Real Art Ways is proud to announce the 2023 Real Art Award recipients.
Artists Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo, Tielin Ding, Dylan Hausthor, Sae Jun Kim, Ezra Moth, and Alex Dolores Salerno will each receive a $2,500 award, a solo exhibition, and curatorial support. Recipients were selected from a highly competitive pool of nearly 350 applicants from the six New England states, New York and New Jersey. The jury for the 2023 Real Art Awards included multidisciplinary artist and educator Aki Sasamoto, artist/writer/curator Devin Kenny, and Will K. Wilkins, Executive Director of Real Art Ways.
The Real Art Awards are designed to support emerging artists at a critical juncture in their careers. In addition to the cash prize and a solo exhibition at Real Art Ways, each artist will receive assistance throughout the exhibition process. Exhibitions will open during Real Art Ways’ monthly Creative Cocktail Hour social event.
The 2023 Real Art Awards are supported in part by awards from the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
________________________
The 2023 recipients are:
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo
New Brunswick, NJ
Bloodroot and Machetes; As We Learn to be Sharpened (No es un Lecho de Rosas)
2022, Acrylic, watercolor, paper
23 x 21 1/2in
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo’s portraits are revolutionary manifestations. Her practice is centered by contemporary and historical movements for Black/Indigenous liberation, which have recognized that food and land are at the core of community agency. Adeyemo’s painted collages and assemblages envision a restructuring of marginalized communities’ relationships with land, labor, and food. Her work depicts both historical subjects, as well as her immediate community, as they practice various forms of stewardship. She considers her work to be an exercise in Black fugitivity, resistance, tenderness, and collectivity.
Sophia-Yemisi Adeyemo has been an Artist-in-Residence at BRIC Arts Media, Lazuli Residency, and the New York Academy of Art. Her work has been exhibited at c1760 Gallery, Marianne Boesky Gallery, The Manetti Shrem Museum of Art, and the Muskegon Museum of Art. She received her BFA in Painting from the Rhode Island School of Design and is currently an MFA candidate at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University.
Tielin Ding
Brooklyn, NY
Born in Chongqing, China. Tielin Ding is a wanderer, observer and mixed-media artist whose diverse practice involves working with playful objects, indeterminate traces and movements to create performative actions. His application of “Mapping” and “Walking” gives him more opportunity to reflect on invisible systems within urban and natural spaces. Under the practice of way-finding, mark-making and game-changing, he has been very interested in drifting in the field of language and space, risking getting lost from point A to point B. He studied architecture engineering at Beijing University of Civil Engineering and Architecture for his bachelor and MFA in photography at Parsons School of Design, The New School in NYC.
He had his first solo show in New York at Nars Foundation in 2023. Recent residency he attended include Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Abbott Watts residency at Monson Art in Maine, Millay Arts in upstate New York.
Between/pɪŋ/and/pɑŋ/
2020, Adhesive Print
66″x44″
Dylan Hausthor
Portland, ME
Dylan Hausthor is a photographer, writer, videographer, and mythmaker who “praises at the altar of story.” He lives on an island off the coast of Maine and spends the majority of his time in New England and Oregon, wearing camo t-shirts and refusing to eat meat. Hausthor is a MFA graduate from Yale University and is currently a teacher and mushroom farmer.
Moths Fucking
2023, Archival Pigment Print
60″x80″
Sae Jun Kim
New Haven, CT
TemporalMigration
2020, Glacial erratic boulder, steel ,Carbon dust, Houseplant, water and grow-light.
Sae Jun Kim (b. 1989, South Korea) is an artist working primarily in sculpture and installation. His practice focuses on the tension between the natural and formulated elements of the landscape that surrounds us. Kim holds a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from the Yale School of Art, where he received the George R. Bunker Award. His works have been exhibited at M 2 3 (NY), Burren College of Art (Ireland), Evanston Art Center (IL), Korean Cultural Center of Chicago (IL), and Union Street Gallery (IL). He has taught at Wesleyan University and currently teaches undergraduate courses at Yale University. Kim lives and works in New Haven, CT.
Ezra Moth
Tolland, CT
Creek Goddess
2018-2022 Live spirulina algae, water, bio-plastic, makeup, burlap, twigs, performance.
Ezra Moth is an interdisciplinary artist whose work teeters on the edge of fantasy and functionality, between science fiction and practicality, and it always deals with the intersection of ecology and queer liberation. It is not medium specific and has been presented in the form of sculptures, speculative agriculture interventions, and performance artworks. Part mad scientist, part community farmer, and part drag persona, their practice ricochets from sublime hopefulness to post-apocalyptic despair, between humor and profundity. Ezra Moth’s installations and performances have been presented internationally in exhibitions and residencies such as Ars Electronica, Thessaloniki Queer Arts Festival, Ortegay Y Gasset projects in Gowanus, RIXC center for new media culture in Latvia, and Joya Arte + Ecologia in Spain.
Alex Dolores Salerno (b. 1994, Washington D.C.) is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. Informed by queer-crip experience, community, and culture, they work to critique standards of productivity, notions of normative embodiment, 24/7 society, and the commodification of rest. Salerno received their MFA from Parsons School of Design and their BS from Skidmore College. They have exhibited at the Museum für Moderne Kunst (Frankfurt), Espacio de Arte Contemporáneo de Castellón (Castellón), ARGOS centre for audiovisual arts (Brussels), Art Windsor-Essex (Windsor), The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation’s 8th Floor Gallery, the Ford Foundation Gallery (NYC), among others. Salerno is a recipient of the 2022 Wynn Newhouse Awards, and their work has been featured in the New York Times and Art in America. They have been an artist in residence at Art Beyond Sight’s Art & Disability Residency (2019-2020), the Artist Studios Program at the Museum of Arts and Design (2021), the Visual Artist AIRspace Residency at Abrons Arts Center (2022-2023), and they are currently in residence at BRIClab: Contemporary Art Residency Program at BRIC (2023-2024).
