Artist Residency

Our artist residency is an integral part of Buffalo Prescott’s work in transforming the Detroit arts community. We provide long-term learning/teaching residencies for up to 8 artists who show vision, talent, and a commitment to community.

Facilities include:

Comprehensive on-site fabrication space with silkscreening, 3d printing, a dark room, an outdoor kiln, and other equipment.
A full communal kitchen for shared use by residents
A small lounge space designed for critiques, artist salons, and documentation of work
A teaching/learning space for workshops, lectures, and other programs
A full backyard and outdoor gathering space for community events

Current Residents

Olivia Guterson

Olivia Guterson is a Detroit-based transdisciplinary artist and mother who in her practice is thinking about brokenness, refusal, and fugitivity. She choreographs bones, shells, beads, soil, and colors into textures, gestures, rhythms, and offerings that challenge notions of her sense of becoming human as contained and fixed. Her practice is a way of communing with and honoring her Black and Jewish ancestors. In 2024, she received her MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art. She has been awarded the 2024 Beau Award, the 2023 Gilbert Fellowship, the 2022 Gilbert Fellowship, and the 2022 Emerging Artist Fellowship. She has held residencies at at McArthur Binion’s Modern Ancient Brown (Detroit, MI); Sibyls Shrine (Pittsburgh, PA); and El Sur (Mexico City).

Olivia is a founding member of ArtMamas Alliance and was the inaugural visual artist for Michigan State Governor Gretchen Whitmer's Juneteenth Proclamation in 2022. Her work has been shown at the Cranbrook Art Museum, Arab American National Museum, EXPO Chicago, Louis Buhl Gallery, Prizm - Art Basel, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, Jewish Artist Salon, Scarab Club, Janice Charach Gallery, and more. Her work can be found in many private collections, as well as public, including the Book Tower (Detroit,MI), the Shinola Hotel (Detroit, MI), and the Zekelman Holocaust Center (Farmington Hills, MI). She is a published author, muralist, and birth advocate.

Shaina Kasztelan

Shaina Kasztelan is a multidisciplinary artist based in Detroit, Michigan. She was raised in a midwest suburb surrounded by rows of identical houses, ever-changing strip malls, and endless fast-food franchises, all of which have influenced the materials and formal signifiers used in her work. Operating between painting, sculpture, collage, and installation, Kasztelan creates psychedelic dreamscapes using kitsch commodities that shuffle between curated control and disheveled mess. Through humorous juxtapositions, her work criticizes the pleasure and disgust many of us feel simultaneously due to the excessive consumption of manufactured goods and media prevalent under late capitalism.

Kasztelan received a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in 2012 and an MFA from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2024. In addition to her formal education, the artist has worked as a muralist, built theater sets, worked as a prop maker, and spent years building floats for America’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. Her work has been exhibited at The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit, MI), the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (Detroit, MI), and the University of Michigan Institute for the Humanities (Ann Arbor, MI). Notable murals include those painted for the NXNE Music Festival (Toronto, ON), Facultad de Artes y Diseño UNAM (Mexico City, MX), and as an assistant for the Glass City River Wall (Toledo, OH) currently the largest mural in the United States.

Evan Mazellan

Evan Mazellan’s paintings grapple with privacy, injury, and ownership, lifting images from news media, personal photos, and belongings in and around the studio. Familiar images take on new meaning as they are fragmented and re-assembled into a pictorial space that highlights the permanence found in media archiving and mass production. Mazellan explores the sought-after transformation found in restoration and medical surgery, where the pursuit of enhancement can swing between helping and harming, a process prone to unexpected outcomes and mishaps.

Mazellan earned his MFA in painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI in 2024, and has since been recognized with prestigious awards, including the Cranbrook Art Museum Purchase Award (2024) and the Meredith Beau and Scott Beau Materials Fund (2023).

Mazellan’s solo shows include Massey Klein Gallery in New York, NY (2022); Bunker East and Bunker West, curated by John Garcia in Rockaway, NY and Malibu, CA (2021); and in two-person exhibitions with Dot Jackson at Mouse Gallery in Detroit, MI (2024); Walker Walls Tarver at Passageway Gallery at the Cranbrook Academy of Art (2022); and Becca Shmuluvitz at Gallery Diorama in Brooklyn, NY (2021). His work has been included in group exhibitions at the Cranbrook Art Museum (2024); Art Clvb, Detroit, MI (2024); Lisa Boudet, Paris, France (2023); the Rockaway Artist Alliance, Rockaway, NY (2021); and Shrine Gallery in New York City (2021). Mazellan and his paintings have been published in print and online publications, including Architectural Digest, Artsy, Two Coats of Paint, Say Who, and Overstandard.

Sara Nickleson

Sara Nickleson is a painter and curator who lives and works in Detroit, Michigan. In search of a departure from prevailing ideas around figuration, Nickleson imagines the body as impermanent, morphing and changing as a representation of complex human emotion and cognition. Rooted in her own longtime battle with depression—and significant reprieve through psychedelic therapy—the artist finds solace in world-building that draws from her studies in consciousness and melancholia, as well as theories around ‘deep adaptation’ in the face of climate crisis.

Nickleson begins each painting by amassing a multitude of disparate elements to create her imagery through digital collage, a process she feels is representative of a human condition that is awkward, expansive, and fragmented.

After completing her BFA and BID, Nickleson spent over a decade as a museum curator and gallery director, and revived her studies in painting early in the pandemic. She recently completed her MFA at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan (Painting ’24).

Contact

Buffalo Prescott sees communication with stakeholders as vital to our efforts to engage with our broader communities. Please click here to contact us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Buffalo Prescott is an arts organization dedicated to nurturing Detroit’s contemporary art ecosystem.