Saturday, Apr 19, 2025
(62) Open Studios
About
After six weeks of creative work shaped by Fishers Island’s sea, sky, and quiet rhythms, our Session 62 Fellows are ready to share what they’ve been making — and what they’ve discovered along the way.
This session’s fellows — a painter, a sculptor, a photographer, and two fiction writers — arrived by ferry and found themselves in conversation with Fishers Island’s landscape, its history, and its community. We invite you to step inside that creative dialogue and join us at Lighthouse Works for our Session 62 Open Studios, an opportunity to visit the fellows’ workspaces, experience the projects they’ve developed during their time on the island, and hear directly about how this place has shaped their process.
Join us for an evening of conversation, curiosity, and celebration — a chance to mark the close of a residency and the beginning of new creative journeys.
Artists
Bio
With a bold, linear vocabulary translated across multiple mediums – drawing, painting, mural, and sculpture – Allison Jae Evans simultaneously seduces viewers and challenges them to consider how images of women are deployed and consumed. In Evans’ work, the nude woman is never passive. She provokes, acting as bait and also baiter, to upend traditional dynamics of objectification and desire.
Evans was born in New Haven, CT and lives/ works in Brooklyn, NY. She earned a BA from Dartmouth College and an MFA from Hunter College (CUNY). Recent solo and two-person exhibitions include Smoke and Mirrors, CURRO, Guadalajara, Mexico (2025), Shapeshifters, LVL3, Chicago, IL (2024), Hung Up, Peninsula Gallery, New York, NY (2022); What Are You Waiting For?, PAS/Tribeca, New York, NY (2022); The Vessel, TSA NY, Brooklyn, NY (2022); Tennis Elbow, The Journal Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2017); and Amuse Bouche, 106 Green Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (2015). Evans’ work has been featured in New American Paintings, Maake Magazine, and Hyperallergic, and has been reviewed in The New York Times. She was a 2016 Rema Hort Mann emerging artist grant nominee and received a 2024 NYSCA/ NYFA Fellowship in Painting.
Website
https://www.allisonjevans.comBio
Emma Safir (b. 1990 NYC) makes paintings that utilize fabric manipulation, lens–based media, smocking, rasterization, upholstery, and digitization. Her paintings function as screen simulations, proxies and portals. Safir is interested in hierarchies of labor in relation to gender and digitization, and in image making apparatus and distribution. Safir holds a BFA from RISD in Printmaking and an MFA from Yale in Painting & Printmaking. She has had solo exhibitions at Blade Study, Baxter St at CCNY, SHIN HAUS at Shin Gallery and Bunker Projects; and has participated in group shows at HESSE FLATOW, Galerie Nicolas Robert, Charles Moffett, Jack Barrett, Lyles & King, among others. She has upcoming solo exhibitions with HESSE FLATOW (2025) and Buffalo Institute for Contemporary Art (2026). Safir lives and works in New York City.
Website
https://www.emmasafir.comBio
Shala Miller, (b. 1993, Cleveland, OH) also known as Freddie June when they sing, was born and raised in Cleveland, Ohio by two southerners named Al and Ruby. At around the age of 10 or 11, Miller discovered quietude, the kind you’re sort of pushed into, and then was fooled into thinking that this is where they should stay put. Since then, Miller has been trying to find their way out, and find her way into an understanding of herself and her history, using photography, video, writing and singing as an aid in this process.
Taking up skin as a site of history and intimacy with the self and across generations, they hold space for the body’s vulnerabilities and maladies. Miller works across photography, film, writing, music, and performance as a means of meditating on the conjunction of desire, mourning, pain, and pleasure.
Miller holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Her book, Tender Noted, was voted best photo book of 2022 by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), and her artwork is in the collections of MoMA, The Studio Museum, the Hessel Museum, the Akeroyd Collection and The Lumber Room among others.
Website
https://www.smille.coBio
Andrea Kleine is a novelist and performance artist. She is the author of the novels, Eden, a finalist for the 2018 Publishing Triangle Award for LGBTQ fiction; and Calf, a Publishers Weekly Best Fiction Book of 2015. She has received numerous honors and awards for her work from institutions including New York Foundation for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts, Ucross, Montalvo, Baryshnikov Arts, and multiple MacDowell fellowships. Her recent evening-length performance works have been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater and New York Live Arts. Her feature-length nonfiction film, The End Is Not What I Thought It Would Be, created in isolation during the pandemic, is currently streaming. At Lighthouse Works she is working on her next novel, How to Make Friends with Birds.
Website
https://www.andreakleine.comBio
Kia Corthron is a novelist and playwright. Her debut, THE CASTLE CROSS THE MAGNET CARTER, won the 2016 Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, was a NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW Editor's Choice, and was recently cited by the Auraist substack as the American Debut Novel of the Century. Her second novel, MOON AND THE MARS, was positively reviewed in THE WALL STREET JOURNAL, THE IRISH TIMES (Dublin), and elsewhere. In 2024, two of her plays had world premieres: TEMPESTUOUS ELEMENTS at D.C.’s Arena Stage and FISH in New York City, a co-production of Keen Company and the Working Theater. Other plays have been produced in New York by Playwrights Horizons, New York Theatre Workshop, Atlantic Theater Company, Ensemble Studio Theatre, Manhattan Theatre Club; regionally by Goodman Theatre, Yale Repertory Theatre, Mark Taper Forum, Actors Theatre of Louisville, Center Stage, Hartford Stage, Children’s Theatre Company, Alabama Shakespeare Festival, New York Stage and Film; in London by the Royal Court Theatre and Donmar Warehouse; and elsewhere. Awards include the Windham Campbell Prize, Horton Foote Award, Flora Roberts Award, USArtists Jane Addams Fellowship, McKnight National Residency. She serves on the Dramatists Guild Council, is a New Dramatists alumnus, and is a member of the Authors Guild.
