SPRING 2021 ART & LAW PROGRAM FELLOWS

Mauricio Cortes Ortega: Cortes Ortega is a Mexican-American artist and educator. His artwork explores Latin American colonial history through painting and sculpture. He holds degrees from The Cooper Union (B.F.A) and Yale University (M.F.A). Mauricio has most recently exhibited at Whitebox Harlem Gallery, Mueller Gallery, the Mexic-Arte Museum in Austin, Texas, the Loisaida Center, Bronx Art Space and the Hunter East Harlem Gallery. He has held numerous fellowships and residencies including the Bronx Museum AIM program, Smelser Vallion Visiting Artist residency at the Doel Reed Art Center in New Mexico, a Rema Hort Mann Foundation Artist Community Engagement Grant, and the Schell Center for International Human Rights Travel fellowship. He teaches Painting and Drawing at Berkeley Carroll School in BK.

Benjamin De Kosnik: De Kosnik is an artist and engineer based in San Francisco, California. He uses art as a research tool, seeking to transgress, illuminate, and demystify control systems. He creates custom software, hardware, and network tools that generate visual artifacts and occasionally incorporate the code itself. These artifacts include works on paper, single and multi-channel video art, electronic media installations, documentation and archival systems, performances, and talks. He has exhibited at Hong Kong Open Printshop in Hong Kong, Gallery West Ginza, Tokyo, Japan, RootDivision in San Francisco, ProArts in Oakland, and the San Luis Obispo Art Museum in California, and has been in residence at Constant Association for Arts and Media in Brussels and the Barbican Centre London. He is in the public collection of The Garage Archive Moscow, HDK Sweden, Hong Kong Open Printshop, and Freehome Berlin. He is a former member of the PARSE (Platform for Artistic Research Sweden) working group in Gothenburg, Sweden. benjamin.dekosnik.com/

Eliza Evans: Evans experiments with sculpture, print, video, and textiles to identify disconnections and absurdities in social, economic, and ecological systems. Her work has been exhibited at the Thomas Erben Gallery, New York, NY (2020), Chautauqua Institution, Chautauqua, NY (2019), Edward Hopper House Museum, Nyack, NY (2019), BRIC, Brooklyn (2017), and Purchase College, Purchase, NY (2017). Residencies include the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, UC Santa Barbara (2020), Bronx Museum AIM, and Franconia Sculpture Park, Shafer, MN (both 2019). Evans holds an MFA from SUNY Purchase College in visual art and a PhD in economic sociology from the University of Texas at Austin. Evans was born in a rustbelt steel town and raised in rural Appalachia. She currently splits her time between New York and Tennessee. http://eevans.net/ https://www.allthewaytohell.com

Hannah Iversen: Iversen is an Insurance Advisor working out of New York City. She specializes in personal insurance and asset management for high net worth clients. She received her BA in Art History from Colorado College. She previously worked in the appraisal department of a New York City-based Auction House. She is passionate in learning further about how art can be protected, managed, and encouraged.

Joshua Liebowitz: Liebowitz is an artist, researcher, and writer currently based in New York City, whose work is concerned with the development of tactical expressions which can recognize and intervene in conditions of power which arise repeatedly between individuals and institutions. Liebowitz' formal education was not in art, but rather in music and poetics, which he studied at Columbia University, and where he received his BA in English. Liebowitz has presented work in solo and group exhibitions nationally and internationally: most recently at Solid Art, Taiwan in 2020, and the Lishui Photography Festival, China, in 2019. He has held residencies at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), and the New York Art Residency and Studios (NARS) Foundation, amongst others, and his work has appeared in numerous publications including The Art Press Asia, The Atlantic, Gothamist, and ArtNews. joshualiebowitz.com

Alva Mooses: Mooses is an artist and educator based in New York City. She received her BFA from The Cooper Union and her MFA from Yale University. She has exhibited her work in exhibitions in the U.S., Latin America, and Europe, and has completed fellowships and residencies at Socrates Sculpture Park in NYC, The University of Chicago, Tou Trykk in Stavanger, Norway, and Casa Wabi, in Oaxaca, Mexico, among others. Since 2004, she has organized community art initiatives and collaborations in Mexico, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, El Salvador, and Argentina. She is co-founder of LAZO, an artist collective that creates participatory projects and exhibitions bringing together Latinx artists, curators, scholars, and activists. Alva is currently a resident at The Center for Book Arts and The Clemente. She is a member of the Editorial Board for Latinx Spaces and teaches Sculpture at The Cooper Union School of Art. alvamooses.com openlazo.com

Se Kyung Ock: Born in Seoul, South Korea, and studied art history and philosophy at the University of Minnesota. With academic interests ranging from postmodern philosophy to critical pedagogy to analytic philosophy of language, he investigates the history of Institutional Critique, semiotic conventions that represent the hierarchical gap between the producers and consumers of knowledge in art, and the relationship between contemporary art and the legal institution. Se Kyung’s current research is focused on how such art theoretical discourses can be applied to the sports and entertainment industry.

Arie Ruvinsky: Ruvinsky is an interdisciplinary textile and fiber designer. Interested in both alchemy and co-designing with nature, and in particular, the uniforms and tactical styles of hermits and witches. Conceptualizing textile design as a form of social production, her work includes transposing how textiles and institutional power structures can overlap. How can textile production techniques and the immune system act as a potential framework for espionage? She is currently a student on the Social Policy and Design Course at the University of Pennsylvania, and holds an MFA in Fibers from Cranbrook Academy of Art and a BFA from Goldsmiths, University of London. She has been an artist in residence on the Land Arts of the American West Program at TTU, the Hollows in NYC, Talking Dolls in Detroit, and Arteles in Finland.

Gabriel Sosa: Sosa is an artist, educator, curator, and linguist. His multi-disciplinary practice incorporates drawing, video, sound, and installation to explore how the use of language subtly shapes and disrupts our everyday experiences. His project No es fácil/It ain’t easy is a bilingual series of billboards now on display in various Boston neighborhoods from July 2020 to January 2021. Additionally, his work has been shown at the O, Miami Poetry Festival; Tufts University Art Galleries; Centro Cultural Español, Miami; La Fábrica de Arte Cubano, Havana; A R E A, Boston; and the Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco. He was one of the curators of the Area Code Art Fair 2020, the first art fair focused on artists with ties to New England. Gabriel has been an artist-in-residence at Lugar a dudas, Cali, Colombia; Santa Fe Art Institute, Santa Fe, New Mexico; Mass MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts; and Santa Cruz Museum of Art and History, Santa Cruz, California. Born and raised in Miami, he is currently based in Boston where he is an artist-in-residence at The Urbano Project, and a visiting lecturer at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design. http://www.gabrielsosa.com/

Sara Stern: Stern is an interdisciplinary artist from New York City. Her recent projects prod histories of urban development with animacy and speculative fiction. Stern received her BA from Harvard University and her MFA from Columbia University. She has exhibited and screened her work in the US and internationally, at venues including SculptureCenter, NY; Anthology Film Archives, NY; the Museum of the Moving Image, NY; The Jewish Museum, NY; MuseumsQuartier, Vienna; and the Institute of Contemporary Arts Singapore. Her awards include the 2018 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, the 2017-18 Fountainhead Fellowship at VCU Sculpture + Extended Media, and the 2018-2019 Visual Artist Fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, MA. www.sarastern.net

Valerie Werder: Werder is writer, art worker, and scholar whose research focuses on the categories of art and commodity, authenticity and forgery, and conceptual and manual labor as they have been produced by art and its markets since the 1960s. She received her MA in Modern Art: Critical and Curatorial Studies from Columbia University in 2015 and is currently a PhD student in Film and Visual Studies at Harvard University, where she is also a Harvard Presidential Scholar. Her work has been published in BOMB magazine and performed at Participant Inc, New York, and Artspace, New Haven. Her first novel, Thieves, was the winner of the 2019 Fence Modern Prize in Prose and will be published by Fence Books in 2021. Valerie was previously the co-facilitator of the New York Arts Practicum from 2017–19, head writer and editor at Lévy Gorvy gallery from 2014–18, and curatorial research assistant at Dia Art Foundation from 2011–13.