Winter Workspace 2025

This year, the Winter Workspace program consists of two back-to-back, eight-week sessions, in which New York area artists research and develop work informed by the site, ecology and history of Wave Hill. Now in its sixteenth year, the Winter Workspace has supported more than 165 artists with studio space and funding. Artists are encouraged to expand their practices using resources from the garden, including access to Wave Hill’s thriving plant collections, horticultural and curatorial staff, horticulture and art libraries, history, architecture and visitors. Stay tuned for more information regarding our upcoming cohort of Winter Workspace artists and stop by Glyndor Gallery for Drop-In Sundays and Open Studios to meet the artists and learn about their creative practices. See program dates below and visit our calendar for more listings.  Read the release. 

The Winter Workspace Program is organized by Wave Hill’s curatorial team: Gabriel de Guzman, Director of Arts and Chief Curator; Rachel Raphaela Gugelberger, Curator of Visual Arts; and Afriti Bankwalla, Curatorial Administrative Assistant. 

Session 1 
January 6 – March 2, 2025 
Participating artists: Melinda Kiefer Santiago, Joyce Yu-Jean Lee, sTo Len, Weihui Lu, Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere, Ye Zhu. 

Drop-In Sundays: February 2 and February 9, 1PM – 3PM 
Open Studios: Saturday, March 1, 12:30PM – 3:30PM 

Melinda Kiefer Santiago is a Queens-based multidisciplinary artist. While in residence at Wave Hill, she will respond to the gardens and greenhouses as well as the socio-ecological histories of the Bronx, incorporating locally sourced natural materials in her work. She has exhibited her work in New York at Flux Factory, SEPTEMBER Gallery, ChaShaMa, Paradice Palase, LABspace, A.I.R Gallery, and Flowers for All Occasions Gallery, among others. Santiago earned an MFA from SUNY Purchase College. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Joyce Yu-Jean Lee is a Chinese-Taiwanese American visual artist who combines video, glass sculpture, and interactive installation with social practice and institutional critique.  Intrigued by Wave Hill as a site of healing and the therapeutic potential of creating work on site, Lee will explore the legacies of healing plants in traditional Chinese medicine. She has exhibited at The Delaware Contemporary Art Museum, Wilmington, and Kreeger Museum, Washington, DC; and her artwork has been covered in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Hong Kong Free Press, Huffington Post, Hyperallergic and on BBC Radio.  Joyce earned an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

sTo Len is a cross-disciplinary artist whose recent work has included printmaking with polluted waterways, opening a Trash Museum on an operating landfill in Kyrgyzstan, and hosting guerrilla performances and coastal clean ups at Superfund sites internationally. Based in Queens with familial roots in Vietnam and Virginia, he often incorporates these connections through issues of history, the environment, and tradition. At Wave Hill, sTo Len plans to collaborate with plants and engage with the site through a process of embedded walking, listening, photographing, and conversing with people to create field recordings, prints, and collections. He has exhibited his artwork in New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Connecticut, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Texas, Vietnam, Japan, Germany, Australia, Denmark, and Canada. sTo Len earned an MFA from the University of Hartford.  For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Weihui Lu was born in Shanghai, China, and raised in Queens. Working across media, she is interested in the psychological implications of the modern landscape and creating re-embodying experiences. Lu is drawn to the cultivated nature of Wave Hill, particularly our relationship to “tender” plants (non-native plants relying on humans to survive winter) and the principles of maintaining a wild garden. Much of her research will involve on-site observation, gathering and combining these elements with the conceptual threads of control, shelter, and tenderness to experiment with installation iterations. Lu’s work has been exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Italy, and in New York at Tiger Strikes Asteroid, Field Projects and Tutu Gallery, among others. Lu earned a BA in English Literature from Barnard College, Columbia University. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Angel Nevarez and Valerie Tevere are Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artists whose practice spans over twenty years of projects that actuate music and sound, radio, dissent, and the cultural complexities of the public sphere. The artists will research the musical histories of Wave Hill with a focus on the acclaimed Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini, who lived at Wave Hill from 1942 to 1945 while working as lead conductor at NBC studios.  Nevarez and Tevere have exhibited and screened their work at The Museum of Modern Art, The Guggenheim Museum, Creative Time, New Museum, and Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York; Manifesta 8/Spain; Museo Raúl Anguiano, Guadalajara, Mexico; Casino Luxembourg, LU; Henie Onstad Art Centre, Høvikodden, Norway; Taxispalais, Innsbruck, Austria, and elsewhere. Nevarez earned a BA in Biology from the University of California, San Diego. Tevere earned an MFA in photography from California Institute of the Arts. For more information, please visit the artists’ website.  

Ye Zhu is a Brooklyn-based interdisciplinary artist whose practice encompasses painting, public art and social practice. Born in Taishan, China to farmers who met in the factories of Shenzhen, his family immigrated to New York, where he grew up in a house with a village-style vegetable garden in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. These histories carry a dialogue in his work through the layering of found, crafted, and sentimental objects. At Wave Hill, Zhu will make molds of plants and natural objects within the site to use in paintings and paper works that hold the specific environment in which he is creating. He has had solo exhibitions at DIMIN Gallery, Harkawik, and the Andrew Freedman Home, in New York, and Moskowitz Bayse, Los Angeles, CA. He has also exhibited in group shows at The Sugar Hill Children’s Museum, Harper’s Gallery and James Fuentes all in New York, NY; Gavlack Gallery, Los Angeles, CA and Galerie Marguo, Paris, France. Zhu earned an MFA from the Yale School of Art. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Session 2 
March 4 – April 27, 2025 
Participating Artists: Ursula Endlicher, Saba Farhoudnia, Kris Grey, John Reynolds, Jennifer Schmidt, Toisha Tucker. 

Drop-In Sundays: April 6 and April 13, 1PM – 3PM 
Open Studios: Saturday, April 26, 12:30PM – 3:30PM 

Ursula Endlicher was born in Vienna, Austria and is based in New York. She is an interdisciplinary new media artist who investigates the structural components and interfaces of digital and “natural” networks. She creates net art, augmented reality (AR), installation, performance, environmental works, and dinners based on the interactions between humans, machines, and nature, to generate new worlds. At Wave Hill, Endlicher will further develop her projects HTMLgardeness and bARK, AR movements, walks, and experiences triggered by scanning the barks of trees, a natural QR-code.  Her work has been shown at Chronus Art Center, Shanghai, China; Haus der Elektronischen Künste, Basel, Switzerland; Transmediale, Berlin, Germany; SIGGRAPH, Yokohama, Japan; and at ZERO1 Biennial; Eyebeam and Harvestworks, both in New York, NY, and on Turbulence.org. Endlicher earned an MFA in Computer Art from the School of Visual Art. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Saba Farhoudnia  was born in Tehran, Iran and is now based in Brooklyn. She merges drawing, painting, language, and verse using brushstrokes, geometric forms, calligraphy, and gestural marks. Immersing herself in the winter landscape at Wave Hill, Farhoudnia will begin a series of paintings that explore the relationship between natural and urban environments with a focus on color, the unique plant species, and the history of the site. Her work has been exhibited at venues including Fou Gallery, the Bronx Museum and Jamaica Center for Arts and Learning, all in New York, as well as Make Room, Los Angeles, CA; Dominico-American Cultural Institute, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic and Reza Abbasi Museum, Tehran, Iran. Farhoudnia earned an MA in Art Research from the University of Science and Culture, Tehran and an MFA from the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Kris Grey is a Brooklyn-based gender-queer artist whose work includes curatorial projects, performance, writing, and studio production that point to the structures that impinge on bodily autonomy and reveal hidden queer histories. At Wave Hill, Grey will work with plant familiars and healers, in particular, cacti and succulents, to explore their migratory pathways, communication strategies, and relationships through experimental performances and drawings. Grey has exhibited at the Bronx Museum, Smack Mellon, the Austrian Cultural Forum and Sarah Lawrence College, all in New York. They earned an MFA from Ohio University.  For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

John Reynolds is a Brooklyn-based artist whose primary focus is oil painting. His paintings depict intimate and colorful settings that stem from personal memories, musings on futurity and utopian visions through a queer perspective. Heavily influenced by literature and ecology, Reynolds will study the changing effects of light and natural motifs in the dormant winter and early spring landscape of Wave Hill to create a new body of paintings entitled Fallow Gardens. Reynolds has exhibited at Pioneer Works, PowerHouse Arts and ArtHouseB, all in New York. He earned an MFA from Brooklyn College.  For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Jennifer Schmidt is a Brooklyn-based multi-disciplinary artist working with print media, graphic design, writing, and sound to create site-responsive installations, video, and performances that question the role of visual iconography and repetitive actions within a given environment. With an interest in the varied descriptions and accounts of Wave Hill over time, Schmidt will research the uses, habitats, and living conditions of plants in the gardens to create graphics for a sculptural installation for a garden party. Inspired in part by Mark Twain’s musings on the winter wind at Wave Hill, she will also collect recordings to create a sound composition or sound sculpture to be amplified on site. Schmidt’s work has been presented at DeBouwput Galerie, Amsterdam, Netherlands; 32. Biennial of Graphic Arts, International Centre for Graphic Arts, Ljubljana, Slovenia; Institute for Contemporary Art and Boston Center for the Arts, both Boston, MA; and in New York at Miriam Gallery, Trestle Gallery, International Print Center, Queens Museum, BRIC, and EFA Project Space. She earned an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.  

Toisha Tucker is an interdisciplinary conceptual artist and writer in the Bronx who uses art as a mode of cultural organizing. Interested in the liminal space inhabited by the former private estate of Wave Hill, Tucker will explore participatory engagement within its public setting. Benefiting from its proximity to the Hudson River, they will also continue to experiment with collective topographic water mapmaking rooted in accounts of memory. Tucker is an Affiliated Fellow of the American Academy in Rome and has participated in residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, ACRE, Ellis-Beauregard Foundation, Marble House Project, Baldwin for the Arts, KODA and VCCA. They earned an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Design. For more information, please visit the artist’s website.