coLAB Arts welcome the Calabar Gallery ART Residency

APPLICATIONS FOR NEXT RESIDENCY TERM ARE OPEN THROUGH NOVEMBER 10, 2023

TO APPLY for Residency Term January to May, 2024: Send a PDF portfolio of work & a statement on social justice as it relates to your work or send us a google drive link with 10 images of work with details: title, year, medium, size and a short bio with a list of exhibitions, website, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter to calabargallery@gmail.com. 

Calabar Gallery Art Residency is a competitive program by curator Atim Annette Oton of Calabar Gallery providing Black artists (African, Caribbean and African American) space and consulting time and advice with art experts/curators/critics while they produce new work in a specific location – locally, regionally and globally.

Calabar Gallery showcases contemporary African Artists and African Diaspora artists globally. Curated by Atim Annette Oton, each artist selected has work that deals with the complexities of the African experience. Based in Harlem, work featured is inspired and influenced by black African culture globally with a focus on dynamic ideas about art and society. Work will include: paintings, sculptures, watercolors, drawings, pastels, prints, photographs, mixed-media works and installations.

This Social Justice Residency is for emerging and mid-career Black Artists globally who are working using unconventional ideas, materials, subject matter and doing some research based work on a particular topic and pedagogy on Black lives globally and socially engaging New Brunswick. Each resident will work with a locally based nonprofit.

LEADERSHIP

Atim Annette Oton is a Nigerian-born, American and British educated designer turned art curator who grew up in Nigeria with her mother collecting and buying contemporary art. She is the Curator and founder of Harlem based Calabar Gallery. She is the African Art Curator for Amref Health Africa ArtBall for the past 4 years which honored Wangechi Mutu, El Anatsui, Toyin Ojih Odutola and Zanele Muholi. She is the curator for the Jersey City Theater Center and was the Curator for Community Engagement for the Bronx:Africa exhibition at Longwood Gallery. In 2016, she launched Calabar Gallery in Harlem to focus on contemporary African Artists and African Diaspora artists globally whose work is inspired and influenced by black and global African culture globally investigating dynamic ideas about art, culture and society.

BACKGROUND
Calabar Gallery represents underserved artists locally and globally: African, African American and Caribbean artists, with the mission of providing a place for community, exhibition, creative initiatives and projects. It provides a venue for them to innovate, sustain, grow and expand ideas, concepts, projects and leverage opportunities by the use of our space, networks and relationships, and a distinctive location in Harlem, New York.

Calabar features artists and art projects that instigate dialogue, build communities, bolster local and global economies, and further social innovation. We also seek underserved artists who are using technology and the internet to create, exhibit, showcase and sell work locally, regionally and globally.

2022-2023 ADVISORS:

Jeanne Brasile, Director, Walsh Gallery, Seton Hall Gallery
Midori Yoshimoto, Associate Professor of Art History and Gallery Director, New Jersey City University
PJ Gupatina Policarpo, Head of Youth Development, Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco
Halima Taha, Curator, Art & Culture Strategist and author of Collecting African American Art Works, NY
Elizabeth Keithline, Exhibitions Director, Woodstock Artists Association and Museum (WAAM), NY
Patricia Andrews-Keenan, Director, Pigment International, Art publication magazine, Chicago
Eto Otitigbe, artist & MFA Deputy Chair, Brooklyn College’s Sculpture Department.

2022/2023 Artist Resident

Ghislaine Sabiti

Ghislaine Sabiti is an interdisciplinary French/American Congolese-born artist, a painter, costume designer, and flame worker who was raised on the outskirts of Paris, France and is now based in New York. She studied fine art at Atelier Chantier du Coq and graduated with honors in fashion design from Atelier Chardon Savard in Paris, France. She studies glass lamp-work and photo decals at Urban Glass. She highlights the technical form used in both African and European arts, which stress form and color.

Sabiti completed a fellowship at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute Cycle VIII of the Spring ICA, and New York Foundation of the Arts Immigrant Artist Program. Her work has been exhibited and commissioned nationally and internationally in France and the U.S. in numerous group exhibitions and solo shows including galleries and museum such as El Teatro del Museo Del Barrio, Occupy Museum Debt Fair at the Whitney Biennial, Atelier Rosal, Westfield State University Arno Maris Gallery, Rio Gallery, shapeshifterlab, Harlem School of the Arts, Brooklyn Film and Art Festival and Small Space Fest, and Poe Park Visitor Center.

Ghislaine had a Chashama artist residency at the Marcel Breuer House Pocantico Center/Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Jamaica Center and Learning, Urban Glass, Commission for the Lexington Hotel, New York, Salon du Prêt-à-Porter. Sabiti was an award winner for the Dupont De Nemours hosiery design competition for DIM Company.