Wafaa Bilal: 2025 Established Artist of the Year

Image: Wafaa Bilal (b. 1966, Najaf, Iraq; lives in New York, NY), Domestic Tension, 2007. © Wafaa Bilal, courtesy of the artist.

EFA Studio Member Wafaa Bilal was named ARTnews’ 2025 Established Artist of the Year.

“For nearly two decades, Wafaa Bilal has put his body on the line for his art-making. “Indulge Me” at the MCA Chicago, the first major survey for the Iraqi American artist, showcased how his work highlights the tension—implicit at times, explicit at others—between what is perceived to be a conflict zone and what is perceived to be its inverse, a “comfort zone.”

Much of his work examines the role of the United States in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. “I watched the terror unfold on a small TV in my studio apartment in Lakeview, and I knew the world would never be the same,” he has said. An even more personal reality—the 2004 killing of his brother by a remotely operated drone in Iraq—has further informed his practice…

…Bilal’s art has contended with that powerful inquiry for years, making it prescient in our current moment, in which conflicts in many corners of the world are seen at a remove by many.”

Devin N. Morris at RBPMW: Best Booths at NADA Miami

Devin N. Morris, Shaving Grays, 2025.
Photo: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews

Devin N. Morris at Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop’s booth was featured in ARTnews’ Best Booths of NADA Miami.

“In 2019, Devin N. Morris was a printmaking fellow at New York’s legendary EFA Robert Blackburn Workshop, where he honed his craft in stencil monotypes. Now, Morris has returned to collaborate with Blackburn in support of its year-round printmaking activities, with the sale of his work at NADA. In these works, you see the shadow of Morris’s stencil monotypes depicting various figures. He then collages these elements into larger compositions incorporating found objects—from parts of gold frames to door frames to sets of keys on hooks to deflated balloons.

This presentation, titled “Building Materials,” considers what “the home” represents, or as Morris put it in an artist statement, “as a metaphor for peace” and all that entails. That idea connects directly to his use of collage, which he describes as his “charge, utilizing what one has to make what one needs.” The tableaux on view depict intimate domestic scenes with a surrealist bent. Among the strongest are Shaving Grays (2025), in which a buff man in a towel faces a bathroom mirror as he grooms his groin in a frame resembling a doorway, and Burning (2025), featuring a blinking red telephone in front of an emergency exit door, seen through a circular portal in a hardwood-floor artist frame.”

—Maximilíano Durón, ARTnews

Bundith Phunsombatlert: Transtrack

EFA Studio Member Bundith Phunsombatlert’s multimedia installation Transtrack is on view at Transmitter.

November 15–December 21, 2025
Opening Reception: November 15, 6–8 PM

Transmitter
1329 Willoughby Avenue, 2A
Brooklyn, NY 11237

Hours: Saturday–Sunday, 1–6 PM

Building on Phunsombatlert’s community-centered practice and ongoing exploration of oral immigration histories gathered from local elders, the exhibition invites participants from diverse backgrounds to share memories of landscape and migration, fostering moments of cross-cultural connection. Transtrack transforms the idea of a train platform into multisensory space where the voices of elderly immigrants recount life journeys, weaving an immersive landscape of sound and story.

Read more in the Press Release.

Cui Fei: Recent Museum Exhibitions & Acquisitions

Work by Cui Fei, courtesy of China Institute

EFA Studio Member Cui Fei is featured in group exhibitions, and her work was recently acquired by two museums.

Exhibitions

Metamorphosis: Chinese Imagination and Transformation
Curated by Dr. Susan L. Beningson
September 10, 2025 - January 11, 2026

This exhibition highlights works by 28 contemporary artists of Chinese descent exploring personal, cultural, historical, and material metamorphosis. For more information on the exhibition and public programs, visit the website

China Institute
100 Washington St, New York, NY 10006

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Walking Their Own Paths: Women Calligraphers in Contemporary Taiwan
Curated by Dr. LU Hui-Wen
September 4 - November 30, 2025

Fei’s work is included in this exhibition, featuring 59 artists from Taiwan, China, Japan, Korea, Iran, the UK, and France. Read more here. 

Hengshan Calligraphy Art Center
No. 100, Daren Rd., Dayuan Dist., Taoyuan City, Taiwan

Museum Acquisitions

Study for Vermicular Calligraphy I and Tracing the Origin IX_I  series have recently been acquired by the Harvard Art Museums.

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Tracing the Origin IX_I_iv  has been acquired by the RISD Museum.

Whitney Oldenburg: left behind at MOCA Jacksonville

Whitney Oldenburg, Feeding Frenzy, 2022, tickets, rock, wood, aluminum, resin, string, staples, helmets, ear plugs, cloth, zipper pulls, red yeast rice, glue mixture.

MOCA Jacksonville is pleased to present the first institutional survey of the work by Jacksonville native and EFA Studio Member Whitney Oldenburg (b. 1987).

Whitney Oldenburg: left behind
On View: November 20, 2025 – April 19, 2026

The exhibition left behind presents a selection of Oldenburg’s recent sculptures, accompanied by a special presentation of the artist’s drawings.

Oldenburg’s sculptural works begin with fragments from repurposed consumer items, remnants from older work, and her own discarded personal belongings; materials that already carry traces of use, and memory, that she seeks to sublimate in her practice. Acting as a conduit for a profound reflection, this materiality is transformed with the presence of other unhampered materials that will define the unexpected final shapes and textures her work adopts. With this process, the artist directs our attention to the complex relationship we have with the objects that we surround ourselves with in our contemporary culture; and invites us to explore, with her, the way we form attachments to objects, gadgets, articles, and things, and how we allow these to become a symbolic part of us. In this way, Oldenburg’s practice invites us to reflect on the complex interplay between material possessions, social dynamics, and value systems, as she gently probes the looming transition away from a future dominated by extractive processes and an overwhelming saturation of disposable technology, toward a more mindful, less consumption-driven social paradigm.

This exhibition was curated by Senior Curator Ylva Rouse. All works courtesy of the artist and CHART Gallery, New York. Special thanks to Clara Ha, and the Eden Arts Foundation.

Print Culture: On the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop

Chakaia Booker at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, New York.

Barry Schwabsky reviews Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop in Artforum, and explores the history of the workshop and Robert Blackburn’s legacy.

”In 1971, Blackburn’s workshop transformed into a nonprofit, and since 2005—two years after his death—it has operated under the auspices of the Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts as the EFA Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop. Throughout its history, across the shifts in organizational structure and in address, what Blackburn maintained was the printshop’s ability to function as both a community arts resource where anyone could come to learn and a place where professional artists could come from around the world to experiment with printing as an open-ended artistic process. As Curlee Raven Holton, one of the many artists who was mentored by Blackburn, recalled in the 2014 catalogue, the workshop has been “a place of acceptance where artists from New York City, Ohio, Oklahoma, Greece, Thailand, or South Africa formed an international exchange, the united nations of artists.” (I’m particularly intrigued by the number of Indian or Indian-born artists who passed through, among them Devraj Dakoji, Zarina Hashmi, M. F. Husain, and Krishna Reddy.) “For many artists new to the city,” Holton continued, “the Workshop was the only open door that would embrace them regardless of where they had come from or their professional rank.” It was probably the most truly integrated art space in New York; this, too, was part of Blackburn’s vision. He wanted to make a place that would welcome other Black artists—and a place that would welcome everyone else. His stance was founded on the faith that art and life are not zero-sum games, but fields in which cooperation and collaboration increase the potential of all participants. “I’ve always been an integrationist,” Blackburn declared. “I think an artist’s way of life has to be one that is trying to make things one, and not trying to fragment.”

—Barry Schwabsky, Artforum

Press & Pull: Two Decades at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop is on view through November 15, 2025.

The James Gallery at CUNY Graduate Center
365 5th Avenue
New York, NY 10016