Meet August’s Artists-in-Residence
Julia Gutman, Manoela Medeiros and Nekisha Durrett
This month’s residency is generously sponsored in part by Adriana and Ricardo Malfitano.
Julia Gutman
Julia Gutman reuses found textiles to produce ‘patchworks’ that merge personal and collective histories with canonical paintings to explore themes of femininity, intimacy and memory. The work is made almost entirely out of clothing worn and donated by the artist’s friends and family; their personal traces imbued in each garment become a significant thematic constituent. Ambitious by nature and rigorous in process, diligently stitches together the materials by machine and by hand, simultaneously rendering detailed figures amid a chorus of various fabrics and textures. With each stitch, both nurture and rupture occur—the process is as tender as it is aggressive.
Gutman is one of six artists exhibiting in Primavera: Young Australian Artists, at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. She was a finalist in the 2021 Ramsay Prize at the Art Gallery of South Australia and the 2020 NSW Visual Arts Emerging Fellowship at Artspace Sydney. Her practice has been profiled in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Saturday Paper, the ABC Art Almanac, and Ocula. Her work has been exhibited across Australia and internationally with shows in Sydney, Adelaide, Rome and New York City. The artist holds an MFA in Sculpture from the Rhode Island School of Design and a BFA in Painting from UNSW Art and Design. She currently lives and works in Sydney.
Manoela Medeiros
In her practice, Manoela Medeiros articulates an approach to painting that transcends the specificities of the medium, making use of sculpture, performance, and installation work. Pursuing a hybrid framework for the pictorial, Medeiros questions artistic media by going beyond their conventional formats, producing paintings and in situ installations that explore the relationships between space, time, and the corporeality of art and of the viewer. The artist frequently performs direct interventions into exhibition spaces, creating works that emerge from the singularities of the space around her, whether they be material, structural, or in relation to natural and artificial light. With this, her practice attributes a sense of organicity to space, turning architecture into its own body, one that is specific to the experience of art.
Medeiros’s recent solo and group exhibitions include Horizons Enfouis at Double V in Paris and O Carnaval da Substância at Nara Roesler in São Paulo. She was awarded the Red Dot award by Allemand, among numerous other prizes.
Nekisha Durrett
From vast freestanding sculptures to intimate gallery installations, Nekisha Durrett’s work leverages unexpected materials ranging from grass and reclaimed wood to neon and stainless steel to make visible the historical connections and connotations that places and materials embody, but are overlooked in our day-to-day lives. Whether reimagining pre-colonial landscapes, bygone Black communities, or family lore, Durrett’s research-driven practice strives to carve out contemplative spaces and offer opportunities for viewers to consider what is revealed or concealed when information is filtered across time. Recent public installations include: "Messages for the City" in collaboration with For Freedoms in Times Square, New York; a wall mounted public sculpture in the Liberty City community of Miami, Florida made in collaboration with conceptual artist Hank Willis Thomas; and a two-story installation at The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, titled "Airshaft," inspired by a panel in Jacob Lawrence’s Migration series.
Durrett earned her BFA at The Cooper Union in New York City and MFA from The University of Michigan School of Art and Design as a Horace H. Rackham Fellow. Her work has been exhibited nationally and is included in numerous private collections and public institutions, including The National Museum of African American History and Culture and The Phillips Collection in Washington, DC, where she lives and works.
