Session (50) Artist Talks

Please join us as we welcome our Session 50 fellows – ‘Pemi Aguda, Bailey Arend, Ivy Guild, Erin Johnson, and Dāshaun Washington – to Fishers Island. Our newest cohort will be in residence with us from July 5, 2022, to August 16, 2022. Join us this Friday to meet our newest cohort and hear a little bit about their work!

‘Pemi Aguda is from Lagos, Nigeria. Her partial novel-in-progress won the 2020 Deborah Rogers Foundation Writers Award. She was a 2021 fiction fellow with the Miami Book Fair, and is a 2022 MacDowell fellow. Her work has appeared in Ploughshares, Zoetrope, Granta, Zyzzyva, Tor.com, American Short Fiction, and One Story.

Bailey Arend (b. 1987 Anchorage, Alaska) is an artist who explores relationships between body, action, material, and ecology. His work generally takes form as sculpture and also touches on performance, drawing and photography. He has been awarded residencies and fellowships including the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the Odyssey Center for Ceramic Arts. He exhibits nationally including solo exhibitions at Lacuna Gallery in Minneapolis, MN, The International Gallery of Contemporary Art in Anchorage, AK, The Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, AK, and Claymakers in Durham, NC. Bailey Arend received his MFA from Alfred University in 2016. He is currently a Lecturer and Lab Operations Assistant Manager for the Art Department at Appalachian State University.

Ivy Guild, a San Diego-based artist, graduated in August 2021 with an MFA in Studio Art from the University of California, Irvine. Guild was born and raised in Phoenix, AZ and moved to San Diego in 2012 to pursue a degree in Marine Biology. Four years later, she graduated with dual degrees in Visual Arts and Art History. Guild’s work considers the sinister side of evolutionary survival and environmental justice, speculating on a world after the Sixth Great Extinction and diving into speculative realms of investigation. Her work manifests in multimedia, living installations that combine organic and inorganic materials to engage all of the viewer’s senses. Guild’s MFA thesis exhibition, The Keeling (2021), was shown at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery at UCI in August 2021 and made alongside Guild’s written thesis “The Encyclopedia of Sublimation” (2021). Pedagogy is key to Guild’s practice and she is a Studio Art Faculty member at La Jolla Country Day School.

Erin Johnson’s short films and video installations interlace documentary, experimental, and narrative filmmaking devices to interrogate notions of collectivity, dissent, and queer identity. In her shape-shifting videos, site-specific performances by artists, biologists, and film extras address the legacies of science and imperialism. Johnson received an MFA and Certificate in New Media from UC Berkeley in 2013, attended Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in 2019, and recently completed residencies at Pioneer Works (Brooklyn, NY), the Jan van Eyck Academie (Maastricht, NL), Lower Manhattan Community Council (NYC, NY), and Surf Point (York, Maine), and Hidrante (San Juan, Puerto Rico). She is an Assistant Professor of Film and Video at the Maryland Institute College of Art.

Dāshaun Washington is a poet living in Northampton, Massachusetts. He is a 2021 92Y Discovery Contest runner-up and 2021 Indiana Review 1/2 K Prize finalist. He has received support from Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, Lighthouse Works, Ucross Foundation, Millay Arts, Tin House, and beyond. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Nation, Indiana Review, Poem-a-Day, American Poetry Review, Tinderbox, and elsewhere.