Smack Mellon

ANNOUNCING THE 2026/27 ARTIST STUDIO

We are thrilled to announce the six artists in the 2026–27 Artist Studio cohort! (from top, left to right):

Amy Bravo
Aparna Sarkar
Asia Stewart
Enrique Garcia
Judy Chung
Soeun Bae

These NYC-based emerging artists, representing a diverse array of practices, will move into their studios at Smack Mellon this September. For an eleven-month period, residents are granted a private studio, a stipend, and access to equipment with which to create work, establish relationships with arts professionals, and grow in community with their peers—all with the financial, technical, and administrative support of Smack Mellon.

A panel of arts professionals selected this year’s cohort, including Nova Benway, Executive Director at Triangle Arts Association; Ian Cofre, Independent Curator; and Pallavi Surana, Independent Curator. Preliminary panelists were former Smack Mellon Studio or Exhibition artists: Christian Amaya Garcia, mujero, Juan José Cielo, Utsa Hazarika, Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, and Armando Guadalupe Cortés.

Amy Bravo combines icons from Latin American popular culture and hyper-personal family stories, to invent her own vision, intimate and fantastic, of an afterlife in the rough shape of the island of Cuba. Rather than classic stretched canvases, Bravo prefers to draw on loose canvas—cut and stitched to create irregular shapes that expand into painting and assemblage sculpture.

Born in 1997 in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Amy Bravo currently lives and works in Queens, New York. After completing a BFA in Illustration at Pratt Institute, New York, she obtained an MFA in Painting at Hunter College, New York in 2022. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Swivel Gallery, New York, Semiose Gallery in Paris, as well as group shows with Buffalo AKG Art Museum and The FLAG Foundation. Her work is featured in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She was a 2024 New York Community Trust Fellow at ISCP and a resident at the Fountainhead in Miami in 2022.

Amy Bravo, Automaton 4.0 (Bull-Remastered), 2024. Found Cabinet, Foam, Acrylic, Wood, Epoxy, Plaster, Thread, Boxing Gloves, Christmas Lights, Synthetic Hair, Co

Get your tickets for our Spring Benefit this Wed, May 6 and catch Pat Oleszko’s performance activating our 30-year archive!

“A timed performantz creating sartorial splendor from the capacious archives of Smack Mellon publicity excess, Oleszko will transform the past into a wearable Version of the Future that she will don in relative discomfort the rest of the evening. A Fool’s errand not to be missed.”

You won’t get these looks at the Met gala 👀

Next week on Wed. May 6th, join us for our Spring Benefit!

As part of the evening’s festivities,
catch a performance by Pat Oleszko 💃
win prizes in the “pearl-diving the archive” game 🦪 bring your best song for a karaoke after party 🎤
enjoy food by 🫓🥗🧀

Celebrate our enduring community and sustain Smack Mellon’s future by buying your ticket today! Tickets start at $175.

More information at the link in our profile. 🎟️

Thanks to our generous event sponsors:

This , meet Kamari Carter, a New York-based artist working primarily with sound, video, installation, and performance. His practice circumvents materiality and familiarity through a variety of recording and amplification techniques to investigate notions such as space, systems of identity, oppression, control, and surveillance.

His work has been exhibited at Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Perez Art Museum Miami, Miami, FL; and Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum, Providence, RI, among others, and has been featured in publications including Artnet, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, and Whitewall, among others. Carter holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MFA from Columbia University. Kamari Carter is represented by Microscope Gallery in New York City.

Image: Kamari Carter, The Horrorscope is back and letting you know that someone is giving you an awful lot of attention recently, and you are not comfortable with it. Your best tactic is to try to ignore them. You can’t try to fake it, but there is also no need