Students and Alumni Selected to Commission New Work at The Shed
Current student Kiyan Williams '19, and Alumni Asif Mian '18 and Hugh Hayden '18 have been selected to commission new work at The Shed, a new visual and performing arts center currently being built in Hudson Yards. They will showcase their work in The Shed’s black-box theater and open-air plaza beginning in late spring 2019.
Over 900 artists from all five boroughs submitted proposals for The Shed’s inaugural Open Call Program, which offers selected artists stipends ranging from $7,000 to $15,000 alongside the promise of additional institutional support and other resources for development. The program is co-organized by Senior Curator Emma Enderby and Chief Civic Program Officer Tamara McCaw, who said in a statement, “We launched Open Call with the intent of creating a meaningful opportunity for emerging artists to make new work. A fundamental part of our mission is to engage our local communities and support New York City’s diversity of talent. Open Call provides the resources local artists need to fully explore their ideas, as well as the platform for reaching higher levels of visibility with new audiences.”
Set to open to the public in 2019, the $500 million complex will boast 8 floors and almost 200,000 square feet. According to The Shed’s mission statement it will be “a cultural hub that minimizes barriers to entry and takes artistic risks. A place for creative experience that is enriching, but not rarefied. A civic institution that is warm, welcoming, and generous to all.”
Kiyan Williams '19 is a multidisciplinary artist residing in Manhattan who creates live performance, sculpture, video, and text informed by autoethnography and archival research, and will be developing a new performance work for Open Call. Williams was also recently commissioned by SculptureCenter and will be showcasing their work in an exhibition entitled In Practice: Other Objects from January 14, 2019 through March 25, 2019 in Long Island City, NY. They will also be performing in the Bruce Nauman retrospective at MoMA PS1 in a live performance entitled Wall-Floor Positions through February 23, 2019.
Asif Mian '18 is a visual artist who lives in Brooklyn and works at the intersection of sculpture, video, and performance. Mian is developing Spectral Decoy for Open Call. Mian is also currently a participant in the exhibition, Queens International 2018: Volumes, at the Queens Museum, which will run through February 24, 2019 in Queens, NY.
Hugh Hayden '18 lives in Harlem, and his work explores ideas of belonging to a social landscape through a lens of camouflage and natural materials. He works in sculpture and salvaged wood and is developing First Apartment for Open Call. He recently had an exhibition of new works at Lisson Gallery in New York entitled Border States.