FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- June 4, 2025

MakerSpace NYC is hosting an opening reception to celebrate a new season of public art at Staten Island MakerPark, on Thursday, July 10 from 6-8 pm.

The reception is free, and open to the public. All ages are welcome.

Staten Island MakerPark is located on the corner of Front St and Thompson St in Stapleton, Staten Island.

Six artists were selected by a juried panel to participate in a 4-month public art residency program at Makerspace NYC. The participating artists are Rosa Suyeon Chang (장수연), Mars Dietz, Diane Matyas, Nifemi Ogunro, Noah Powell, and Gabrielle Vitollo.

Rosa Suyeon Chang (장수연) is a South Korean artist specializing in kinetic installations, printmaking, performance, and machine learning. Her practice examines how seemingly insignificant daily habits and obsessive repetition are products of heritage, intimate relationships, physical environments and political identities. Documenting and analyzing these patterns– especially as an isolated immigrant redefining her personal values apart from her cultural upbringing– has reshaped her understanding of why people perpetuate or tolerate harmful cycles. On the other hand, it also emphasizes the poetics of mundane, repetitive acts, recontextualizing their significance within our ordinary lives. Chang earned a BA in Computer Science and Art from Yale University and has exhibited her work in solo and group shows internationally, including at the Hongik Arts Center, Montclair Art Museum, We Are the Arts Foundation, The Graduate Hotel, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. Her work has been featured in VICE i-D and HUG100’s Artists to Watch. She has also received fellowships and residencies from institutions such as Anderson Ranch Arts Center, Ox-Bow School of Art, Vermont Studio Center, Pocoapoco, Makerspace NYC and Trinity College. Chang’s sculpture for Makerpark titled, Goose Father, is inspired by the term Gireogi Appa and refers to fathers who remain in their home country while supporting families abroad, often to further their children’s education while understanding the limitations of professional opportunities abroad. The sculpture’s winglike forms make reference to migratory geese and blends personal history with universal themes of migration, displacement, and homecoming.

Mars Dietz is an intermedia sound artist and musician whose background includes multi-channel sound performance, club DJing, writing, and interdisciplinary collaborations in Berlin, New York, and elsewhere. Mars’ work is often research-driven, focused on topics such as human rights, the affect of knowledge, and the fallout of extractivism, but sometimes Mars creates pieces and performances with more nebulous motives, like feelings, or interpersonal states. Mars was born and raised along the shores of the very tidal strait bounded by MakerSpace NYC’s two locations. For the Makerpark residency, Mars is presenting a sound piece entitled, Detuning, which consists of two public announcement horns atop steel beams, playing in a daily cycle. A chord progression repeats in sequence, every note gradually detuning in scaled proportion to the amount of sea level rise projected for this decade and known to render this exhibition area and its near surroundings vulnerable to coastal surge flooding.

Diane Matyas was raised in Ithaca, New York, and received her MFA and BFA from Cornell University in printmaking. Diane lives on Staten Island, where she maintains her studio. In addition to painting, drawing, and printmaking, Diane is also an author and illustrator and has had a career with museums most notably as a curator and VP of Programs and Exhibitions at the Staten Island Museum, and now currently is a teaching artist for the Guggenheim Museum. Diane is an avid swimmer and is a founder of Swimmers of Anarchy, a creative wild-swim community that swims near the Verrazzano Bridge. In her own words, “My work is an intersection of art, science, and allegory. I create works-on-paper and public art with animal themes. These metaphorical tableaus are narrative, while reflecting our human condition. My fascination with biology, physicality, imagination, and theatricality, are always in evidence.” Her piece in the Makerpark Art in the Park 2025 exhibition is The Luna Park Elephant Project and is a large-scale swimming elephant based on a true story about Alice, the Sri Lankan elephant that swam from Luna Park, Coney Island to Staten Island in 1904.

Nifemi Ogunro is a Nigerian-American designer and artist whose work reimagines furniture as functional sculpture, blending personal history, cultural identity, and social consciousness. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Ogunro's practice integrates photography, performance, and design to explore themes of Blackness, queerness, and the lived experience of everyday objects. Ogunro's innovative approach has garnered attention in the design world. She was featured in Dezeen's "Fourteen Black Architects and Designers You Should Know" during Black History Month 2022, nominated by Nifemi Marcus-Bello of NM Bello Studio. Her work has been exhibited at notable venues, including the Denver Art Museum and Side Gallery in Barcelona. In 2023, Ogunro was awarded the Black Utopian Fellowship by Culture Push for her project "MELD," which reimagined public spaces for play and rest, blending art and functionality to create inclusive environments. Nifemi’s has created Temporal for Makerpark; a family of sculptures that live outside of the confines of a gallery and are meant to be places for rest and play. This piece allows for passersby to engage with work that otherwise would be exclusionary.

Noah Powell hails from the urban streets of New Jersey and often uses materials associated with urban growth and decay in his sculptural work. Environment plays a tremendous role in the inspirations for his work. Conveniently placed in an ecosystem based on survival - naturally the art of sublimation instructed and guided Noah to be able to obtain the broken pieces of what once was and construct them into something new, true and unique. A familiar motto " As above So Below" can serve as an explanation to the rusted and thrilling material used to emphasize the imperfections that Noah uses as his muse to tell a story universally familiar to the viewer yet foreign enough to question the concept of perfection. The sculpture he will present at Makerpark is entitled A Conversation and consists of two moss covered concrete walls that face each other.

Gabrielle Vitollo is a painter, sculptor, and mollusk/arthropod enthusiast living in Brooklyn, NY. They teach figurative drawing at Pratt Institute and observational painting at Montclair State University. As a German Fulbright and DAAD research scholarship recipient, they understand education and visual art to be essential as it can serve as a powerful educational tool for environmental advocacy initiatives. By staging nature-inspired public art paired with educational programming involving nature journaling and upcycled embossing, they aim to inspire a more environmentalist, humanitarian future by engaging viewers in a dialogue about our collective impact and potential for change. For Makerpark, Gabrielle has created, Exoskeletal Odyssey, a 15-foot-long stainless steel sculpture inspired by the forms and resilience of the ancient horseshoe crab — the undefeated evolutionary champion that survived the last five mass extinctions. This “spiritual armor”, painted with blues symbolizing the creature's copper-rich blood used in the pharmaceutical industry, is an exploration of the boundaries between nature and culture, abstraction and image, painting and sculpture.

2025 Art in Makerpark projects are made possible by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Development Fund.