(60) Artist Talks

Walter Cruz is a native Bronx-based creative exploring the intersections of art, design, and architecture through the lens of his Dominican-American upbringing. His work aims to understand how Black and brown bodies activate and inhabit space. Cruz has completed residencies at The Laundromat Project, Haystack School of Craft, and NurtureArt Gallery, among others. His work has been exhibited at venues including the Museum of the City of New York, Center for Political Graphics in Los Angeles, Syracuse University, and Longwood Gallery in the Bronx. Cruz participated in the New York edition of the New Art Dealers Alliance art fair and recently had a solo exhibition at Swivel Gallery in Brooklyn. As visual designer for the Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), Cruz brings an artistic eye to social justice issues. He also co-founded Zeal, a Black artist-owned cooperative uplifting multidisciplinary Black talent. Cruz holds an MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art and a BA in Architectural Studies from Hobart & William Smith Colleges. His goal is to create work that inspires and empowers Black and brown communities to embrace their identities and the lessons we navigate through life.

Maggie Hazen is a New York-based visual artist, activist, and experimental filmmaker. Her work has been exhibited, screened, and performed at the Bronx Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Museum of Tolerance, Center for Photography at the University of California Riverside as part of Southern California’s Pacific Standard Time, CICA Museum, South Korea, Granoff Center at Brown University, Pulse Miami Beach as part of Pulse Play, and The Boston Young Contemporaries exhibition; among others.

Public works include Hidden in Plein Site, a billboard about carceral landscapes in the Catskill Mountains, Transmimic, a projection on the Manhattan Bridge, and Of Departed Delineations, a transformative memory commemorating the 1992 LA Riots. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at venues throughout the United States and internationally, including New York, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, and Philadelphia.

Hazen has had fellowships, grants, and residencies from Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, NY; AIM Fellowship at the Bronx Museum, Squeaky Wheel Media Arts Center, New York State Council on the Arts/Wave Farm; Vermont Studio Center and the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art at the European Graduate School in Switzerland; and many others.


Current projects in her series of works The Legends of Spook Rock have evolved through personal collaboration with incarcerated individuals in New York State at the Columbia Secure Center for Girls, the Brookwood Secure Center for Youth, and the Shawangunk Correctional Facility which amplify the experiences of carceral space, aiming to address, disarm, and dismantle the complex dynamics in our systems of punitive power. In 2020 Hazen founded the Columbia Collective, an exhibiting group of emerging female/trans incarcerated and formerly incarcerated artists dedicated to exercising their gifts of creative freedom.

She has taught at the Rhode Island School of Design, NYU, The Stevens Institute of Technology, The Shanghai Institute of Visual Art, and as part of the Bard College Clemente courses in the humanities. She is a visiting artist-in-residence at Bard College in the Studio Arts program. She has studied at Brown University, MIT, and the European Graduate School. She holds a BFA from Biola University in California and an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design.

Hai-Wen Lin is a Taiwanese-American artist currently based in Chicago. They are an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and earned a Master of Design in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago where they were selected as a Fashion Future Graduate by the CFDA upon graduating. They have received fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, and the Ox-Bow School of Art and attended residencies at the Wassaic Project and Houston Center for Contemporary Craft. Lin has performed publicly at the Chicago Cultural Center and MU Gallery and has exhibited work in a variety of places including Prairie, in Chicago; Queen, in Bellingham, Washington; the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles; the Pittsburgh Glass Center; the Czong Institute for Contemporary Art, in Gimpo, South Korea; 3S Artspace in New Hampshire; the walls of their home; their friend’s home; on a plate; on a lake; on their body; in the sky.