Open Studios: Spring Artist Residency Showcase

Our Spring 2026 Artist Residency explores the theme of climate and climate justice. Over their time with us, these artists have been investigating what it means to create work that engages with environmental questions, whether through the materials they use, the stories they tell, the systems they explore, or the futures they imagine.

Sandi Elizabeth Halley creates allegorical paintings that examine corporate power and ecological collapse, using myth, architecture, and symbolism to explore systems of extraction and complicity. Her work constructs layered visual mythologies that reflect on hierarchy, instability, and resilience within contemporary social and environmental structures.

Keertana Sreekumar is an artist and writer developping a collection of short stories based on testimony from Malayalee communities affected by the 2018 Kerala floods, exploring climate-induced displacement, loss, and changing relationships to land. Her practice combines research and fiction to translate lived experience into narrative, foregrounding intimate, human-scale accounts of climate justice and environmental rupture.

Carlos Biernnay is a textile-based installation artist who is examining the water crisis affecting Mapuche communities in Chile, using recycled fabrics, ceramics, and copper to explore the impacts of water privatization under neoliberal policies. His work treats textile as an archive of memory and identity, foregrounding the spiritual and political dimensions of environmental justice and the sacred relationship between water and land.

Lisa Lee Freeman is a visual artist creating installation works using cartographic abstraction and scientific visual language to explore the impacts of global warming on both planetary systems and human psychology. Drawing on oceanographic research and climate data, her practice translates environmental change into emotional and visual forms that reflect ecological uncertainty, loss, and transformation across human and geologic scales.

Hedwig Brouckaert creates sculptures and installations using recycled magazines, foam debris, and ceramics to address plastic pollution and the toxicity of hyper-consumer culture. Her work transforms waste materials into forms that evoke biological and natural systems, exposing the hidden violence of microplastics while reflecting on environmental degradation and possibilities for regeneration.

Sakena Washington is a writer and storyteller exploring how climate change and environmental inequality shape the lives of Black residents in Pittsburgh, particularly in neighborhoods impacted by redlining, industrial zoning, and long-term environmental exposure. Her work combines oral history, reporting, and personal narrative to challenge dominant “revitalization” narratives and foreground environmental justice and lived experience.

Danielle Mund is an artist and writer developping lyrical picture book manuscripts exploring the global carbon cycle and its relationship to climate change, combining illustration, collage, and mixed media experimentation. Drawing on personal experience of Hurricane Maria and broader environmental negligence, her work uses the picture book form to translate climate crisis into intergenerational storytelling that fosters awareness, emotional connection, and responsibility.

Jing (Ellen) Xu is a multidisciplinary artist creating sculpture and installation works using fragile, everyday and reused materials to explore climate, care, and environmental health through themes of repair, accumulation, and maintenance. Her practice builds delicate systems from repetitive processes, translating ideas of ecological and social resilience into evolving structures that reflect vulnerability, persistence, and transformation over time.

This is your chance to step into their studios, see what they've made, and hear directly from them about their practice and thinking.

Art offers a unique way to engage with complex challenges like climate change through emotion, imagination, and lived experience rather than data alone. We're excited to introduce our community to artists working at this intersection and we hope to see you there!