Three TOY Fellowships are supported by Monique and Max in the name of Yves and the TOY Family at NXTHVN, New Haven, Connecticut each year. NXTHVN, founded by Titus Kaphar, Jason Price and Jonathan Brand in 2015, is an ambitious art space housed in two former manufacturing plants in New Haven. They provide 7 Studio Fellowships each year, where artists get a large studio space, a 20’000 dollar stipend as well as professional mentorship in the form of workshops and seminars throughout the year.

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The three TOY Fellows 2020 are Allana Clarke (https://allanaclarke.com/), Esteban Ramón Pérez (https://estebanramonperez.com/) and Ilana Savdie (https://ilanasavdie.format.com/).

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Allana Clarke is a Trinidadian-American artist whose practice is built upon a foundation of uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through video, performance, photography, and text, her research-based practice incorporates socio-political and art historical texts, to contend with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and of the possibility to create non-totalizing identifying structures. Clarke received her BFA in photography from New Jersey City University in 2011 and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014. Clarke has been an artist in residence at the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo. She has received several grants including the Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been screened and performed at Gibney Dance in NY, Invisible Export NY, New School Glassbox Studio NY, FRAC in Nantes, France, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin and was featured in the Bauhaus Centennial edition Bauhaus Now: Is Modernity an Attitude. She is currently a 2020 NXTHVN fellow and an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit.

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Esteban Ramón Pérez is an interdisciplinary artist from the greater Los Angeles area in CA, who is currently a studio fellow at NXTHVN in New Haven, CT. His studio practice is concerned with the intersection of materiality and iconography within American cultures, their implications, and their relationship to subcultures, labor practices, social classes, and socio-political histories. The content in each of his works is meant to be multifaceted, usually containing aspects of art histories, subjectivity, spirituality, and social issues. Pérez received his BFA in Art from The California Institute of the Arts in 2017, and his MFA in Painting & Printmaking from Yale University School of Art in 2019.

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Ilana Savdie was raised in Barranquilla, Colombia and is now based in Brooklyn, New York. She received her MFA from the Yale School of Art in 2018 and her BFA from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2008. Savdie had her first solo show in New York with ltd los angeles in 2019 and has been included in numerous group exhibitions nationally and internationally including recent shows at Golestani Gallery in Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum aan de Stroom and CASSTL gallery in Antwerp, Belgium; Jack Barett gallery in New York; and ltd los angeles in Los Angeles.