Artist In Residency Program
The Dofe House is pleased to announce Willa Cosinuke as the newest Resident. Willa will be in Willow Creek through the end of April 2024
Willa Cosinuke (b 1997, Massachusetts) is a Brooklyn based painter who graduated with a BFA from The Cooper Union in 2020 where she received the Michael S. Vivo Prize for Excellence in Drawing. Her work has been included in Apple in the Dark, a group show at Harkawik Gallery in Manhattan, and other group exhibitions curated by Ornella Polo and Braden Hollis. Cosinuke was selected as an artist in residence at the Macedonia Institute in Chatham, NY, March, 2023. Cosinuke’s first solo presentation of her work was with EUROPA Gallery in Manhattan, NY, in the spring of 2023. She also exhibited work at art fair, NADA Miami, with EUROPA Gallery this past December.
Cosinuke has family roots in Montana where she grew up visiting grandparents and cousins. She lived and worked near Bozeman in 2018, and parts of 2019. Her time at The Dofe House Residency will be a homecoming of sorts.
Aunt Dofe is so pleased to announce Anna Paige as our artist/writer in residence at The Dofe House Residency. Anna will be staying through Dec. 31, 2023
Anna Paige is an award-winning arts journalist based in Montana and co-founder of Young Poets, winner of the 2021 Library of Congress Award for Literacy. Anna has been writing about arts and culture in the west since her first newspaper job in 2004 and now is a contributor to the Montana Free Press, among other statewide outlets. She is also the co-host of Resounds: Arts and Culture on the High Plains on Yellowstone Public Radio.
Anna also teaches poetry in the elementary schools and has taught writing and composition at Montana State University Billings, as well as classes through the Big Sky Writing Workshops. In 2019, she launched an open mic event for poetry at Kirks’ Grocery, an arts and community center where she was instrumental in installing the city’s first community refrigerator. Anna is also an organizer for Julia Louis-Dreyfest, an annual multi-venue music, arts, poetry, and comedy festival and she has organized events for the High Plains Book Festival.
An active performer in the Billings community, Anna holds the 2013 Montana Slam Grand Champion title and has been honored multiple times as Best Spoken Word Artist by the Magic City Music Awards. She’s shared poetry in several collaborative pieces, including the Billings’ Fringe Festival.
Anna is also a passionate advocate for the humane treatment and support of ex-racing greyhounds, having adopted four of her own over the years.
Introducing our lastest artist in residency: Cristina Marian
Cristina Marian
Artist Bio
Cristina Marian is a Romanian-American visual artist whose work explores such themes as her experience within the community she now inhabits, togetherness and the sense of belonging, communal and global changes, and finding peace within unpredictability.
Throughout her life, Marian often found herself on the edge of vulnerability. Her sense of belonging was often replaced by the feeling of living in constant movement and the unpredictability of spaces and states of the unknown. As a child, she lived between two vastly divergent political regimes and witnessed the violent Romanian Revolution of 1989. She moved by herself at the young age of 13, from a small village in the Romanian countryside to a city of two million to follow her dream and study art and during this time, lost her childhood home to a fire. Still, she completed her studies, established her career as an artist, and later emigrated to the U.S. All of these experiences contributed to the feeling of permanent transition and to this day, strongly influence her artwork. In Bucharest, Romania, Marian earned a BFA in Painting at the National University of Fine Arts in 2003. Marian participated in MAP (Montana Artrepreneur Program) offered by the Montana Arts Council in 2015; and, most recently, earned her MFA from Montana State University, Bozeman, in 2020. Marian works with a variety of mediums including painting, sculpture and public installations.
She has exhibited internationally, including in Bucharest, Paris, Tel Aviv, Oslo, Dakar and Vienna. In the U.S., Marian’s work has been shown in several towns and cities in Montana, and in Spokane, WA. Her most recent group show participation was at the Missoula Art Museum in The Space of Hope: A Collective Response exhibition. The Winds Are Changing is her most recent solo show, at Echo Arts Gallery in Bozeman. For almost ten years, Montana has been her home. Here, she divides her time between working in the studio, exhibiting her artwork and teaching.
Aunt Dofe’s Gallery is thrilled to introduce our first artist in residency: Thomas Pomarico
His residency will run from June 1 through mid August
My name is Thomas Pomarico. I am a recent MFA graduate from Montana State University. I was born and raised in Indiana and Michigan. I graduated from the University of Michigan in 2011 with a degree in Classical Civilizations, a minor in Global Media Studies, and as a 3-year letter winner on the football team. After my undergraduate studies, I spent time living and working in New Orleans, as part of the film industry. Around this time (2012) I began a serious artistic practice of painting and drawing and have continued ever since.
My research focuses on the acceleration of technology and its effects on a media-saturated society. Born in 1988, I am part of a unique generation that has witnessed the rise of a ubiquitous technological change in society. I have the privilege and curse of remembering a pre-connected world up until early adulthood. This gives me the ability to compare the two eras; a notion parallel to the ubiquitous rise of the car in the first half of the 20th century.
Painting and drawing serve a dual purpose in my practice. They indirectly access researched themes through metaphorical imagery and function as a tool for slowing the pace of technologies’ blinding velocity. I use imagery filtered by pop culture or technological processing. This coalesces in my work with images such as the classic hardboiled detective, the astronaut adrift, and a version of my father’s head blown up to a surrealistic size. The effort required to bring an art object into its final form is the most effective formula I have discovered for mitigating the effects of an entertainment-addicted, media-saturated society.
Aunt Dofe’s would like to offer an Artist in Residence program, starting this summer. Studio space and living quarters provided in return for part time assistance in the gallery.
Interested parties should contact Juni Clark at jc@riversageinns.com.