Artist residencies provide artists, scholars, educators and other creative professionals with time, space and resources to work, individually or collectively, on areas of their practice that reward heightened reflection or focus. – Artist Communities Alliance

BOOM Concepts is happy to announce that we will be hosting a range of national and international artists for our 2022 BOOM Universe at Alloy Studios residency program. During the Summer of 2022, BOOM will host 3-5 visiting artists from outside the Western PA region representing a wide range of disciplines. These artists will stay at BOOM Concepts’ live/work studio for an average of 7-10 days. This marks our 2nd year connecting this residency with artists outside the region as a national field-building program of BOOM Concepts.  

As always, our goal is to provide artists space to achieve career growth by utilizing resources, mentorship, and developing a strategy without focusing on completing a new set of work. 

Our first BOOM Universe at Alloy Studios resident artists of the 2022 season is poet, art writer, and librettist Jessica Lanay:

Jessica Lanay is an interdisciplinary writer, poet, and art journalist raised in Key West, Florida. Her debut hybrid poetry collection, am•phib•ian, won the 2020 Naomi Long Madgett Poetry Prize judged by Toi Derricotte from Broadside Lotus Press. Her poetry can be found in Indiana Review, Prairie Schooner, Poet Lore, Poiesis, and others. She has performed her poetry at the Brooklyn Museum, The Cave Canem and Bowery Presents First Book series, and with Brooklyn Poets. 

Her essays can be found in Salt Hill Journal, Black Warrior Review, and Electric Literature. 

Her art writing can currently be found in BOMB Magazine, where she has interviewed artists such as El Anatsui, Howardena Pindell, Vanessa German, and Shikeith, among others. Her art criticism can also be found in catalog contributions for The Andy Warhol Museum’s exhibition Fantasy America, Nona Faustine’s monograph from MACK Books called White Shoes, and the Washington Project for the Arts exhibition curated by Tsedaye Makonnen Black Women As/And The Living Archive. She is a Cave Canem and Callaloo fellow.