MOCA GA / Calendar

The Walthall Artist Fellowship is WonderRoot’s signature professional development program for artists at pivotal stages in their careers. In its fifth year, the Fellowship seeks to forever impact participating artists by providing necessary tools to significantly advance and define their careers.

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Curated by Sarah Higgins

Sarah Higgins is curator at the Zuckerman Museum of Art at Kennesaw State University. She has curated over 30 exhibitions featuring a diverse range of emerging, established, and international artists for institutions such as the Hessel Museum of Art, Atlantic Center for the Arts, and the Southeastern Center for Contemporary Art. She holds a M.A. in Curatorial Studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), where she also served as Graduate Program Coordinator from 2013-2015.

Opening reception Thursday, July 13 from 6:30-8:30 pm at MOCA GA!

Walthall Artist Fellowship 2016/2017

Addison Adams is a visual artist and experimental musician based in Atlanta, GA. He received his BFA in painting and drawing from the University of Georgia in 2012 and has continued developing his work in painting as well as his experimentation with sculpture, installation, performance art, and film. Adams has performed at the High Museum of Art, the Goat Farm Art Center, and MINT gallery. In addition, he has exhibited his paintings and video art in galleries throughout the Southeast including MOCA GA, ATHICA, and Non‐Fiction Gallery.

Joe Camoosa lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia and makes concise, bold, graphic works on paper, Mylar or canvas that combine drawing, painting and collage. This work relies on restraint; compositions are edited, rigorously arranged and rearranged to forge a singular image that reads as a symbol or icon. His explorations focus on the relationships between shape, scale, pattern and repetition, while limiting color choices. His work is informed by cartography, music, aerial landscapes and architectural fragments. He received an MFA in painting and drawing from the Lamar Dodd School of Art at the University of Georgia and graduated from Florida State University where he studied Mass Communication and Anthropology.

Morgan Carlisle actively broadens and diversifies Atlanta’s cultural arts scene through her choreography, arts administration, dance education and curation work. Giving back is a passion, inspiring Carlisle to work for dance related nonprofits instead of larger institutions. She has invested years, working to provide free and subsidized dance instruction for children of low income households. Carlisle graduated with a BA in Dance from Kennesaw State University. She later returned to KSU to set her own work Monad Tetrad as a guest artist. Carlisle has since shown work at Emory University and re-staged T.Lang’s Post Up (In The House) at Middle Tennessee State and Spelman College. In 2014, she joined the board of Eyedrum Art and Music Gallery and created a committee for performance based art. After three years, she concluded her service with the title of Performance Committee Chair and Board Chair of the organization. Carlisle currently serves as Board Chair for Fly on a Wall Dance Collective and is honored to be one of the first elected members of the Marta Arts Council. She and her husband Carlos Thompson, also received the first Idea Capitol Margaret Kargbo Activist as Artist Grant for their show Left Out, (a mixed media exhibit dedicated to personifying the transition process of combat veterans) scheduled to officially premiere in 2018. As a WonderRoot Walthall Fellow, Carlisle is excited to present her work at MOCA GA for the Summer of 2017.

Nicole Johnson, Atlanta native and a founding artist of Fly on a Wall, is thrilled to find herself a part of an organism grown from the fertile and creative grounds of the vibrant city of Atlanta. As a young artist, she trained at The Atlanta Ballet Center for Dance Education. In 2006, she was invited to join the Atlanta Ballet, where she had the pleasure of performing works by a number of choreographers. In 2009 she began to spend more intimate time in the studio with dance maker Lauri Stalling’s. This led to the formation of gloATL, a platform for contemporary movement language and physical gesture. In her five years helping to build gloATL, she learned a great deal about herself, Atlanta, and the relationship between art and the individuals experiencing it. This involvement provided new perspectives into her art form and a heightened level of respect for the many facets of a sustainable arts organization in the contemporary world. Nicole’s numerous opportunities to work with artists across mediums has given her the understanding that all work is truly collaborative at heart, and she thrives on creative processes that ask more of individuals so that they might achieve something greater than themselves.

Wihro Kim is an artist based in Atlanta, GA, where he received his BFA from Georgia State University in 2015. He is a current Walthall Fellow for the 2016-2017 cycle and was named a finalist for the 2017-2018 Forward Arts Foundation Emerging Artist Award. Since graduating, Kim has shown locally in Atlanta at MINT Gallery, Hathaway Contemporary, and Poem 88 amongst others. His work consists primarily of paintings that question how we perceive space and surface. Recently, he has started making three dimensional objects and installations dealing with those same issues.

Macey Ley is a mixed-media artist in Atlanta, Georgia. The form of her work follows the concept and ranges from painting and sculpture to installations and artist books. She completed her BFA in photography at the University of New Mexico, studied book arts at Studio Arts Center International in Florence, Italy, and earned her MFA in painting at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is a Distinct Fellow at the Hambidge Center Creative Residency and is a 2016-17 Walthall Artist Fellow. Ley is a corporate event producer and creative director and has curated shows and exhibited her artwork throughout the United States and Italy. She recently finished the final editions of a collection of clear sculptural artist books about double entendre entitled Versions of Truth and has begun a loosely-related body of work centered around food relationships and the dynamics of family dinners.

Steve Morrison received his MFA in painting from Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta in 2015. Morrison’s studio practice involves painting, sculpture, window screening, animated gifs, computer glitches, theatrical design, puppetry, folk magic, and baking. Morrison is a part-time art professor at the University of West Georgia and a professional illustrator.

Ali O’Leary (b. 1988) grew up in Chapel Hill, NC. She received her Bachelor’s degree from Barnard College in New York City and earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, MD. She went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts degree at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ali is an artist and professor working out of Atlanta. Her artwork combines fiber with photography to create textiles that explore how identity has become linked to commercial items and media. Ali’s photographic tapestries build upon the history of quilting and embroidery while creating unique textures that both invite touch and confound depth perception.

Tori Tinsley is an Atlanta-based painter and sculptor. She received a BFA from the Stamps School of Art & Design at the University of Michigan, an MAAT from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and an MFA from Georgia State University. Tori is a recipient of a 2016 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, a 2016 City of Atlanta Emerging Artist Award, a City of Atlanta Artist Project Grant, and 2015 Idea Capital Grant. She is also a founding member of Atlanta-based Day & Night Projects and Doppler Projects. Tori is represented by Hathaway Contemporary Gallery in Atlanta, GA and 19 Karen Contemporary Artspace in Gold Coast, Australia.

Charlie Watts an Atlanta-based queer artist, seeks to create images not of this world, to use photography as a stepping-stone to the unknown realm just past the peripheral edge of consciousness. She creates images to bring imagination into fruition and provide a visual escape from the mundane to the fantastical. This past spring, Watts finished an MFA program in photography with the San Francisco Art Institute after graduating with highest honors and a B.A. in art history and visual arts at Emory University. She has been a member of the Dashboard CO-OP and a resident with The Creatives Project, through which she teaches photography in underserved neighborhoods. Her photographs are heavily performance-based and have been exhibited at Fort Mason, Hartsfield–Jackson Atlanta International Airport, SomARTS, Root Division, WhiteSpace, the Diego Rivera Gallery, Mason Murer, Barbra Archer Gallery, and “Boom City” with the Dashboard CO-OP. Her photographic exploration to raise awareness of sex trafficking in Atlanta, The ThrowAways, currently is on display at the Rollins School of Public Health. In 2011, Watts received the Emory Center for Creativity and the Arts Community Impact Award, and she is the recipient of grants from the City of Atlanta’s Office of Cultural Affairs, among others. She is currently a fellow with the Walthall Fellowship through WonderRoot. Through founding Hive Mind Arise collective, she just complete a four month residency with the Hambidge Hive at Colony Square where she explore the intersection of art and healing. Her piece, Honey or Tar v, was just selected for first prize out of 850 artist as past of The New South at Kai Lin Gallery.

Cosmo Whyte was born in St. Andrew, Jamaica in 1982. The Jamaican born artist attended Bennington College in Vermont for his Bachelor in Fine Arts, Maryland Institute College of Art for his Post-Baccalaureate Certificate and the University of Michigan for his MFA. He has exhibited in the US, Jamaica, Norway, France, Italy and South Africa. In 2010 he was the winner of the Forward Art emerging artist of the year award. In 2015 he was the recipient of the International Sculpture Center’s “Outstanding Student Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award” and in 2016 he was the recipient of an Artadia Award. In 2016 Cosmo Whyte participated in the Atlanta Biennial and the recent 2017 Jamaica Biennial. Cosmo Whyte is based in Atlanta, Georgia and Montego Bay, Jamaica and is currently a professor at Morehouse College.