FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE June 16th, 2020 Penumbra Foundation Selects Six Outstanding Emerging Artists for 2020 Workspace Program Penumbra Foundation today announced its selections for the Penumbra 2020 Workspace Program, which supports outstanding emerging artists working in the photographic arts. The artists are Robin Crookall (New York), Christine Elfman (Portland, Maine), Adama Delphine Fawundu (New York), Arash Fewzee (New York), Whitney Hubbs (Alfred, New York), and Martyna Szczęsna (New York). The Penumbra Workspace Program facilitates emerging artists of all colors, all genders and all ages with time, workspace, resources and support to get them and their work closer to the distribution platform that is the city of New York. Each artist will receive a one time stipend to use in researching, photographing, experimenting, scanning, printing, working on an exhibition, and/or editing a book. For one month, the artists have access to Penumbra’s darkrooms, digital tools, alternative processes lab, and shooting studios as well as technical and theoretical support. Program director Leandro Villaro explained the importance of the Penumbra Workspace Program: “Our residency gives artists the possibility to engage in a dialectic practice with historical photographic processes and the history of photography. Given the widespread abandonment of analogue processes, there remain fewer opportunities for artists to explore these fundamental pathways and techniques. Artists can explore and experiment not only by thinking about the medium in relation to their own histories, needs and interests, but also by disputing its essence, questioning its facticity and pushing the conceptual and material limits of what photography or a photograph is or could be through the making of it.” Now in its fourth year, the Workplace Program receives generous support from The Henry Nias Foundation, The Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation, The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Foundation, Roz Leibowitz, and a number of accomplished photographers who donate their work for Penumbra’s annual auction (see list below). The 2020 Workplace Program jury included Monique Deschaines (Director of Euqinom Gallery, CA), Odette England (Artist and Educator, RI) and Arthur Ou (Artist and Educator, NY). Former Workplace Program recipients include Sunè Woods, Aspen Mays and Rachelle Bussières among others. th 36 East 30 Street · New York, NY 10016 917 288 0343 · [email protected] Page 1 of 3 Applications for the program are due each year in December. For more information about the Workspace Program, and to see a selection of works by the 2020 Workspace Program Artists, visit: penumbrafoundation.org/workspace About the Artists: Robin Crookall is a 2019 NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellow in photography from The New York Foundation for the Arts. In 2017, she participated in a group show at Seattle’s Soil Art Gallery, exhibited at Art Basel in Miami, and completed a two person show at Brooklyn’s McCarren Park. Robin was interviewed in July 2016 by local artist and writer, Wenxin Zhang, for an online Chinese photography magazine, IndieFoto. Previously in 2013 she completed a solo show at Seattle’s 4Culture Gallery and her post bacc at University of Montana. Crookall holds an MFA from New York University and a BFA in ceramics from the University of Washington. She is currently living and creating in Brooklyn. Christine Elfman is a visual artist who makes photographs about and through the process of fading. She makes pictures out of their own disappearance, to see how the desire for pictorial permanence gives way to change and the invisible. She received her MFA from California College of the Arts and her BFA from Cornell University. Her work has recently been exhibited at Zona Maco in Mexico City; Philadelphia Photo Arts Center; Handwerker Gallery, Ithaca College; University of the Arts, Philadelphia; Photofairs San Francisco; and Gallery Wendi Norris, San Francisco. Awards and fellowships include a Light Work Grant in Photography, San Francisco Artist Award, Murphy and Cadogan Fellowship, and Constance Saltonstall Foundation Residency. Her work has appeared in The San Francisco Chronicle, Photograph Magazine, Der Greif, Humble Arts Foundation, SF Weekly, and The Photo Review. She has taught photography at Cornell University, San Francisco Art Institute, Foothill College, California College of the Arts, and UC Berkeley. She is currently Visiting Assistant Professor of Art at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine and lives in upstate NY. She is represented by Euqinom Gallery, San Francisco. Adama Delphine Fawundu is photographer and visual artist born in Brooklyn, New York to parents from Sierra Leone and Equatorial Guinea, West Africa. With over fifteen years experience working as a photographer, Fawundu enhanced her studio practice and completed her MFA in Visual Arts from Columbia University in 2018. In recognition of her artistic practice, Ms. Fawundu received the Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award, was named one of OkayAfrica’s 100 Women making an impact on Africa and its Diaspora and included in the Royal Photographic Society’s (UK) Hundred Heroines, in 2018. Ms. Fawundu’s awards also include, New York Foundation of the Arts Photography Fellow, Brooklyn Art Council Grant, Open Society Foundation Community Fellow, the Brooklyn Historical Society Community Initiative Grant, and BRIC Workspace Artist-in-Residence. Ms. Fawundu has exhibited internationally, with solo shows in 2019 at the African American Museum in Philadelphia and Crush Curatorial gallery in Chelsea, New York City. Ms. Fawundu’s works can be found in the private and public collections such as the Brooklyn Museum of Art, The Brooklyn Historical Society, The Norton Museum of Art, Corridor Art Gallery, The David C. Driskell Center at the University of Maryland and The Museum of Contemporary Art at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. th 36 East 30 Street · New York, NY 10016 917 288 0343 · [email protected] Page 2 of 3 Arash Fewzee (b. Mashhad, Iran) lives and works in New York. His work includes photography, installation, video, and sculpture and has been exhibited both in New York City and internationally, including most recently at Lishui photography biennial 2017 at Lishui Museum of Art in China. He holds a Bachelor of Science in Economics from Ferdowsi University and an MFA from Parsons, The New School. Arash has been an artist in residence at Showhegan, Triangle Arts and Baxter Street. Whitney Hubbs was born and raised in Southern California with a brief stint in Portland, Oregon. She was involved in the punk rock riot grrrl community from a young age, where she made fanzines, organized art shows, participated in performances and worked as an activist. She later received her BFA from the California College of Arts in 2005 and an MFA at UCLA in 2009. She is an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University. Hubbs is currently represented by M+B Gallery in Los Angeles and Situations Gallery in New York City. She currently lives in New York state. Martyna Szczęsna (b. Olsztyn, Poland) is a multi-disciplinary artist working between photography and sculpture to unpack the conflict between image and reality. Her work pursues an urban surrealism whose disruptive somatic effects point toward ideological dissonance reflecting the culture at large. Szczęsna is a graduate of the Cooper Union and completed MFA studies at UCLA. She lives and works in Brooklyn. Recent exhibitions include: Ground Control at Under the Oven Gallery, LES; Portrait of a Landscape at the Museo Sivori, Buenos Aires; Disarming Geometries at Dorsky Gallery, LIC; and Bronx Calling: The Third Bronx Biennial. Her work has been supported by residencies at Yucca Valley Material Lab, Franconia Sculpture Park, HDTS Wagonstations and The Watermill Center. Photography Auction Donors Each year Penumbra Foundation sponsors an auction of photographs donated by outstanding photographers to support the Workspace Program. The photographers whose work is supporting the 2020 program are: Sophie Barbasch, Erica Baum, Marina Berio, Rachelle Bussières, Tim Carpenter, Dillon DeWaters, Larry Fink, Jenia Fridlyand, Theresa Ganz, Edward Grazda, Aspen Mays, Raymond Meeks, Andrew Moore, Adam Putnam, Meghann Riepenhoff, Almudena Romero, Liz Sales, Victoria Sambunaris, Victor Sira, Joni Sternbach, Eric Taubman, Pedro Weiner and Samira Yamin. About Penumbra Foundation: Penumbra Foundation is a non profit organization that brings together the Art and Science of Photography through education, research, outreach, public, publishing and residency programs. Its goal is to be a comprehensive resource for photographers at any level, artists, students, professionals, historians, researchers, conservators and curators. th 36 East 30 Street · New York, NY 10016 917 288 0343 · [email protected] Page 3 of 3.