Session (34) Artist Talks

We are pleased to welcome our Session 34 Fellows – Ari Banias, Gabriela Garcia, Kunlin He, Shana Hoehn and Jang Soon Im – to Fishers Island. Our Session 34 Fellows were selected by independent panels from a pool of over 1,200 applicants and will be in residence from March 12 until April 23, 2019. We hope you’ll join us to both welcome our Fellows to Fishers Island and hear about their work.

Ari Banias

*Ari Banias is the author of Anybody (W.W. Norton, 2016), which was named a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the PEN Center USA Literary Award. His poems have appeared in various journals, in Troubling The Line: Trans and Genderqueer Poetry and Poetics, and as part of the MOTHA exhibition Transgender Hirstory in 99 Objects. He is the recipient of fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing, and Stanford University. Ari works with small press books and teaches poetry in the Bay Area. His most recent chapbook, A Symmetry, was published by The Song Cave in 2018.

• Gabriela Garcia

Gabriela Garcia is a fiction writer, poet, and journalist. Her writing appears or is forthcoming in Tin House, Iowa Review, Zyzzyva, Michigan Quarterly Review, The Cincinnati Review, The Normal School, TriQuarterly, and many other journals. She is the winner of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writer’s Award and served as writer-in-residence for Sarabande Books. She received an MFA in fiction from Purdue University. Gabriela is the daughter of immigrants from Mexico and Cuba and grew up in Miami.

Kunlin He

*Born in 1992 in Nanchang, China, Kunlin He currently lives in San Francisco, CA. His work focuses on redefining Asian identities, territories, borders, nationalisms, as well as Chinese masculinity in traditional art and philosophy, in his visual and media-based conceptual art. He is also interested in revealing the hybridity and heterogeneity of Chinese identities in the context of globalization, using the resources of East Asian traditional cultures and culture studies.

He received a BFA in Environmental Design from Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China in 2014, an MFA from San Francisco Art Institute in 2016 and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018. He is a graduate fellow and affiliated artist at Headlands Center for the Arts (2017-2019). His work has been included in exhibitions at the Drawing Center, Headlands Center for the Arts, Seattle Art Fair, Chinese Culture Center of San Francisco, Pennsylvania State University, among others. He has participated in several residencies including Ox-Bow School of Art; MASS MoCA; Atlantic Center for the Arts; Elsewhere Museum; and Santa Fe Art Institute. He has been selected as one of the finalists for the 2019 SFMOMA SECA Award.

• Shana Hoehn

*Through video and sculpture, Shana Hoehn disorganizes spaces and objects that manifest forms of social regulation. The protagonists in her work are the spaces themselves, ranging from bureaucratic institutions to the rural landscape of East Texas where she was raised. Hoehn received her BFA in painting from Maryland Institute College of Art and her MFA in sculpture and extended media at Virginia Commonwealth University. She has participated in residencies and fellowships such as the Core Program at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Acre Residency, SOMA Summer, the Fulbright Program, and she will participate at the Jan Van Eyck Academie in 2019. Hoehn has received grants from the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, Houston Arts Alliance, the Idea Fund, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. Hoehn has recently exhibited at Klowden Mann (Los Angeles), Vox Populi (Philadelphia), the Visual Arts Center at University of Texas (Austin), Hiram Butler (Houston), and will have a solo exhibition at Women and Their Work (Austin) in 2019.

Jang Soon Im

*Jang Soon Im has been the subject of exhibitions in numerous venues including Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Smack Mellon, Diverse Works, TX, Seoul Museum of Art, Korea, Kanazawa Art Port, Japan. Im completed artist residency programs at the Core program, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Macdowell colony, Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts and Vermont Studio Center (VSC) and was awarded a Marin Fellowship from VSC, an Artadia awards 2012 Houston and a James Nelson Raymond Fellowship in 2010.

He earned an MFA in Drawing and Painting from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010 and his BFA in Asian Painting from Seoul National University in 2003. He was born in Seoul, Korea and currently lives and works in New York City.*