Tusen Takk Announces 2025 Artists-in-Residence
The Tusen Takk Foundation is delighted to announce the eight artists who have been awarded 2025 residencies! Coming to Northern Michigan from across the globe, they will explore new ideas at Tusen Takk in various mediums including photography, sculpture, painting, weaving, and bookmaking. The artists will work and live at Tusen Takk for between three and eight weeks, immersing themselves in the landscape of Northern Michigan. As much as a residency at Tusen Takk provides artists with a time to create, it’s also a time to step out of their daily lives to slow down, reflect, and regenerate.
The 2025 artists-in-residents are: Alon Koppel (Catskill, NY), Tomoyuki Ueno (Berlin, Germany), Morgan Ford Willingham (Waco, TX), Nadia Sablin (Highland, NY), Abbey Muza (Chicago/Paris, France), Brenda Zlamany (Brooklyn, NY), Fritz Horstman (Bethany, CT), Letha Wilson (Craryville/Brooklyn, NY).
About Tusen Takk
The Tusen Takk Foundation seeks to nourish artists by giving them a time and a place to work, an engagement opportunity to enrich the culture of Northwest Michigan, and a platform to share their work internationally.
“Tusen Takk” means “thousand thanks” in Norwegian and is often used to convey appreciation for something received, like a wonderful dinner or a helping hand. With this same sense of gratitude and grace, the founders established the Tusen Takk Foundation to express thankfulness to artists for the transcendent truth and intangible joy they give back to the world in their work.
Located on the isolated Leelanau Peninsula in Northwest Michigan, the Tusen Takk studios and guesthouse are set into the quiet, forested dunes of Lake Michigan. Designed by world-renowned architect Peter Bohlin, the buildings provide artists with an architecturally inspiring space to focus on their work.
The Tusen Takk Artist-in-Residence Program
Tusen Takk was designed to host one artist-in-residence at a time (or two artists in collaboration) to provide artists with space and time to develop current work and explore new directions. While in residence, artists are encouraged to engage with the local arts community. In the past, artists have invited guests for a workshop or studio visit or given a public talk, exhibition, or performance in collaboration with one of the Foundation’s partner organizations.
Alon Koppel's landscape photography is conceptual in nature. He plays with location, time, and repetition. Grounded in photographing the sublime, one of his recent series documents the evolving landscape by combining historical images of man-made structures with photographs he has meticulously made of the same structures, seen today from the same viewpoint. Another series captures the beauty of ships and trains in motion. Alon often returns to the same locations in different seasons to make the same (but different) photograph. The end product, the photographs of frozen moments, are not moments at all, but rather compared periods of time.
At Tusen Takk Alon will create long time exposures of Lake Michigan and the surrounding landscape, documenting the shifting nature of weather and water. Using Tusen Takk’s state-of-the-art photographic printers, he'll print this new work in the form of diptychs, collages, and the like.
Always his first passion, Alon returned to photography following a career in design. He currently resides in Catskill, New York. His Shipping Lane project was included in the Klompching Gallery's FRESH 2023 exhibition. In 2024, Alon is a year-long artist-in-residence with the Erie Canal. In this capacity, he is working on a long-term re-photography documentation project. This work centers on making present-day canal views taken at the same locations where historical views had been made in prior decades.
Right: Alon Koppel, 30 seconds of bulk carrier Amis Glory, Catskill, 2022 (detail)
Tomoyuki Ueno was born in Kobe, Japan and lives in Berlin. By using natural materials, his work explores the connection between art and everyday life. He says, "Just as a forest is made up of individual trees, its life is inherited from hundreds of millions of years ago—so there is a universality to the repeated patterns that make up this world."
At Tusen Takk, Tomoyuki will create new sculptures that explore pattern-making possibilities. For instance, in his Forest series, he will collect and assemble similar shapes of twigs (Y’s and T’s) from local cherry and apple orchard trimmings. When viewing the finished sculptures, viewers come away feeling new connections to the natural world.
Ueno earned two Masters degrees, one in Inter Media Art from Tokyo University of the Arts, and a second in Art and Media from the University of the Arts in Berlin. Ueno has participated in residency programs at the Stiftung Insel Hombroich, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, and Akiyoshidai International Art Village. He has shown work internationally, including at the Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art's Print Art Triennale and the 6th Moscow International Biennale for Young Art.
Right: Tomoyuki Ueno, Berliner Forest 2021-23, 2023. Twigs, brass rings, 428 x 190 x 50 centimeters
Morgan Ford Willingham is a photographic artist and educator whose work explores pop culture, advertising, and societal norms to better understand their influence on women’s identity and self-image. She explores the medium of photography in various ways, including mixed-media, book arts, and intricate gallery installations.
At Tusen Takk, Morgan will experiment in creating photographic textile collages by printing blue cyanotype self-portraits on fabrics. She will also embark on a new project that examines the photographic representation of women from Ancient and Modern Egypt. She will experiment printing and collaging these new images using the alternative VanDyke photo process which produces brown images on fabrics.
Ford Willingham received an MFA in photography from Texas Woman’s University. Her work has been widely exhibited, including Humble Arts Gallery in NYC, Filter Photo in Chicago, and Manifest Gallery in Cincinnati, OH. She is currently Assistant Professor of Photography at Baylor University in Texas.
Right: Morgan Ford Willingham, Untitled (Minerva), 2023. Cyanotype with hand embroidery on found textiles, 31 x 12 inches
Nadia Sablin is a photographer whose work blurs the line between documentary and fictional storytelling, exploring the larger world through close personal narratives.
At Tusen Takk, Nadia will turn her attention to healing (something our broken world needs). On her travels, she has collected suitcases of materials about medicinal plants and traditional folk medicine. While in residence, she will create a series of still-life photographs of these collected materials. The end result will be an artist book containing recipes for healing, texts, plants, embroidery, and archival photographs.
Sablin is a Guggenheim fellow and has published books with Duke University Press and Dewi Lewis. She teaches at SUNY New Paltz.
Right: Nadia Sablin, Katya, Alekhovshchina, Russia, 2013 (detail)
Abbey Muza uses weaving and other forms of image-making to explore narration, identity, and abstraction. Their upcoming project involves a series of pochoir-printed and painted woven textiles that consider how narratives are imparted via textiles’ relationship to the body.
At Tusen Takk, using their own or found photographic images of 'touch,' Abbey will make compositions for each work and turn these into pochoir stencils to paint unwoven threads. As they weave these threads, the images will break apart, shift, and come back together, rebuilt into new compositions.
Muza has been in residence at ACRE and Alternative Worksite, a Fulbright France Harriet-Hale Wooley Fellow in the Arts, a Leroy Neiman Fellow at the Oxbow School of Art, and a visiting artist at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris. Their recent solo and two-person shows include exhibitions at Tusk (Chicago), Slow Dance (Chicago), and the Fondation des États Unis (Paris). They have a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA in Fiber and Material Studies from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia. They currently live between Chicago and Paris.
Left: Portrait by Patricia Zheng
Right: L: Abbey Muza, Réciter le corps de l’autre, 2023. Wool, cotton, linen, acrylic, 130 x 37 centimeters
Brenda Zlamany, a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn, New York, has been reinvigorating portraiture since her first portrait show in 1994. Painting a portrait, stroke by stroke, creates a longed-for connection amid our fast-paced, digital era. Her work aims to illuminate the lives, both historical and present, of individuals who have been overlooked in art and undervalued in society, celebrating the enduring power of human connection.
At Tusen Takk, Brenda will continue her multi-year global project The Itinerant Portraitist with a new "Climate in America" chapter focused on Michigan's cherry farming community. Painting watercolor portraits while simultaneously video recording conversations, she will explore the challenges farmers face, from the impacts of climate change to increased global competition.
Zlamany has shown her work in many solo exhibitions internationally including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Taipei; the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver; and Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent, Belgium. Grants received include a Peter S. Reed Foundation Grant, Fulbright Fellowship, Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant, New York Foundation for the Arts Artists’ Fellowship, and Jerome Foundation Fellowship. She received a BA from Wesleyan University.
Right: Brenda Zlamany, watercolor portraits
Fritz Horstman is an artist, curator, and educator based in Bethany, Connecticut. Through his practice of sculpture, he conflates and overlaps the subjective and objective, form and void, flatness and three-dimensionality, nature and culture. In sum, his work celebrates the potential of fluidity.
At Tusen Takk, with the glacially-carved Lake Michigan at his doorstep, Fritz will create sculptures that extend his U-Shaped Valley series. He will also create new and larger works in his Folded Cyanotypes series, possibly incorporating other photographic and printing techniques.
Horstman's upcoming solo exhibitions include the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, Connecticut; Municipal Bonds in San Francisco; and Planthouse Gallery in Manhattan. Recent residencies include The Arctic Circle Residency and The Bauhaus Residency. In his role as Education Director at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Fritz has curated exhibitions internationally, including Anni Albers: In Thread and On Paper. He has also authored a book: Interacting with Color: A Practical Guide to Josef Albers’s Color Experiments.
Right:
(Above) Fritz Horstman, U-Shaped Loom, 2021. Maple, cotton thread, 10 x 9 x 18 inches
(Below) Fritz Horstman, Folded Cyanotype 130, 2021. Cyanotype fluid on paper, 13 x 13 inches
Letha Wilson was born in Hawaii, raised in Colorado, and currently works in Craryville and Brooklyn, New York. In her work, the ability of a photograph to transport the viewer is both called upon and questioned. Her sculptural “interventions” attempt to compensate for the photograph’s failure to encompass the physical site it represents.
At Tusen Takk, Letha will work in photogram collages in the darkroom and develop new studies for photo-sculpture works. Her Re-Photogram series starts with analog darkroom prints that are then taken into the studio where she will cut, rip, fold and tear their surfaces; then re-photograph them. She also plans to work on new wall-based and freestanding photographic sculptures by mounting inkjet prints onto matboard to create small-scale models of what will eventually become large-scale installation pieces.
Wilson received her BFA from Syracuse University and her MFA from Hunter College. She then attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Her artwork has been shown at many venues including Mass MoCA, deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, Bronx Museum of the Arts, and The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, among others. Letha has been awarded residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, among others. Letha will have her first institutional solo exhibition at Center for Maine Contemporary Art, Rockland, Maine in September 2024.
Left: Portrait by Guzman
Right: Letha Wilson, Idaho Sunrise Triple Bend, 2023. UV prints on steel, steel frame,24" x 19 5/8 x 1 5/8 inches
