2025 ARTISTS IN RESIDENCE
Photo: Chad Crews.
Photo: Marco Giugliarelli for Civitella Ranieri Foundation, 2022.
KIAH CELESTE
STACY LYNN WADDELL
The Foundation is thrilled to announce that artists Kiah Celeste and Stacy Lynn Waddell have been selected for our inaugural cohort of SFJF Artists in Residence. Both of these exceptional talents have lived and forwarded their artistic practice in the South, and have achieved considerable professional success regionally and nationally. The 2025 finalists were chosen from a highly competitive field of artists nominated by a wide range of artists, curators, directors, collectors, and SFJF advisors. We are grateful to all of our colleagues and friends who generously assisted in the selection process.
KIAH CELESTE
Kiah Celeste (B. 1994, Brooklyn, NY) is a multi-dimensional artist whose work transcends fitting into one category or medium. Upon completing a BFA in Photography in 2016, Kiah moved into three dimensional production. She has completed artist residencies and exhibitions within the US and internationally including Lisbon, Barcelona, New York, Chicago and Italy. In 2021, Celeste received the inaugural 21C Artadia Award in Louisville, KY. Her work has been acquired by the Speed Art Museum, KMAC Museum and the UK Art Museum. She has been featured in Hyperallergic, The Wall Street Journal, Burnaway, and ArtForum. Celeste is currently preparing for a solo exhibition in NYC and is concluding several art fairs in Europe.
Constantly searching and gleaning objects from urban and industrial environments, Kiah Celeste forages for materials that speak to her. Her practice consists of a few components, to which Celeste often incorporates a motif to establish a visual cadence of repetition, balance, motion and variation. Her free-standing work includes almost exclusively discarded or secondhand items, and minimal hardware, creating something new and fortuitous out of decay. Recent stretched spandex framed works explore the meeting of sculpture and two-dimensionality while retaining foundations in found materiality and physics. By asserting the cruciality of sustainability, Kiah’s work negates the gratuitous nature of buying new, synthetic materials only to enter into inevitable disorder over time.
Although these works are made with primarily synthetic, industrial and household materials, the forms they take on allude the organic, the surreal and non-function.
Sink Belly, 2025.
Spandex, PVC, sink drain, poplar frame. 85h x 63w x 21d in.
By adhering to rigorous principles of sustainability and low intervention, she often challenges physics, with compositions which carefully balance through tension, weight, flexibility and gravity. These texturally rich compositions highlight the inherent beauty of the objects, while retiring their original practical functions.
With a multifarious identity as a Black and Jewish woman, both feminine and androgynous, and introverted and social, among other contrasting combinations and in-betweens, the sense of her un-belonging finds respite in the embrace of seemingly disparate materials to create a cohesive whole, finding freedom in self, the world, and creative practice.
Kiah Celeste is jointly represented by DOCUMENT and Swivel Gallery
Fight, 2024.
Rebar (Kindof chair), hosiery
Dimensions variable
Hundred Nipples, 2024.
Fabric, thread, retail pegs, poplar frame.
60h x 60w x 11d in.
Ripple, 2025.
Reformed Kindof bookcase, Memory foam, spray paint. 34h x 40w x 21d in.
STACY LYNN WADDELL
Stacy Lynn Waddell considers the authorship and idealism of art historical narratives and how they correspond to the economic and political structures of their time while highlighting contemporary issues related to visibility, desire, and power.
Since earning her MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Waddell has participated in exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Durham; Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro; North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth, Pérez Art Museum, Miami, and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum among other venues.
Her work is included in several public and private collections that include The Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University, Weatherspoon Art Museum, North Carolina Museum of Art, The Studio Museum in Harlem, Brooklyn Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Princeton University Art Museum, and Bristol Museum & Art Gallery among others.
She has most recently been featured in Artnet, Brooklyn Rail, and Artforum.
Dancers with fists, palms, stripes, straps, loops and hoops (for M. S.), 1973/2023.
78 x 60 x 1 1/2 inches, 22-karat gold leaf on linen
Waddell is a recipient of the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, an Artist-in-Residence at Joan Mitchell Center in New Orleans, Queen Space in New York and Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. During Fall 2022, Waddell ended the year with an exhibit at Sala1 in Rome, Italy and as a Civitella Ranieri Foundation Fellow in Umbria, Italy where she spent six weeks producing works and conducting research in a 15th century castle.
She lives and works in North Carolina and is represented by CANDICE MADEY in New York.
Untitled #7 (awakening after the Gulf Stream and the Hurricane), 2023. composition gold leaf, variegated metal leaf, silver leaf and Japanese colored silver leaf on handmade cotton/abaca paper with laser etching, 29 inches in diameter.
Damaged Emergency Blanket (for the Black Knight satellite having landed in Rome), 2019–2022.installation view, Civitella Ranieri, Umbertide, Italy. composition metal leaf, aluminum leaf, aluminum foil tape on distressed FujiFilm printing plate packaging, 88 x 218 inches.