Kahn, Willy Heeks, and David Humphrey, amongst others. At the same time, Cone has shared his technologies with countless other studios and privateers who use the inks, software and methodologies he develops and distributes via Inkjet Mall. Today, he is revolutionizing the speed and precision of UV exposure systems for alternative printmaking processes.
Cathy Cone is a photographer and painter. Her surrealist approach to photography began in the late 1970s with the introduction of the "Diana" camera, leading to investigation of experimental techniques towards a multidisciplinary approach to her poetic image making. Cathy received her training at Ohio University and her MFA at the Maine Media College. Exhibitions include Weisman Art Museum, University of Alabama, DeCordova Museum, the Griffin Museum of Photography and the Vermont Center for Photography. Cathy, with her husband Jon, founded Cone Editions Press in 1980 in Port Chester, NY, now East Topsham, VT, as a collaborative printmaking workshop where Cathy is director of the Workshops and Studio.
At Tusen Takk, Jon and Cathy will collaborate, bridging both of their ongoing work using and re-imagining historical processes.
Debra Salopek was born in California, raised in Mexico, and grew up bilingual, straddling 2 cultures. She received her BFA from the University of New Mexico in printmaking and drawing. Debra worked as a fine art printmaker in Los Angeles, CA collaborating with artists such as Alex Katz, Robert Mangold, Silvia Plimack Mangold, Robert Therrien, before dedicating full time to her studio with a focus on painting and work on paper. She has exhibited nationally with work in corporate collections and museums; she is currently represented by the William Havu Gallery in Denver, CO, and the Kiechel Fine Art Gallery, in Lincoln, NE.
At Tusen Takk, Debra will continue a series of work on paper started in 2019 titled, ‘chronicles’. The focus of this phase of the ‘chronicles’ series will be the winter ice, icebergs, and light on Lake Michigan, which will serve as the starting point for further investigation through different mediums, materials and processes in residence.
Juan Giraldo is a photographer currently living and working in Brooklyn, NY; he received his MFA from Columbia College. He was born in Manizales, Colombia and raised in Paterson, New Jersey. He received his BFA in photography from William Paterson University. Giraldo’s artistic practice explores verisimilitude through Identity, Dignity, and Allegory within long-term photo projects where he looks at the personal lives/spaces of working-class people of color. His work explores the personal interior spaces of working people, the textures of a working life, and the banal indicators of domesticity that shaped his view of the world, both as a first-generation immigrant and laborer. In addition to this work he continues to photograph his family as part of an ongoing project.
At Tusen Takk, Juan will be making work in/about Paterson, NJ, where he was raised, turning the work into photogravures. Additionally, he will continue to edit his East 17th St. body of work (ongoing) that focuses on his parent’s home life. Having access to a darkroom will help with his editing process, as he makes contact sheets and work prints for his archival pigment prints.
Martha Tuttle is an artist working between painting, textile, and sculpture. She is interested in the intimacies and discourses possible between entities of varying scales and time frames, such as the human and the mineral, or the pebble and the interplanetary. She received her BA from Bard College in 2011, and her MFA from The Yale School of Art in 2015. Fellowships and residencies have included The Rauschenberg Foundation, The Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, The Montello Foundation, A-Z West and The Ucross Foundation. Research grants include from the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library and a Josef Albers Travelling Grant. Her work has been shown throughout the U.S. and internationally, and has been reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Art Forum, Art in America, and The Brooklyn Rail among others. She is based in Brooklyn, NY.
At Tusen Takk, Martha plans to focus on a series of paintings that connect the material specificity of her woven stretched surfaces with hand-fabricated stretchers, constructed in residence. She will use both the visual landscape of the winter shoreline, and research into the geological formation and history of the Great Lakes to inform both the conceptual and visual direction of these works. Integrating her material surroundings is also an intention, whether this is incorporating collected stones into the pieces, or collecting sediment-rich snow for ice dyeing. She aims to make between six and eight finished paintings.
Leilehua Lanzilotti is a Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) musician dedicated to the arts of our time. A "leading composer-performer" (The New York Times), Lanzilotti is the recipient of a 2020 Native Launchpad Artist Award and 2021 McKnight Visiting Composer Residency. Her “conceptually potent” compositions often deal with unique instrument-objects, such as The Noguchi Museum commissions involving sound sculptures. “Lanzilotti’s score brings us together across the world in remembrance, through the commitment of shared sonic gestures.” (Cities & Health)
At Tusen Takk, Leilehua will work alongside the Takaezu Foundation and the Noguchi Museum to develop new works for an upcoming traveling exhibition to illuminate Toshiko Takaezu’s interest in hidden soundscapes through touch and sound. Born in Pepeekeo, Hawaiʻi, Takaezu later settled in New Jersey where her former studio now houses hundreds of her sculptures.
Hong Hong was born in 1989 in Hefei, Anhui, China, and earned her BFA from State University of New York at Potsdam and MFA from University of Georgia. Since 2015, she has travelled to faraway and distinct locations to create site-responsive, monumental paperworks. Hong’s research investigates the voyages of bodies, both plant and human, across borders and between continents. These works have been included in exhibitions including Real Art Ways, Hartford, CT; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR; and Asia Society Texas Center, Houston, TX. Hong has been awarded residencies and fellowships at MacDowell (2020), Yaddo (2019), and the Vermont Studio Center (2019) and currently lives and works in Beverly, MA.
At Tusen Takk, Hong will harvest invasive and native plants from the Michigan landscape. She will process these materials using traditional Chinese methods. She will set up several large-scale, paper formation structures on the residency grounds. This is where she will make paper outdoors whenever the weather allows. After the paper dries, Hong will cut, arrange, and sew multiple sheets into a new series of monumental installations and paintings. She will also begin a series of experimental investigations in text and textile, working with silk, voile, and embossment.
Jeremiah Chamberlin teaches in the Department of English at the University of Michigan. He is a Contributing Editor for Poets & Writers Magazine and the Editor-in-Chief of Fiction Writers Review. His work has appeared in Absinthe, Flyway, Glimmer Train, Granta, Michigan Quarterly Review, VQR, Vagabond, and elsewhere. He has taught for the College Year in Athens program and for Semester at Sea. In 2017, he was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Bulgaria.
At Tusen Takk, Jeremiah will be working on a book-length nonfiction project, based on the year that he spent living and traveling in Bulgaria. Inspired by iconic travelogues of Eastern Europe, his book is similarly structured as a braided narrative, weaving his travels together with Bulgaria’s cultural, political, and literary history. There is also a deeply personal element to the project: what he found as he traveled through Bulgaria was not foreignness, but echoes and resonances of northern Michigan, where he grew up—both in terms of geography and the experiences of the people who live there. And he looks forward to the opportunity to be able to situate himself in this landscape as he continues working to uncover the complicated intersections of place and identity, loyalty and belonging.
Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez are partners and independent artists working with photography and mixed media. Drake, a member of Magnum Photos, published her fourth book, Knit Club, in 2020, was named a Guggenheim fellow, and is the 2021 recipient of the Henri Cartier Bresson Fellowship. Gonzalez’s second book, American Origami, was published in 2019 and premiered in the exhibition American Epidemic: Guns in the United States at MoCP Chicago in 2021. Their independent works were also recently exhibited at SFMOMA’s show Close to Home.
At Tusen Takk, Carolyn and Andres will edit, sequence, and proof photographs and cyantotypes from Ficciones, their ongoing collaborative project along the US Mexico border. The visual pairings they are making across the border reflect that struggle: to find balance, to relate, and to defy the expectations of our own storyline. They are drawn to the way identity is negotiated in the borderlands. Their goal with the images is not to capture a unified identity or moment in time, but rather to contemplate the unfinished and continually complicated nature of human relations. The title Ficciones comes from the Jorge Luis Borges book of short stories. The title is a reminder that the border itself is not a natural condition; it is an imagined concept – albeit one that occupies physical, political, and psychological space.
Barbara Bosworth and Emily Sheffer have worked together for the past decade. In that time, they have collaborated on many projects, including several handmade photography books through the publishing imprint, Dust Collective. These titles include, From Where the Sun Now Stands (2020), Light of the Eclipse (2019), and Tide and Air (2019). These titles feature photography by Barbara Bosworth and book design and production by Emily Sheffer.
At Tusen Takk, Barbara and Emily will make a collaborative, handmade photography book. Barbara’s photographic project, Diana’s Baths and Other Landscape Stories will be the subject of the book. The project describes the idea that people are interactive participants within the environment. The sweeping images are multi-paneled, enhancing the feeling of being surrounded by the landscape. The wild landscape of northern Michigan is an ideal match for the subject matter and will inspire new photographs. The studios and library at Tusen Takk will provide the artists with a rich creative environment, while the rural setting will allow for the necessary solitude and focus that this project requires.
Katrina Bello is a visual artist who works in Montclair, NJ, and in the Philippines, where she was born and raised. Her work is informed by observations and experiences of natural environments encountered during migration. She has participated in exhibitions in the US and the Philippines and is a 2021 Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation Creative Fellow at Millay Arts. Katrina received a BFA from the Mason Gross School of The Arts at Rutgers University and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art.
At Tusen Takk, Katrina plans to observe the qualities of Lake Michigan, photograph it, and make sketches that embody the sense of the water being infinite, volatile, and in a state that “borders on insanity.” The sketches will be part of her ongoing series of drawings called 30,000 Tons, a series of works about water and the genesis of the planet. She intends for the drawings to share and express the sense of wonder, beauty and complexity of large bodies of water. Her hope is for the drawings to inspire a mixed sense of care, calm, curiosity and awe for the subjects of the works.
2022-23 Tusen Takk Residency Jurors
Johnny Coleman is an interdisciplinary artist and educator. His sculptural work and sound installations are composed as intentional gestures in homage and prayer. He holds the Young Hunter Professorship of Art and Africana Studies at Oberlin College. He has created sound installations for Arts institutions throughout the U.S. Over the last twenty-five years, he has worked collaboratively with a range of poets, musicians, dancers, and visual artists across the United States. Additionally, he has performed on stage at BAM, Majestic Theater: Next Wave Festival '96, and his work is included in the permanent collections of the following: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Fort Wayne Museum of Art, San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, California Center for the Arts, N'Namdi Center for Contemporary Art, and extensive private collections. Research interests include site specificity of African American cultural experience, the African roots of the banjo, furniture design, and the maroon communities of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Ellen McCulloch-Lovell is currently the Interim Director/CEO for the Wolf Kahn and Emily Mason Foundation and she served recently as Interim Executive Director for the Vermont Studio Center from July 2019-2020. In 2016, she was appointed Rock Point Legacy Minister, working with the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont until September 2018 to enhance and conserve its 130 acres on Lake Champlain. Ellen served as the eighth and first female president of Marlboro College in Vermont from 2004-2015, overseeing all operations of a small, residential institution of liberal studies, and more than doubling the size of its endowment. She is an outspoken advocate for the liberal arts, publishing opinion pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Huffington Post, New York Times online and other outlets. She started her career as program director, then executive director, of the Vermont Arts Council, the state cultural agency, from 1970-83. She served as U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy’s chief of staff in Washington, D.C., from 1983-94, during which time she supervised the D.C. and Vermont offices and performed as his political designee. She received her BA in philosophy from Bennington College and her MFA in Creative Writing from Warren Wilson College. Her first book of poems, Gone, was published by Janus Press in 2010. She continues her civic engagement on the boards of the Windham Foundation, Friends of Writers, Vermont Public Radio, and the Episcopal Diocese of Vermont. She also participates on the Working Communities Challenge Advisory Council of the Boston Federal Reserve and the Middlebury College Advisory Council. Ellen and her husband Dr. Christopher Lovell live in Montpelier, VT, not far from their son Evan, daughter-in-law Kristi, and three grandchildren, who are based in Stowe.
Brian David Mooney has published essays, fiction, and poetry in the Alaska Quarterly Review, Bellevue Literary, Cincinnati Review, Crazyhorse, and other journals from further into the alphabet. He is the creator of the popular Storymatic family of creative prompts and games, and his essays about the creative process were presented by Leonard Nimoy for United States Artists at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, Paramount Studios, and Jazz at Lincoln Center. Brian received his MFA in fiction from UMass and is the recipient of two creation grants from the Vermont Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Vermont.
Leah Ollman has been writing criticism and features about art for the Los Angeles Times since 1987, and has served as Corresponding Editor for Art in America since 1997. She has written essays for books on William Kentridge, Alison Rossiter, Michael Light, Michal Chelbin, John Brill and others, and contributed to numerous exhibition catalogues. Her articles and reviews have also appeared in such publications as Sculpture, Paris Review Daily, Photograph, Art in Print, History of Photography, ARTnews, Art on Paper and American Craft. She earned her M.A. in Art History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University, and graduated from Scripps College with a joint degree in Art History and Philosophy. She is currently at work on a book exploring the intersection of poetry and photography.
Geoffrey Peckham (right) with Tusen Takk’s architect Peter Bohlin (left)
Geoffrey Peckham is the Founder and Director of the Tusen Takk Foundation and a photographer. He founded Clarion Safety Systems in 1990 as a means to fund his photographic pursuits and the company grew to become the world’s leading firm in the field of graphically-based safety sign systems. Geoffrey was born in Minnesota, raised in Madison, WI, and educated at St. Olaf College with continued studies in art history, literature and philosophy at Cambridge and Oxford Universities.
Misha Rai is a Shirley Jackson Award nominated writer whose novel-in-progress has received support from the Kenyon Review Fellowship Program, the Whiting Foundation, the Ucross Foundation, MacDowell, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the Dana Award in the Novel Category. She is the first-ever and only fiction writer to be awarded a Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies for creative work. Misha is an Edward H. and Mary C. Kingsbury Fellow, recipient of the George M. Harper Award, winner of the Dogwood Literary Prize in Nonfiction, and her work is listed as a Notable Essay in the 2019 Best American Essays anthology. She was born in Sonipat, Haryana and brought up in India where she first worked as a journalist, and then, later, in human rights for the National Human Rights Commission, The International Labour Organization and on projects run by the Ministry of Women & Child, India, and the UNICEF. She currently edits for the Kenyon Review and teaches Creative Writing and Literature at Hamilton College.
Cynthia Van Maanen’s compositions have been performed by both professional musicians and collegiate faculty members and students from around the country. In addition to concert music, Van Maanen enjoys collaborating on projects with other artists like creative writers, visual artists and choreographers. Van Maanen holds the Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition with a minor in music theory from the University of Houston. Her Master’s degree is from the Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. In addition, she holds the Performer's Certificate in Scoring for Film and Television from the University of Southern California. Her undergraduate degree, also in composition with a focus in flute performance is from Baylor University. As an educator, Dr. Van Maanen is committed to helping students discover their own voice and communicate that to an audience. She has been asked to give masterclasses and/or teach private lessons in a variety of places and is published as part of the Music Library Association’s Technical Report Series in Information Literacy in Music: an Instructor’s Companion. Van Maanen currently teaches composition and theory for Interlochen Arts Academy. She also teaches for the Boston Conservatory High School Composition Intensive (HSCI). She is a member of ASCAP and on the composition council for NAfME.
