ArtWRKD celebrates innovative approaches to art-making through special projects, fostering curation and incubation within its space. By breaking down traditional structures and constraints, it creates an environment that nurtures creativity, celebrates fresh perspectives, and brings groundbreaking concepts to life.
2026 SPECIAL PROJECTS
THE MINA PROJECT at ArtWRKD
Are you looking to be a part of a creative collective, and have an immersive experience of theatre, film, poetry, or costume design? Poet and filmmaker Vasiliki Katsarou is developing a multimedia poetry-film project exploring the life and legacy of 20th century artist-poet Mina Loy. This winter and spring 2026, ArtWRKD will host this work-in-progress through a series of immersive workshops. These workshops will enable participants to hone their skills and gain experience in writing, performance, and video; and to work in creative collaboration and make creative connections that may spark their own future creative projects.
Workshop #1: Experimental Writing, Jan. 24-25, 2026
This will be a poetry/text-focused- Mina Loy reading group & writing workshop led by Vasiliki. Open to writers and others with a particular interest in modernism, feminism, and creative expression. Prior to the weekend workshop, participants in this workshop will have read Lost Writings by Mina Loy ed. Karla Kelsey (Yale Univ. Press). The weekend-long discussion group will culminate in generating poems, and other forms of experimental writing.
Workshop #2: Bringing Writing to the Stage: March 7-8, 2026
Led by Vasiliki Katsarou together with ArtWRKD founder and artist Ashara Shapiro, this performance-based workshop will focus on adaptation and performance basics. It will begin with a read-through of selected writings of Mina Loy, together with original writing developed by participants in Workshop #1. The short scripts developed will inspire movement, and lead to performance experiments.
Workshop #3: Mask-work, Set & Costume Design Mar. 21-22, 2026
This performance-based workshops will also be led by Vasiliki Katsarou together with ArtWRKD founder and artist Ashara Shapiro. It will delve even further into performance/choreography, costume & set design.
Videography: May 2-3, 2026
Participants in Workshops 1, 2, and 3 will be invited to attend and assist (depending on interest and experience) the filming of experimental scenes drawn from the generated writing and performance experiments. These will be captured on video by Brooklyn-based filmmaker Tommy Gonzalez, under the direction of Vasiliki Katsarou. Those who take up crew positions for this shoot will be acknowledged in the final film’s credits for their work. A video-screening of the rough-cut of the poetry-film will be held at ArtWRKD at a later date TBD. The goal of this session is to create a work-in-progress, which will be refined
and taken to the next stage (editing and installation).
Registration for these workshops is open to the public: especially to emerging and experienced poets, writers, filmmakers, and creatives of all kinds, ages 21+. All workshops provide a unique opportunity to participate in the vibrant, creative unfolding of a new multimedia artwork. A limited number of scholarships are available. Please contact Vasiliki for details - cineutopia@gmail.com
More details: Weekend workshops are both Saturday and Sunday 10am-5pm. Lunch will be provided.
Workshop registration:
Workshop #1 –$275
Workshop #2 –$375
Workshop #3 –$375
Choose the workshops which most speak to your interests. It is very much welcomed, but not required, to participate in all workshops.
Bios
Mina Loy was born in 1882 in the UK, and was living in Colorado in 1966 with her daughters when she passed away. Mina Loy’s life in art included all the modernist art movements of the 20th century: Dadaism, Futurism, and Surrealism, as well as assemblage/collage art using recycled materials. In Florence and Paris and New York, Loy wrote avant-garde poetry, wrote published and unpublished novels; acted in the theater with poet William Carlos Williams, and found the love of her life--a poet and boxer, who was also the nephew of Oscar Wilde. Then she lost him in a tragic boat accident. Her son-in-law was the gallerist Julien Levy, whose gallery featured the most prominent works of modernism. Loy’s life is the stuff of legend; but her ground-breaking poetry was virtually lost to history, then found again through the work of devotees, who have assembled a body of significant scholarship on her art. There could be many films of Mina Loy, and The Mina Project proposes to create one of them: a poetry-film that in the 21st century, will reflect on Mina Loy, and reflect us back to ourselves.
Vasiliki Katsarou is a poet, filmmaker, curator, and publisher, with an MFA in filmmaking from Boston University, and an undergraduate degree in Literature from Harvard College. Her experience includes film production in France and Greece, and as writer-director: 16mm short films, as well as an award-winning 35mm film. She has published several poetry collections, and was honored with an invitation to read at the Dodge Poetry Festival and serve as a Geraldine R. Dodge Poet in New Jersey. She has worked on the writing and art of Mina Loy for over two decades.
Ashara Shapiro is a multidisciplinary creative, arts educator, and entrepreneur. A magna cum laude graduate of Emerson College (BFA in acting and theater education) she brings a rich performance background to this project. Ashara is the founder of ArtWRKD in Newtown PA, a dynamic space featuring a gallery, artists’ studios, and workshops. From her ArtWRKD studio, she also produces her own wearable art.
SLUMPING CARYATIDS
A SPECIAL PROJECT OF MARGARET KOVAL
In response to the disintegration of the norms and values that have been formative for the artist’s identity as an American, painter Margaret Koval has begun a series of figure paintings that are provisionally called ‘Slumping Caryatids.’ This new series will build on a prior body of work that addressed the same issues by positioning the viewer within a liminal world, where ordinary people and familiar places seem unsettling and a sense of liquefaction pervades. She has described that work as landscape paintings of the ‘uncanny valley of everyday life’. It mostly deploys an outward gaze, offering the perspective of a viewer looking at the world–with a hint of the world looking back at the viewer. The new series will shift focus back to the viewer more unequivocally. It will reflect on how the liminal period of history we’re living through makes us feel, but also how its pressures are forming and deforming us, in real time.
To do that, the ‘Slumping Caryatids’ series will also build on Koval’s singular painting technique.
She creates her images by applying thick oil paint to the back of loose-weave linen and pushes it through the pores. The paint extrudes out the front like raised stitches or long strands of yarn. The painting’s surface thus looks like a tapestry, needlepoint, or old carpet. And her ‘ordinary people and familiar places’ are literally sieved into being through the fine mesh of her canvas screen. Viewers describe their encounters with the paintings’ physical presence as an uncanny experience of its own, prompting strong urges to touch and investigate in depth.
The ‘Slumping Caryatids’ series will lean on that ‘sieving’ process and the visceral connection it creates with viewers to express the psychological and social tensions of the present moment. ‘Slumping Caryatids’ deploys references to Greek antiquity as a prompt to see these paintings in a political light. Caryatids, of course, are the female-sculpted columns used as building supports in classical architecture, now, a single human figure dressed in contemporary clothing, roughly life-sized but with monumentally sturdy proportions, leaning hard against a chain-link fence. The two main paintings will act as supports and entrance to the space patrons experience, which will include portraits and group imaging.
Visually, the individual paintings will merge in the viewer’s eye thanks to the dominating presence of the chain-link fence. The fence will extend across the entire surface of each painting, flat on the picture plane. Conceptually, it will create both a boundary limit for the figures and another grid through which they are being sieved. But it will do something more. We will display the works in a three-sided configuration that funnels viewers into its center. They will literally find themselves fenced in; corralled by the paintings into a figurative pen.
Thus, the fence enclosure becomes a vector of shared experience with the figures. Stress and fragmentation will be observable at first glance. The figures’ exposed flesh and body parts will bulge through the apertures of the chain link. The forms themselves will be disaggregated into diamond-shaped units; pressure points will be accentuated. Whereas the fence will be painted onto the linen surface, the figures themselves will be established from the back of the canvas, with paint extruded, first, through the linen support and then through the bas-relief of the fence. Paint strands will bulge and curl around the fence, physically performing the tensions that the works depict. The pressure will be palpable.
From a slight distance, however, these paintings take on a calmer, more ambiguous persona. As mentioned, the paint threads and the patches of exposed linen make them look like tapestries, or worn rugs–artifacts suggesting the repetition of history… even a societal memento mori.
This special project is being created and presented to the Positions section of Art Basel, Miami. "The Positions sector at Art Basel Miami Beach is a dedicated platform for emerging artists to showcase major solo projects, providing a launchpad for new talent. Featuring around 19 curated solo presentations, it highlights diverse, ambitious, and often site-specific work across various media."
2025 SPECIAL PROJECTS
Meryl Lettire
Heroes of the Holocaust is a traveling art exhibition that honors the stories of creative resilience during one of the darkest periods of human history. The series consists of 20-25 portraits, each a fabric assemblage that tells the story of individuals who, despite facing unimaginable hardships, found solace, strength, and a voice through their art. This exhibition will not only display these stories through the medium of textiles but will also include an educational curriculum to deepen viewers’ understanding of the historical and cultural significance of these figures. WORKSHOP GALLERY - ON VIEW JANUARY 10TH - 26TH
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Katee Boyle
This body of work will illustrate a life lived in the veil, the thin place where one becomes the overseer and executor of dreams. The float through the stages of a growing distance between all of the living beings, the Believing Space. EXHIBITION SPACE - ON VIEW MARCH 7TH - 30TH
02
Unthinkable - Paul Plumadore
For the past 30 years, I‘ve been repurposing ephemera to create images that feel three-dimensional, play with scale and content, disregard norms, and manifest the inner life of characters. If your mind is plunged into unknown territory and your imagination sparked with shock and humor, I will feel I have succeeded. EXHIBITION SPACE - ON VIEW JUNE 6TH - 29TH STAGE READING WITH ILLUSTRATIVE PROJECTION- ARTWRKD EXHIBITION SPACE ON JUNE 29TH
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