After a successful experimental year where Recess suspended its annual Session Open Call to re-engage previously short-listed applicants and Session alums, the organization has restructured its application cycle to occur bi-annually.
Recess receives hundreds of submissions each cycle. With more space between each one, the organization hopes to honor the many hours each artist takes to complete their application. It also wants to respect the time taken by staff and the Selection Committee to carefully review every application, which includes providing written individualized feedback to any non-selected applicant who requests it.
Recess also doesnt want to miss the opportunity to discover artists not yet on our radars. A two-year cycle allows the organization to work with even more promising artists, and to invest the time normally spent administering the selection process into longer-term collaboration on project development and outreach strategies.
Time is one of the most important ingredients of care, and Recess hopes that being more intentional about how the team spends it will result in deeper relationships with the visionaries in its Session Program.
Recess receives hundreds of submissions each cycle. With more space between each one, the organization hopes to honor the many hours each artist takes to complete their application. It also wants to respect the time taken by staff and the Selection Committee to carefully review every application, which includes providing written individualized feedback to any non-selected applicant who requests it.
Recess also doesnt want to miss the opportunity to discover artists not yet on our radars. A two-year cycle allows the organization to work with even more promising artists, and to invest the time normally spent administering the selection process into longer-term collaboration on project development and outreach strategies.
Time is one of the most important ingredients of care, and Recess hopes that being more intentional about how the team spends it will result in deeper relationships with the visionaries in its Session Program.
2024- 2025 Session Artists
Zain Alam
Meter & Light: Month
Meter & Light: Month is a 3-channel audiovisual installation which enacts in miniature and in music, the interlocking rhythms of time in Muslim life. Zain will invite scholars and vocalists from the Islamic tradition to collaborate in performances and conversations about shepherding religious practice forward with care, creativity, and criticism into a diasporic future.
Zain Alam is an artist and composer of Indian Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year with the AIF William J. Clinton Fellowship, working as an oral historian studying the 1947 Partition. @humeysha
June Canedo de Souza
Deli Radio
Considering the paradoxical nature of modern technology like social media, which fosters global connectivity while simultaneously isolating communities, Deli Radio at Recess will explore how a traditional medium like radio can cultivate connection.
June Canedo de Souza works with photography, performance, film, painting, and sculpture. Her practice engages in a conceptual exploration of memory as it relates to migration and is anchored by her lived experience.
A. K. Burns
Recess Alumni
Research & Development
Session (postponed from 2024)
Former Session artist A.K. Burns will be undertaking several months of research and collaboration with a screenwriter, culminating with the staging at Recess of public screen tests that will be used to develop a new video work that mines the periphery of the horror film genre.
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York, born on the coast of Northern California in 1975. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration, Burns explores systems of value and the body as a contentious domain wherein socio-political issues are negotiated.@aaykayburns
Cleo Reed
The Untitled American Project
The Untitled American Project (tentative) is a research and theory-based multidisciplinary project focused on propaganda and group-think, working to protest against the demand of labor and productivity in the US.
Cleo Reed is a sound composer, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In their creativity, they look closely at their lineage and use it as a primary reference in music-making, instrument building, and multi-disciplinary art projects.@cleoforshort
Miriam Simun
WE MAKE PEOPLE
In the face of rapid ecological and technological change, Miriam Simun proposes a study group and public practice for designing the evolution of our species based on the cephalopod model - a future that is sensorial, relational, wet, attuned, and in the body.
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. @yoururgetobreatheisalie
Dancing Through Prison Walls
Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls
Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls is an activated, inter-disciplinary response to written dances, deeply imagined and authored from bunks within prisons in South Dakota, California, New York, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, centering handwritten pen and pencil dances entrusted to this community of formerly incarcerated and “free world” choreographers and artists, these previously censored works will be activated through dance, full-scale transforming constructions, video installation, an abolition resource center, and weekly community dance jams.
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people, and addressing mass incarceration. #carenotcages
About Session
Session supports the creation of new work by giving artists a project stipend, artist’s fee, technical support, mentorship, and approximately two months to transform Recess into a hybrid of a productive studio space dynamic exhibition platform.
About Recess
Recess partners with artists, youth, writers, and their chosen publics to create transformative cultural experiences. Our programs welcome radical thinkers to imagine and shape networks of resilience and safety. By challenging dominant narratives and activating new forms of creative production, Recess defines and advances the possibilities of contemporary art. Recess is free and open to the public to serve as a meeting place to generate art, ideas and actions.
Recess is supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Art for Justice Fund; The Pinkerton Foundation; ELMA Philanthropies; The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; The Tikkum Olam Foundation; The Visionary Freedom Fund; The National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council; Prospect Hill Foundation; The Salomon Foundation; The Horace Goldsmith Foundation; VIA Fund; New York Community Trust; ArtMatters; Frank E. Clark Charitable Trust. In-kind support is provided by Materials for the Arts.
Zain Alam
Meter & Light: Month
Meter & Light: Month is a 3-channel audiovisual installation which enacts in miniature and in music, the interlocking rhythms of time in Muslim life. Zain will invite scholars and vocalists from the Islamic tradition to collaborate in performances and conversations about shepherding religious practice forward with care, creativity, and criticism into a diasporic future.
Zain Alam is an artist and composer of Indian Pakistani origin based in Brooklyn. Described as “a unique intersection, merging the cinematic formality of Bollywood and geometric repetition of Islamic art,” his recording project Humeysha began during his year with the AIF William J. Clinton Fellowship, working as an oral historian studying the 1947 Partition. @humeysha
June Canedo de Souza
Deli Radio
Considering the paradoxical nature of modern technology like social media, which fosters global connectivity while simultaneously isolating communities, Deli Radio at Recess will explore how a traditional medium like radio can cultivate connection.
June Canedo de Souza works with photography, performance, film, painting, and sculpture. Her practice engages in a conceptual exploration of memory as it relates to migration and is anchored by her lived experience.
A. K. Burns
Recess Alumni
Research & Development
Session (postponed from 2024)
Former Session artist A.K. Burns will be undertaking several months of research and collaboration with a screenwriter, culminating with the staging at Recess of public screen tests that will be used to develop a new video work that mines the periphery of the horror film genre.
A.K. Burns is an interdisciplinary artist and educator based in New York, born on the coast of Northern California in 1975. Using video, installation, sculpture, drawing, and collaboration, Burns explores systems of value and the body as a contentious domain wherein socio-political issues are negotiated.@aaykayburns
Cleo Reed
The Untitled American Project
The Untitled American Project (tentative) is a research and theory-based multidisciplinary project focused on propaganda and group-think, working to protest against the demand of labor and productivity in the US.
Cleo Reed is a sound composer, performer, and multi-disciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, NY. In their creativity, they look closely at their lineage and use it as a primary reference in music-making, instrument building, and multi-disciplinary art projects.@cleoforshort
Miriam Simun
WE MAKE PEOPLE
In the face of rapid ecological and technological change, Miriam Simun proposes a study group and public practice for designing the evolution of our species based on the cephalopod model - a future that is sensorial, relational, wet, attuned, and in the body.
Miriam Simun is a visual artist whose multidisciplinary practice uses science, somatics, scent, power, poetry and humor to create art works in various formats, for example - video, installation, painting, performance, and communal sensorial experiences. @yoururgetobreatheisalie
Dancing Through Prison Walls
Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls
Undanced Dances Through Prison Walls is an activated, inter-disciplinary response to written dances, deeply imagined and authored from bunks within prisons in South Dakota, California, New York, Louisiana, and Puerto Rico, centering handwritten pen and pencil dances entrusted to this community of formerly incarcerated and “free world” choreographers and artists, these previously censored works will be activated through dance, full-scale transforming constructions, video installation, an abolition resource center, and weekly community dance jams.
Dancing Through Prison Walls is a dance and performance project whose mission is to dance with, choreograph with, and tell stories within embodied carceral landscapes and beyond, amplifying voices of incarcerated people, and addressing mass incarceration. #carenotcages
About Session
Session supports the creation of new work by giving artists a project stipend, artist’s fee, technical support, mentorship, and approximately two months to transform Recess into a hybrid of a productive studio space dynamic exhibition platform.
About Recess
Recess partners with artists, youth, writers, and their chosen publics to create transformative cultural experiences. Our programs welcome radical thinkers to imagine and shape networks of resilience and safety. By challenging dominant narratives and activating new forms of creative production, Recess defines and advances the possibilities of contemporary art. Recess is free and open to the public to serve as a meeting place to generate art, ideas and actions.
Recess is supported, in part, by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts; The Art for Justice Fund; The Pinkerton Foundation; ELMA Philanthropies; The Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund; The Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation; The Tikkum Olam Foundation; The Visionary Freedom Fund; The National Endowment for the Arts, Art Works; the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew Cuomo and the New York State Legislature; The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in Partnership with the City Council; Prospect Hill Foundation; The Salomon Foundation; The Horace Goldsmith Foundation; VIA Fund; New York Community Trust; ArtMatters; Frank E. Clark Charitable Trust. In-kind support is provided by Materials for the Arts.
