Call for Artists: The JJC Artist in Residence at MICA

Applicants are asked to submit the following materials. Incomplete applications will not be considered.

• Letter of Intent: Not to exceed one (1) page, outlining the artist’s goals for the residency and approach to utilizing the community setting of the residency.
• Current Resume: Not to exceed three (3) pages.
• PDF Portfolio: Up to ten (10) relevant artworks into a single PDF. For each, include title, one (1) image of the completed work, creation date, complete materials, scale, duration (as applicable). A brief statement up to 200 words per artwork and one (1) additional image of each artwork’s installation may be incorporated.

Ainsley Burrows (b. 1974 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a full-time multidisciplinary artist who explores untold stories and unspoken emotions. He is a poet, musician, and performer, as well as a painter, and his different creative pursuits influence each other. As a self-taught artist, Burrows began his visual art practice in 2009. He created hundreds of works between 2009 and 2020 as he sought to transform his talent and success in writing into a visual language using predominantly acrylic paint on canvas. During the pandemic in 2020, Burrows was forced to take a break from his livelihood and fortunately was ready to hit the ground running in the art world. He had spent the previous four years (2016-2019) creating a series of 125 paintings, called The Maroons: Rebellion. Select paintings from that series were the subject of Burrows’ first solo exhibition at State University of New York (SUNY) Oneonta in 2022. Since then Burrows has been emerging as a prolific abstract artist with solo exhibitions at Rush Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD; The DC Arts Center, Washington, DC; and Gallery In The Sky (World Trade Center), Baltimore, MD. Burrows has participated in group exhibitions at Artscape, Baltimore, MD; 11:Eleven Gallery, Washington, DC; Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA; and Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. His work is included in several private collections including those of Hill Harper, Jeffrey Wright, Wayee Chu, Lisane Basquiat, Jeanine and Herve Heriveaux, Raymond McGuire and the Capitol One Collection.

Vetiver (Vonne Napper) is a community-based interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Washington, D.C. As a child, they displayed great interest in learning new things, with one door of inspiration opening to the next. Consequently, their art practice spans various mediums including music production, printmaking, graphic design, videography, painting, writing, sewing, movement performance, installation, and assemblage. Vonne’s practice centers on social justice, new-age healing, and preserving Black queer and trans narratives. Identifying as nonbinary and trans- masculine, Vonne pulls from their lived experience to highlight the challenges of existing at a particularly targeted intersection in today’s society and employs their spirituality to establish connections between the communities to which they belong.

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.