Meredith James, Kameelah Janan Rasheed, and Casey Tang make work that sheds light on personal and cultural forces—perception, record-keeping, vernacular belief—that drive the formation of individual and collective narratives.

Working in video, sculpture, and theater, Meredith James explores mechanisms of perception and the fallibility of observation. Elaborately crafted and playfully executed, her work reveals surprising and disorienting dimensions of the way we see the world around us. Kameelah Janan Rasheed is an artist-archivist who works in the space between visual and literary arts to explore how we construct narratives around our personal and social histories. She creates archive-like installations that visually map conversations between texts, ephemera, personal memorabilia, and photography. Casey Tang freely engages diverse disciplines including ecology and musicology in his exploration of socio-cultural narratives within and outside of Western worldviews. Through geographic and historic investigation of human experiences and material cultures, Tang re-contextualizes cultural systems in his multi-disciplinary practice that includes video, sound, and graphics and sculptural installation.

As the first recipients of the Queens Museum/Jerome Foundation Fellowship for Emerging Artists, these New York-based artists have spent the past year working closely with curators and other staff members to optimize opportunities to expand their practice with the Museum serving as a catalytic agent.  They were selected by a panel that included Naomi Beckwith (Curator, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago), Herb Tam (Curator, Museum of Chinese in America, New York), and Hitomi Iwasaki (Director of Exhibitions, Queens Museum, New York).