2024-26 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Project for Empty Space is pleased to announce the 2024-2026 Artists In Residence: Heather Hart, Jake Troyli, Lina Puerta, and Noelle Lorraine Williams. The PES AIR Program is an annual initiative that welcomes four visual artists interested in intersectionality and social activism, discourse, and engagement to participate in a two-year residence in their studios at 800 Broad Street, Newark, New Jersey. During the upcoming residence cycle, Hart, Troyli, Puerta, and Williams will have time, space, and support to develop their work; cultivating professional development opportunities such as studio visits and critical feedback meetings, facilitating community programs that engage their practice, and culminating their experience with a solo exhibition of work created during their time at PES.
Over the past eight cycles of the AIR program, PES has fostered a unique space where individual artists are supported and conversations around social equity are cultivated, forging bridges from artist to community, from community to community, and collectively pushing important dialogues forward. Past PES Artists in Residence include Adama Delphine Fawundu, Amy Khoshbin, Andrea Chung, Azikiwe Mohammed, Damien Davis, Daphne Arthur, David Antonio Cruz, Delano Dunn, Derrick Adams, Helina Metaferia, Jaret Vadera, JC Lenochan, Kambui Olujimi, Layqa Nuna Yawar, Nadia Estela, Nina Chanel Abney, Renluka Maharaj, Richard Hart, Ron Norsworthy, Shoshanna Weinberger, Victoria-Idongesit Udondian, and Wardell Milan.
HEATHER HART
Heather Hart (b. Seattle, WA) is an interdisciplinary artist exploring the power in thresholds, questioning dominant narratives, and creating alternatives to them. She often makes objects that are activated and expanded through collaboration with performers and publics. Hart work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, Storm King Art Center, The Kohler Art Center, NCMA, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Eastern Illinois University, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Newfields Museum, University of Buffalo, and University of Toronto, Scarborough among others. She was awarded grants from Anonymous Was A Woman, the Graham Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, and the Jerome Foundation, NYFA, and Harpo Foundation. Hart co-founded Black Lunch Table in 2005 and has won a Creative Capital award, Wikimedia Foundation grants, Ford Foundation grant, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant and an Andy Warhol Foundation of Art grant with that project. Hart is an Assistant Professor at Mason Gross School for Art + Design, a member of the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums, an external advisor for AUC Art Collective, and a trustee at Storm King Art Center. She studied at Skowhegan, Whitney ISP, Cornish College of the Arts, Princeton University and received her MFA from Rutgers University.
JAKE TROYLI
Jake Troyli received his BA from Lincoln Memorial University, Harrogate, TN (2013), his MFA from the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL (2019), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Skowhegan, ME (2019).
Jake has had solo exhibitions with Monique Meloche Gallery in Chicago, IL (2022/2020); Tempus Projects, Tampa, FL (2018); and ArtsXchange, Saint Petersburg, FL (2018). Troyli’s work has been featured in group exhibitions at Perrotin Gallery, New York, NY (2024); Galerie Droste, Düsseldorf, DE (2024); Milwaukee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI (2023-24); Everson Museum, Syracuse, NY (2023); Galerie Droste, Paris, FR (2021); The Ringling Museum, Sarasota, FL (2021); Contemporary Art Museum, Tampa, FL (2019); San Francisco Art Institute, CA (2018). Troyli’s work is included in the group exhibition Get in the Game: Sports, Art, Culture, curated by Jennifer Dunlop Fletcher, Seph Rodney, and Katy Siegel, at SFMoMA, which travels to the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art and the Pérez Art Museum in Miami, FL. Jake’s next solo exhibit, Collision Course, opens in Chicago at Monique Meloche Gallery on November 9th. Jake was the recipient of the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center Fellowship (2019-2020) and the Creative Pinellas Emerging Artist Grant, Largo, FL (2017). Troyli was a 2023 Visual Artist fellow of the Academie des Beaux-Arts x Cite Internationale Des Arts program in Paris, France.
LINA PUERTA
Drawing from her experience as a Colombian-American, Lina Puerta’s art examines the relationship between nature and the human-made and engages in themes of food justice, xenophobia, hyper-consumerism, and ancestral knowledge. She creates mixed media sculptures, installations, collages, handmade paper paintings, and wall hangings by combining a wide range of materials, from artificial plants and paper pulp to found, personal, and recycled objects.
Puerta was born in NJ, raised in Colombia, and lives and works in NYC. Holding an MS in Art Education from CUNY, she has exhibited widely and received numerous awards, including the NYFA Fellowship in Crafts/Sculpture and the Joan Mitchell Painters and Sculptors Grant. She has participated in artist residencies at various institutions, including ArtOmi, the Sugar Hill Children's Museum of Art and Storytelling, Dieu Donné, Smack Mellon, and the Joan Mitchell Arts Center.
NOELLE LORRAINE WILLIAMS
Noelle Lorraine Williams lives and works in Newark, NJ. She received her bachelor's from the New School for Social Research and her master’s from Rutgers University Newark. As an artist, public humanities specialist, historian, researcher, and curator, her work examines the ways African Americans utilize culture to re-imagine liberation in the United States.
She has exhibited and lectured in multiple venues, including the Newark Museum of Art, The African American Museum in Philadelphia, and Jersey City Museum. Her work as an artist and curator has been reviewed in the New York Times, ArtNews, and other publications, including the Star-Ledger, as a part of their profile on “The Newark School” and about her exhibition Black Power! 19th Century Newark’s First African American Rebellion.
She is an Aljira Emerge graduate. Her exhibition Radical Women: Fighting for Power and the Vote in New Jersey! was the recipient of the Giles R. Wright Award for contributions to African American History in NJ. She recently received the Creative Catalyst Grant from the City of Newark to produce two artistic interpretations of nineteenth-century African American history. She is also a recipient of the 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship Award for Crafts from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts. In the summer of 2024, she was accepted into the Wilmington Black Storytelling Residency.
Williams’ work is public-facing. She created a five-billboard outdoor art installation in downtown Newark. Recently, a project she served as lead researcher on a proposal to the National Park Service’s National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom as one of northeastern New Jersey’s first federally recognized sites. She received, with the Project for Empty Space Gallery, the Abbey Mural Prize from the National Academy of Design for New Jersey’s first two-story mural on Black women suffragists.
Currently, her multimedia exhibition Stay: The Black Women of 19th-century Newark is on view at The Newark Museum of Arts’ Ballantine House. Her website is www.blackpower19thcentury.com