The New York Public Library Announces the 2024 Picture Collection Artist Fellows
The New York Public Library is pleased to announce the 2024 fellows for the Picture Collection Artist Fellowship Program. This program, established with the generous support of the Anne Levy Charitable Trust, supports artists or scholars engaged in the research, development, and/or execution of a new creative or scholarly work based on the Collection’s holdings.
Yuchen Chang
Body Dictionary
Chang Yuchen has been developing an experimental curriculum titled Body Dictionary, exploring the generative intersection between the somatic and the semantic, the lived and the discursive. In the Picture Collection, Yuchen aims to compile a pictorial Body Dictionary based on the Collection’s holdings, exploring how our species imagines itself in the form of imagery. Fragments of the dictionary might be published periodically as booklets, piecing together a “full body” over time.
Chang Yuchen works in an interdisciplinary manner—writing as weaving, drawing as translation, teaching as hospitality, commerce as social experiment (see Use Value) and publishing as a dandelion spreading its seeds. Yuchen was a recipient of the Queens Arts Fund, Ruth and Harold Chenven Foundation Grant, Poetry Project Curatorial Fellowship, Huayu Youth Award Grand Jury Prize, and Luminarts Fellowship. She has shown/performed her work at Carnegie Museum of Art, Amant, Artists Space, UCCA Dune, Para Site, Taikwun Contemporary and more. She was an artist in residence at Smack Mellon, Asymmetry Art Foundation, MASS MoCA, Museum of Art and Design, Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, among others. Yuchen has written for publications including Te Magazine, Heichi Magazine, Art in Print, Randian, etc. Visit Chang Yuchen's website.
Molly Cox
Accidental Inspiration: Browsing the Collection
As a Fellow, Molly Cox intends to bring the essence of the Picture Collection into direct public view through window displays and installations. In collaboration with local businesses, she will transform merchandise into artistic displays through creative manipulation, elevating commercial goods into sculptures that will come to life with playfulness and spontaneity. By using the visual media of the Collection as a primary source, Cox will give the public a chance to experience this arm of The New York Public Library from what could be considered the most democratic space in New York City: the sidewalk.
Molly Cox is an artist and floral designer based in New York City. Her practice revolves around creating images and environments that are imbued with a sense of poetry and delight. Whether using botanicals, styling props, or hosting a dinner party, her goal is to bring people into thoughtful, beautiful worlds—and give them a reason to stay. Her company, Saint Agnes, specializes in event and set design. Learn more.
Nick Fraccaro
(Un)Fulfilled
Nick Fraccaro’s project will involve working with a series of "Unfilled Patron Request" notebooks kept by early custodians of the Picture Collection. This ledger, something of a lexical dream book of images—yearned for, imagined, or never seen—continued on and off for a number of years (1917, 1925, 1926, and possibly others). Recently digitized, these notebooks will serve as a creative interlocutor, a guide back into the Picture Collection’s 100+ years of subsequent picture sedimentation and accretion. By developing a series of operations, creative strategies, and “solutions,” he is aiming to “fulfill” these long unfulfilled requests, to create something like that notebook’s obverse—a collection of lost images regained. The final result will involve the reunion of ideas, words, and images in public and private spaces—an event, an artist’s book, and a series of other visual investigations.
Nick Fraccaro is a multimedia producer of documentaries, television and experimental events. Whether the subject is lithium extraction, Hitler’s watercolors in a U.S. Army warehouse, or stand-up comedy in the metaverse, his work engages with a continual process of narrative accumulation from the margins. He fossicks, rummages, corrals and steals sights, sounds, errata, spoors, and erratics to produce encounters where audience and marginalia intersect. Across documentary film, photo essay, live lecture, text, and other forms of exhibition, his work strives toward the continual redefinition and reanimation of the past and the institutions and tools that often fail to contain it. His work has been screened, streamed, performed, exhibited, and lost within libraries, phones, garages, tablets, parking places, and atop public statues. Visit Nick Fraccaro's website.
Shane Morrissy
Critical Histories of Mass Media
Shane Morrissy’s project takes advantage of the unique archival structure of the postcard collection (part of the larger Picture Collection) in order to create workshops that will help students of all ages to navigate an ever-shifting media landscape. Placing contemporary mass media in dialogue with the postcard “craze” that engulfed the Western world a century ago, the workshops will provide a historical perspective on contemporary forms of mass communication. In doing so, the workshops will not only help to demystify archival research, they will foster crucial skills necessary for engaging critically with online media.
Shane Morrissy is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies at Duke University. His dissertation examines the relationship between art and print ephemera in the context of Progressive era America. His doctoral research has been supported by fellowships and awards from institutions including Princeton University, Harvard Art Museums, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Saar Shemesh
wholes, holes, and other voids
Saar Shemesh’s project “wholes, holes, and other voids” weaves together research nodes from their studio, such as mold-making terminology, geo- and cosmo-logical phenomena, architecture, biopolitical erotics, liberation philosophies, and disability, to investigate holes as metaphysical sites of power. Images and diagrams of these themes culled from the Picture Collection become the source material for this mediation on presence, capacity, and interconnectivity. It may become a performance-lecture, a film, a publication, and/or a set of drawings and object relations, who knows.
Saar Shemesh is an artist and educator born and based in New York City. They utilize sci-fi aesthetics and the sensory potential of mold-making and casting to create abstract and immersive works across mediums. Fluidity, repair, and transformation guide their research and decision-making in and out of the studio, cropping up in forms borne by oyster shells, craters, internal organs, ephemera, and junkyard scraps (to name a few). Operating on a nonlinear timescale structured by queerness and chronic illness, Saar often works with materials that undergo a necessary and often messy state-change in order to take shape. They are concerned with neglected and liminal intersections in our understanding of identity, spatial politics, and embodied experience. They have been an artist-in-residence at the Visual Arts Center of Richmond, VA; RAIR Philly, PA; Franconia Sculpture Park, MN; and SOMA, Mexico City. Recently, they have shown at Current Space (Baltimore, MD), Vox Populi, Artlot, and Virginia MoCA . They hold an MFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University and a BFA from Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. Visit Saar Shemesh's website.