Each year, a selection committee from Kennesaw State University School of Design and the Bernard A. Zuckerman Museum of Art will review the work of emerging and established artists and select two individuals (one per semester) to be awarded the four-week Artist Residency at KSU.
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Fall 2024 Windgate Artist

artist matthew kirk standing in front of his colorful artwork
Matthew Kirk (Queens, NY)

Matthew Kirk (b. 1978, Ganado, AZ) is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation and currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. A self-taught artist, Kirk has worked for over twelve years in New York City as a professional art handler— a trade that has often influenced his artistic practice in terms of utilizing readily available materials to make his art. His gestural paintings and abstract assemblages are steeped in symbolism and iconography that relate to the visual language of the Navajo, while his use of the grid as compositional armature takes structural inspiration from traditional Navajo weavings and rugs, as well as topographical maps and urban landscapes. Kirk states, “Just as family, work, current events, and city life are reflected in the work, my Indian heritage plays an important, but nuanced role.”

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Spring 2024 Windgate Artist

photo of artist in front of flowers
Leandra Urrutia (Corpus Christi, Texas)

Leandra Urrutia is an object maker and storyteller based in Corpus Christi, Texas. Borrowing parts of the human form, she makes powerful compositions and installations that showcase her wild and unconventional creative sense. Her studio work illustrates compelling female-centered struggles between body and mind, especially as one experiences injury, healing and the aging process. Her Mexican-American heritage, Catholic upbringing, interest in aggressive sports, and visits to China continue to bring an unorthodox influence to the ceramic and mixed media sculptures she dreams up. 

Leandra’s work has been exhibited locally, regionally, nationally, and internationally. Her honors and awards include a McKnight Residency award from the Northern Clay Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, an ArtsMemphis Emmett O’Ryan Award for Artistic Inspiration, and a National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts (NCECA) Emerging Artist award. Currently she serves on the faculty of Texas A&M University in Corpus Christi, Texas, teaching ceramics to undergraduate and graduate students. 

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Fall 2023 Windgate Artists

installation artwork of artists Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan
Mind the Heart! Maya Gelfman and Roie Avidan (Israel)

Mind the Heart! (est. 2009) is a worldwide art project by Israeli artists Maya Gelfman & Roie Avidan. In the past decade, the project has reached more than 100 cities across 5 continents: from New York to Bangkok, Delhi to London, from the Israel National Museum and the National Cathedral in Washington D.C. to orphanages in Kenya and Uganda. 

The project works at the intersection of art and social awareness. It engages the public domain with the aim of getting both the artists and the audiences to be fully present, to ‘be here now’. This is achieved through tangible street-art but expands on that across mediums and disciplines, to temporary installations in the wild, performances, poetry and public actions. The works are made with soft materials that clash with the concrete jungle. They deal with the power of choice, the cyclical nature of things, acknowledging wounds in order to heal, and interconnectedness. 

Image courtesy of the artists. 

Learn More About Mind the Heart! Project

Spring 2023 Windgate Artist

photo of jamele wright sr

Jamele Wright Sr. (Atlanta, GA)

Born and raised in Ohio, at the age of 22, Jamele Wright Sr. moved with his family to Atlanta, Georgia. While raising a family, Jamele produced art, jazz, and poetry events throughout Atlanta. Realizing that many young artists were not being represented, he started a gallery called the Neo-Renaissance Art House. After curating the gallery for over a year, Jamele was inspired to pursue his own artistic career. After several solo and group exhibitions, Mr. Wright graduated from Georgia State University with a B.A. in Art History. He concentrated on African and African American Contemporary Art. Jamele graduated with an MFA from the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, New York. He completed a fellowship at Project for Empty Spaces in Newark, New Jersey. In August 2020, Wright was one of three artists selected for a collaboration between MARTA Artbound and Decatur Arts Alliance to create public artworks for the East Lake, Decatur, and Avondale MARTA stations. The artist is represented by September Gray Fine Art Gallery in Atlanta, Georgia.   

“My work is concerned with the Black American vernacular experience. The work entails collecting found materials, Georgia red clay, and Dutch Wax cloth, by creating a conversation between family, tradition, the spiritual and material relationship between Africa and the South. My process is influenced by the way Hip Hop gathers different cultures through sampling and is charged with an energy channeled and passed through the Pan African lineage. The “In Transit” Series and my textile work is inspired by the Great Migration of Black Americans, who left the familiar in the hope of something better.”

 — Jamele Wright, Sr. 

Fall 2022 Windgate Artist

Photo of Donte Hayes

Donté K. Hayes (Atlanta, GA and Cliffwood, NJ)

Donté K. Hayes has been selected as the Fall 2022 Windgate Foundation Artist-in-Resident.

Hayes graduated summa cum laude from Kennesaw State University at Kennesaw, Georgia with a BFA in Ceramics and Printmaking with an art history minor. Hayes received his MA and MFA with honors from the University of Iowa and is the 2017 recipient of the University of Iowa Arts Fellowship.

Recent art exhibitions include groups shows at the Museum of Science + Industry, Chicago, Illinois, the Trout Museum of Art, Appleton, Wisconsin, and the 2021 Atlanta Biennial at the Atlanta Contemporary in Georgia. Donté’s artwork has been presented at the 1-54 art fair, London, England, Design Miami, Florida, and a solo presentation at the 2021 Armory Art fair in New York. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., The Gibbes Museum of Art, Charleston, South Carolina, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, Texas, and the Newark Museum of Art, Newark, New Jersey, amongst others.

Hayes is a 2019 Ceramics Monthly Magazine Emerging Artists and Artaxis Fellow. Donté is the 2019 winner of the 1858 Prize for Contemporary Southern art from the Gibbes Museum of Art. Donté K. Hayes is represented by Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, Florida.

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Spring 2022 Windgate Artist

Anthony Goicolea

Anthony Goicolea (Brooklyn, NY) 

Anthony Goicolea was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and now lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Anthony utilizes a variety of media--including painting, photography, sculpture and video installation--in the creation of his compelling and, many times,  foreboding visual narratives. 

Goicolea will discuss his work in these varied mediums and the principal ideas and explorations addressed in his work which include personal history, heritage, identity and cultural tradition. These are reflective of his own personal familial experiences; his extended family fled Cuba and immigrated to the U.S., not long after Castro came to power. His works are also powerful and engaging contemplations on displacement and alienation.   

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Fall 2021 Windgate Artist

photo of amy pleasant

Amy Pleasant (Birmingham, AL)

Amy Pleasant’s work includes painting, drawing, and ceramic sculpture, all exploring the body and language through repetition. Pleasant explores the fragmented figure as sign or symbol. With a limited palette and an economy of line, she draws images like writing a letter, documenting essential, universal motions and human behaviors. This repetitive and calligraphic drawing process creates a visual language over time, like an alphabet. In her clay work, she uses a similar process, cutting figurative forms out of hand rolled slabs, maintaining a sense of directness and intuitiveness that is similar to her drawing and painting practice.

She received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1994) and an MFA from the Tyler School of Art, Temple University (1999).

She has held solo exhibitions at Geary Contemporary (NYC/Millerton, NY), Laney Contemporary (Savannah, GA), Institute 193 (Lexington, KY), Jeff Bailey Gallery (Hudson/NYC), whitespace gallery (Atlanta, GA), Augusta University (Columbus, GA), Indianapolis Museum of Contemporary Art (IN), Birmingham Museum of Art (AL), Atlanta Contemporary (GA), Auburn University’s School of Liberal Arts (AL), Rhodes College (Memphis, TN), Candyland (Stockholm, Sweden), and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (AL) among others.

 

She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship (2018) and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters & Sculptors Grant (2015).

Learn more about Amy Impact Report