About the exhibition:

DVAA is excited to introduce our 2023 Fellowship cohort in Forecast : 2023 Fellowship Preview, on view in Gallery 2 from January 11th - January 22nd, 2023.

This years awarded fellows are :
Heather Marie Scholl as our 2023 Linda Lee Alter Fellow
Mai Eltahir as our 2023 Kathryn Pannepacker Fellow
Neill Catangay as our 2023 Michelle Angela Ortiz Fellow

Each artist comes into this space pursuing narrative explorations of their culture, identities, and sense of home, utilizing disparate techniques and communication styles. Forecast hopes to give the audience a sense of what the Fellowship exhibitions this fall will encapsulate and find the connections within each artist’s work.

Each artist comes into this space pursuing narrative explorations of their culture, identities, and sense of home, utilizing disparate techniques and communication styles. Forecast points to the connections within each artist’s work and provides a sense of what the Fellows will be working on during their fellowships. Towards the end of their year-long fellowships, these artists will have exhibitions of their own in DVAA’s Gallery 1. In September, mai eltahir will curate an exhibition that examines existence and w/holeness through the artwork of Black artists and the theoretical framework of Sylvia Wynter, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Frantz Fanon, and Michel Foucault. In October, Neill Catangay will curate an exhibition of local Filipino artists including himself to address the memories and ideas of the homeland (the Philippines) as a way to express ideas of remembrance, memory, and shared native practices to analyze colonial/imperialistic histories and present alternative futures. In November, Heather Scholl will have a solo exhibition of her work which tells the story of lesbian relationship violence and childhood familial abuse through works that reveal how these experiences are situated within family histories, community context, and racial and gender identities. Fellows will lead the exhibition process with year-long support from DVAA. 

Inspired by the vision of DVAA’s founders to build community through art, the DVAA Fellowship Program annually supports under-represented voices, innovative ideas, and underserved artists. The year-long partnership between DVAA and the Fellows encourages these artists to develop and pursue experimental concepts and themes with the support of our organizational resources.

About the Artists:

Heather Marie Scholl is a Philadelphia-based artist. Her work confronts personal and national legacies of violence through the use of embroidery, sculpture, and writing. She is a queer lesbian survivor of childhood sexual abuse and intimate partner violence, which is illuminated in her current body of work Resurrection of a Victim. Through needlework she investigates how generational violence is woven into our bodies, homes, rituals and daily lives; how it bleeds into the stories we tell about ourselves and each other. She holds a BA in Race, Gender and Sexuality and an MFA in Fashion and Knitwear Design. Her installation “Sometimes It’s Hard to be a Woman” was awarded a Brooklyn Arts Council Grant (2014). In 2015, Scholl began work on her series “Whitework,” an exploration into white women’s roles in white supremacy. This led her to co-founding and directing Confront White Womanhood, an anti-racism education initiative (2016-2020). She held workshops for the Women’s March, Columbia University, and others. She was a 2019-20 fellow with the Leslie-Lohman Museum Artist Fellowship. Her work has been exhibited at the Fuller Craft Museum, Morris Jumel Mansion, Rokeby Museum, and Virago Gallery, among others. Her work has been written about in Slate, Cosmopolitan, i-D magazine, and BUST.

mai eltahir is an art worker, researcher, and community archivist based in Philadelphia by way of Flint, Michigan. mai is interested in how tension and proximity to policed borders of Black existence wed mean-making work. Her work explores relics and aesthetics of post-calamity where expression and intellectual work on blackness reveal the truths of being. mai’s practice attempts to complicate Black articulation marked by violent histories and erasure to rupture notions of endings and existence. 

Neill Catangay (b. 1993) is a Filipino interdisciplinary artist born and raised on Guam. Catangay received his BA at the University of Guam and his MFA at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA. Catangay embraces his cultural identity and upbringing to create work that examines decolonialization as a form of care. With his multimedia practice, Catangay’s work investigates his own awareness of care, it’s meaning, and how reclaiming oneself can be crucial to understanding systems of control, productivity, and place. Through visual interpretation of research and awareness his work speculates progressive solutions for individual and collective futures.

Press: