2024-2025 virtual Cohort
Fall 2024 | Winter 2025 | Spring 2025
Tuesdays via Zoom
With Canopy Mentor
EJ Hauser
Artist
Based in Brooklyn, NY
Cohort Artists
The artists featured below were accepted to the 2024-2025 year of The Canopy Program. Together, with the guidance of their Faculty Mentor, EJ Hauser, the artists will develop their studio practice through critiques, Artist Talks + Q&As, seminars, and workshops. The Canopy Program is a year-long commitment, this Cohort will meet via Zoom for three consecutive semesters. Their experience will culminate with a pop-up Group Show in Chelsea (NYC).
Guest Speakers + Visiting Critics
Each semester, EJ Hauser's Cohort recieved Artist Talks, Lectures, Workshops
and Visiting Critiques from an esteemed roster of Guest Artists + Speakers.
Erin Lee Jones
Guest Artist
Leeza Meksin
Guest Artist
Kris Rac
Art History Speaker
Eric Hibit
Color Theory Lecture
Keltie Ferris
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Kari Cholnoky
Artist Lecture + Visiting Critic
Amanda Nedham
Guest Writing Editor
Stephen Truax
Guest Curator
Jay Gorney
Guest Curator
Will Hutnick
Professional Practices Speaker
Adrienne Elise Tarver
Professional Practices Speaker
Canopy Mentor EJ Hauser
EJ Hauser (they/them) is a painter who lives and works in Brooklyn and is represented by Derek Eller Gallery in New York City and Haverkampf & Leistenschneider in Berlin. Hauser’s paintings are both graphic and open to interpretation, teetering between iconography and something familiar but abstract. This imagery shifts between omnivorous references both ancient and current — the paintings are mysterious talismans, employing buzzing pallets and marks that dance. Stuttering lines form a visual code like musical notes, which coalesce with atmospheric layers to create ineffable messages. Hauser’s source library draws from the natural world, imagery that is cross-pollinated with the formal qualities found in craftwork like rugs, fabrics, wallpapers, and mosaics, as well as digital visual characteristics, which they interpret through drawing and then transliterate onto canvas. Each piece is composed of multiple layers of color. They have shown extensively throughout the United States and Europe, including Anton Kern Gallery, New York, NY; Haverkampf & Leistenschneider, Berlin, DE; Brigitte Mulholland Paris, FR; Parrasch Heijnen, Los Angeles, CA; Sperone Westwater, New York, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Participant Inc., New York, NY; Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, New York, NY; Cheim &; Read, New York, NY; The Journal Gallery, New York, NY; AWHRHWAR, Los Angeles, CA; KARST, Brighton, UK; The Breeder, Athens, GR. Hauser’s work has been featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Frieze, The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, and Turps Banana, among others. Hauser received a BFA from University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA and an MFA from University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, NC. They are a recipient of the 2021 American Academy of Arts and Letters Purchase Prize. In the Fall of 2023, Hauser was the Teiger Mentor in the Arts at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY.
Cohort Exhibition
Each Canopy Cohort presents a culminating pop-up group exhibition.
Raccoon Energy
Canopy Studio, 508 W. 26th St. #6E
June 19-21, 2025
Racoon Energy is a pop-up Group Exhibition celebrating the work of nine artists who worked together for one year with their Canopy Mentor, EJ Hauser, as part of the 2024-2025 Canopy Program. Artists include Beth Fishman, Elana Bober, Jenny Zoey Casey, Jerstin Crosby, Brezaja Hutcheson, Katherine Adkins, Hanna, Jenn Garrido and Jorge Rios.
Raccoons symbolize magic and shape shifting. They summon curiosity and remind us to embrace change. From the beginning, our cohort welcomed ‘raccoon energy’. We began the year with questions, asking each other about the role art plays in our individual lives: how much our studio practice can hold; will we recognize our work when it shows up? Throughout, we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable through art making and conversation. We witnessed one another's work as it expanded, noticing its messages from the future. We helped each other decipher and elaborate on these transmissions, growing as artists. The collection of work in this show is a mysterious brew of our individual journeys, stirred up together to cast a new spell.
Brezaja Hutcheson’s layered brushwork creates a moment of transcendence, blurring the line between what is seen and what lies beneath—a process of self-exploration in search of meaning. A shared interest in transcendence and the unseen also guides the work of Elana Bober, an interdisciplinary artist whose pieces are inspired by irregular patterns in the natural world. Her investigations of fluidity echo natural systems and cycles.
Materiality becomes a site of care in Jenny Zoe Casey’s practice, where she draws an analogy between the act of art making and caretaking. Her process-rich approach deepens the conversation around how labor and emotion are embedded in form. Exploring material boundaries from another angle, Jen Garrido breaks from the traditional canvas, crafting shaped paintings through collage and cut-out forms. Her hybrid works occupy a space between object and image, each asserting a distinct visual identity.
Questions of form and transformation also arise in Jerstin Crosby’s geometric compositions. His shapes repeat and shapeshift across works, gradually forming a symbolic language—one that hints at a cohesive narrative just out of reach. Jorge Rios delves into the language of abstraction through gestural marks and graphic structure. His work, vibrant with saturated pigments and layered techniques, builds on the history of abstraction while creating its own visual syntax.
Katherine Adkins engages abstraction as a method for recalling and recording time. Her all-over compositions interweave pixelated brushstrokes with hand-made craft elements, creating a tactile meditation on memory and emotion. Beth Fishman’s energetic paintings similarly capture the interplay between the ephemeral and the material. Drawing from her background in skateboarding and glassblowing, Fishman’s work channels motion, tension, and the impermanence of lived experience.
Rosy Hanna’s painting considers the simultaneous mundanity and mystery of everyday life through the medium of egg tempera. Using the recognizable settings and symbols of cities; escalators, bridges, cars, Hanna evokes a sense of familiarity that is then disrupted through the distortion of perspective, scale and narrative.
Raccoons symbolize magic and shape shifting. They summon curiosity and remind us to embrace change. From the beginning, our cohort welcomed ‘raccoon energy’. We began the year with questions, asking each other about the role art plays in our individual lives: how much our studio practice can hold; will we recognize our work when it shows up? Throughout, we allowed ourselves to be vulnerable through art making and conversation. We witnessed one another's work as it expanded, noticing its messages from the future. We helped each other decipher and elaborate on these transmissions, growing as artists. The collection of work in this show is a mysterious brew of our individual journeys, stirred up together to cast a new spell.
Brezaja Hutcheson’s layered brushwork creates a moment of transcendence, blurring the line between what is seen and what lies beneath—a process of self-exploration in search of meaning. A shared interest in transcendence and the unseen also guides the work of Elana Bober, an interdisciplinary artist whose pieces are inspired by irregular patterns in the natural world. Her investigations of fluidity echo natural systems and cycles.
Materiality becomes a site of care in Jenny Zoe Casey’s practice, where she draws an analogy between the act of art making and caretaking. Her process-rich approach deepens the conversation around how labor and emotion are embedded in form. Exploring material boundaries from another angle, Jen Garrido breaks from the traditional canvas, crafting shaped paintings through collage and cut-out forms. Her hybrid works occupy a space between object and image, each asserting a distinct visual identity.
Questions of form and transformation also arise in Jerstin Crosby’s geometric compositions. His shapes repeat and shapeshift across works, gradually forming a symbolic language—one that hints at a cohesive narrative just out of reach. Jorge Rios delves into the language of abstraction through gestural marks and graphic structure. His work, vibrant with saturated pigments and layered techniques, builds on the history of abstraction while creating its own visual syntax.
Katherine Adkins engages abstraction as a method for recalling and recording time. Her all-over compositions interweave pixelated brushstrokes with hand-made craft elements, creating a tactile meditation on memory and emotion. Beth Fishman’s energetic paintings similarly capture the interplay between the ephemeral and the material. Drawing from her background in skateboarding and glassblowing, Fishman’s work channels motion, tension, and the impermanence of lived experience.
Rosy Hanna’s painting considers the simultaneous mundanity and mystery of everyday life through the medium of egg tempera. Using the recognizable settings and symbols of cities; escalators, bridges, cars, Hanna evokes a sense of familiarity that is then disrupted through the distortion of perspective, scale and narrative.
