WINTER 2025 ARTIST-IN-RESIDENCE SHOWCASE

Within this cohort, materials exist as living archives, turning familiar objects into spaces where identity, memory, and the body converge. The Winter–Spring 2026 Artists-in-Residence approach their practices through lineages outside traditional power structures, centering experiences often overlooked in patriarchal cultural spaces. Textiles stretch into collage, yoga mats become painted ground, beads and shells form constellations, and photographs carry the weight of history. The art that emerges is a collective reimagining of how materiality can unravel, mend, and re-thread the stories we inherit. 

Mahari Chabwera makes tapestry paintings using beads, shells, fabric, and oil paint to explore transformation and self-mythology. Centering Black women in harmony with cosmic and natural worlds, her work imagines ”what cannot be verified.” In these spaces of healing and becoming, each artwork itself is a meditation on spirit, balance, and celestial power.

Kimberly English’s fiber-based practice examines the relationship between individual agency and collective experience. Working with woven and sewn forms that merge narrative and contemporary motifs, she reflects on labor, heritage, and belonging in the American South. Through pattern, precision, and suspended cloth, her textiles become metaphors for historical continuity and systemic tensions.

William Evans, our John O. Calmore Creative Activism Artist-in-Residence, approaches his practice as both an artist and cultural worker, exploring how identity, place, and power intersect. Using everyday materials like welcome mats, flags, and heirloom neckties, he reframes the familiar as sites of cultural tension and reflection. Through humor, craft, and care, his work questions belonging, resistance, and the systems that shape American life.

Njaime Njie creates photographs, collages, and installations that trace the connections between place and memory, with a specific focus on the contours of Black life within Black landscapes. Drawing from oral histories and archives, she documents how systemic forces shape everyday experience while honoring joy, beauty, and resistance. Her work bridges past and future, inviting viewers to imagine freer worlds.

Preetika Rajgariah explores layered identities as an immigrant, a brown queer woman, and a Southerner. Working with yoga mats, sari fabric, and other culturally charged materials, she reflects on visibility, consumption, and matrilineal legacy. Her vibrant assemblages transform acts of making into meditation, challenging systems of erasure while celebrating resilience and care.

Komikka Patton’s multimedia practice moves between drawing, painting, and collage to explore intimacy, perception, and surrender. Layering material and meaning, she examines how consciousness is shaped by vulnerability and reciprocity. Her works become quiet invitations toward presence, spaces where revelation and ambiguity coexist. Here both darkness and illumination are equal participants.