NYC Announces Three New Public Artists in Residence
Ifeoma Ebo, Stephen Kwok, and Mauricio Higuera will bring “creative problem solving” to three public agencies.
The New York City Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA) has selected three artists to be embedded across public agencies over the next year as part of a 10-year-old municipal residency program.
As part of the Public Artists in Residence (PAIR) program, the three artists — Ifeoma Ebo, Stephen Kwok, and Mauricio Higuera — will be placed in the Mayor's Public Engagement Unit, New York City Department of Small Business Services, and the Mayor's Office of Housing Recovery Operations, respectively. Over the next 12 months, the resident artists will work in tandem with their respective agencies to produce a public artwork.
The three artists, who will each receive a $40,000 stipend and a desk at their partner agencies, are intended to bring "creative problem solving" to city agencies as they address urgent civil issues, DCLA Commissioner Laurie Cumbo said in a statement.
For the first four months, the selected artists will shadow agency employees, attending meetings and visiting relevant sites, in a process meant to build trust. The residents will then propose a collaborative project for their agencies.
The city launched the public residency in 2015, drawing inspiration from the work of Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who served as the City’s first official artist-in-residence with the NYC Department of Sanitation in 1977. As part of her unpaid tenure, Ukeles shook the hands of thousands of New York City sanitation workers in her “Touch Sanitation” (1979–80).
Incoming Mayor Zohran Mamdani lauded public arts residencies in city agencies on the campaign trail while speaking about accessibility to the arts.
Brooklyn-based architect and designer Ifeoma Ebo, who is the Principal of Creative Urban Alchemy, an urban planning studio, will deploy artmaking to bridge gaps between the government and community at the Mayor's Public Engagement Unit. Ebo describes her work as rooted in "diasporic understandings of the Black experience."
"Through participatory design processes that center community voices, I hope to create artistic interventions that make city services more accessible while building lasting partnerships between vulnerable New Yorkers and the institutions meant to serve them," Ebo said in a statement shared with Hyperallergic.
Curator and artist Stephen Kwok of Brooklyn, who will work with the NYC Department of Small Business Services, said in a statement that he hopes his work will help "resist encroaching monoculture and contribute to a more textured,
dynamic urban environment." Kwok's previous work includes digital and participatory performances, such as his 2021 "Recreational Meetings," which used video conference platforms for creative experimentation.
"My work focuses on site not just as physical space, but as a system that shapes social, cultural, and political possibility, especially in everyday environments like storefronts and public service centers, where routine can be reconfigured to produce unexpected exchange and imagination," Kwok said.
Colombia-born educator and artist Mauricio Higuera, who will work with the Mayor’s Office of Housing Recovery Operations, which has assisted asylum seekers, said he would "lend a hand in this effort through the arts" by "engaging and collaborating with our newest New Yorkers to mark this moment in history." Higuera, who teaches drawing at Cooper Union, interrogates physical and immaterial borders in his multifaceted practice.
“As I get to know the staff and make art with fellow migrants to reflect together on migration today, it starts dawning on us that the experience is as much a displacement as it is an exchange of stories and images we hold as the horizon of our lives,” Higuera told Hyperallergic.
