Berlin Fellowship
The Berlin Fellowship is an exclusive residency program tailored for artists based in Los Angeles. In collaboration with esteemed partner organizations in Berlin, Villa Aurora & Thomas Mann House (VATMH) extends an invitation to an artist to reside and create in Berlin for a duration of several weeks annually. This initiative is designed to nurture artistic creativity, foster meaningful interactions, and encourage collaborations.
Established in 2012, the Berlin Fellowship operates on a nomination-only basis. Artists cannot apply directly for the fellowship; instead, they are carefully selected and nominated by VATMH along with its collaborative partners.
68projects
68projects is a private project space, founded in 2014 by Galerie Kornfeld in Fasanenstraße 68 in Berlin. The 150 square meters space offers international art exhibitions, a scholarship program and independently curated projects. The scholarship program gives internationally working artists the opportunity to live and work in Berlin for a fixed persiod of time. The work created during this period is presented either in an individual exhibitions or in a group exhibitions.
Yunhee Min – 2024
Yunhee Min, born in South Korea, lives and works in Los Angeles, California. In 2008, Min received a Master in Design Studies from Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. She works with painting and site-specific projects, exploring visual abstraction as an open proposition for aesthetic relationality and perception, expressed through color, surface, gesture, as well as material and form. Min is interested in creating spaces of individuation and experience through abstraction, resisting fixed or dominant meanings. In this context, color plays a significant role in its delicate contingency inherent in our perception and sensation. - www.yunheemin.com
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023 | New Paintings, Miles McEnery Gallery, New York
2021 | Vitreous Opacities, Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA
2019 | Hammer Projects: Yunhee Min, Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA
Selected Group Exhibitions
2021 | Twenty Year Anniversary Exhibition Part 2, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA
2019 | The Light Touch, Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles, CA
2018 | Evolver, LA Louver Gallery, Venice, CA
Grants and Awards
John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship
Korea Arts Foundation of America Artist Grant
City of Los Angeles Cultural Affairs Individual Artist Grant
University of California Institute for Research in the Arts Grant
Teaching
Professor of Art at the University of California Riverside
Kyungmi Shin – 2023
Kyungmi Shin, born in 1963 in South Korea, lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Shin received an MFA from UC Berkeley, CA (1995). Working with painting, sculpture, and photography, Shin explores various histories, identities and migrations by interrogating colonial, capitalist and religious global expansion and its effect.
Shin has presented works at Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles; Galerie Marguo, Paris; Various Small Fires, Los Angeles, Seoul, Dallas; Orange County Museum of Art, California; The Berkeley Art Museum, California; Art Sonje Center, Seoul; Japanese American National Art Museum, Los Angeles; and Torrance Art Museum, California.
Shin has received numerous grants including California Community Foundation Grant, Durfee Grant, Pasadena City Individual Artist Fellowship and City of Los Angeles Master Artist Grant (COLA). Her work is part of the permanent collections at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, JP Getty Center, and the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. She has completed over 20 public artworks, and her most recent public video sculpture was installed at the Netflix headquarters in Hollywood, CA (2018).
Selected Solo Exhibitions
2023 | The Invisible Woman, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, Barnsdall Art Park, Los Angeles
2023 | Monster's Appetite, Various Small Fires, Seoul
2021 | citizen, not barbarian, Various Small Fires, Los Angeles
2020 | Father Crosses the Ocean, Orange County Museum of Art, Santa Ana, California
Selected Group Exhibitions
2023 | Imperfect Paradise, Barbati Gallery, Venice, Italy
2022 | Wonder Woman Los Angeles, Jeffrey Dietch, Los Angeles
2022 | The Hearing Trumpet: Part II, Galerie Marguo, Paris
Liat Yossifor – 2022
“Discourse is alive outside of comfort zones. A new place can bring about new ideas: and working and showing abroad has always shifted my thinking, but especially now during a time when the world is shaken. My Berlin Fellowship with VATMH and 68projects is a set up to test new ideas in a new context, away from what I know, from my routines.
I will be working on a body of work entitled 'the gray feather a thrush lost' (a line from 'Try to Praise the Mutilated World' by Adam Zagajewski), which is about beauty and loss. My work is both painting and reflections on history, and I get there not necessarily through concepts, but by being present and dealing with current events through a daily practice of painting.”
Liat Yossifor is a painter living and working in Los Angeles. In her work, she explores the effects of cultural change and identity ruptures. Using a monochromatic palette, Yossifor's gestural brushstrokes explore the tension between figure and ground, action and stillness, sign and symbol. Her paintings are not pictorial, but more physical, akin to sculpture.
Liat Yossifor was born in Israel in 1974 and has been living in the United States since 1989. She holds an M.F.A. from the University of California, Irvine and a B.F.A. from the San Francisco Art Institute.
Solo exhibitions (selection): Contemporary Art Museum (St. Louis, MI), Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena, CA), Pitzer College Art Galleries and Benton Museum of Art at Pomona College (Claremont, CA), Patron Gallery (Chicago, IL) und Galerie Anita Beckers (Frankfurt/M.)
Group exhibitions (selection): Minnesota Museum of American Art (St. Paul, MN), Carolyn Campagna Contemporary Art Museum (Long Beach, CA), Museo de Arte de Sinaloa (Culiacán, Mexico), Museo de Arte de Zapopan (Mexico), Museum of Modern Fine Arts (Minsk, Belarus), Margulies Collection (Miami, FL), Kunsthaus Nürnberg und Lyman Allyn Art Museum (New London, CT)
Publications: Movements: Liat Yossifor. Published by DopplHouse Press, Los Angeles, CA.
Collections (selection): County Museum of Art (Los Angeles, CA), The Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA), Isabel and Agustin Coppel Collection (Mexico City), The Margulies Collection (Miami, FL)
www.liatyossifor.com
Chris Hood – 2019
“I have a preference for clichés. They can be fluid in their ability to describe something profoundly real and also be without meaning in their obviousness. Much like the influx of daily images coded, translated, and misread my practice reflects on the sensation of finding oneself in a slippery amalgam of coalescence and entropy. New and old forms are spliced, reinterpreted, internalized, and regurgitated reflecting on eternal themes at the dawn of a new era.”
Chris Hood is a painter who currently lives and works in Los Angeles.
Though representational in nature, Chris Hood's paintings reflect an understanding of abstraction in which personal and social imagery collide in the 21st-century. Combining traditional techniques with the languages of digital territories, his work often features images culled from the American counterculture, art history, and mass media rendered abstract by translation. The paintings are cast in a liminal surface space with a unique reverse stain technique that rests his compositions in ambiguous and perceptual tension. Likening them to faded advertisements or T-shirts turned inside out, Hood invests the evocative physicality of his paintings with themes of identity, memory, and loss. The works hint at challenges to the idea of static perspective while pointing to larger questions concerning the role of images and contemporary painting.
Chris Hood holds a BFA from Georgia State University and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute.
He has had solo exhibitions at Praz Delavallade (Los Angeles), Lyles & King (New York), MIER Gallery (Los Angeles) and Galerie Bernard Ceysson (Paris). Group exhibitions include The Zuckerman Museum of Art, Venus Over Los Angeles (Los Angeles), CANADA (New York), Saatchi Gallery (London), and Jack Hanley (New York) among others. Hood's work has been featured in Art in America, Elephant, Mousse, The Art Newspaper, Time Out, and New American Paintings.
Michael John Kelly – 2018
Michael John Kelly studied painting at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and UCLA, Los Angeles, California. His works have been shown in numerous exhibitions in the USA. The artist is represented in well-known collections such as Susan and Michael Hort Collection, New York; Gayle and Stanley Hollander Collection, Los Angeles; Carole Server and Oliver Frankel Collection, New York.
The work of Michael John Kelly is characterized by a multitude of different influences: his paintings unite painting, printing, photography, drawing and collage. The content includes elements of new media and Abstract Expressionism, graffiti, cartoons, as well as science fiction films and the world of hip hop and punk rock. In doing so, he always emphasizes the equal juxtaposition of both the materials and the sources of inspiration. In finding the title for his works, he plays with English, Spanish and German word combinations that one must read against the backdrop of his own background between Berlin, Austria and L.A.
Sandeep Mukherjee – 2017
Sandeep Mukherjee received an MFA from UCLA, and a BFA from Otis College of Art and
Design, Los Angeles. Born in Pune, India, he lives and works in Los Angeles.
His works are in numerous public collections, including those of MOCA, Los Angeles; MOMA, New York; LACMA; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi and the Jumex Collection, Mexico City. Mukherjee has had solo shows at Brennan & Griffin (New York), Project 88 (Mumbai), Margo Leavin Gallery (Los Angeles), Chimento Contemporary (Los Angeles), Shilpakala Academy (Dhaka) and the Pomona College Museum of Art among others.
For over a decade Mukherjee’s work has explored the notion of abstracting as a means to image a particular aspect of flowing matter. Working in painting, drawing and installation, the work has been process oriented and improvisational. Following multiple paths of inquiry such as imaging the performing body, subtracting the material body and enfolding the architectural body, the work continues to explore the relationship between process, affect and image.
For his project in Berlin Mukherjee will make a cast of his 2006 BMW Mini Cooper.
Weiss Berlin
The focus of WEISS BERLIN is the presentation of contemporary art from the United States. The gallery offers artists residencies in Berlin to artist especially from Los Angeles and New York. Among others the gallery represents the artists Elif Erkan, Alex Becerra, Evan Nesbit, Stanya Kahn, Eric Mack, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, Buck Ellison, Allison Miller and Keith Mayerson.
Elif Erkan – 2016
Elif Erkan (*1985, Ankara) lives and works in Los Angeles.
Erkan uses classical sculptural materials and processes to produce modern objects that reference the industrial and the romantic at once.
A graduate of the HfBK Städelschule Frankfurt am Main, her work has been exhibited widely for instance at the WIELS Centre d’art contemporain (Brussels), the Portikus (Frankfurt am Main), the Maison des Arts (Brussels) as well as the Villa Aurora (Los Angeles).
Erkan's solo exhibition at the gallery Weiss Berlin in January 2016, Lotus Eaters, addressed narcotics and antidepressants, the good life, apathy, and the fiction of home.
Rosha Yaghmai – 2016
Rosha Yaghmai lives and works in Los Angeles. She graduated with an MFA at CalArts in 2007, and was a Terra Foundation Fellow in 2009. Upcoming solo projects include Weiss Berlin, and Cleopatra’s, New York. She will also be included in KNOWLEDGES at the Mount Wilson Observatory in Los Angeles. Her work has been exhibited at various spaces including Public Fiction, Los Angeles; Commonwealth & Council, Los Angeles; GBK, Sydney; Kayne Griffin Corcoran, Los Angeles; Thomas Solomon Gallery, Los Angeles; Riverside Art Museum; LACE, LAX><ART, Estacion Tijuana; and Transmission Gallery, Glasgow.
Zentrum für Kunst und Urbanistik (ZK/U)
ZK/U is an innovative venue, offering artistic and research residencies for artistic practice at the interface of urban research. Located in a former railway depot surrounded by a landscaped park, ZKU – the Center for Art and Urbanistics - is the cornerstone of a concept developed by the Berlin-based artists‘ collective KUNSTrePUBLIK. Analogous to the nineteenth-century transport of goods by rail, this unique new venue is set to become a lively hub for the transport of ideas and ideals in the postindustrial era. In addition to symposia, workshops, conferences, concerts and exhibition projects the ZK/U is testing experimental formats to reach several target groups.
The first fellow, who received the Berlin Fellowship in ZK/U is Rosten Woo (November 2014 - January 2015)
Steve Rowell – 2015
Steve Rowell is a research-based artist who works with still and moving images, sound, installation, maps, and spatial concepts. Currently based in Los Angeles, he has lived in Berlin, Chicago, and Washington DC, over the past 20 years. His transdisciplinary practice focuses on overlapping aspects of technology, perception, and culture as related to ontology and landscape. Rowell contextualizes the built environment with the surrounding medium of nature; appropriating the methods and tools of the geographer and archeologist. In addition to being Program Manager at The Center for Land Use Interpretation (Los Angeles) since 2001, he has collaborated with SIMPARCH (Chicago) and The Office of Experiments (London). Steve's work (collaborative and solo) has been exhibited internationally at a range of galleries and museums, including: The 2006 Whitney Biennial and PS1, New York; Yerba Buena Center for The Arts, San Francisco; The Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; Temporäre Kunsthalle and NGBK, Berlin; The Barbican Art Centre and the Frieze Art Fair, London; The John Hansard Gallery, Southampton; Ballroom Marfa; The Center for PostNatural History, Pittsburgh; The Institute for Visual Art, Milwaukee; and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2013 he received awards from Creative Capital and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Rosten Woo – 2014
Rosten Woo is a designer, writer, and educator living in Los Angeles. He produces civic-scale artworks and works as a collaborator and consultant to a variety of grassroots and non-profit organizations including the Advancement Project, the American Human Development Project, the Black Workers Center, Los Angeles Alliance for a New Economy, and Esperanza Community Housing Corporation, as well as the city of Los Angeles and Los Angeles County. His work has been exhibited at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Triennial, the Venice Architecture Biennale, Netherlands Architectural Institute, Storefront for Art and Architecture, Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and various piers, public housing developments, tugboats, shopping malls, and parks in New York and Los Angeles. His work has been supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, The Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, and the Los Angeles County Arts Commission. He is co-founder and former executive director of the Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP), a New York Based non-profit organization dedicated to using art and design to foster civic participation. He has written on design, politics, and music for such publications as the Village Voice, Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Metropolis Magazine. His book, "Street Value," was published by Princeton Architectural Press in 2010.
He teaches art and design at the California Institue of the Arts, Pomona College, and Art Center College of Design. He has lectured nationally at such institutions as the Netherlands Architectural Institute, Brown University, Chicago University, MIT, Princeton, the Maryland Institute College of Art, the California College of the Arts, and the Chicago Art Institute. He has served on the boards of the Los Angeles Forum, Place in History and the Groundswell Community Mural Project.
I make things that help people understand complex systems, re-orient themselves to places, and participate in group decision-making. Most of what I make is designed with a specific context and community in mind. Collaboration is my primary skill. - Rosten Woo
www.rostenwoo.biz
Torstraße 111
Galerie Torstraße 111 is located in the heart of Berlin and can make living and studio spaces for artists available. The fellowship is conceived as a two-month stay at Torstraße 111, use of a work space and the opportunity to mount an exhibition in their gallery.
Starting in 1999, the artist Ingo Fröhlich converted an apartment building in Berlin Mitte into living quarters, studios and exhibition spaces. He understands his uncompromising return to the building's original structure as a social sculpture in the context of his own artistic work.
Since 2012, Verein ‘111 is a contemporary place for art on three floors for artists of all media. The residencies span from March to November and are open to artists from all over the world.
Abel Baker Gutierrez was fellow at Torstraße 111 from July 7th to August 20th, 2012.
The artists Alice Wang & Benjamin Tong stayed at Torstraße 111 from March 31 to June 2, 2013.
Alice Wang – 2013
Alice Wang (b. 1983, China) is an artist and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. She received her BSc from the University of Toronto, BFA from the California Institute of the Arts, and MFA from New York University. Since the summer of 2012, Alice has been living and working in Paris through the support of the Carla Bruni-Sarkozy Foundation. Alice has exhibited work at The Armory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, Deutsches Haus in New York, and forthcoming projects at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and Immanence in Paris. Her experimental film The fallacy of misplaced concreteness is distributed by Vtape, and part of their permanent collection.
Benjamin Tong – 2013
Benjamin Tong (b.1981), studied computer science at the University of Toronto, and then received an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts. His projects have appeared in various spaces such as; The Hart House (CAN), Images Festival (CAN), REDCAT Gallery (CA), Sonja Roesch Gallery (TX), Hochschule für Bildende Kunst HBK (GER), RosaB.net, and LA Mart (CA). A transcript of The Parrot Lecture, published by Golden Spike Press and performed at CalArts, can be found at Printed Matter (US), Ed. Varie (US), Art Metropole (CAN) and Ooga Booga (US). He has also been in residence in Mexico City for the SOMA summer program.
Abel Baker Gutierrez – 2012
Abel Baker Gutierrez was born in California and graduated from the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Is his work Gutierrez deals with sexual identity and the representation of masculinity with a special focus on aesthetics in rock music, the boy scout movement and in the old masters.
Applying a variety of materials, he created pictures and installations, reflecting society’s obsession with youth and topics of maturing. Gutierrez’ work was shown in multiple group exhibitions in California.
