BALTIMORE, MD – The Baltimore Museum of Art, (BMA), Joshua Johnson Council (JJC), and the Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) today announced Ainsley Burrows and Vonne Napper have been selected for the 2024 Summer Artist-in-Residence program at MICA jointly sponsored by the three organizations. Launched in 2022, the residency program provides selected artists the opportunity to work in MICA’s Fred Lazarus IV Studio Center Studio over the course of eight weeks in June and July, allowing the artists to expand their work and scale, as well as embedding themselves within the college community. Napper and Burrows are both Baltimore-based artists who were selected by a five-panel jury comprised of Benjamin Kelley, Donna Rawlings, and Annie Roberts, representing each organization, as well as Nicoletta Daríta de la Brown and Charles Mason III, the previous JJC artists-in-residence.
Ainsley Burrows (b. 1974, Kingston, Jamaica) is a full-time multidisciplinary artist who explores untold stories and unspoken emotions. He is a poet, musician, and performer, as well as a painter, and his different creative pursuits influence each other. As a self-taught artist, Burrows began working with acrylic paint on canvas in 2009, transforming his talent and success in writing into a visual language. During the pandemic in 2020, he was forced to take a break from his livelihood and hit the ground running in the art world. He had spent the previous four years creating a series of 125 acrylic paintings called The Maroons: Rebellion. Selections from that series were the subject of Burrows’ first solo exhibition at State University of New York Oneonta in 2022. Since then, Burrows has had solo exhibitions at Rush Arts, Philadelphia, PA; Creative Alliance, Baltimore, MD; The DC Arts Center, Washington, DC; and an upcoming solo exhibition at Gallery In The Sky (World Trade Center), Baltimore, MD. He has also participated in group exhibitions at Artscape, Baltimore, MD; 11:Eleven Gallery, Washington, DC; Arlington Arts Center, Arlington, VA; and Amos Eno Gallery, Brooklyn, NY. His work is included in several private collections.
Vonne Napper (b. 1989, Washington, DC) is a community-based interdisciplinary artist born and raised in Washington, DC. As a child, they displayed great interest in learning new things, with one door of inspiration opening to the next. Consequently, their art practice spans various mediums including music production, printmaking, graphic design, videography, painting, writing, sewing, movement performance, installation, and assemblage. Napper’s practice centers on social justice, new-age healing, and preserving Black queer and trans narratives. Identifying as nonbinary and trans-masculine, Napper pulls from their lived experience to highlight the challenges of existing at a particularly targeted intersection in today’s society and employs their spirituality to establish connections between the communities to which they belong. Their work has been presented in galleries and included in numerous programs throughout the Baltimore-Washington region.
More information: https://artbma.org
