ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Friday, February 13th, at 8pm, ISSUE presents a first-time collaboration between multimedia artist and 2014 ISSUE AIR Raúl de Nieves and interdisciplinary artist Dawn Kasper (2015 AIR) in honor of the anniversary season. The evening will open with a performance by Justin Allen (2020 AIR).
Bringing together two artists whose practices foreground transformation and world-building through live performance, Raúl de Nieves and Dawn Kasper meet for a striking new collaboration. Exploring the dynamic tension between individual authorship and collective creativity, the artists draw on de Nieves’s symbolic visual language and Kasper’s improvisatory “scenes” to shape a new immersive encounter.
Writer and performer Justin Allen returns to ISSUE with a new work building on his interest in rhythm, language, communication, and sound. Pulling from his backgrounds in tap dance and writing, Allen will play with the many ways cadence can appear in time and space.
Raúl de Nieves (born in Michoacan, Mexico; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY) is a multimedia artist, performer and musician whose wide-ranging practice investigates notions of beauty and transformation. De Nieves’ visual symbolism draws on the motifs of classical Catholicism and Mexican vernacular to create his own unique mythology. Through processes of accumulation and adornment, the artist transforms readily available materials into spectacular objects, which he then integrates into immersive narrative environments. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include and imagine you are here, Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD (2023); A window to the see, a spirit star chiming in the wind of wonder..., Henry Art Gallery, Seattle, WA (2023); The Treasure House of Memory, ICA Boston, Boston, MA (2021); Eternal Return & the Obsidian Heart, Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, Miami, FL (2021) and Reemerge the Zero Begins Your Life, Eternal is Your Light, SCAD Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2020). De Nieves has participated in numerous group exhibitions including those at Hauser & Wirth, The High Line, MoMA PS1, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, K11 Foundation, Documenta 14, Performa 13, ICA Philadelphia, The Watermill Center, The Kitchen, Artists Space and numerous other venues. His work is included in public collections at the Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
Dawn Kasper is an interdisciplinary artist working across genres of performance, installation, sculpture, drawing, photography, video and sound. Her work often improvisational emerges out of a fascination with existentialism, subjects of vulnerability, desire, and the construction of meaning. In 2017, Kasper participated in the 57th Venice Biennale, Viva Arte Viva, curated by Christine Macel, with a 6-month durational performative installation in the Central Pavilion entitled “The Sun, The Moon, and The Stars” (2017). Select recent solo exhibitions include: Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Portland, OR; Tang Museum, Skidmore College, NY; ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy; CCS Bard College, NY; ISSUE Project Room, New York; and David Lewis. Select group exhibitions include: American Academy in Rome, Italy; The 2012 Whitney Biennial, curated by Elisabeth Sussman and Jay Sanders, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Tramway, Glasgow, Scotland; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; Pacific Standard Time Public and Performance Art, Los Angeles, CA; Public Art Fund, Art Basel Miami Beach, FL; The Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst, Zurich, among others. Kasper is represented by David Lewis in New York, and has work included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; ADN Collection, Bolzano, Italy; and Aïshti Foundation, Beirut, Lebanon.
Justin Allen works in music and sound, performance, visual art, and writing. He has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, The Shed, and ISSUE Project Room and received support from Franklin Furnace, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Jerome Foundation. He received his BA in literary studies from Eugene Lang College at The New School and his MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2022 he released a four-song EP with his punk band Black Boots. In the fall of 2024, he released his first book, Language Arts, published by Wendy’s Subway.
