2019 Artists in Residence

*This performance is in honor of the Polar Bears a 73 yr old group (members were originally exclusively African American women, but are now inclusive of all) who meet in the Inkwell Beach the water every morning during July and Aug. The performance will honor this group and those who came before us.

Tsedaye Makonnen is a multidisciplinary artist who exhibits internationally. Her main focus is on the African Diaspora's response to forced migration. As a mother and former doula: birth, femmehood, matriarchy and the medical industrial complex are other major themes in her practice and interwoven with migration, as well as colorism. She is currently DC Public Library’s Maker-in-Residence, the recipient of the 2019 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship and DC Oral History Collaborative grant in which she will archive the oral histories of her parents Ethiopian generation that migrated to the U.S. in the 1970s. She has performed at the Venice Biennale, Art Basel Miami, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery, El Museo del Barrio, Pratt Film Institute, Queens Museum, Festival International d’Art Performance in Martinique, Chale Wote Street Art Festival in Ghana, Fendika Cultural Center in Ethiopia and more. The summer of 2018 she completed a residency with her mentor El Anatsui at his studio in Nsukka, Nigeria. Tsedaye has a new sculpture titled Aberash, a ten foot tall monument dedicated to black women and girls who have died at the hands of state sanctioned violence in the United States or on their journey to Europe that was recently exhibited at the National Gallery of Art and the August Wilson Center. She is currently taking part in speaking engagements across the country connecting migration and intersectional feminism.  

Ayana Evans is a NYC based artist. Evans received her MFA in painting from the Tyler School of Art at Temple University and her BA in Visual Arts from Brown University. In 2015 she received the Jerome Foundation's Theater and Travel & Study Grant for artistic research abroad. During the summer of 2016 Evans completed her installment of the residency, "Back in Five Minutes" at El Museo Del Barrio in NYC. The next year she completed a 10 hour endurance based, citywide performance and 100 person performative dinner party in the Barnes Foundation museum (free and open to the public) during the Spring of 2017 for "A Person of the Crowd” which was a major performance art survey featuring artists such as, Marina Abramovic, Tania Bruguera  and William Pope L. in Philadelphia, PA. Her international work includes FIAP, a performance festival in Martinique and Ghana'a Chale Wote festival which drew 30,000 people. Evans was a 2018 Fellow in the Studio Immersion Program at EFA’s Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, as well as, a 2018 resident and grant recipient at Artists Alliance Inc (NYC), and a 2017-2018 awardee of the Franklin Furnace Fund for performance art, and a 2018 NYFA Fellow for Interdisciplinary Arts. Within the past year she completed her first three solo exhibitions with MediumTings Gallery( Brooklyn), Cuchifritos Gallery (NYC) and the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop at NADA(Governors Island). Her current exhibition on Governors Island, "My Colonial Get-Away: Fu** It I Ain't Budgin'"  runs throughout this summer. Evans recent press includes: ArtNet, New York Magazine's The Cut, Hyperallergic, the Huffington Post,BBC and CNN. She is currently a professor at Brown University.