Recess is proud to announce our 2026-28 Session Artists |
|
| | After receiving the largest number of applications in Recess history, we are thrilled to announce the artists selected for our 2026–27 and 2027–28 Session program.
Session provides artists with time, space, resources, and public engagement to develop ambitious projects in dialogue with Recess's communities. Across two years, these artists will transform our gallery into sites of research, experimentation, performance, study, exchange, and collective imagination.
The selected projects explore archives and cultural memory, sonic technologies, diasporic knowledge, mutual aid, Black joy, queer study, environmental sustainability, and community infrastructures of grief and repair. Together, they reflect the range of questions artists are asking about how we live, remember, organize, and create with one another.
We are honored to welcome these artists into the Recess ecosystem and the team is excited to support the micro-worlds they will build in the years ahead. |
|
| | 2026-2027 Session Artists |
|
| | |
The Khajistan Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development
Khajistan is a New York–based archive and publishing platform operated by Saad Khan, Joey Chriqui, and Amad Ansari. It preserves and digitizes print and web-based media from North Africa to South Asia that has historically circulated outside formal archives, preserving vernacular culture from the region. The Khajistan Institute for Advanced Research and Necessary Development will bring together the collective’s vast print and digital collections of overlooked and banned materials from the Middle World in a physical space, activating them through a computer lab installation and collaborative workspace, as well as screenings, lectures, and workshops, aligning with Khajistan’s grassroots archival and dissemination practices.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Koneh Pelawoe
YATTA is a Sierra Leonean-American artist and composer working across music, performance, installation, and film. Their album PALM WINE builds on the legacy of their great-uncle, pioneering Sierra Leonean guitarist S. E. Rogie, reimagining palm-wine music through storytelling, lilting vocals, and a slant toward levity, ease, and play. For Session, they will be developing Koneh Pelawoe, a chapter of their feature documentary about Black wandering, palm wine music, nature, and the legacy of S.E. Rogie. Image Credit: Jazmin Jones.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The Global South Drum Machine & Sampler
SLD is an artist- and technologist-led collective building accessible, anti-extractive musical instruments, sound libraries, and educational resources as tools for resistance, study, and collective care. Emerging from graduate research at NYU and incubated through NEW INC, SLD began with the Palestine Drum Liberator and is now developing the Global South Drum Machine & Sampler, a production instrument built around regionally sourced sounds, non-traditional tuning systems, tactile interaction, and collaboration with musicians, organizers, and ethnomusicologists across geographies. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The Listening Library: Cassette Culture Across Diasporas
Chaia is a composer that weaves archival Yiddish audio with techno and ambient frameworks, creating hybrid folk-electronic compositions that situate ancestral sound within global and liberatory rave culture. The Listening Library: Cassette Culture Across Diasporas is an evolving cassette library where artists, archivists, elders, and community members across five diasporas gather, contribute tapes, and reactivate cassette culture as an infrastructure of cultural vitality and diasporic exchange.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
An Encyclopedia of Black Joy
Zoë Pulley is an artist, educator and designer based in Brooklyn. Her work utilizes textiles, writing, and digital media to examine American heritage and the seemingly ordinary stories of Black folks. An Encyclopedia of Black Joyreimagines the encyclopedia as a communal form, replacing taxonomies and expertise with the embodied knowledge of Black joy, culminating in a book and evolving installation. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | 2027-2028 Session Artists |
|
| | |
Collect, Clean, Cut, Circulate Alex Strada is an interdisciplinary artist and educator whose socially engaged practice creates platforms for collectivity, civic agency, and political transformation. Since 2022, she has served as the Public Artist in Residence with the NYC Department of Homeless Services and the Department of Cultural Affairs. Collect, Clean, Cut, Circulate will transform Recess into a working site of textile recirculation, where donated garments are received, repaired, reassembled, and redistributed through existing mutual aid networks. The project challenges donation as an endpoint and intervenes in the waste systems that structure material disposal and value. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
The Life Fight
Ellery Neon is a NYC born and based artist, and through his mural and graffiti work (as Hugo Gyrl), has been part of the visual landscape of the city for decades. He also is a co-founder of Chokehole, a drag wrestling troupe with roots in New Orleans, Louisiana. In The Life Fight, he intends to investigate the nature of conflict and resolution through the proxy of his own campy wrestling characters. Image credit: Acudus Araniyan.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Pinko Symposium
Pinko is a collective project for thinking gay communism together through print media, collaborative study, and community events. They publish a print magazine, one-off books and zines. Pinko Symposium will gather their editorial collective, past and future contributors, the Recess community, and anyone curious about gay communism, to a space for archival exploration and forum of collective study as we develop our next issue, transforming Recess into a temporary magazine headquarters, reading room, and activated event space. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
Space Doula Academy
Oni’s practice explores loss, legacy, and its deep connection with place. Recent projects include the FABnyc Chrystie Street African Burial Ground Memorial commission, the DCLA Public Artist-in-Residence at Crossroads Youth Detention Center, and a commissioned Southern New Jersey Monument for Im/Migration and Labor. While New York uses multiple approaches in social work and policing to address community trauma, less attention is paid to sites of loss; Space Doula Academy will respond by inviting creatives to Recess to collectively shape “space doula” practice - techniques for addressing spatial “scars” and co-creating spaces that hold both grief and possibility.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| |
DREAMTV
Amina Ross is an artist, filmmaker, and educator whose interdisciplinary practice moves between video, sound, sculpture, and installation, attending to the body, feeling, and the subtle architectures that shape perception. They approach materials and technologies not as fixed categories but as sites of relation and ongoing experimentation. Working at the intersection of somatic practice, experimental media, and Black and Indigenous dreaming traditions, DREAMTV will transform the Session space into a live production studio where participants generate their own dream-based knowledge, rituals, and moving image work through Dreamers' Circles, workshops, and on-site tapings that question who is granted the time, safety, and social permission to dream, and who is denied it. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| | | | Our community needs you. Every gift—big or small—helps us keep our doors open, our programs free, and our artists resourced. Support Recess today. |
|
| |
|
|
|
|
