MOAD Artist Residency Featuring Ema Ri

This August through November, MOAD Projects will feature an artist residency with Ema Ri at Miami Dade College's Padrón Campus. Ema Ri will use the campus's newly renovated gallery to make new work and engage with students throughout the semester. Ema Ri is a noted mixed media artist in Miami, whose work is informed by languages of abstraction and explorations of materiality. Influenced by personal experiences, Ema Ri examines themes of displacement and deconstruction.

MOAD is proud to offer artists resources, support, and space to create in Miami. This artist residency will also invite the public to step into the studio and observe and interact with the artist at work.
Ema Ri’s work has been exhibited at the Lowe Art Museum, El Espacio 23, Locust Project, Spinello Projects, and CIFO. They have participated in artist residency programs at Oolite Arts (2022-23), Kinosaito Arts (2022), Atlantic Center for the Arts (2022) and NWSA Alumni Studio Residency (2017-18).

Artist Statement: “A sense of homelessness and exile have been profoundly impactful forces in my life. Naturally, they are woven deeply into the fabric of my artistic practice. I’m a second-generation Cuban American interdisciplinary artist. I am also queer, though my queerness is less a function of my sexuality than it is a question of exile. Exile from the boundaries of the Normal, the Moral, even the Real. I am the child of first-generation Cuban migrants. I am brown. I live with physical and learning disabilities. Though vital, none of these things wholly encapsulate me. I am more than the total sum of my categories. But they’re nevertheless significant, even central, to who I am, and subsequently, to my artistic practice.”

MOAD's programs are made possible with the support of the Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs and the Cultural Affairs Council, the Miami-Dade County Mayor, and Board of County Commissioners. They are sponsored in part by the State of Florida through the Division of Arts and Culture and the National Endowment for the Arts, and with generous support from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. The Miami Herald is a media sponsor of MOAD's programming.

Ema Ri, photo courtesy of Spinello Projects.