Princeton University’s Lewis Center for the Arts has announced the selection of five Mary Mackall Gwinn Hodder Fellows for the 2023-2024 academic year. This year’s recipients include artist Kayla E., choreographer Moriah Evans, theater artist Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez, composer Joseph C. Phillips, Jr., and conceptual artist Charisse Pearlina Weston.
In making the announcement, Lewis Center Chair Judith Hamera said, “Our 2023-2024 Hodder fellows are a rigorously visionary group: probing the limits and potentials of their chosen media and exploring our most urgent issues in their work, including trauma, interiority, community, resistance, and hope. Mrs. Hodder understood that making complex and compelling art requires time and support. We are ever grateful for her gift and very excited to welcome these five emerging artists to the Princeton University and Lewis Center community.”
Hodder Fellows may be writers, composers, choreographers, visual artists, performance artists, or other kinds of artists or humanists who demonstrate, as the program outlines, “much more than ordinary intellectual and literary gifts.” Artists from anywhere in the world may apply in the early fall each year for the following academic year. Past Hodder Fellows have included novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, painter Mario Moore, poet Natalie Diaz, choreographer Okwui Okpokwasili, playwright Lauren Yee, and Zimbabwean gwenyambira (mbira player), composer, and singer Tanyaradzwa Tawengwa.
Kayla E. Photo Credit: Sara Mulvey
Kayla E. is a Texas-born artist and designer of Mexican-American descent. Her comics practice centers around her childhood and functions as a map-making exercise. Leaning heavily on the fixed compositional structure and aesthetic codes of post-war American comics, she imposes order onto recollections once disorganized by intrafamilial abuse, addiction, and sexual violence. Her textile work and painting practice are concerned with memories that present as unmappable. She works as creative director at Fantagraphics and is the co-founder and president of Nat. Brut Inc., a non-profit that produces the art and literary magazine Nat. Brut. She earned her B.A. from Harvard University, where she was awarded the Albert Alcalay Prize in Visual Arts and served as the art director for the Harvard Lampoon. As a public speaker, E. has been invited to expand on her practice at universities and creative conferences across the country. For the past few years, she has worked out of her downtown attic studio in rural North Carolina, where she lives with her wife, Laura Bullard. During her time as a Hodder Fellow, she plans to complete Precious Rubbish, her forthcoming graphic memoir (Fantagraphics), and build out an extratextual autobiographical narrative in her fine art practice.
Moriah Evans. Photo Credit: Alex Beriault
Moriah Evans positions choreography as a speculative and social process. Drawing on somatic choreographic practices and feminist critiques of visuality, her work expands a relation to dance beyond the visible, towards the different ways of sensing ourselves and our relations to each other. Developing movement from the unseen, yet felt, worlds of a body’s material and affective interior, Evans’ projects question hierarchies between flesh, body, self, and subject. Evans maintains a multi-pronged approach to her art practice, creating site-specific performances, theater-based productions, museum-based participatory installations, symposia, theoretical texts, and curatorial projects. Her recent works include Remains Persist (Performance Space, 2022); Rehearsals for Rehearsal (Public Art Fund, 2022); RESTOS (Espacio Odeon, 2021) REPOSE (Beach Sessions, 2021); Be my Muse (Pace Live, 2021; Hirshhorn Museum, 2018; FD-13, 2017; Villa Empain, 2016), BASTARDS: We are all Illegitimate Children (New York University Skirball Center, 2019); Configure (The Kitchen, 2018); and Figuring (SculptureCenter, 2018). In 2011 Evans initiated The Bureau for the Future of Choreography, an ongoing collective investigating participatory performance. From 2013-2020, she served as editor-in-chief of the Movement Research Performance Journal and continues to contribute to the journal as editorial director. For two years she was a Tanzkongress curatorial advisor and has been a dance and process co-curator at The Kitchen since 2016. Evans has been an artist-in-residence at MacDowell, Movement Research, The New Museum, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Issue Project Room, Studio Series at Νew York Live Arts, ImPulsTanz, MoMA/PS1, MANA Contemporary, and Onassis AiR. She is a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Individual Artist Awardee and 2022 Guggenheim Fellow. She has a B.A. in art history and English from Wellesley College and M.A. in art history, theory, and criticism from University of California San Diego. During her fellowship year, Moriah Evans will further her research of epigenetics and jurisprudence, as well as her exploration of an intersectional feminist interpellation of the theater.
Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez. Photo Credit: Crichton Atkinson
Modesto ‘Flako’ Jimenez is a Dominican-born, Bushwick-raised, multi-hyphenate artist. As a poet, playwright, educator, actor, producer, and director, his work exists in and explores the intersections of identity, language, mediums, cultures, and communities found in his personal life and beyond. Jimenez’s recent work includes Taxilandia, a multifaceted Bushwick community tour and poetic experience from the back of a taxicab that earned the New York Times Critics’ Pick and rave reviews from Time Out New York. Jimenez is the founder of ¡Oye! Group, a nonprofit that serves as an incubator for artists both native and immigrant to New York City. In 2021, Jimenez received a Jerome Foundation Fellowship and Foundation for Contemporary Arts award in performing arts and theater. During his Hodder Fellowship, he will continue working on Mercedes, a multi-disciplinary art experience exploring the relationships between matriarchy and ancestors, familial bonds and inherited trauma, and how one’s own identity can impact one’s mental health.
Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. Photo Credit: Mark Elzey
The music of composer Joseph C. Phillips, Jr., has been performed by the San Francisco Symphony, pianist Simone Dinnerstein, and at the Steve Reich Festival in The Hague, Netherlands, with compositions commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), the Ecstatic Music Festival, Maryland Opera Studio, the Crossing choir, and pianist Lara Downes. He has been featured in The New York Times, NPR Weekend Edition, BBC Music Magazine, Gramophone, and WNYC’s New Sounds. He conducts his large orchestra Numinous, which has released four critically well-received recordings of his music: The Music of Joseph C. Phillips, Jr. (2003), Vipassana (2009), Changing Same (2015), and the latest The Grey Land (2020), a mono-opera that The New Yorker notes is “rich with allusions to tragedy, hope, and resistance” and a “…stirring meditation on racial injustice.” During his fellowship year, Phillips will begin to develop three of the six operas in his forthcoming 1619 opera cycle partly inspired by the 2019 New York Times series The 1619 Project and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay for The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations.”
Charisse Pearlina Weston. Photo courtesy the artist.
Born in Houston and based in Brooklyn, Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose work contends with the dynamic interplay of violence and intimacy through repetition, enfoldment, and concealment. She received her M.F.A. from the University of California-Irvine and is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of Art’s Independent Study Program. She has recently participated in group and solo exhibitions at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College of Art, Smack Mellon, and the Queens Museum. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Artadia, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Dedalus Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, the Graham Foundation, and Bard Graduate Center. In 2021, she received the Museum of Art and Design’s Burke Prize. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Artsy, Art Reviews, and Art in America. Currently, Weston is artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As a Hodder Fellow she will continue her research examining Black interior life, resistance, and technologies of surveillance by beginning a new body of work focused on zombie laws, their omnipresence, and what their threat means for the possibilities of Black intimate futures.
Our 2023-2024 Hodder fellows are a rigorously visionary group: probing the limits and potentials of their chosen media and exploring our most urgent issues in their work, including trauma, interiority, community, resistance, and hope.
—Judith Hamera, Chair of the Lewis Center for the Arts
In addition to creating new work, Hodder Fellows may engage in lectures, readings, performances, exhibitions, and other events at the Lewis Center for the Arts, most of which are free and open to the public.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about the Hodder Fellows, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts and lectures presented each year, most of them free.
