Ocean Virtual Art Residency
The Ocean Virtual Art Residency program, in collaboration with MANGO, empowers artists to embark on a journey of developing new projects centered around the residency's thematic focus: OCEAN. This residency aims to provide dedicated time and space for artists interested in ocean science, whether emerging or established, and to cultivate a collaborative community where like-minded artists can connect and create together.
The OVAR residency creates a welcoming, empowering, and challenging virtual space for artists. Over 5 weeks, participants met weekly to discuss ideas, critique concepts, and share resources and knowledge, fostering mutual support and project enhancement.
We are thrilled to showcase the projects developed by each artist during the residency. Through the power of art and the brilliance of these artists, prepare to be transported, inspired, and spurred to ignite your passion for our Ocean and their future.
Why a map?
We intentionally chose to present the participating artists using a map format. This decision was driven by our desire to visually highlight the global interconnectedness symbolized by our oceans. By mapping the artists, we aim to emphasize how, regardless of location, we all share a deep love and concern for our planet's waters. This spatial representation underscores our planet's interconnectedness and the collective efforts of artists to draw inspiration from the ocean and, through their work, inspire others.
Ocean Virtual Exhibition
We recommend viewing the map on a desktop. If you would like to see the map bigger, just click on the top right square. Every artist is placed on the map with a colored marker. When you click on the marker, you will see a window to the left of your screen with the name of the artist, their piece, the artist’s statement about their work, and a link to their website. Please click on the images so you can see the full image or video. If the artist has several pieces in the exhibition, you can scroll through them using the arrows.
Leave your feedback for the artists here!
Open Studio
Participating Artists
Richard Vivenzio
Richard Vivenzio is an inter-disciplinary artist formerly based in Brooklyn NY, who has recently relocated to Los Angeles, CA. Through sculpture and installation, Vivenzio’s work explores interior and exterior space through tangible and perceived intervention. Using everyday materials along with light, shadow, and gravity, his compositions draw visual conclusions to how the unseen affects perception, exemplified by the intangible materials being as important as the physical. Using this concept, Vivenzio has shed light upon the effects of climate change and the ramifications of metastatic pollution and consumerism, while striving to create the work sustainably.
Vivenzio’s work aims to intrigue the viewer with its aesthetic, then capture their attention within the recontextualization of everyday materials in non-everyday environments. Once captivated by the external elements, their focus can shift to the work’s intent—to reflect on our impact on nature and how small, mindful adjustments can lead to further introspection and meaningful, actionable change.
Vivenzio received an MFA in Fine Art from The School of Visual Art (SVA) in 2016. In 2024, Vivenzio spent much time in Costa Rica, working with the PI Organization and Marriott Autograph Collection Hotel Punta Islita, to create a permanent public art installation and workshops series at Museo Islita, fostering a relationship between the local arts community and abroad.
In recent years, Vivenzio has shown at The New House Center of Contemporary Art NY, Las Cruces Gallery at the Southwest Environmental Center NM, Rockefeller Center NY (in collaboration with The Climate Museum and The United Nations Environmental Program), and The C. Rockefeller Center in Dresden, DE. Additionally, Vivenzio has been included in fairs—PI Art Festival, Pulse Art Fair-Projects, Flux Art Fair—and has been published in La Nacion, Hyperallergic, Artnet, and Time Out Magazine.
www.richardvivenzio.com
Midori Samson
Dr. Midori Samson (she/her/siya) サムソンみどり is a bassoonist, sound artist, educator, and social worker whose artistic practice integrates music with social justice and healing-centered care. Holding degrees in music performance and social work from Juilliard and the universities of Texas, Michigan, and Wisconsin, she facilitates arts and healing workshops for communities around the world. Her proudest recent activities include touring the Turkey/Syria border with a circus arts festival to perform for families living in conflict zones, co-writing a play with artists in Kigali to commemorate the anniversary of the Rwandan genocide, researching the artistic contributions of atomic bomb survivors in Hiroshima, leading virtual arts therapy sessions for internally displaced high schoolers in Ukraine, and composing an audio-visual album based on stories of her Filipino/Japanese immigrant ancestors. She is a professor at the University of Kansas, performs with the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, and volunteers as a crisis hotline counselor. midorisamson.com
Bradly Couch
Bradly Couch is an artist and conceptual cartographer with an A.S. in Computer Information Systems and certifications in networking. Bradly Couch's artistic research reveals a coherent, global system of mythological iconography encoded directly into the Earth's topography. This is not random pattern recognition but a self-validating system of immense complexity. His work has been exhibited and published, including peer-reviewed presentations on the "Heaven on Earth Map" at ISEA and the Human Vision and Electronic Imaging Conference. He received a grant from The Urania Trust in 2024 for "Heaven on Earth: As Above, So Below."
Natalie Wells
Natalie Wells is an emerging printmaker based in the United Kingdom. Since studying art at school, she has had a deep love of prints and printmaking, having been inspired by a workshop run by Norman Ackroyd. As she built a career in marketing and raised a family, she struggled to find the time to fully explore this passion beyond it just being a hobby.
In her twenties, Natalie also discovered a passion for scuba diving, becoming an instructor and travelling to many countries worldwide to dive. The underwater world holds endless wonders, and she has always enjoyed capturing them through photography. Recently, she made space to combine these two creative passions. Natalie’s underwater photos now serve as the inspiration for her prints.
Natalie loves sharing the beauty of marine life, especially species that people may not have encountered before. Part of the joy for her is in choosing the right printmaking technique to express the essence of each image. She is always experimenting and learning new methods to help bring these subjects to life.
Techniques used by Natalie include: etching; screen printing; Mokuhanga; linocut; and cyanotype.
Natalie has trained in printmaking in the UK at Central Saint Martins, South Hill Park Arts Centre, and Reading College, as well as at The Art Print Residence in Spain.
Natalie Wells (@littleprintden) • Instagram photos and videos
Marine Theunissen
Raphaël Dely
LABORARE is a collaborative duo composed of Raphaël Dely, a non-binary media artist, and Marine Theunissen, an artist-researcher working at the intersection of live arts and technology. Based in Moncton (New Brunswick), we have been co-creating works since 2018 that bring together our respective practices through a research-creation methodology we call the “Laboratoire-oeuvre” (Laboratory-artwork). Our projects explore the relationship between humans and non-human entities onstage and in life.
In our artistic approach, the laboratory itself is the artwork—where artistic experimentation merges with anthropological inquiry. Encounters, interviews, training sessions, recordings, performances, conceptual explorations, and the development of visual and interactive pieces all form part of the creative process and are considered as pieces of our artwork. While the laboratory usually unfolds behind closed doors, it opens to the public through encounters during our research steps and with choreographic, visual, or media pieces that emerge—whether finished or still in progress.
We aim to invite audiences into the work-in-process: to witness the search, the testing of ideas, and the unfolding of forms. This is always done in connection with each project’s core theme and with a strong ethical attention to the relationships—both human and more-than-human—that shape our practice.
From 2018 to 2023, our last Laboratoire-oeuvre focused on partnerships between human performers and technological entities (artificial intelligences) in the context of collective dance improvisation. It has been broadcasted in international festivals and dance programmer.
Aloïs Aguettant
Aloïs Aguettant is a marine social science researcher-to-be. Currently doing her PhD in Human Geography at the University of Milano-Bicocca and based in Sicily, she is is part of a research project investigating the human dimensions of the conservation of Marine Biodiversity in the Mediterranean (MEDiverSEAty). Her interdisciplinary research specifically looks at the gender dynamics of fishing communities - tying together notions of care and equity in marine spaces. She experiments with participative photography and mixed-creative methods as a way of collecting scientific data.
https://mediverseaty.eu/
Leila Hernandez
I am Leila Hernández, MFA, and artist and educator in the Art Department at South Texas College, originally from El Salvador. My practice spans oil pastels, watercolor, and mixed-media textiles made from recycled clothing sourced from thrift stores and pulgas, reflecting my commitment to sustainability and the lived histories held within the materials, My work often explores cycles of transformation, interconnectedness and migration. Drawing from culture, symbolism, and nature to consider harmony and change.
During the OCEAN IV Visual Art Residency, my focus centered on the decline of whale songs—a resonant symbol of silence, loss, and ecological fragility. I studied the blue and humpback whales, translating their vocal patterns into visual form through dry pastel and fluorescent materials Using organic, concentric waveforms, I sought to echo the way sound travels through the ocean, capturing voices now fading due to global warming and overfishing. This work reflects on our shared responsibility to these majestic mammals and the urgency of protecting what may soon fall silent forever.
Heather Stivison
Heather Stivison is a visual artist who works primarily in painting and drawing. Her artworks have been exhibited in museums, universities, and galleries across the United States and in juried shows in Europe and Asia. She is a former museum director, former president of both the New Jersey Association of Museums and the Mid-Atlantic Association of Museums. Today, she is a full-time artist who creates her work Hatch Street Studios, a converted factory building in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She is a published author and a contributing arts writer for Artscope Magazine. She holds an MFA in painting from the University of Massachusetts and is represented at Pleiades Gallery in New York City.
For the past ten years, Stivison has lived on the coast of Massachusetts, and the ocean has become part of her daily existence. She is fascinated by the ocean—both scientifically and visually. As the daughter of a scientist and the mother of a scientist, she is especially interested in projects in which art and science collide. She recently completed a multi-year collaboration with a scientist who was researching sea water biochemicals at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. This gave her the opportunity to visualize, in paint, the invisible chemistry he found in various zones and depths of the Atlantic Ocean.
Stivison is fascinated by the reflections and patterns created by the ocean’s surface. In a group of surface paintings she explores how much she can alter and abstract ocean patterns, while still maintaining the sense that the subject is surface water. Her paintings seek to capture the essence of water—something clear and colorless, with a shape entirely formed by external forces of objects, land, wind, gravity. Searching for water’s most primary qualities, she uses light, color, form, shape, line, to engender a sense of water. Fluidity, reflections, rhythms are evident on the surface, while a sense of weightlessness and mystery are found in the unknown ocean depths. Her explorations of ocean water have led her to become a vocal advocate for protecting our oceans and the many ecosystems within it.
https://www.heatherstivisonart.com/water
https://www.heatherstivisonart.com/synergy
https://www.heatherstivisonart.com/ebb-flow
Gina Laurenzi
A mover, maker, researcher and educator, Gina Laurenzi graduated from the University of WI - Milwaukee where she earned her MFA in dance. With roots in jazz dance and contemporary ballet, Laurenzi’s professional dance career began when she was eighteen and awarded a full merit scholarship to train at Giordano Dance Center, later performing with Giordano II and Inaside Chicago Dance. In Milwaukee, Laurenzi’s performance career expanded as she began to perform contemporary dance works as a company dancer with Danceworks Performance MKE, Wild Space Dance Company and Hyperlocal MKE. In 2015, Gina created the Gina Laurenzi Dance Project to present and develop choreographic ideas. Through the project, Gina created six self-produced concerts featuring a collective of artists and various music collaborators. Gina was most recently a Co-artistic Director at Danceworks, and for the past ten years, a lecturer in the dance department at the University of WI - Milwaukee where she taught ballet, jazz, modern, contemporary, composition, and lead repertory rehearsals. Interested in keeping dance accessible, building community, and encouraging connection, Gina started a series called TERRESTRIALscapes; a reflective experience that takes place in nature and stimulates creativity as participants respond to the experience through movement, writing, and art-making. Gina aims to craft curious, and dynamic, interdisciplinary works of dance that spark wonder and invite reflection. A passion for scuba diving and a lover of nature, Gina’s recent choreographic work explores awe and the human impact on the planet through the medium of dance. Laurenzi refers to her movement works as “choreographic ecosystems”. The “ecosystems” are carefully crafted worlds and interdisciplinary works that spark wonder and invite reflection regarding the human relationship to the planet. Laurenzi’s works meet at an intersection of curiosity and eco-conscious ideas; through a layered creative process, Laurenzi works to choreograph immersive worlds through sensing, observation, and reflection. Laurenzi continues her research as an Assistant Professor of Dance at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley and is thrilled to have the opportunity to share her movement research through this virtual residency.