Circle in Square

acrylic on hand sculpted canvas and digitally designed frames, hand dyed wool yarn (a blend of sheep and alpaca) harvested by the artist's mother

20 x 20 x 3 inches

Special thanks to the artist for this 100% donation

Mel Renea is a fabrication and materials focused artist, with an education in fashion design, from VCU, and a creative practice spanning multiple disciplines. Her contemporary work is a distillation of studio art, craft, and speculative design, in corroboration with biological and material research. Her creative practice attempts to combat a paralyzing tendency toward hyper-conceptualism & perfectionism, and acts as a practice of meditative catharsis. Personal, subconscious motifs are explored and distilled visually through texture, color, and form. Compositions are clean, geometric, and organic; making space and ordering psychic clutter. Processes such as quilting, painting, sculpting, fiber craft, and natural pigment rendering are used often. Mel currently resides in the California Bay Area.

Untitled I

archival inkjet print on hand-formed paper

13 x 25 inches

Special thanks to the artist for this 100% donation

Each summer and fall, Hong Hong travels to faraway and distinct locations to make paper. The environmental, site-specific investigations map interstitial relationships between landscape, time, and the body through cartographic, symbolic, and material languages. During the winter and spring, she forms paintings directly on the floor of her studio. These schematics combine intergenerational story-telling, collaborative texts, and image-making to document states of interiority and subjectivity.

Hong is the recipient of a Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024 - 2026), the Margie E. West Prize at University of Georgia (2024), a United States Artists Fellowship in Craft (2023), a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in Painting (2023), a Carnegie Foundation Fellowship at MacDowell (2020), a Helen Frankenthaler Foundation Fellowship at Vermont Studio Center (2019), an Artistic Excellence Fellowship from the Connecticut Office of Arts (2019), and a Creation of New Work Grant from the Edward C. And Ann T. Roberts Foundation (2018 - 2019). She has also participated in residencies at McColl Center for Art + Innovation (2022), Houston Center for Contemporary Craft (2020 - 2021), Yaddo (2019), and I-Park (2018).

Hong's projects have been presented in exhibitions at Real Art Ways (Hartford, CT), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Fitchburg Art Museum (Fitchburg, MA), Ortega Y Gasset Projects (New York, NY), Georgia Museum of Art (Athens, GA), Center for Maine Contemporary Art (Rockland, ME), NXTHVN (New Haven, CT), San Francisco Center for Book Arts (San Francisco, CA), Tiger Strikes Asteroid (Los Angeles, CA), Akron Art Museum (Akron, OH), Texas Asia Society (Houston, TX), and University of Texas at Dallas (Dallas, TX), among others. Her practice received press in publications such as Art21, Art New England, Southwest Contemporary, Hyperallergic, Public Parking, Two Coats of Paint, and Glasstire.

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