Call for Artists: The JJC Artist in Residence at MICA

Congratulations to Baltimore-based artists Ainsley Burrows and Vonne Napper.

Learn more about this year’s JJC Summer Artists-in-Residence at MICA.

The Joshua Johnson Council (JJC) Artist in Residence (AIR) program is a collaboration between the JJC, the Baltimore Museum of Art (BMA), and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA). The JJC AIR program seeks applications to select two (2) artists living and working in Baltimore City for the summer residency. Applicants are not required to be alumni of MICA. Artists of color are strongly encouraged to apply.

The JJC, an affiliate group of the BMA, was formed in 1987 to both provide educational outreach and support initiatives between the BMA and Baltimore’s Black community. Named for 18th-century African American portrait painter Joshua Johnson, the JJC is one of the nation’s oldest African American museum groups.

The JJC AIR program expands the impact of the JJC by creating platforms to support artists, encourage intergenerational learning, and grow collaborative relationships. The residency begins on June 3, 2024 and concludes on July 26, 2024, with artists working in studios in the Fred Lazarus IV Studio Center, located on MICA’s main campus in Baltimore.

The residency is designed to support artists and create meaningful connections and discourse with the JJC, the BMA, and MICA. It provides artists based in Baltimore City with access to resources and helps to build relationships that will allow each artist to explore and expand their practice within the community.

Artists selected for the residency program are offered studio space for eight (8) weeks, access to MICA facilities, a materials stipend of $2,500, and the opportunity work with low-residency MICA graduate students for critique and studio visits at the artist’s determination. After the residency, each artist will give a public presentation as part of the year’s JJC programming JJC Talks, with the potential for additional engagements with the MICA community.

Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown (Panamanian-American, b. 1981, Baltimore, MD) is an award-winning interdisciplinary artist and curandero chamána (shamanic practitioner). Her artworks re-conceive the life of an artist as thriving, nourishing others during and through her art practice, while healing herself in public space as a Black-Latine woman. She is a 2022-23 Public Humanities Fellow at Johns Hopkins University’s Winston Tabb Special Collections Research Center and 2023 Artist-In-Residence at the National Aquarium; as well as a “Mindfulness in Art Practice” instructor at Baltimore School for the Arts. She has performed at The Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; The Smithsonian Hirshhorn Museum & Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; The Smithsonian Arts + Industries Building, Washington, DC; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD; and Eubie Blake Cultural Center, Baltimore, MD. Exhibitions of Brown’s video artworks and installations have been presented at the Tribeca Film Festival, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; and numerous regional galleries. Her work is in the collections of The Sheridan Libraries at Johns Hopkins University and GLB Memorial Foundation Collection, among others.

Charles Mason III (b. 1990, Baltimore, MD) is an artist and curator who creates abstractions around identity politics and the “performative act of blackness” experienced and manifested through physical materials. Solo exhibitions of his work include Screaming in Silence, My Salvation is Love (The End) at Anna Zorina Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2022); Goya Contemporary Gallery, Baltimore, MD (2021); and Spillway Collective, Philadelphia, PA, (2019). He has participated in group exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, NY; Urban Institute for Contemporary Art, Grand Rapids, MI; and Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL; among others. He has work in the permanent collections of the James E. Lewis Museum of Art in Baltimore, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles. He is also a recipient of the Maurice Freed Memorial Prize from the Woodmere Art Museum in Philadelphia. Mason received his BFA in Graphic Design from the University of Maryland Baltimore County and his Master of Fine Arts in Studio Art from Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.