Press contact: Stewart Campbell, stewart@artistcommunications.com, Phone +1 (917) 557-3857

 

Brooklyn, NY, August 5, 2024—KODA is pleased to announce the launch of its first artist residency partnership, a collaboration with multidisciplinary artist Rowan Renee’s experimental art retreat, Stilt City. Launching as KODA celebrates its fifth anniversary, KODA x Stilt City Retreat will invite former KODA residents to spend up to six weeks conducting research and producing community engagement projects at Stilt City in Rockaway Beach starting with artists Alex Mari and Toisha Tucker in early 2025. The partnership launches on September 7 with a public “Jackhammer Party” and fundraiser with proceeds going toward the artist residency retreat.

 

KODA x Stilt City Retreat developed out of the organizations’ shared commitment to support mid-career artists who engage in socially impactful art practices and community engagement work. Since 2019, KODA has provided financial assistance, studio space, exhibition space, community engagement support and professional development workshops to four mid-career artists from diverse backgrounds per year through its residency program. The artist residency partnership model creates the opportunity to expand the impact of its offerings and strengthens the ongoing institutional support that they offer the artists with whom they work.

 

KODA founder Klaudia Ofwona Draber says, “As we celebrate our fifth anniversary, we are thrilled to launch our first artist retreat partnership. This partnership expands the support that we are able to offer the mid-career artists we work with, and we cannot wait to welcome Alex and Tucker next year. Stilt City is an artwork, and we are grateful to Rowan for inviting KODA to this retreat-style residency collaboration.”

 

Renee’s vision for Stilt City began in 2013 when they purchased a bungalow in Rockaway Beach that had been flooded by Superstorm Sandy. Their vision was to rebuild it to create an artist space that would be artist-run and owned. Shortly after, they began a collaboration with Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects to redesign the bungalow with the goal to elevate the structure to meet current flood resiliency guidelines while still keeping the character of the beach bungalow style that is slowly disappearing from the Rockaways. Renee's dedication to the project through ten years of planning and construction is fueled by their view that art making is a world-building practice that can resist, transform and heal.

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Rowan Renee says, “I am so grateful to the community of supporters that have helped bring Stilt City to life. The success of this project is a testament to our ability to find creative ways to resist the dehumanizing impact of unbridled capitalism and uplift each other.”

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The Still City bungalow is both a 400 square-foot tiny house and a sculptural and conceptual work
of art. Jaklitsch/Gardner's design references the form of the original bungalow, while introducing streamlined and modern elements including dramatic roof lines and the use of low-cost black asphalt roofing shingles as exterior cladding. The centerpiece of the design is the sculptural re-imagining of the former front porch as a 16-foot-high hot pink metal frame that turns the facade into a stage. Many of the interior and exterior details were handmade by Renee using materials and techniques from their practice or refurbished from architectural salvage. These include the staircase banisters, light fixtures, bathroom tiles, marble countertops and an antique claw foot tub.

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KODA x Stilt City Retreat is envisioned as a retreat-style residency that will hold space for research, experimentation and the inward contemplation necessary for artists to refuel their creative practices. Resident artists will be able to share their work with the Rockaway community through intimate public events.

 

KODA x Stilt City Retreat will host four artists per year for up to six weeks at a time and organize dinners. Alex Mari and Toisha Tucker will be the first two artists in residence, beginning in early 2025. Both Mari and Tucker participated in KODA Fall 2023 residency program, “Borders + Boundaries,” which consisted of a three-month studio residency on Governors Island and culminated in mid-career survey exhibitions for each of the artists. During their time at the Retreat, Mari and Tucker will use their time at Stilt City to continue working on their research projects. Mari is a conceptual and durational performance artist based in Atlanta whose work reclaims constructs such as race, gender, sexuality, orientation and status. Tucker’s work examines structures of neocolonial oppression, white supremacy, racism and the Trump-era legacy of the fallen state.

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RSVP Jackhammer Party at KODA x Stilt City Retreat

Saturday, September 7 at 2-5 PM
Stilt City, 100-10 Rockaway Beach Blvd. Rockaway Park, NY 11694

 

RSVP KODA 5th Professional Development for Artists Symposium
Friday, October 11 at 12-5pm
Teachers College at Columbia University, 525 W 120th St, New York, NY 10027

 

About Alex Mari

Alex Mari (they/she) is a conceptual and durational performance artist from Atlanta. They received their MFA from SCAD-Atlanta in 2013 and have shown work across Atlanta including MINT Gallery, whitespace, Echo Contemporary, ACA Sculpture Gallery, and Mason Murer Fine Art, among others. They have performed in the Brooklyn International Performance Art Festival and in Yellow Fish Durational Performance Art Festival. They have also performed and shown work nationally and internationally in Seattle, NYC, Berlin, London, Monrovia, Fez, Puri, and most notably at the Shangyuan Art Museum in Beijing. They have received awards from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts, Burnaway’s Southern BIPOC Artist Grant, and National Endowment for the Arts Distinguished Fellowship. They recently finished a Fellowship with Emory University’s Arts and Social Justice Fellows Program in 2022. Mari continues her conceptual practice as a 2023-2025 Artist-in-Studio resident with The Creative’s Project in Atlanta.⁠ Mari’s 2023 KODA residency exhibition, “Our heads stuffed with lies, Her Belly Full of Ice,” was the artist’s first survey spanning a decade of conceptual performances documented in photo, video, text and sound with a new work that featured the artist wearing a gold sequined dress and with a bag of ice press up against their belly to symbolically numb their womb. 

 

About Toisha Tucker

Toisha Tucker is a New York based interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer. Their work explores three often-overlapping veins of critique. They use art as a mode of cultural organizing illuminating social constructions of gender, race, and identity. They posit incisive critiques of contemporary and historical events of Western society. They delve into the anthropomorphic relationship between technology and humans, contemporary dystopia and human empathy. Their practice is process and research based and manifests through text-based prints, photographs, video, participatory works, sculptural installations, analog and virtual physical labor, crafting, repetition, and other media that aim to directly engage with the body. Many of their pieces are ongoing or mutable.⁠ Tucker’s 2023 KODA residency exhibition, “It’s a most peculiar sensation; or that time Virginia Woolf wore Blackface,” featured an altar dedicated to Virginia Woolf, a new video work, works on paper, sculptures, and an immersive conceptual installation based on the “Dreadnought Hoax.” In 1910, Woolf, with other members of the modernist literary movement, darkened their skin and spoke fake Swahili in order to board a famous British battleship as a fake delegation of Abyssinian royalty.

 

About Rowan Renee

Rowan Renee (b. 1985, West Palm Beach, Florida) is a genderqueer artist currently working in Brooklyn, NY. Their work addresses intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence and the impact of the criminal legal system through image, text and installation. They have been exhibited in solo exhibitions at The Green-Wood Cemetery (2023), KODA (2022), Smack Mellon (2021), FiveMyles (2021), Aperture Foundation (2017), and Pioneer Works (2015). Renee's solo projects are influenced by community-based workshops with people affected by gender-based violence and mass incarceration. Previous partners include Recess Art, The ReEntry Theater of Harlem, and The Stories We Tell. They have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Jerome Hill Foundation, and the Art for Justice Fund. Their installation, No Spirit For Me (2019), was included in the critically acclaimed exhibition Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration, curated by Dr. Nicole R. Fleetwood at MoMA PS1. Rowan Renee is an artist-in-residence at KODA in the “Healing” season, and is also the founder of Stilt City.

 

About Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects

Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects is an award-winning architecture and design practice with an international reputation for design excellence. Founded in 1998, and led by firm principals Stephan Jaklitsch and Mark Gardner, the studio is based on the belief that design is for people and possesses the ability to communicate collective values, provide relevance, and create meaning. Jaklitsch/Gardner Architects believe that there is fundamental value in designing distinctive buildings, spaces, interiors, furniture, and products of all scales that contribute to the quality of how people live. Jaklitsch/Gardner is a Black-and-LGBTQIA+-owned architecture and design studio.

 

About KODA

Established in 2019, KODA is celebrating its 5th anniversary in 2024. KODA is a nonprofit arts organization based in New York dedicated to mid-career artists of diverse backgrounds. We grant residencies to allow for experimentation and facilitate creative projects through strategic partnerships with socially engaged partners. We are the go-to thinking spot and serve the community through exhibitions of contemporary art, events and outreach to strengthen art education. KODA works with mid-career conceptual artists who explore social justice related topics. They surface the world’s economic and social challenges through their insightful research and concepts. Our work is designed around the needs of individual artists, with the main aim to provide them with due exposure and scholarship. Our projects include residencies and survey exhibitions, community and education programs as well as partnerships with socially engaged businesses. Our work is aligned with the United Nations 17 Sustainable Development Goals. www.kodalab.org IG: @kodalab

 

Funding

KODA’s program is made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, along with major individual support.

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