Nazli Efe: 2025 AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum

EFA Studio Member Nazli Efe, named a 2025 AIM Fellow at The Bronx Museum!

Nazli’s interdisciplinary work explores Water, memory, and the unconscious, using alchemical processes like pouring molten wax into Water to create evocative, ever-changing forms. Her installations, sculptures, and performances transform materials into preserved fragments of personal history.

Image: Nazli Efe, 'Kanlica (My Grandfather’s House),' 2022, IV bags, IV pole, mulch, silicon tubing, Water, beeswax, oil sticks, acrylic, resin, photographs, found objects from nature, glass containers, aquarium pump, chains, metal wire, 79 x 87 x 63 in.

© Courtesy of Federico Savini

Cecile Chong: NYSCA Grant Recipient

EFA Studio Member Cecile Chong, together with Tao Leigh Goffe as part of their collaborative project Broken China, has received a Support for Artists grant from the New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA) to support their creative work.

Sponsored by The Old Stone House, this grant will help fund their upcoming exhibition, Splintered Family Frames: Diaspora Albums, which continues their exploration of memory, identity, and cultural heritage.

On top of that, Cecile Chong has received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant 2026.

Sally Egbert: Everyday Devotions: Gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation and Beyond

EFA Studio Member Sally Egbert is featured in the upcoming exhibition Everyday Devotions: Gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation and Beyond, opening February 12, 2026 at the Lower Jetté Gallery.

The exhibition brings together more than forty works by twenty-five artists who embrace collage as a medium or conceptual strategy. Featuring transformative gifts from the Alex Katz Foundation alongside works from the museum’s collection, the show spans cut paper collage, painting, textiles, sculpture, and assemblage, highlighting collage as both a site of serious artistic inquiry and an accessible form of creative expression.

The exhibition will be on view through May 31, 2026, and we encourage our community to visit and support our Studio Member!

Image: Sally Egbert, Perfumes, 2010. Mixed media (acrylic paint, paper, fabric, watercolor) on canvas, 70 x 60 1/8 in.

Vidal Mouet: C24 Gallery Representation

EFA Studio Member Vidal Mouet (b. Navojoa, México) is now represented by C24 Gallery in New York.

Mouet is an abstract painter whose work reconsiders the fundamental language of painting—canvas, oil, shaped stretchers, and space—to transform the way we see everyday moments. His compositions turn familiar objects—a leaning stack of coffee cups or the edge of an open magazine—into precise, quietly disorienting works that fully engage with space, considering front, back, and edge equally.

This representation follows his recent group exhibition, Traces, at C24 Gallery alongside Leda Tsoutreli and Elise Coker. We congratulate Vidal on this exciting milestone and encourage our community to follow his practice as it continues to grow.

Image: Vidal Mouet in his studio, Photo courtesy of C24 Gallery.

Keren Benbenisty: 2026 NYSCA Award

Image by Keren Benbenisty

EFA Studio Member Keren Benbenisty has been awarded the 2026 NYSCA Support for Organizations award via EFA for her ongoing project “The Blackheads (Les Points Noirs)”.

The project excavates a buried history of Jewish-Arab coexistence through Morocco's sacred citron (Etrog) trade. Returning to her mother's homeland, this work confronts personal and collective trauma by documenting an ancient agricultural collaboration that challenges dominant Western narratives about Jewish and Arab identities.

The film traces her investigation of this forgotten symbiosis, where Jewish religious needs and Arab agricultural expertise created centuries of interdependence.

Akira Ikezoe: 2026 Whitney Biennial

Image: Akira Ikezoe: Toads on the Diagram of Nuclear Fuel Cycle, 2021/2024

© Foto: Haupt & Binder, Universes in Universe

EFA Studio Member Artist Akira Ikezoe has been selected as one of the 56 artists in the 2026 Whitney Biennial, opening March 8.

This year's show will contend with what the museum described as "various forms of relationality, including interspecies kinships, familial relations, geopolitical entanglements, technological affinities, shared mythologies, and infrastructural supports."

Akira Ikezoe (b. 1979) is a New York-based artist born in Kochi, Japan. Ikezoe creates works in diverse disciplines, including drawing, painting, video and performance, in relation to the balance between the forces we think of as outside or before ourselves, and the “civilizing” of ourselves. In Ikezoe’s works, the human figure is presented as his alter ego and woven into a metaphysical and mythological context that depicts a timeless melting point between human and natural boundaries.