Threaded Tensions

April 4–27, 2025
Opening Reception: Friday, April 4, 2025, 5–8 PM

LaiSun Keane Gallery
460C Harrison Ave, C8A
Boston, MA 02118

Artists
Chakaia Booker
Raque Ford
Tomashi Jackson
Mavis Pusey

In anticipation of Witnessing Humanity: The Art of John Wilson at the MFA Boston and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, LaiSun Keane Gallery is pleased to welcome the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop (RBPMW), the longest-running community printshop in the U.S. While the Blackburn Print Archive documents Wilson’s frequent collaborations with RBPMW, it is less widely known that Robert Blackburn was Wilson’s best man at his wedding.

Blackburn pioneered experimentation in color lithography, once using up to 17 colors with multiple stones. Many of his works exist as unique variations rather than traditional editions, with subtle shifts in color and composition. Threaded Tensions reflects Blackburn’s ethos of experimentation, featuring artists rooted in textiles and printmaking.

Programming

Boston University College of Fine Arts: Tuesday Night Lecture Series
Guest speaker: Raque Ford
Tuesday, April 8, 7 PM
808 Commonwealth Ave Boston MA

Gallery Talk with Essye Klempner, Director of RBPMW
Saturday, April 19, 1 PM
RSVP: info@laisukeane.com

Email info@laisunkeane.com for inquiry

The Reality Principle
in partnership with Monira Foundation

March 8 - April 15, 2025
Opening Reception: Opening March 8, 4–6 PM

Monira Foundation
888 Newark Ave ste 250
Jersey City, NJ

Artists
Atif Akin
Fanny Allié
Keren Anavy
Allen Ball
Keren Benbenisty
Tyler Christopher Brown
m burgess
Mattia Casalegno
Annette Cords
Fei Cui
Andreana Dobreva
Koray Duman, Ted Kerr, and Carlos Motta
Nazli Efe
Jason File
Del Geist
Liselot van der Heijden
Erik Hernádez
Tamiko Kawata
Sarah Leahy
Patricia Leighton
Cy Morgan
Cynthia Reynolds
Yali Romagoza
Susan Silas

Curated by Deric Carner and Ysabel Pinyol Blasi   

EFA Studios and the Monira Foundation proudly present The Reality Principle, featuring EFA Studios and Monira Residency artists. The exhibition focuses on proposed, in progress, or otherwise unrealized work through models, mockups, and drafts. It is a show of dreams and experiments that tells the hidden stories of artists aspiring to make work that has been stymied by demands of reality or the approval of others. We celebrate these artists who continue to offer ambitious ideas and images to the world.

The reality principle is a Freudian concept that describes the ability to assess reality and act accordingly instead of acting solely on the pleasure principle. Artists are tasked with dreaming of new, until-then-impossible realities and are often indulged in pursuing pleasure and grand ambitions. However, they must work within the constraints of funding bodies, publics, and material realities. Rejection and setbacks can feel arbitrary and prejudicial. And yet many artists face this pain over and over again to see their visions through.

Contact: Deric Carner at Deric@efanyc.org

The Rain Don’t Mind

April 3 – May 16, 2025
Opening Reception: Thursday, April 3, 6–8 PM

EFA Studios
Hours: Tue–Fri, 12–5 PM

Artists
Shimon Attie
Richard Barnes
Rhona Bitner
Edgar Jerins
Greg Kwiatek
Nazanin Noroozi
Maria Rapicavoli

Curated by Deric Carner

The Rain Don’t Mind is a group exhibition exploring the complexity of violence and tragedy. It uses humor, glamour, and absurdity to approach heavy themes from unexpected angles. Featuring works by EFA Member Artists Shimon Attie, Richard Barnes (alumni), Rhona Bitner, Edgar Jerins, Greg Kwiatek, Nazanin Noroozi, and Maria Rapicavoli, the exhibition invites viewers to engage with narratives that resist simple interpretations, encouraging reflection on the ambiguity of life's darker moments. 

The participating artists explore tragedy as a complex, often chaotic phenomenon as they engage with themes of responsibility, the role of the observer, and how we attempt to make sense of the incomprehensible. Through their work, the artists reveal how creative practices can become spaces for reflection, reconciliation, and even transformation.

Inspired by Milli Vanilli’s 1989 hit song “Blame it on the Rain,” the exhibition suggests that there may be a satisfying answer to the question of blame. Negative icons such as the Unabomber, Hitler or the US’s exit from Kabul lurk in our cultural imagination as unhealed trauma. New traumas and tyrants make these themes ever more relevant. The artists' engagement with dark iconography of war, terrorism, abuse, and death seeks a way to acknowledge and transform imagery.

Contact:  Deric@efanyc.org

2025 SHIFT Residency for Arts Workers

EFA Studios Program Artists-in-Residence

DaeQuan Alexander Collier
Hawu Lim
Stephen Lau
DW Zinsser

Since its inception in 2010, SHIFT Residency has been providing peer support, mentoring, studio spaces, and exhibition opportunities for over ninety artists who work in various arts organizations (as curators, educators, administrators, etc.), to advance their creative practices and to support the balance of their careers. SHIFT recognizes the contribution of arts workers to the art community, providing other individuals and the public with opportunities for growth and expansion. The SHIFT residency honors these artists’ commitment with a supportive, enriching, and collaborative environment.

SHIFT hosts a cohort of artists working in a range of media each year, from sound and installation to painting, performance, and social practice. In addition to its role as a support network, SHIFT promotes advocacy for arts workers and seeks to increase equity and representation within the field.

SHIFT Residency for Arts Workers 2025 is generously supported by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.

2025 Kahn | Mason Studio Immersion Project SIP) Fellowship

EFA RBPMW

Artists: Carly Mandel, June Canedode Souza, Anna Ting Moller, Zalika Azim, E Jane, Anne Wu, Elle Perez, and Serafina Ariel

This intensive fellowship is designed to introduce artists from multiple disciplines to printmaking. Fellows are artists seeking creative exploration through printmaking, regardless of expertise, to apply their creative knowledge and conceptual goals to the print medium. The fellows are each provided access to a community and professional printmaking workspace, a stipend, three printmaking workshops, and assistance from EFA RBPMW staff.

The Kahn | Mason SIP Fellowship is named in honor of avid printmakers and educators Emily Mason and Wolf Kahn, with partial funding provided by the Emily Mason | Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation and the Wolf Kahn Foundation.

Adji Fatou Amdy Dieye and Eleonora Luccarini
In Partnership with the Italian Cultural Institute

EFA Studios Program International Artists-in-Residence

EFA Studios is hosting the New York Prize winners for two five-month residencies. The New York Prize is a residency award for emerging Italian artists, promoted by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation, the Ministry of Culture, the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, and the Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America at Columbia University in New York.

Adji Dieye (Milan, 1991) is a visual artist living and working between Dakar, Milan, and Zurich. Photography is central to her work, serving both as a versatile medium and as a means to question representational “knowledge” and processes of othering across Western and non-Western societies. By exploring the role of culture in advertising, architecture, and national archives, she scrutinizes the forms of aesthetics of self-determination within neoliberal contexts.

Eleonora Luccarini (Bologna, 1993) lives and works in Bologna and New York. Her research is interdisciplinary, systemic and focused on the performative potential of language, mainly explored through fiction, meta-narrative strategies and the crafting of alter egos, often mediated by poetry writing.