FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE- June 9, 2026

 

Makerspace NYC welcomes a new season of public art and is hosting an opening reception to celebrate at Staten Island Makerpark, on Sunday, June 28th from 4-6 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/artist teams were selected by a juried panel to participate in a 4-month public art residency program at Makerspace NYC. The participating artists are Danielle Cowan, Zoe Hamersly, Roxane Revon, Saar Shemesh, Rosalie Smith, and the artist team of Antonio Serna & Todd Ayoung.

 

Artwork will be on display from June 28, 2026-May 15, 2027.

 

2026 Art in Makerpark projects are made possible by the NYC Department of Cultural Affairs Cultural Development Fund and the New York State Council on the Arts.

 

Danielle Cowan  

 

Danielle Cowan is a blind, queer and Blackarican native New Yorker dabbling in community health, poetry and performance. She has helped combat Covid disparities as part of the CDC‘s Covid disparities grant and continues to advocate for disabled women of color around NYC. Her artistic work plays with ways to write and perform within shared histories and trauma. She has had poems published in Causeway Lit’s revolution issue, The Seventh Wave’s “On Queer Family anthology”, Mobius: The Journal of Social Change and elsewhere. She has read in The Rally Reading Series and produced a project with Recess Arts. She received fellowships from More Art and Office Hours Poetry Workshop. She has been funded by Ellen Bass’s craft workshop, and Cave Canem.

 

Danielle’s piece for Makerpark is entitled, Supporting Soundscapes of Hope, and it is a community project that involved collective listening and brainstorming sessions followed by participants creating a small audio recording answering the following question: What is the sound of hope in the community you help or call home? The final product is a public artwork that is accessible to visual and hearing-impaired viewers who can touch the artwork and can scan a QR code to access the sound files.

 

Zoe Hamersly  

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Zoe Hamersly (Z(0)E) is a composer working through InfoCorp(us), an ongoing project and framework for interdimensional sound. Rooted in heavy metal, experimental noise, and DIY practices, her work uses custom tuning systems, nonlinear scores, dream analysis, and self-built instruments to create new spaces for perception. Recent work includes the sound and light installations Earth Node [0] (Fundaziun Nairs, 2025), and the Encryption Nodes series (2024–2025). Their ongoing zine, Information, and the archive at www.infocorp.systems, serve as an open-source decryption manual for interdimensional sonic research. 

 

Zoe’s work in Makerpark is entitled, Resonant Body (0) and it is made of steel, strings, and tuning pegs.

Resonant Body (0) is an aeolian harp that gives physical and audible form to an abstract symbolic system. The work explores how symbols can be embodied through both sound and structure, blurring the boundaries between score, instrument, and sculpture.

 

Roxane Revon

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Roxane Revon (b. 1986, Paris) is a multi-disciplinary Brooklyn based artist. After graduating in philosophy from La Sorbonne University (MA), she moved to New York where she started a career as a theater director and scenographer, and shifted more recently to the creation of multimedia installations and visual arts. Her artwork has been exhibited in institutions such as the CICA Museum, Athens Conservatory, the Rockefeller Center, the French Institute (L'Alliance), The Invisible Dog Art Center; fairs such as Armory satellite, Yi Tai Art Central Hong Kong, Art on Paper NY; and galleries in New York, Hong Kong, and Athens. Her recent residencies include Nature of the Cities, Artist Alliance Inc., Residency Unlimited, LMCC Art Center on Governors Island and Celia and Wally Gilbert Fellowship at CSHL. Revon’s artwork and scenography have been recently reviewed in the New York Times, the New Yorker and Le Monde.

 

The title of the piece is Panta Rei and it takes its title from Heraclitus's foundational philosophy — "everything flows" — and draws on the biological concept of anastomosis, the merging of separate networks into one that will separate again to create movement. The sculpture's steel pipe structure forms an hourglass silhouette, its wavy semicircular arches meeting at the top in a gesture of convergence. Inside, reused wiring traces rhizomatic networks, while handcrafted discs of mycelium, seed, and hemp evoke the layered, living matter beneath the earth's surface that will decay and transform. A living plant grows upward from the ground through the structure, animating the work from within. Together, these materials make time, growth, and interconnection visible and tangible.

 

Saar Shemesh 

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Saar Shemesh is an interdisciplinary artist whose creative practice uses the aesthetics of feminist abstraction and abjection to complicate bodily, spatial, and emotional binary logics through architectural interventions, large-scale installations, text/ image-based studies, and sonic experiments. Saar's work examines conditions of mutability and transformation, drawing on visceral references like the glistening of mucosal membranes and the violent beauty of craters, highlighting the way materials and emotions resist containment both physically and conceptually.

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For their work at Makerpark, Saar is presenting a large-scale sculpture titled SPIRAL TIME, consisting of a dome of terrazzoed playground rubber, trowelled into the architecture of a sundial that rejects tightly regulated clock-time. In place of hour lines to delineate daytime, this dial privileges the expansive space-time between sunset and sunrise, and what grows in its quiet dark.

 

 

Rosalie Smith  

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Rosalie Smith was born in Blacksburg, VA, USA, in 1993. She holds a BA in Studio Art from Smith College and MFA in Sculpture from Hunter College. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Torrance Art Museum, NADA Curated, The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, The Contemporary Arts Center (New Orleans), Material Art Fair (Mexico City), Universität der Künste (Berlin), and the Carroll Gallery at Tulane University. Her work has been written about in The New York Times, Impulse, Art in America, Burnaway, and WhiteHot Magazine. She has been an artist in residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Millay Arts, Makerspace Brooklyn, Springboard for The Arts, and Nes Artist Residency. She has forthcoming residencies at Yaddo, Stoveworks, and Sculpture Space.

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Her piece at Makerpark is called House for Message Ingestion and is made of steel, corrugated tubes, satellite dishes, wheel, toy butterflies, mirror, toy house, bear bells, hooks, dirt, acrylic medium, shellac, chrome spray paint, blue spray paint, hummingbird feeder. It is a piece about memory, communication, and how sculptural form can encourage curiosity, rest, and informal gathering without requiring instruction.

 

Antonio Serna & Todd Ayoung  

Unearthing Site is an outdoor installation that utilizes the visual language and medium of an archaeological excavation test area. Over the course of 3 months, a 1-square-meter area (10.7639 square feet) at Makerpark was excavated, during which soil, moraine, and material fragments were unearthed as part of a traditional test
excavation. Additionally, the unearthed material is being examined, recorded, and used to build additional above-ground structures to accompany the site throughout the year-long exhibition. Unearthing Site investigates the material history and geological potential of the earth and land at Makerpark, Staten Island, NY.
Materials include various soil layers, moraine, archaeological material, along with added structural material such as metal wire, nylon twine, high-density polyethylene (HDPE), and concrete.

Todd Ayoung, originally from the Caribbean Island of Trinidad and Tobago, is a transdisciplinary art practitioner and a studio art and design adjunct professor at Pratt Institute and Parsons, the New School in NYC.

Antonio Serna is a Mexican-American artist, visual researcher, and educator currently living and working between Texas, Taiwan, and New York. He is currently working on “The Same Sun/Calendar,” a multimedia project that combines personal and historical narratives with deep-time maps, and “The Archive,” a visual exploration of printed media by communities of color in America.

 

Makerspace NYC is a non-profit organization with locations in Stapleton, Staten Island and Sunset Park, Brooklyn. We are dedicated to building economic growth and supporting innovation in our community. Our mission is to promote creativity and collaboration across disciplines and to make technology accessible to anyone who desires to make or invent something, regardless of skills or experience. We seek to support individual entrepreneurship and help sustain artists, designers, craftspeople, engineers, hobbyists, inventors, and other community organizations by offering low cost access to a facility that houses industrial and digital fabrication equipment and facilities, open workspaces, meeting rooms, and private studio and storage spaces.

 

 

Makerpark is located across the street from Staten Island Makerspace on the corner of Front and Thompson Streets. It is an outdoor sculpture park and community workspace that provides opportunities for artists to make and exhibit temporary public art projects. We also host community events and teach outdoor workshops in carpentry, blacksmithing, sustainable energy systems, and more. Partner organization, Makerpark Radio presents concerts throughout the summer. Another partner organization, Bee University provides a beekeeping fellowship program for youth.

 

When we opened Staten Island Makerspace in 2013, the empty lot across the street was filled with 18 burned out, flooded, and smashed up abandoned vehicles. Thanks to the help of the NYCEDC, NYC Councilwoman Debi Rose, Borough President Jim Oddo, volunteers, community partners, and artists, we are transforming the derelict lot into a useable community space. It is a work in progress.

 

For more information about MakerSpace NYC visit www.makerspace.nyc or contact DB Lampman at (718) 273-3951 or db@makerspace.nyc

 

 

 

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