ossabaw island residency

Session One [October 24–31, 2026]

Le’Andra LeSeur

Tulsa, OK

LeSeur is a multidisciplinary artist whose work encompasses a range of media including video, installation, photography, painting, and performance. Her body of work, a celebration of Blackness, queerness, and femininity, seeks to dismantle systems of power and achieve transcendence and liberation through perseverance. 

LeSeur has received the Tulsa Artist Fellowship (2024), Leslie-Lohman Museum Artists Fellowship (2019), the Time-Based Medium Prize as well as the Juried Grand Prize at Artprize 10 (2018). LeSeur has completed residencies at Pioneer Works, iLab at The University of the Arts, Visual Studies Workshop, ArcAthens, NARS Foundation, Marble House Project, and MASS MoCA. 

Michi Meko

Atlanta, GA

Meko creates paintings and sculptures focusing on the African American experience of navigating public and wild spaces while remaining buoyant within them. In 2017, he traveled into the Sierra Nevada seeking to understand what it might mean for a Black man to personify nature. Rather than finding transcendence, he encountered a landscape marked by historical trauma. During the 2020 pandemic, he returned to remote environments as a refuge from anxiety, political unrest, and public visibility. Living in tents, standing in rivers, and recording field notes, he embraced isolation as both freedom and disappearance. This experience continues to shape his studio practice. Working as an explorer, cartographer, and abstractionist, he approaches the landscape as a lone Black man reporting back from an unfamiliar world.

Meko received a BFA in Painting from the University of North Alabama. He is represented by Mariane Ibrahim in Chicago, Paris, and Mexico City.

Blanche Nettles Powers

Savannah, GA

Powers’ paintings, assemblages, and mixed-media works engage material systems through repetition, accumulation, and improvisation. Her practice is informed by fractal patterns in natural environments and shaped by an interest in the sensibilities of the Dansaekhwa movement. Working with natural and found materials such as pigment and plant matter, Powers shifts recognizable elements into abstract, structured compositions. Walking, collecting, and close observation are central to her process. Through compression, containment, and layering, materials move between visibility and obscurity, producing irregular patterns that echo botanical, animal, and geological systems. Recent work focuses on regionally specific materials and their relationship to architectural space. The studio serves as a site of ongoing inquiry, where form and meaning emerge gradually through repetition, variation, and attention to material behavior.

Powers received her MFA from the Savannah College of Art and Design. She has completed residencies at Mass MoCA, Vermont Studio Center, and SCAD’s New York Studio Workspace. She has received fellowships from the Jentel Foundation and Anderson Ranch Arts Center, and has completed commissioned projects for Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Verge Yacht Design, and SCAD. 

Jessica Rankin

New York, NY

Using embroidery and needlework on diaphanous panels of organdy, Rankin creates expansive maps of landscapes and the night sky dotted with codes, signs, and symbols that refer to the processes of memory, intuition, and interpretation. Though she states, “in many ways I think I’m a landscape artist,” Rankin’s work is not a naturalistic rendering of the vistas before her. Rather, mountain ranges, constellations, thermodynamic readings, lines of stream-of-consciousness text, and neurological signals morph, merge, and stretch across her embroideries, as well as her works on paper.

Rankin has exhibited widely since the 1990s, with solo exhibitions at Savannah College of Art and Design, Atlanta; PS1 Contemporary Arts Center, New York; and Franklin Artworks, Minneapolis. She has participated in major group exhibitions at Palazzo Grassi, Venice, Italy (2024); Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; The Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; The Project, Los Angeles; and Artists Space, New York. 

Dana W. Richardson

Savannah, GA

Richardson’s work follows paths through landscape, story, and time. Working across sculpture, photography, drawing, painting, film, and sound, she uses walking, looking, and collecting as primary tools. 

Richardson holds a BFA in Painting and an MA in Teaching from the Savannah College of Art and Design and received an M.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art. She has exhibited at the Riggs Gallery at Lazarus, Baltimore; ROB Gallery, Lake City, SC; and Savannah, with mural commissions at Telfair Museums’ Jepson Center, the Emma James, and the Starland Mural Project. 

Claire Sherman

New York, NY

Sherman creates paintings that are seductive yet ambivalent, drawing on the history of landscape painting while examining contemporary relationships to the environment and media. Referencing idealized visions of the sublime, the works resist specific locations and move between tropical, arctic, lunar, and ordinary terrain. Through unstable perspectives, layered imagery, and marks that shift between representation and abstraction, the paintings disrupt expectations of landscape and become environments of their own. Recent paintings address environmental change caused by globalization, trade, travel, and human intervention. Dense, tangled forms suggest new ecosystems in which plants and invasive species are forced into coexistence. These works reflect both anxiety and hope as they consider climate change, globalization, and the increasingly unstable relationship between human activity and the natural world.

Sherman received her BA from the University of Pennsylvania and her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She has completed residencies at the Terra Foundation for American Art, the MacDowell Colony, the Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program, Yaddo, The Albers Foundation, and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. She was recently awarded a 2026 John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship in Fine Art. Sherman is a Professor at Drew University and is represented by DC Moore Gallery in New York and PATRON Gallery in Chicago.