Asia Sztencel

2020 #5

2021

7"x10"

Watercolor on paper

Fair market value: $500

This series includes landscape paintings from the soap operas and other TV series. These paintings reflect on the pandemic experience, the lockdown, and longing for the freedom of travel and visiting places that hold emotional memories.

Asia Sztencel is a first-generation Polish immigrant and a Brooklyn-based artist. She is inspired by the role of the artist in the community emphasizing sensitivity, and a respectful approach. Through conceptual practices and traditional craft, Sztencel's work offers a personal exploration within the larger narrative of the immigrant experience, highlighting landscape as a narrative and feelings of exile, recall, and longing. As a lauded artist-educator, she engages diverse communities in Brooklyn, Queens, Los Angeles, and Poland through social practice art projects.

In Sztencel's latest (2020/21) joint-art residencies at Artists Alliance Inc. and Residency Unlimited, Sztencel focused on the series of landscape paintings inspired by the Covid lockdown experiance. In 2019, that artist's community art project, Welcome to My Pico, was supported by the Polish Embassy in Los Angeles, 18th Street Arts Center's Culture Mapping 90404 Project, and the City of Santa Monica. Her 2016 project, You Can't Carry Your Landscape With You, was awarded the Grant Award for Artists from the Polish Cultural Institute of NYC, the Emigration Museum in Poland, and the Consulate General of Poland, NYC. In 2015, Sztencel was awarded a grant from the Culture Shock Foundation, Warsaw, Poland, for her workshop series in Greenpoint. In 2004, she received the Young Artist's Scholarship from the Mayor of Krakow Award, Krakow, Poland.

Artist residencies include 2020/21 joint-art residencies at Artists Alliance Inc. and Residency Unlimited; 2019 Artist-in-Residence, Wladyslaw Strzeminski's Academy of Fine Arts, Lodz, Poland; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, Burton Chace Park, Marina Del Rey, CA; 2018 Artist-in-Residence, 18th Street Arts Center, Santa Monica, CA; 2017 Artist-in-Residence, Residency Unlimited, Brooklyn, NY; 2017 Artist-in-Residence, The Hollows, Brooklyn, NY; 2016 Artist-in-Residence, Kurier Plus, Polish Weekly Newspaper, Brooklyn, NY. Sztencel's work is in the permanent collections of Rosenthal Library, Queens, NY; CUNY Queens College, NY; Polish & Slavic Federal Credit Union, Brooklyn, NY

Education: 2013 Master of Fine Arts, Social Practice, CUNY Queens College, NY; 2003 Master of Fine Arts, Printmaking, Academy of Fine Arts, Krakow, Poland.