Current Studio Access Residents
The Visual Arts Center of Richmond’s Studio Access Residency is designed to support emerging and established visual artists as they develop new ideas and to foster artistic exploration by providing free access to VisArts’ 17 communal studio spaces.
Allegra Codamon
Allegra Codamon is a mixed-media artist who draws inspiration from the wild beauty of nature, often focusing on micro-details easily overlooked in a landscape. Having dabbled in various mediums, she is excited to explore new ways to bring nature and sustainability into the studio. Outside of VisArts, you can find her paddleboarding, snuggling with her cat, reading a novel, doing yoga, or eating Scoop.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/allegracodesigns/
Ambrose Hernandez Godoy
Ambrose Hernandez Godoy is a multinational and multidisciplinary artist born in Mexico City and residing in Richmond, Virginia. They work using themes of sarcastic body horror, Zapotec culture and mythology, queerness as a form of resistance, and the monstrous feminine. Their work takes form in technicolored assemblages of chimerical creatures, objects of sexual pleasure, and amalgamations of both. They have an interest in material as a sentient collaborator, working with the materials rather than against them, embracing the mistakes that may occur. Working mostly with second hand and reused materials considered waste, functions as an exploration of maximalist excess and how (over)consumption extends to people with marginalized identities being treated as discardable. When using new materials, the choice to use “forever” synthetics, usually plastics, is to further the concept that man-made materials will outlast the natural world. The hyper-maximalist sculptures are a nod to their belief in the superabundance of pre-existing materials and their own existence out lasting our own as humans, as well as the Chicano artistic sensibility of rasquachismo.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chilangothic/
C.A.P. Ward
C.A.P. Ward is a queer, black illustrator and cartoonist working on heartfelt stories centering diverse characters. Their work often incorporates natural imagery and vibrant colors to build emotions into the environments of their narratives. When they aren’t drawing, Ward is often found taking pictures of fungus or longboarding around the illustrious potholes of the east coast.
Website: http://artcward.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/cevarra/
Cassie Sheedy
Cassie Sheedy is a multimedia artist whose practice follows coincidence and embraces inconsistency. Their work combines original stories or experiences with object-props that may “publish” prose, both supporting and supported by a story. Humor and sentimentality are central in their sculpture and their writing, sometimes in the form of scripts or plays performed solo or with close collaborators. Currently, they are revisiting a childhood fantasy phase and the concept of luck in objects, materials, and activities.
Their practice involves a variety of processes including metalworking, woodcarving, sewing, bookmaking, and drawing. They believe in valuing the process and outcome of art equally as to approach a “practice” with earnestness and adaptability. This aligns with their interests in teaching where they consider humor essential and an allowance for open exploration. With experience teaching small metals to young people, at VisArts they hope to strengthen these skills along with other craft processes to be more equipped as an educator for young artists. They hold a BFA in Sculpture and Extended Media from Virginia Commonwealth University.
Website: cassheedy.com
Elliot Weaver
Elliot Weaver is a photo-based visual artist working and experimenting with a number of analog mediums to translate foreign emotions and themes. Enthralled to have access to VisArts’ numerous studios, he hopes to utilize as many of them as possible to innovate new ideas and connect with the community.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/skellyot/
Gabriel Thomas
Gabriel Thomas is a recent graduate from William & Mary and majored in Art and Art History with a concentration in studio art. Gabriel’s primary mediums are ceramics and darkroom photography and she is currently developing a body of work that focuses on the patterns of growth and death throughout life; the flowing and transforming of energies. In other words, spiritual weathering; the process that happens naturally as we age and our life experiences shape us.
Jade Dickinson
Jade is a queer painter, designer, and educator. She is also a graduate of North Carolina State University with a Bachelor in Art & Design and a history of arts mentoring outside traditional academic environments.
Their most recent work explores the relationship between the shifting adult self and the inner child, specifically in a search for spiritual meaning. Her paintings depict childlike symbols in emotionally nuanced or abstracted situations, and she hopes to expand these concepts into more mediums in the future. Jade’s work can be found in several past editions of the Virginia-based zine Mala Leche. Jade can be found in Richmond, Virginia if you know where to look.
Website: jadesketches.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jadesketches/
Khoi Lee
Khoi Le is a Vietnamese-American interdisciplinary artist based in Richmond, Virginia. His practice is an assortment of experimentation, collecting, object building, and research, all converging to explore the relationship between impermanence and memory. He is particularly interested in using found objects and altering them to create new narratives for something that already bears a past. The interplay between memory and impermanence unfolds into an examination of time and its malleable impact on the human experience. Le received his Bachelor of Fine Arts in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2023.
Website: khoi-le.com
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/khoitle/
Lawson Cumming
Lawson Cumming is a multimedia artist and animator living and working in Richmond, Virginia. Their artwork is influenced by natural and ancient human history, in order to produce pieces that evoke a sense of joy and belonging for both them and the community through the creative process.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mosspunkstudio/
Lucy Gillis
Lucy Gillis is a multi-media artist, with a focus on light, glass, labor, and ephemera. Born and raised in a small-town in Southwestern Virginia, Lucy discovered glassblowing
while earning her BFA from Virginia Commonwealth University. Captivated by the singular and magical properties of this medium, Lucy has traveled throughout the United States to Penland School of Crafts, Pilchuck Glass School, Haystack Mountain School of Crafts and Ox-Bow School of Art and Artist Residency to pursue the skills needed to expand her work with glass. After completing her MFA education at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, Lucy became the premier glass fellow at Ox-Bow in 2020, and returned as staff and glass technician in 2021. Lucy then worked in Chicago as a glassworks artisan producing high-end and custom furniture in glass and bronze, until returning to Virginia in 2023.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/misslucyelizabeth/
Maeve Shea
Maeve Faolan Shea is a changeling, queer, agender, process-oriented, multidisciplinary/dimensional/mirrored artist, weaving the realms of their waking and dreaming life, in conversation with all inhabitants of the liminal. They are interested in the interplay of text and imagery to convey emotional realms, time travel, and mythologize a fleeting existence. Their work is inspired by trans futurity, working class romance, metamorphosis, child-raising, portals, ghost stories, inter-species relationships, and winding roads.
Website: https://www.maevefaolan.com/
Melchisedek Shabazz
Melchisedek Shabazz is a fine artist with a focus on printmaking based in Richmond, Virginia. After gaining his bachelor’s in Fine Arts/Graphic Design at Norfolk State University, Shabazz creates woodcuts and illustrations that reflect the experiences of queer African Americans through the lenses of self-discovery, mental health, and celebration.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/afro_spectrum/
Sam Schieren
Sam Schieren is a writer from Valley Cottage, New York. He received his MFA from the University of California, Davis. He writes stories and books about mystics, obsessives, aliens, the dying, and men made out of spaghetti. His work has been published in Bellevue Literary Review, Gulf Coast, and Southern Humanities Review among other journals. He has taught at UC Davis and Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. He lives in Richmond, Virginia, and will begin teaching at VCU this fall.
Website: https://samschieren.com/
Valerie Parker
Colors, Font, and Pattern Matchmaker, and quiltmaker, Valerie Dionne Parker was born in a US Army Hospital in Germany and raised in Richmond, Virginia. She earned a Post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Family Literacy from Penn State University and a BA in English Literature from VCU. She is a charter member of the Kuumba Afrikan-American Quilt Guild of Richmond. Valerie’s small, quilted wall hanging entitled ABUNDANCE, designed in the style of the number game Sudoku with Scrabble letters and a myriad of African, batik, seersucker, denim, and cotton fabrics, was acquired by Capital One in 2023
Zaza Willis
Zaza Willis is an emerging artist working primarily in jewelry and small sculpture. They often utilize themes of blackness, desirability, horror and spirituality to encourage a critical understanding of how race is spatialized in social environments. They are heavily interested in how violent histories work to construct the current physical and emotional spaces we occupy. Zaza is based in Richmond, Virginia.
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/3000realm/
Website: http://www.3000realm.com