"Luis Emilio Romero was living off the Jefferson L train stop in Bushwick, trying to concentrate on his oil painting despite the constant thrum of activity outside his door. But the Jersey City native lucked out when he was accepted in December to the Monira Foundation's highly competitive residency program at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City. Now he paints intricate, textile-influenced patterns as the light streams into his basement studio with no distractions."
"“I love it here,” Romero told Hyperallergic during Mana's Spring Open Studios this past weekend. My paintings imply a meditative spiritual process, and I need a space that is calm. I can just be here and continue building my practice."
"Since real estate developer Moishe Mana and co-founders Eugene Lemay and Yigal Ozeri converted the former century-old tobacco warehouse in 2011, the sprawling 2 million-square-foot campus has served as one of the nation's largest artist-run facilities, on par with MoMA PS1 and MASS MoCA. They embarked on a vision to mount multiple gallery exhibitions, host the International Center of Photography's archives, the Richard Meier Model Museum, and the estates of Dan Flavin and Irving Penn, and provide studio space for hundreds of artists."
"But the complex closed during COVID-19 and shifted much of its programming online, which dampened turnout from the city. (Lemay's indictment for evading $7.8 million in payroll taxes in 2021 d"
More than a third of Mana Contemporary’s artists opened their spaces to the public for Spring Open Studios, producing the largest participation in years. Luis Emilio Romero, a Jersey City native, described how a Monira Foundation residency at Mana gave him a calm basement studio where he could focus on intricate, textile-influenced oil paintings. The Jersey City campus, created from a former tobacco warehouse, is a large artist-run facility that supports exhibitions, archives, museum programming, and studio space for hundreds of artists. After closing during COVID-19 and moving programming online, turnout from New York City declined, and the open-studios event helped bring visitors back to the physical site.
Read at Hyperallergic
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