Join us in conversation with curator Anna Kustera and Summer 2025 Artists-in-Residence as they discuss their artwork, themes, and creative processes.
About the Curator:
Anna Kustera is a New York City–based art dealer and gallerist with more than four decades of experience in the contemporary art world. After running successful galleries first in Soho and later in Chelsea, she opened Kustera Projects in Red Hook, Brooklyn, a space known for its dynamic exhibitions at the intersection of art, culture, technology, and design. Throughout her career, Kustera has curated numerous independent projects and continues to advise private collectors on building and managing their art collections. She has also served as a guest advisor at leading art institutions including the School of Visual Arts (NY), the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), the NARS Foundation, and the International Center of Photography (NY).
About the Exhibition + Artists:
Contradiction, duality, and displacement are not problems to solve, but points of departure. Summer 2025 Parent and Educator Artists-in-Residence Mara Baldwin, Scott Carter, Maritea Dæhlin, and Estephania González all build from paradox, crafting grounded and hybrid worlds of their own making where multiple truths can coexist. Through sculpture, sound, ritual, and performance, captivating spaces and objects are constructed of their layered experiences.
Mara Baldwin is a multidisciplinary artist whose work focuses on the impossible dream of utopia and asks if a perfect life can include the imperfect feelings of failure, loneliness, and dissatisfaction. Baldwin's labor-intensive mark-making, textile manipulation, and sculpture examine the roles of imagination as a tool for both artist and utopian, the depth of women’s experience and past lives, and the earnestness of present-day feminism and queerness.
Sculptural artist Scott Carter creates objects and installations that exist in a liminal space between art, architecture, design and sound. As both a musician and a visual artist, Carter’s practice highlights a struggle for clarity and satisfaction through the act of intertwining both fields. Motivation, procrastination, failure, and nostalgia often become entangled in this pursuit. Resulting in creative works attempting to fill a personal void, need or desire.
Maritea Dæhlin splits her focus between video, performance art, sound, theater, and text as she also divides her time between Norway and Mexico. Both art and life are shaped by shifting geographies and contexts leaving space for interpretation, misunderstanding and lost words.
Continuous adaptation to different realities has become central to Dæhlin’s artistic practice, a constant dialogue with spaces, places, and their paradoxes.
Interdisciplinary artist Estephania González explores the intersections of environmental injustice, identity, and our spiritual connection to both land and cosmos. She draws inspiration from physics, spacetime theories, and pre-Columbian cosmologies. González’s work is deeply attuned to the tensions between belonging and displacement, tradition and assimilation. These become immersive experiences spanning video, installation, performance, and sculpture.
Related Events:
The Summer Artists showcase will be on view from June 14 through August 2. Visit anytime during gallery hours to meet the artists and explore their works.
