New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship for Visual Artists supports a cohort of 3 visual artists between the ages of 18 and 30 years old for a residency at Abrons Arts Center over the course of 21 months.

2024-2026 Van Lier Fellows. Image by Whitney Browne

New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship for Visual Artists supports a cohort of 3 visual artists between the ages of 18 and 30 years old for a residency at Abrons Arts Center over the course of 21 months. Each fellow will be paired with a professional artist mentor who is an alum of the Abrons Arts Center Visual Artist AIRspace Residency program. The mentor will support the creative and professional development of the fellows during the residency period.

2024–2026 Fellows

Cyle Warner

Cyle Warner (2001, New York) is a multidisciplinary artist of Afro-Caribbean descent whose practice engages with space, place, time, and distance in relation to the past and how we choose to move forward outside of contemporary values, an idea he refers to as Dis. Working across fiber, photography, and sculpture; he creates compositions that consider
notions of home, care, and the creation & preservation of new myths. Warner attended the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art in 2022, and he earned a BFA in Photography and Video from the School of Visual Arts in 2023. Warner has exhibited at Regular Normal, New York, New York (2020, 2021); Oolite Arts, Miami, Florida (2022); Bradley Ertaskiran, Montréal, Canada (2022); Welencora Gallery, Brooklyn, New York (2022, 2023).

Megan Mi-Ai Lee

Megan Mi-Ai Lee is an interdisciplinary artist based in Queens whose work explores the ways fantasy diffuses through popular culture. Recent exhibitions include White Columns, online (2024); Cierah, New York, NY (2024); Pumice Raft, Toronto, ON (2024); Room 3557, Los Angeles, CA (2023); the Godwin-Ternbach Museum, Queens, NY (2022); and Art Lot, Brooklyn, NY (2022). Lee has held residencies at Ox-Bow School of Art, Storm King Art Center, and Smack Mellon, and was the 2018 Curatorial Fellow at Socrates Sculpture Park. She is a two-time Canada Council for the Arts grantee and received her BFA from the Cooper Union School of Art in 2018.

Kiara Ocasio

kiarita is a Queer Dominican American multi-disciplinary artist based in New York City. Working predominantly with paint and photography, their work tenderly honors their chosen family during moments of rest. They have participated in several US-based group shows and been awarded the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grand as well as a recipient of the Sylvia Lipson Allen Memorial Fund.

2024–2026 Mentors

Baseera Khan

Baseera Khan (Visual Artist AIRspace 2016–17) is a New York-based performance, sculpture, and installation artist. Khan currently has a public art commission Painful Arc Shoulder High on The High Line park, NYC under the Standard Hotel until summer 2024. Khan mounted their first museum solo exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York (2021-22), and created a solo touring exhibition that same year for Houston, Texas at Moody Arts Center for the Arts, Rice University and Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, Ohio (2022-2023). They have exhibited in numerous locations such as the Wexner Center for the Arts (2021), New Orleans Museum of Art (2020), Aspen Museum (2017), Participant Inc. (2017). Khan's performance work has premiered at several locations including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Art POP Montreal International Music Festival. Khan was an artist in residence at Pioneer Works (2018-19), Abrons Art Center (2016-17), was an International Travel Fellow to Jerusalem/Ramallah through Apexart (2015) and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2014). Khan won an Artist Prize for the MTV/Smithsonian Channel TV docu-series, called The Exhibit in 2022-23. Khan is also a recipient of the UOVO Art Prize (2020), BRIC Colene Brown Art Prize, and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant (2019), NYSCA/NYFA and Art Matters (2018). Their works are part of several permanent collections including the Guggenheim, Whitney Museum, Brooklyn Museum of Art, and the Walker Art Center, MN.

Park McArthur

Park McArthur (Visual Artist AIRspace 2013–14) experiments with personal and social meanings of debility, delay, and dependency under the guidance and instruction of disability. Recent solo exhibitions include Kunstraum Leuphana University, Lüneburg; Paid, Seattle, Washington; Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr.

Elliott Jerome Brown Jr. (Visual Artist AIRspace 2019–20) is an artist, photographer, and educator currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

In his personal practice, he uses photography to explore representation through privacy and fiction. Occasionally the work turns away from standard archival prints to examine photography as a sculptural, redactive, and site-specific process.

Funding

New York Community Trust Van Lier Fellowship for Visual Artists is supported by the New York Community Trust.