About the exhibition:

DVAA is excited to celebrate our 2022 Residency cohort in Cumulative Threads, on view in Gallery 1 from January 11th - January 22nd, 2023.

Nasir Young, Morgan Thomas Shankweiler, Kathleen Beausoleil, David Pratt, LEMUS, Nashay Jones, and Isabel Brown—seven of our residency artists from the 2022 cohort—creates a dynamic exhibition through seven distinct, visually immersive lenses. Each participating artists has included work inspired by their month long residency at DVAA. Use the button below to learn more about the 2022 residency cohort.

About the Artists:

Nasir Young is a recent graduate of the Pennsylvania academy of fine arts. He is a trained illustrator, and draftsman. “My work describes my relationship with the world around me, often capturing urban life and figures in happenstance moments that would otherwise be lost. I look deeper into moments most people would not find interesting, but for me, they’re fascinating I find the essence of the most bland location and show it.”

Morgan Thomas Shankweiler splits her time between Philadelphia, PA and the coast of Maine. She graduated with sociology and studio art majors from Williams College and studied miniature painting in Jaipur, India. Her background in sociology informs her work, which examines community, relationships and the commonalities of human experience through metaphoric and aleatoric paintings and interactive installations. Using common linkable units as a visual equalizer, Shankweiler utilizes the language of game-play to communicate the concepts and data-informed confines of a social system. Shankweiler has been awarded residencies at the Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, SVA, Penland School of Craft and Da Vinci Art Alliance and also works as a portrait painter for MuralArts Philadelphia. Her award-winning work has been featured, exhibited and collected across the continental US and online.

Kathleen Beausoleil lives and works in Fair Haven, NJ. Primarily working in oil paint, her works focus on what it means to be a social being. Kathleen Beausoleil received a 2022 Fellowship from the NJ Council of the Arts; was a member of The Drawing Center’s Viewing Program and has been an Artist in Residence at programs including the Cuttyhunk Artist Residency, Chalk Hill Artist Residency, Da Vinci Art Alliance and the Artist *Forests* Community Program sponsored by the Holter Museum of Art and Helena National Forest. She recently had her first solo show at the Monmouth Museum. Her work is in the permanent collection of The Art Museum of Missoula and numerous private collections. She has also taught at the SUNY Empire State’s Studio Semester program. She received her BFA Cum Laude at Syracuse University.

Isabel Brown is a West Philadelphia-based multimedia maker. Their practice seeks the intersections between self and other, whimsy and melancholy, and art and craft. Throughout the 2022 Residency, Isabel experimented with new mediums including textiles, fibers and collage using found and reclaimed materials. They live and work in West Philadelphia.

David D Pratt is a multimedia artist and writer born and raised in Philadelphia. He is a graduate of Temple University, where in 2019 he received his BFA in Photography. Pratt's fondness in media arts stems from how unbiasedly the medium can document the world around him, as well as his want to see the lives of those close to him and the cultures that affect his lived experience. Pratt’s work centers his identity, his loved ones, and the varying intersections that define their bonds. Exploring the ways they allow him to navigate the city through the lens of race, prejudice, history, class and kinship.

LEMUS is an interdisciplinary artist, draftsman, and educator. They divide their artistic practice into two; community bast art and studio art practice. Their studio practice is deep-rooted in drawing and the work is composed from classical techniques and experimental processes. The work transcends our notion of the real world to depict the surreal. As a surrealist, LEMUS explore the subconscious and memory, to connect to their ancestral roots of pre-hispanic America.

Nashay Jones is a painter and digital media artist. “I use strong colors, layers and textures to create images in which both my materials and the way I think about them become something new and different, changed in the process of making as we are changed when we share ourselves and our stories with others. I am also interested in the use of the body itself as a painterly object, a site of performance that renders the black body, the female body, visible: seen not just in terms of an overt sexuality generated from a history of oppression that is at once magnetic and repulsive but also as a valuable, viable part of the complex history of our life and time.”

Press: