Smack Mellon

ANNOUNCING THE 2026/27 ARTIST STUDIO

We are thrilled to announce the six artists in the 2026–27 Artist Studio cohort! (from top, left to right):

Amy Bravo
Aparna Sarkar
Asia Stewart
Enrique Garcia
Judy Chung
Soeun Bae

These NYC-based emerging artists, representing a diverse array of practices, will move into their studios at Smack Mellon this September. For an eleven-month period, residents are granted a private studio, a stipend, and access to equipment with which to create work, establish relationships with arts professionals, and grow in community with their peers—all with the financial, technical, and administrative support of Smack Mellon.

A panel of arts professionals selected this year’s cohort, including Nova Benway, Executive Director at Triangle Arts Association; Ian Cofre, Independent Curator; and Pallavi Surana, Independent Curator. Preliminary panelists were former Smack Mellon Studio or Exhibition artists: Christian Amaya Garcia, mujero, Juan José Cielo, Utsa Hazarika, Angélica Maria Millán Lozano, and Armando Guadalupe Cortés.

Amy Bravo combines icons from Latin American popular culture and hyper-personal family stories, to invent her own vision, intimate and fantastic, of an afterlife in the rough shape of the island of Cuba. Rather than classic stretched canvases, Bravo prefers to draw on loose canvas—cut and stitched to create irregular shapes that expand into painting and assemblage sculpture.

Born in 1997 in Park Ridge, New Jersey, Amy Bravo currently lives and works in Queens, New York. After completing a BFA in Illustration at Pratt Institute, New York, she obtained an MFA in Painting at Hunter College, New York in 2022. Recent exhibitions include solo shows at Swivel Gallery, New York, Semiose Gallery in Paris, as well as group shows with Buffalo AKG Art Museum and The FLAG Foundation. Her work is featured in the permanent collection of the Perez Art Museum in Miami. She was a 2024 New York Community Trust Fellow at ISCP and a resident at the Fountainhead in Miami in 2022.

Amy Bravo, Automaton 4.0 (Bull-Remastered), 2024. Found Cabinet, Foam, Acrylic, Wood, Epoxy, Plaster, Thread, Boxing Gloves, Christmas Lights, Synthetic Hair, Co