Lectures are held on Tuesdays at 6PM
Free & Open to the Public
At the Brooklyn Navy Yard
1 Dock 72 Wy
Brooklyn, NY 11205
About VALS Fellows
Hosted by Pratt’s Fine Arts MFA program, VALS is our visiting artist lecture series. Graduate student coordinators invite contemporary artists to participate in a public lecture and studio visits at our new location at Dock 72 in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. The aim is to provide our students with exposure to a wide array of artists working in a variety of fields at various stages in their careers. The VALS series provides an opportunity for a deeper engagement with our community and is free and open to the public. Follow us on Instagram @prattfineart to see what’s coming up!
Previous VALS artists include Diana Al-Hadid, Korakrit Arunanondchai, Judith Bernstein, Michael Berryhill, Wafaa Bilal, The Black School, Pradeep Dalal, Abigail D. Deville, Nicole Eisenman, Rochelle Feinstein, Keltie Ferris, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Schezerade Garcia, Rico Gatson, Jeffrey Gibson, Mark Thomas Gibson, Nancy Grossman, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Edgar Heap of Birds, James Hyde, Laura Kalman, Nina Katchadourian, Elektra KB, Baseera Khan, Savannah Knoop, Leigh Ledare, Jennie Jieun Lee, Ann Lewis, Tau Lewis, Kalup Linzey, Ibrahim Mahama, Park McArthur, Alicia Mersy, Wardell Milan, Ayanah Moor, Lavar Munroe, Narcissister, Rashaad Newsome, Catherine Opie, Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya, Alexis Rockman, Aura Satz, Shazia Sikander, Lorna Simpson, Wendy Red Star, Dan Walsh, Hu Xiangqian, and Frank Wang Yefen.
We are grateful to the Robert Lehman Foundation for supporting this series.
Flaviu Cacoveanu, whose artistic discourse simultaneously embraces – from a performative perspective – language, photography, installation, ready-made objects, or sculptures, and it mainly occurs at a point where these media intertwine. His profoundly intuitive process is sensitive to the interplay between the elements and materials he carefully selects.
The artworks are born within his cell phone – which has in the meantime become not only a living space or an extension of reality but outright the artist’s studio – in the shape of sketches or short story-type videos, advancing slices of reality which, taken out of the context, are endowed with new meanings. Therefore, his works are brought to the attention of the public as “notifications” inviting viewers to do a double take and look more closely at the details, which reveal the poetry inherent in the everyday. Through seemingly nonchalant, yet sharp and humorous observations he highlights traces left by unnoticed inhabitants of the city, often insects, discarded items of consumption and various random acts which all compile a portrait of the artist as a reflection of his environment.
Flaviu Cacoveanu, born 1989 in Cluj, Romania, lives and works in Berlin, Germany. His works have been exhibited amongst others at Parliament Gallery in Paris (FR), Lutnita Gallery in Chisinau (MD), Liste Art Fair 2024 in Basel (CH), Baronian Gallery in Brussels (BE), NADA Villa Warsaw in Warsaw (PL), Art Brussels 2023 in Brussels (BE), Art Au
Centre 2023 in Liege (BE), ART-O-RAMA 2022 in Marseille (FR), The National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest (RO) and at the Art Encounters Biennial 2021 in Timisoara (RO).
Florencia Escudero was born in Singapore in 1987 and grew up in Mendoza, Argentina. She lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Escudero received an MFA in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art in 2012 and a BFA in Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts in 2010. Her works have been exhibited at Kristen Lorello, Aldrich Museum, Instituto Cervantes, Friedrich Petzel Gallery, Mrs. Gallery and Rachel Uffner Gallery among other venues. She was a 2016 year-long Artist in Residence at the Loisaida Center, New York, NY, and has also completed residencies at Collarworks, Troy, NY; Art Farm, Marquette, NE; and Pilchuck Glass School, Seattle, WA. Works by Escudero have been discussed in Editorial Magazine, Aether Magazine, The Art Newspaper, Hyperallergic, The American Reader, Cultured Magazine and the Brooklyn Rail. She is an editor and founder of Precog Magazine.
Frank WANG Yefeng – 9/19/23
Residency: September 11 – October 6, 2023
Frank WANG Yefeng (b. 1984, Shanghai) is a transdisciplinary artist, researcher, and digital nomad situated in-between New York City and Shanghai. Yefeng earned his MFA in Art and Technology Studies from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2011. His projects have been featured in exhibitions internationally, including the BRIC Biennial, the OCAT Biennial, the Bangkok Art Biennale, CCS Bard Hessel Museum of Art (NY, USA), Gasworks London (LDN, UK), Pylon Lab (DRS, DE), Hyundai Motorstudio Beijing (BJ, CN), Shanghai K11 Museum (SH, CN), etc. Yefeng has also been awarded solo exhibitions, residencies, and fellowships at K11 Art Foundation (WH, CN), Smack Mellon (NY, USA), International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP) (NY, USA), New York Art Residency & Studios (NARS) Foundation (NY, USA), Asia Art Archive in America (NY, USA), MacDowell (NH, USA), and Vermont Studio Center (VT, USA), among others.
Mark Thomas Gibson – 10/17/23
Residency: October 16 – November 10, 2023
Mark Thomas Gibson’s personal lens on American culture stems from his multifaceted viewpoint as an artist—as a black male, a professor, and an American history buff. These myriad and often colliding perspectives fuel his exploration of contemporary culture through languages of drawing, painting, print, and sculpture revealing a vision of a satirical, dystopian America where every viewer is implicated as a potential character within the story.
Mark Thomas Gibson (b. 1980, Miami, FL) received his BFA from The Cooper Union in 2002 and his MFA from Yale School of Art in 2013. He is represented by M+B in Los Angeles and Loyal in Stockholm. In 2016, he co-curated the traveling exhibition Black Pulp! with William Villalongo. Gibson has released two artist books, Some Monsters Loom Large (2016) and Early Retirement (2017).
In 2021, Gibson was awarded residencies at Yaddo and the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency. He was awarded a Pew Fellowship from the Pew Center for Arts and Heritage, Philadelphia, PA and a Hodder Fellowship from Lewis Center for the Arts, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ. Gibson was most recently awarded a 2022 Guggenheim Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, New York, NY and a Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Grant from the Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, New York, NY.
His most recent solo exhibitions were at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University in 2022 and Sikkema Jenkins & Co. in 2023.
Tau Lewis – 2/6/24
Residency: January 15 – February 9, 2024
Tau Lewis (b. 1993, Toronto Canada) is on exhibition at The 59th Venice Biennale and at 52 Walker, New York, NY. She has exhibited in several museums and institutions, including the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; MoMA PS1, New York, NY; New Museum, New York, NY; Hepworth Wakefield, Wakefield, UK; College Art Galleries, Saskatoon, SK; Agnes Etherington Art Centre, Kingston, ON; the Art Gallery of Mississauga, Mississauga, ON; and the Art Gallery of York University, Toronto, ON. Lewis’s work has been acquired to the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Library Collection, New York, NY; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, ON; Library and Archives Canada, Ottawa, ON; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, Miami, FL; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Montreal, Quebec; and Grinnell College Museum of Art, Grinnell, IA. Lewis currently lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Lewis is represented by Night Gallery, Los Angeles.
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya – 2/27/24
Residency: February 12 – March 8, 2024
Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya is a Brooklyn-based multidisciplinary artist. Born in Atlanta to Thai and Indonesian immigrants, her practice spans participatory installations, textile, sculpture, large-scale murals, and public art campaigns.
Through defiant storytelling, her work brings forth textures, histories, and rituals to amplify marginalized voices and creates liminal spaces that heal and transform.
She is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow in Visual Arts and Civic Practice Artist in Residence with Poster House and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum. In 2022, she transformed Lincoln Center’s campus with “GATHER: A series of monuments and rituals” that used ceremony, sound, and large-scale mixed media installations to inscribe new meaning to memory and foster belonging.
As artist-in-residence with the NYC Commission on Human Rights, Amanda’s art series celebrating the resilience of the AAPI community, “I Still Believe in Our City”, reached millions in New York City and worldwide reclaiming space on billboards, bus shelters, subway tunnels, buildings, at rallies, protests, and on the cover of TIME Magazine.
Her work is held in permanent collections at the Museum of the City of New York, the Goldwell Open Air Museum, the Library of Congress, the Museum of Chinese in America, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
In 2023, she was appointed to the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities where she advises the President on how art can foster community well-being.
She is currently building a large-scale textile installation in collaboration with the US State Department and textile communities across the US and Thailand that uplifts marginalized voices, celebrates making home and the enduring legacy of matrilineal inheritance, which will be unveiled at the Bangkok Art and Culture Center in 2024.
