Meet July’s Artists in Residence
Alanna Fields, Jenelle Esparza and Olivia Jia
This month’s residency is generously sponsored by the Carlo and Micol Schejola Foundation.
Alanna Fields
Alanna Fields is a mixed-media artist and archivist whose work explores representations of Black queer identity, history, and counternarratives, primarily through the lens of photography. Her work has been included in exhibitions at The High Museum of Art, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Yancey Richardson Gallery, Baxter St. CCNY, Expo Chicago, Felix Art Fair, UNTITLED Art Miami, and MoCADA. Fields is a Gordon Parks Foundation Scholar and has participated in residencies at Silver Art Projects, Light Work, and Baxter St. CCNY. She received her MFA in Photography from Pratt Institute and has given artist talks at the Aperture Foundation, Light Work, NYU Tisch School of the Arts, Parson's New School, Syracuse University, Rutgers University, Stanford University, and the Studio Museum in Harlem.
Reviews of her work have appeared in Aperture Magazine, Light Work’s Contact Sheet, and Foam Magazine. Fields has produced commissioned work for The New York Times, T Magazine, and The Atlantic. She is a lecturer of Photography at Howard University and lives and works in Washington, D.C.
Jenelle Esparza
Jenelle Esparza is an interdisciplinary artist who is interested in the landscape: interconnected identities that are tied to it, and the stories it can tell us. She studies the ancestry and identity of a people through landmasses and other organic forms, and researches the untold or unknown history of a place; what happened and who lived there, and what’s left behind. This area of research also enforces a connection to the body as a vessel for understanding which is a frequent reference in her work. She employs a variety of different techniques and processes to understand historical narrative and portray a human experience.
Esparza’s own labor in these new processes has become part of the work. By letting the materials guide the process, Esparza employs various techniques and forms of expression such as weaving, bronze casting, and other sculptural processes. Any new direction in her work encourages an exploration of form, history, and narrative. Natural materials such as rocks, logs, organic matter, and found objects find their way into the work, but cotton is the root source of material and inspiration stemming from Esparza’s family lineage of cotton farmers in Texas. She attended the University of Texas at San Antonio and received her BFA in photography in 2010. She currently lives and works in San Antonio, Texas.
Olivia Jia
Olivia Jia’s meticulously painted, unconventional still lifes depict books, manuscripts, and archival spaces as containers of personal narratives and history. The images depicted on these pages stem from her extensive and ongoing personal archive of photographs, ephemera, and objects. Sources range from family photographs to snapshots she takes, from found ephemera to historical artworks. A photograph of her great-uncle’s star-spangled tunic is placed next to a clay pot from an internet search, found while pining for a lost heirloom; a bunch of market lilies is painted while thinking of 19th-century botanical illustration; the moon in her childhood bedroom window is be juxtaposed with a comb carved with a crane. Ultimately a form of self-portraiture, her work investigates the confluence of images, objects, and cultural ephemera with personal narratives to picture the psychological space she inhabits.
Recent awards include the Ellen Battell Stoeckel Fellowship to attend the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2015 and the President’s Award for the highest GPA in the School of Art at the University of the Arts. Her first solo exhibition was held at WORKPLACE in London, U.K. in May of 2022. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues including Nathalie Karg Gallery in NYC, Margot Samel in NYC, Dongsomun in Seoul, South Korea and Marginal Utility, New Boone, and Space 1026 in Philadelphia, PA. Jia has written for publications including Title Magazine and Hyperallergic. She lives and works in Philadelphia.
