ArtTable Fellowship: 2020 Recipients

Jewel Ham 
Arts Student League

Jewel Ham is a 2020 Summa Cum Laude Howard University graduate, with a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts. Interested in production, curation, and distribution of fine art alike, she intends to increase the accessibility of visual art in Black and brown communities. 

Project: Jewel will assist in organizing an exhibition in Cinque Gallery, an important artist collective founded in 1969 by Romare Bearden, Ernest Crichlow, and Norman Lewis with the mission to exhibit the work of both new and established African–American artists.

Jocelyn Lopez-Anleu
Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions

Jocelyn Lopez-Anleu was born and raised in South Central Los Angeles and is the first member in her family to attend a four-year university. Lopez-Anleu has packed a lot in her four years at UC Santa Cruz. Besides her B.A., she is completing minors in Latin American and Latino studies and History of Consciousness. During her second year, she studied contemporary curatorial practices at the University of Cape Town in South Africa and engaged with different methods of studying art history at UCLA. She also interned at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and The Broad. These experiences starkly illustrated how limiting the traditional art world can be, and she has dedicated her efforts to bring underrepresented artists from communities of color to the forefront. “I do this in hopes that by seeing art that engages with their identity, communities of color and queer communities of color will arrive at an understanding that art and careers in the arts is not something that is inaccessible to them.

Project: Jocelyn will act as a curatorial and program assistant in preparation for the 2020 exhibition Intergalactics: Against Isolation.

Michelle Mandarino
Chrysler Museum of Art

Michelle Mandarino is an MA student in Art History at Indiana University and the Graduate Curatorial Assistant of European and American Art at the Eskenazi Museum of  Art. Her research interests include southern Baroque painting and the cross-cultural relationship between Italy and Spain in the seventeenth century.

Project: Michelle will assist the McKinnon Curator in researching the Chrysler Museum’s permanent collection of early modern North American art for a major gallery rotation focused on the theme of international exchange between Mexican and United States artists.

Taylor Payer
Socrates Sculpture Park

Boozhoo! My name is Taylor Payer and I am a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Anishinaabe. I graduated from Dartmouth College in 2015 with a Bachelor’s in Women’s and Gender Studies. During my last year of undergraduate, I was a student fellow at the Hood Museum of Art where I worked on public programming and curated an exhibition of contemporary art by women of color and indigenous women.

For the last three years I have worked as a curator and community engagement director at the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota. I have also been an arts educator at the Walker Art Center.  As an emerging arts professional, I have been able to curate, organize, and install several exhibitions and creative place-keeping initiatives. 

Project: Taylor will be managing the publication for the Park’s upcoming
exhibition, Monuments Now (on view May 16, 2020-March 2021) and
implementing associated public program under the supervision of Curator, Jess Wilcox.

Erica Rawles
The Laundromat Project

Erica Rawles is an artist, writer, facilitator, and collaborator with a background in community engagement and organizing. In addition to her personal art practice and work as a freelance writer, Erica collaborates with organizations in a participatory, creative process that prioritizes community building and empowerment. Before joining the Laundromat Project as an ArtTable fellow, she worked as Creative Strategist for the Little Tokyo Service Center and as an educator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She is also an AmeriCorps alumna. Erica holds a dual B.A. in studio art and philosophy from Claremont McKenna College

Project: Erica will support research projects in relationship to upcoming socially engaged arts programming in collaboration with LP staff, cultural, artists, and, and cultural producers: including curriculum development and public arts programming.

Carola Reyes
Yerba Buena Center For The Arts

Carola Reyes Benítez is a recent graduate from NYU’s College of Arts and Sciences. Born and raised in San Juan, Puerto Rico, she embarked to New York City to pursue studies in Art History and Business Studies. During her four years at university, she has had various experiences in the art world, including internships at The Whitney Museum of American Art, Sotheby’s, and Salon 94 gallery in NYC. Her academic interests include international contemporary art and design, specifically that of the Americas. As an incoming ArtTable Fellow at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, she plans to gain further experience in an arts institution while fostering new relationships within the San Francisco art community.

Project: Carola will perform research to develop and write exhibition texts, working both independently and in collaboration with staff for a guest-curated show on June 18th entitled A Place Beyond which reimagines modes of commerce through utopian models of exchange.

Lisa Zhang
Museum of Chinese in America

Lisa Yin Zhang is an artist, art historian, and writer, based in Queens, NY. She is a graduate of Williams College, and is interested in marginal narratives of modern and contemporary art history. 

Project: Lisa will work with the curatorial team to conduct research in various archives and secure items for the Spring 2021 exhibition about Iris Chang, a journalist that wrote about the atrocities committed against the Chinese during World War II.