2024 Artists-in-Residence
We are excited to invite another cohort of artists to San Juan Island for our Artists in Community program. Below is a list of our 2024 Artists-in-Residence. Working in printmaking, ceramics, photography, and mixed media, these artists will spend 1-2 months with us during our residency season, which runs from spring to fall. Scroll on to learn more about each of them.
For past AIR participants, go here.
Ben Driggs
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Ceramics
Ben Driggs is a Chicago-based artist and construction worker interested in the nature of workmanship and the home as an artist built environment. His work often engages abstraction through the materials and processes of the building trades along with aluminum casting, coppersmithing, sun prints, mosaic and ceramics. At Alchemy Art Center he will be working toward making a ceramic tableware set for his home.
Learn more about Ben here.
Abigail Hendrix
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Photography
Abigail Hendrix is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. Hendrix holds a BA in anthropology from the University of Washington and an MFA in film from Emerson College, with emphasis on analog film, experimental media, and ethnography. Hendrix’s current artistic practice consists primarily of exploratory films and audiovisual installations, stemming from her parallel interests in folklore and expanded cinema.
Learn more about Abigail here.
Andy Thomas
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Photography and Video
Andy is a photographer and video/sound artist living in New Orleans. She enjoys playing with music for the emotions it celebrates, and can be found trying various methods of joining music with her personal and professional life. Her work includes music videos, abstract sensory video, and spatial audio experiments. Has many songs on deck to die to.
Learn more about Andy here.
Jo Becker
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Printmedia
Jo Becker is an artist from northern Indiana, now living and working in Washington State. Her work is inspired by history, the philosophy of consciousness, and a humanist approach to the divine. Through painting and printmaking, she seeks to create objects that offer opportunities for transcendence.
Learn more about Jo here.
Ben Hernandez
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Ceramics
Benjamin is a first generation Mexican-American potter based in Bellingham Washington. He primarily focuses on wheel thrown vessels intended for everyday use. As a student of clay, he is always striving to learn from the medium in hopes to create community around the art. Benjamin draws inspiration from his family’s roots in Oaxaca, Mexico.
Learn more about Ben here.
Laura M Cañas
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Printmedia
Laura’s mediums of choice are printmaking, comics, digital illustration and writing. Laura was born in Medellín, Colombia and her creative work is made from her perspective as a Latina and woman. Through her art she explores the themes of the feminine, gender violence, the power to heal, resilience and relationships within nature. She is also interested in the questioned relationship between Global North-South and economies. Currently, she is directing her career towards community art and maintaining her personal art practice.
Learn more about Laura here.
Maren Lamb
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Printmedia
Maren Lamb is a mixed media printmaker from Philadelphia, P.A, and earned her B.A. from Guilford College in Greensboro, N.C. Her current work explores themes of mental illness, nature, and religion, and employs bright colors and densely layered textures. She is drawn to printmaking because of its tradition as the art form of social movements.
Maya Djiji
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Special Projects
Maya Djiji is a visual artist from California who loves exploring different mediums, and makes work with ceramics, textiles, glass, printmaking, and more. Her work touches on the playful nature of magic, the delicate beauty of life, and the intricacies of death.
Maya participated in Alchemy’s AIR program in 2021 and 2022.
Learn more about Maya here.
Coco Leeper
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Mixed media
Coco Leeper is a multi-disciplinary artist from San Francisco who plays with the boundaries between organic and human-made imagery. Coco has a passion for things that grow and the beauty of the natural world around her; native plants of California often weave in and out of her work like the fine threads. Her mediums include but are not limited to screenprinting, ceramics, tattooing, painting illustration, sewing, weaving, mending and stop animation.
Learn more about Coco here.
Emerald Vernon-Lapow
2024 Artist-in-Residence, Mixed Media
Emerald Vernon-Lapow is a singer, songwriter, and visual artist. Emerald has written and performed a full set of original songs each summer she's been at Alchemy, in addition to learning screen printing, ceramics, and continuing her work in collage and drawing. She lives in Berkeley, California and graduated from UC Santa Barbara College of Creative Studies, where she focused in drawing. Emerald joins us for a third AIR season after joining us in 2022 and 2023.
Sophie Stratyner
2024 Artist-in-Residence, printmedia
Sophie Stratyner is a fiber artist, printmaker, photographer, and traveler. Currently, Sophie lives on the road, working seasonally. Her work is shaped by the ever changing environments she finds herself in, utilizing natural pigments, found objects, and personal narratives to document internal and external landscapes.
Learn more about Sophie here.
Mpumelelo Buthelezi
2024 Arist-in-Residence, Photography
Mpumelelo Buthelezi is a South African photographer who lives and works in Johannesburg. He completed his Photojournalism and Documentary Photography degree at the Market Photo Workshop in 2017. In his practice, Mpumeleloʼs work explores the themes of social activism and religion as well as the ways that people sustain themselves like in the case of waste pickers. Mpumeleloʼs work finds itself at the intersection between documentation, storytelling and activism.
Gugulethu Ndlalani
Gugulethu is 25 year-old self-taught visual artist from Johannesburg, South Africa, Soweto township, which shares a huge significance in what he does. He is the creative director in a collaborative project called Brokenvillages and a storyteller of the African narrative. In his visuals he tries to show a different perspective, allowing his audience to draw new conclusions through what they see in his imagery.
Learn more about Gugulethu here.