Raul Ayala
Resident, SHINE Portrait Studio

Raúl Ayala’s practice bridges art, social engagement, and pedagogy through large-scale paintings, site-specific installations, collaborative murals, performance, and public interventions. As a drawing and painting lecturer at Rutgers University, his classroom mirrors his studio: a space for connection, storytelling, and experimentation. Working in both New York and Ecuador, Ayala’s work weaves cultural narratives and ecological themes into the fabric of shared spaces, inviting participants to craft a sense of belonging.

Ayala’s current and upcoming projects include the Fourth Arts Block (FABnyc) Artist Residency and Public Art Commission, for which he is developing a multilayered public light installation at Sara D. Roosevelt Park that explores the immigrant experience. His 2026 work also includes a Blue Sky Center Residency and Action Fellowship in Cuyama, California, and a Rutgers University Cultural Programming Grant for faculty-led cultural programming.

His mural commissions and collaborative installations range from a major public mural for Pierce County in Tacoma, Washington (2025), to Hatarisunchik, commissioned by El Museo del Barrio’s Talk of the Town Residency (2024); A Giving Hand for NYC Health + Hospitals Arts in Medicine (2024); and Karanakuy, an interactive altar installation at Green-Wood Cemetery (2024). Ayala’s mural portfolio also features Juntos Caminando with Layqa Nuna Yawar for Make the Road New York (2024); Aya Uma in Jamaica, Queens (2023); Nuestra Épica, a collaboration with Vertigo Graffiti for Metro de Quito (2023); and the triptych Yakumanta at Yaku Museo del Agua (Museum of Water) (2022).

During his residency at SHINE Portrait Studio, Ayala developed In Fervor, in which seeds, flowers, and spices from the Ecuadorian Andes are reimagined within a geometric composition designed as a site of transformation. The backdrop draws conceptual inspiration from chicha fermentation, framing this traditional process as a metaphor for cultivating belonging, grounding oneself, and resisting the systemic alienation of our time and space. Here, the visual landscape becomes an active domain of self-determination for diasporic communities.

Throughout the residency, this environment will be physically activated by a series of performative movements featuring custom, wearable garments, forming the visual foundation for an upcoming video performance.

Kimmah Dennis

Resident, Express Newark, Educational Initiatives

Kimmah Dennis (b. 1996, Yamoussoukro, Côte d’Ivoire) is a Liberian-Ivorian painter exploring displacement, identity, and inherited memory. Through a fusion of materials, methods, and visual languages, she constructs layered narratives that bridge a diasporic past with an expansive present, envisioning future possibilities shaped by resilience and adaptation. Born during the First Liberian Civil War, Dennis draws from the trauma of forced displacement, government instability, and survival. The experience of uprooting at a moment’s notice profoundly informs her artistic approach, leading her to reject the constraints of a single medium. Instead, she embraces painting, collage, and experimental processes to create compositions that reflect the fragmentation and reconstruction of identity.

Dennis earned a BFA from Rutgers University and an MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was awarded the prestigious New Artist Society Full Scholarship Merit Award. Her work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, including a recent solo exhibition at Temple University Rome Gallery and the Trolley Barn Gallery in Poughkeepsie, NY, as well as the American Academy in Rome, the New York Academy of Art, the University of Chicago, SHINE Studio, the Paul Robeson Gallery, and the Philly Art Collective. Dennis is the recipient of the 2024–25 Terra Foundation Affiliated Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the 2025 Silver Art Residency and Visiting Professorship at Rutgers University, and the 2026 Artist in Residence.

During her residency, Dennis developed “I Will Not Be a Loose Talker,” a painting made from newspapers her grandmother in Liberia once used to wrap dried fish sent to her mother—collaged into the canvas so that the scent still lingers when the work is shown. Made during a period of enforced isolation, the piece became a three-generation collaboration when Dennis invited her six-year-old brother, Prince, to add his own marks to the canvas, and grew into an interactive work with an embedded blackboard notebook inviting viewers to do the same. The result is a living archive that asks who is permitted to speak, and treats legacy not as something fixed, but as something continuously rewritten through participation.

As the 2026–2027 Express Newark Artist-in-Residence, Dennis will develop a new body of interdisciplinary work examining legacy, migration, memory, and intergenerational storytelling through painting, collage, found materials, sound, and participatory installation. In partnership with Express Newark’s Educational Initiatives, she will engage Newark’s youth and community through summer instruction, artist talks, open studios, and hands-on workshops centered on creative expression and collective history.