The Benedetti Teaching Artist Residency is a nine-month Visiting Instructor/Artist-in-Residence Fellowship offered through MCLA Arts & Culture and MCLA's Department of Fine and Performing Arts. It is an annual residency, beginning in the Fall of every school year. Selected artists may work in painting, sculpture, graphic design, illustration, or mixed media. While teaching courses at MCLA they also work in the studio as one of Gallery 51's resident artists who will culminate their tenure with an exhibition in Gallery 51. These exemplary artists provide our students and the community with workshops and public programs and each teaching resident has an MCLA student who assists them and is mentored by the resident for the school year. The residency aims to bring new artistic perspectives to MCLA and contribute to the diversity, equity, access and inclusion on campus and in the community.
This residency is funded by a generous bequest from the estate of Alma Benedetti ’37. A beloved North Adams art teacher and life-long advocate and friend of the College, Alma Benedetti inspired generations of children with her keen sense of color, composition, and design.
Learn more about applying for the residency HERE.
WANG Chen (b.1991) received a BFA in Painting and Printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University (2014) and an MFA in Photography from the Rochester Institute of Technology (2018). WANG has exhibited nationally and internationally, including at Fotografiska Museum in Stockholm, Sweden, Roswell Museum, New Mexico, Lauren Powell Project, Los Angeles, The Immigrant Artist Biennial, NYC, Alfred University, and Crosstown Art Center in Memphis.
WANG’s fellowships, awards, and residencies include New York Foundation for the Arts Artist Fellow (Interdisciplinary), MacDowell Fellowship, Vermont Studio Center, NYFA IMP 2018, NARS Artist Foundation in Brooklyn, and Roswell Artist’s in Residency.
WANG Chen incorporates drawing, animation, sculpture, costumed performance, fabrication, sound engineering, and 3D game design to create highly saturated fictional immersive dreamscapes within video installation. For WANG’s recent solo exhibition at Roswell Museum, In the Woods, which draws upon the artist’s concerns and anxiety to the (im)possibility of the future during the COVID-19 pandemic. Using the dark woods as a metaphor to mimic the current chaotic present-day society, exploring both utopia and dystopia and examining issues such as power structures, politics, race, and gender.
2021-2022
Conrad Egyir (b. 1989, Ghana; lives and works in Detroit) has an MFA from the Cranbrook Academy of Art. His work has been featured in group shows at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Cranbrook Art Museum (Bloomfield Hills, MI) and Grand Rapids Art Museum (MI). Paintings have been acquired by the Detroit Institute of Art (MI), Perez Museum (FL), Kalamazoo Institute of Art (MI), Rennie Collection (Vancouver, BC), the Jimenez-Colon Collection (Puerto Rico) and the Cranbrook Art Museum (MI).
Addressing contemporary American culture, biblical parables and Ashanti iconography from his native Ghana, Egyir’s work explores questions of ethics, honesty, identity and the social-psychology of community. Monumental, uncanny and often satirically grandiose, the paintings combine the graphic sensuality of Pop Art with the far-reaching narratives of history painting. Egyir’s materials include oil, acrylic, glitter, Plexiglas, wood and found fabric flowers. His works are deeply art historical, often making explicit reference to specific works by Kerry James Marshall, Jacob Lawrence, Charles White and Kara Walker. They are also in dialogue with diverse forms of popular culture, whether they are religious, musical or animated.
