Celebrating visual artists in the 11385 zip code of Queens, NYC.
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I am a first-generation transdisciplinary Colombian-American artist born and raised in Queens, NY. Drawing from my desire to be genreless, I use music, theater, video and performance to create my own origin stories and visions of a liberated future; one that reaches beyond colonial constructs of language and gender. I like to create expansive visual and sonic worlds to explore concepts of home, identity, and borders that ask how do we continue to honor our ancestors? What myths do we inherit that keep us away from ourselves?
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I am a furniture designer based in New York City, where I combine traditional craftsmanship with a playful, modern approach. Since founding my design practice in 2016, I’ve focused on creating pieces that blend function with expressive design, using bold shapes, vibrant colors, and thoughtful materials. My work has been showcased in prominent venues like the International Contemporary Furniture Fair (NYC), 3daysofdesign (Copenhagen), and Salone del Mobile (Milan), reflecting my commitment to pushing the boundaries of contemporary furniture craft.
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Through material experimentation and collecting my work considers the fragility of systems that can feel inevitable. I use low tech technologies, like paper mache, knitting, and stop motion intertwined with 3D modeling and animation to make installations, videos and sculptural scenarios. Born and raised in rural Tennessee, I now reside in New York City. My work has been shown in New York City, Philadelphia and Chattanooga. I have been awarded residencies at I-park, NARS Foundation, Walkaway House, and Saltonstall. I hold an MFA from Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia.
The Tallichet Freedman Foundation is proud to share our Fall 2024 micro grant recipients.
TTFF supports visual artists in the Queens, NYC neighborhoods in the zip code 11385 through unrestricted funding and visibility. By investing locally, the Foundation supports connection, community, and encourages artists to keep making art.
Watch the videos to meet this year’s grantees.
FALL 2024 Timeline
Oct 15 | Applications closed
Jan 15 2025 | Grantees announced
Jan – Feb 2025 | Studio visits
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My sculptures are made with found, vacuum-formed plastic headboards and vanities that were mass-produced and popularized in the eighties. To me, these Baroque and Art Nouveau-inspired furniture pieces are signifiers of aspirational luxury. I pair individual pieces together and upholster latex sheeting with steel tacks to the contours of the furniture, transforming them into tactile forms that evince the body.
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I am a figurative painter, woodblock printer, and collage artist. My work is rooted in an existential search for self and community and fueled by love, despair, and a desire for collective liberation. Through my portraits, I explore the nuances of queer relationships and the emotional complexities hidden in quotidian domesticity.
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I create sculptures and interventions that question standardized forms, revealing human gesture, labor, and cultural specificity. Drawing from my structural engineering background and upbringing between Cuban Miami and the Basque Country, my work responds to visual homogenization and cultural erasure driven by globalization. I use metals and polymers from mass produced consumer goods and construction materials, combining traditional metal work with artisanal goldsmithing techniques and digital fabrication.
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My artworks are rooted in contemporary understandings of diasporic historiography; primarily a propensity within diasporic communities toward filling gaps in history and at times replacing memories with speculation and parables while intermixing fragmented and misappropriated detritus, symbols and signifiers of oppression. I have worked through many modes of inquiry toward speculative objects that seem to have constructed themselves through the wreckage of dismantled found material. At some stages in my practice this has been through ready-made objects and assemblage of commonplace objects, and in more recent stages this has dealt with innovative approaches toward automation and collecting from archives of digital assets.
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I am an interdisciplinary artist and writer creating physical, emotional, and sonic choreographies. My monumental sculptural installations offer the opportunity to observe how our reality is constructed daily, and reveal its potential to change, grow, or rot. While the visual and aural aspects of the installations document my own experiences, the sculptural elements transmute those encounters into a new experience for participants; a warm ripple that offers the opportunity to reconsider what one may have already been resigned to.
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I was born in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and have lived in New York since 2015. During my childhood, I lived in Bogotá, Colombia for several years. Back in Rio de Janeiro, I graduated in Industrial Design at PUC-Rio and worked for a few years as a fashion and pattern designer for various Brazilian brands. At the same time, I began developing my artistic practice.
My work combines painting, sculpture, video and installation to create imaginary spaces that blend disconcerting fables with everyday feminine ornaments and recycled fragments of memory. I seek the tension between abstraction and figurativeness, intertwining human and animal forms with totems in an unsettling yet playful universe. These figures are humorous but exist in an eerie and violent world, where things are destroyed, abandoned, and covered by layers of different materials. Using oil paint, airbrush, nail polish, and found objects, I work with symbols—houses, flowers, hands—and build layered abstractions shaped by chance and discovery.
Additionally, I create jewelry, home goods, and apparel under the brand Pink Session. For years, I’ve aimed to integrate my art practice with these creations, often encountering a tension between the two. This tension is particularly evident in how art is valued compared to what is considered functional or decorative. I look forward to continuing to blend both practices and exploring their boundaries.
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My work presents consciousness as having bodily and physical substance—and therefore capable of undergoing geological processes for transformation, particularly on a collective level. With this in mind, I create paintings with atmospheres of robust, earth-like textures and saturated color—while my sculptures are artifacts born from these otherworldly landscapes. In the paintings, the mark making resembles that made by earth formations but in suspension with multiple gravitational pulls—such as shifting planes of lava pouring, tides flowing, surfaces cracking, tectonic plates shifting, and so forth. The majority of the sculptures, on the other hand, are totemic, stratified core samples of various terrains while other works appear more figurative and mummified or as relics from unknown realms—all tethered to earth’s gravity.