NEW YORK, NY.- Monica King announced Monica King Projects, a newly-formed initiative which includes two new endeavors for 2021, a future series of traveling exhibitions in response to declining travel and art fairs, alongside an artist-in-residency based on a two-acre forested retreat in Litchfield County, Connecticut. The program also announces the addition of seven new artists to the artist roster including Hyun Jung Ahn, Chellis Baird, Lauren Ball, Kharis Kennedy, Aleksandra Stone, Michael Wolf, and Mie Yim.
“As we navigated uncharted waters of how to exhibit and view artwork during the pandemic, it became clear to us that we needed to create a new path forward,” states gallery founder Monica King. “We envisioned a new model for a ‘gallery’ that is creatively fluid and can bring our diverse exhibitions to cities around the world where our collectors are based, alongside an incubator for our artists to experience respite and unbridled creativity. 2021 will see a new path for Monica King that aims to further our unwavering mission to support emerging and established artists, and present their work in a dynamic and creative way that is not tethered to one location. The Grotto, that welcoming area where collectors and artists would gather in the back of the Tribeca gallery, became a trademark for the open and inviting nature of our platform. We realized in 2020, among other things, that the Grotto was much more a way of seeing and living than it was a physical place.”
Monica King Projects’ inaugural artists in residence will be April Marten, a performance and multimedia artist and Aleksandra Stone, an artist who works in photography, painting and multimedia. The invitation-based art residency program will debut in fall 2021 on a two-acre forested retreat on the border of New York and Connecticut in Litchfield County.
A curated program of traveling exhibitions is planned to launch in 2021 including a solo exhibition in New York City by pioneering Chicana artist Judithe Hernández. Other future exhibitions will be announced.
Monica King Projects also announces the addition of seven new artists to the program including:
Hyun Jung Ahn (b. 1986, Seoul, South Korea) Korean painter and sculptor Hyun Jung Ahn’s work investigates personal connection through enigmatic, abstract forms. Her process begins with a visual diary that draws from emotional states, emphasizing capsules of time that crystalize feelings and words with color and form. Ahn earned a first MFA from Duk-Sung Women’s University, Seoul in 2013 before she received her second MFA in painting and drawing from Pratt Institute in 2017. Ahn currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York and Seoul, South Korea.
Chellis Baird (b. 1983, Spartanburg, SC) Chellis Baird blurs the intersection of painting, sculpture, and textiles. Baird explores the elements of painting by reconstructing handwoven canvases from a unique perspective. She received her BFA in textiles from Rhode Island School of Design and studied studio art at the Art Students League in New York City. Baird lives and works in New York City.
Lauren Ball (b. 1980, Chicago, IL) Lauren Ball’s work relies on the painting process, color, and surface as a site evoking the emergence of shape and space to create an essential realism within the work. Digital media, the still life genre, modern portraiture, and 19th century Realism are reservoirs of inspiration. Ball received her MFA in Studio Art from New York University and her BFA with a concentration in Painting and Drawing from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.
Kharis Kennedy (b. 1976, Los Angeles, CA) Kharis Kennedy works across mediums including painting, video, and performance to approach the body and objects as sites of knowledge and repositories of awareness that can be resourced to reveal inner truths. She received her B.A. and B.F.A. from the University of Washington (Seattle, WA). Her work has been featured internationally in exhibitions and happenings at the Caribbean Museum Center for the Arts (St. Croix, USVI), A.I.R. Gallery (New York, NY), Watermill Center (Watermill, NY), SculptureCenter (New York, NY) and Intersect Aspen (Aspen, CO) among other prominent public and private institutions. She lives and works on the island of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
Aleksandra Stone (b. 1989, Zenica, Yugoslavia) Aleksandra Stone is a multimedia artist creating work related to memory, time, and ancestry as they relate to the construction of narrative identity. Stone’s work has been exhibited at galleries, institutions, and non-profit spaces within the United States and internationally including Flowers Gallery in London, the Bouzianis Museum in Athens, Greece, and Pen & Brush in NYC. Stone lives and works in New York City.
Michael Wolf (b.1961, Paterson, NJ) is a New York City area artist whose artwork encompasses sculpture, installation, and drawing. Architectural spaces and forms inspire Wolf's artwork. Using these forms as a metaphor for the human experience, his work explores the dichotomies of protection vs. vulnerability. Wolf’s work has been exhibited in solo shows at the Sculptors Guild Gallery; I'm Your Venus at the Bee in the Lion gallery; Inversions, a tribute to the architecture of Louis Kahn; and American Twist at Antenna Gallery in New Orleans. He has been invited by numerous institutions to create installations, including an outdoor installation for The Morris Museum's 90th anniversary and in 2021 will be creating an installation at the Center for Contemporary Art.
Mie Yim (b. 1963 in Seoul, South Korea) earned a B.F.A. from the Philadelphia College of Art and spent a year at the Tyler School of Art’s program in Rome. Her work has been in numerous international exhibitions, including solo shows at the Lehmann Maupin gallery in New York and at the Galleria in Arco, Turin, Italy. She is the recipient of both the Pollock Krasner Foundation Grant (2020) and The Lillian Orlowsky and William Freed Grant (2018). The artist says of her work, “I’m interested in articulating a more complex visual language, sublimating story and bring form and the presence of paint to the forefront. I transmute many pictorial moments of pretty shapes into the unknown and dark.” She lives and works in New York City.
