CURRENT
>>> so excited to announce this solo exhibition!
REWILDING THE GRID:
A PROLOGUE
April 25 - May 11, 2025
Reception: April 25, 6-9pm
Open on April 26, 12-6pm, and by appointment
PROTO PS GALLERY
333 Newark St., Building H, 4th floor, Hoboken, NJ
In "Rewilding the Grid: A Prologue," a pop-up solo exhibition at Proto PS Gallery, Milcah Bassel presents an installation of new works on paper and a site-specific mural that reconsider the origins and evolution of geometric forms. Drawing connections between ancient symbolism and natural phenomena, Bassel questions modernist assumptions about controlled structure and offers alternative perspectives and new metaphors for our relationship to contingency, order, and each other.
The opening coincides with Project Studios Open House and Garden State Art Weekend. I will be in attendance for the Friday opening and either in the gallery or in my adjacent studio all day Saturday. Come hang out!
The exhibition is made possible with a grant from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and with support from Project Studios LLC.
>>> I’ve been awarded a 2025 New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship
I’m tremendously honored, and excited for the impact it will have on developing and sharing projects in the year ahead.
>>> Thrilled to have my work included in this ground-breaking publication:
Radical Paper: Art and Invention with Colored Pulp
by Lynn Sures and Michelle Samour
published by The Legacy Press, 2024
>>> HARD FEELINGS
Showcasing ceramic works by seven artists exploring surface, texture, and feeling both tactile and emotional.
Lauren Skelly Bailey
Milcah Bassel
Doris Cacoilo
Beth DiCara
Stacey As Pritchard
Jan Kathleen Reyes
Judi Tavill
September 13 - October 26, 2024
Opening reception as part of JC Fridays: September 13th 4-7pm
Artist talk and closing reception: Saturday, October 26 1-4pm
Gallery hours daily 8am-1pm. Contact Beth DiCara ahead of your visit at 201-388-7323 to confirm.
Evening Star Studio Gallery
11 Monitor st
Jersey City, NJ
***PRESS***
Check out this generous review by Tris McCall in the JCTimes!
>>> Excited and grateful to share that I’m a 2024 recipient of an
Individual Artist Fellowship Award
from the Jersey City Arts + Culture Trust Fund
Thank you for your support, Jersey City!
RECENT
>>> I’ll be performing at PS122 Gallery for the closing of Habit-At!
The performance spans two durational activations of my Continua paper sculptures.
1-3pm: STRONG STRUGGLES IN SOFTNESS (me and louise)
4-6pm: READINGS AND REPOSITIONINGS (me and bell)
Sunday, April 28, 2024
PS122 Gallery, NYC
The structure is fluid, feel free to come and go throughout the performances.
>>> HABIT-AT
Milcah Bassel with Patricia Brace
Amra Causevic
Yu Rim Chung
Eugenio Salas
curated by
Renana Neuman
opening reception and performance: April 6, 5-8pm
closing and performance: April 28
April 6 - 28, 2024
Friday - Sunday 1-6pm, and by appointment
150 1st Ave
New York, NY
“habit-at” investigates the multiple realities we inhabit and re-imagines the meaning of what surrounds us. The participating artists work together with their habitats, becoming a part of the ecological systems in which they live and work. They create habits through which they source their materials, found and discarded objects, “leftovers” of activities that act as a diary of a place and time, of political and cultural structures. They actively aspire to tangle their relation to the places they inhabit and the different people who cohabitate there with them. They make our blindspots visible, acknowledging what we usually filter out as the “background noise” of everyday life. These are offerings for possible futures, of different ways of formulating what can be sustainable approaches to existing in the world at large and as artists specifically.
During our lives, we inhabit different spaces by choice, chance, or necessity. How we inhabit them is what's at stake. The participating artists foreground not what can be taken advantage of or exploited, but what we can give back, and how we can understand ourselves as one component of an ever-growing and changing system that is reaching its capacity. These are matters of belonging, relinquishing control, collaborating with the landscape, with people, and the unknown.
>>> Virtual Artist Talk: Elevated Paper
Programming for NAHP Sustainability in Chaos Exhibition
Hosted by RCW Museum of Papermaking at Georgia Tech
Tuesday, January 23, 8-9pm EST
>>> We Are the River: Complex Narratives, Conservation & Committing to New Jersey's Waterways
Stockton University Art Gallery
101 Vera King Farris Drive
Galloway, NJ 08205
January 16 - April 7, 2024
panel talk and reception on Monday February 5, 2024 from 11:30am to 2pm
additional programming, tours, and a catalog will be available in February
Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking
Georgia Institute of Technology
500 10th St. NW
Atlanta, GA
January 16 - April 12, 2024
Virtual Artist Talk: Elevated Paper: Tuesday, January 23, 8-9pm EST
Reception: Thursday, February 8, 4-7pm
>>> The Brodsky Center at Rutgers University: Three Decades, 1986-2017
Voorhees Gallery
Zimmerli Art Museum
71 Hamilton Street New Brunswick, NJ, 08901
Sep 13 - Dec 22, 2023
>>> Sustainability in Chaos
SPROUT CoWorking Gallery
166 Valley St., Bldg 6M, Suite 103
Providence, RI
opening reception: Fri, Oct 20, 6:30 - 9:30pm
The exhibition will travel next to Robert C. Williams Museum of Papermaking, Atlanta, GA.
>>> SUMMER POUR (Part 1: Milfoil, Maine, Summer 2023)
A friendship-based papermaking project, co-created annually with a rotating constellation of people, plants, and places. Centering skill-sharing and nurturing between people and plants, the project asks to reconsider and reshape the roles of integration and intimacy within a rigorous collaborative art practice.
Founded by: Milcah Bassel
Co-creator: Patricia Brace
Collaborators:
William O Valdes, Ziv Steinberg, Grace Brace, Chris Hayden
Fibers:
Milfoil, Abaca.
Places:
Lake Arrowhead, and Patricia and Chris’s backyard and home, North Waterboro, ME.
SMFA Paper Studio, Boston, MA.
Description:
Milfoil, an invasive aquatic plant, was collected from Lake Arrowhead in late spring and dried by local resident and performance artist, Patricia Brace. These fibers were cooked briefly with soda ash and processed in a Reina beater at SMFA-Tufts Paper studio by Will O Valdes, an MFA candidate, with guidance from Milcah Bassel. To provide supplemental and strengthening options for the milfoil, which was for us a new and experimental fiber, we also processed some Abaca (a strong trustworthy papermaker’s fiber, from the inedible banana plant grown in the Philippines and supplied by Carriage House Paper in Brooklyn, NY). The pulped fibers were transported to the home of Patricia and Chris, where they were formed into large sheets of paper using a handcrafted pour mould and rudimentary equipment over the course of a special birthday weekend at the end of July. Patricia and Milcah formed the sheets with the help of Ziv and Grace, discovering the qualities of the milfoil by playing with texture, layering, gradients, and composition. The paper was board dried or air dried and the resulting sheets were documented by Patricia holding each in turn for the camera.
2023 summer pour is dedicated to Stacey Kemp.
>>> Interspacing | “Sulamot V’Sipurim” (ladders and stories)
Interactive Installation (in a very special independent bookstore)
handout made in collaboration with the illustrator Oru Serfaty
curated by Shahar Kramer
Sipur Pashut
36 Shabazi St.
Tel Aviv, Israel
May 30 - June 30, 2023
Sunday -Thursday: 10 am. – 8 pm.
Friday: 9:30 am. – 4 pm.
more info in Hebrew here
2022
>>> RIVERBOUND, a community papermaking event
Led by Artists Milcah Bassel and Amanda Thackray
Partnering with Green Fest at
Riverfront Park, 709 Raymond Blvd, Newark, NJ
Saturday, August 6, 2022
12-4pm
Come join the RIVERBOUND project to collaborate on a large-scale image made of paper pulp. Learn about the process of pouring sheets of paper using locally sourced materials, and partake in creating a community pulp painting. Come build connections between the Passaic River and the people of Newark through artmaking! All ages welcome, young children with adult supervision, no prior experience necessary.
Riverbound is funded by a Newark Artist Accelerator Project-Based Grant.
2021
>>> We are the recipients of a Newark Artist Accelerator Project-Based Grant which will help fund our collaborative project - Riverbound !!
Collaborating artist Amanda Thackray and I look forward to sharing the project with you as it unfolds in 2022!
Thank You to Project For Empty Space, The Andy Warhol Foundation, and The New Jersey Arts and Culture Recovery Fund.
>>> Made In Contact
Is a beautiful digital publication including the work of 30 artists curated and produced by Bonny Nahmias and Gabriella Willenz, with the support of Asylum Arts.
You can now view its entirety by clicking the above title, or jump straight to my contribution Water(s)Wishes here
A living exhibition and residency curated by Ulla Warchol and Robin Hill
ArtYard, Frenchtown, NJ
Sep 15 - Dec 30, 2021
Please visit the website for a full description of this exceptional project, to learn more about the 16 participating artists, and the programming at ArtYard. You won’t regret it!
https://artyard.org/exhibitions/going-to-the-meadow/
>>>Happy to share an urban intervention for the 2021 Terrain Biennial in Chicago:
To See The Sky Through (hello Yoko), curated by AP Vague for Flat Rate
on view at 1437 Albion Chicago, IL
Oct 2 - Nov 15, 2021
2020
>>> Thrilled to announce that I am the recipient of an Asylum Arts Small Grant 2020. Very grateful for the support during these crazy times.
>>> the6ftzine.com is now LIVE
Stay tuned for a paper publication in 2021
>>> Vegetarian Tiger Productions & Friends invite you to
ZOONOTIC MASQUERADE, a launch party for the The 6ft Zine!
Eventbrite for zoom link and cocktail recipes
Friday, December 18
7 - 8:30pm EST
Vegetarian Tiger Productions is Patricia Brace & Milcah Bassel
Featured Artists: Ardele Lister, Renana Neuman, Daonne Huff, Luba Drozd, Kara Lack & Roni Gross
The 6ft Zine: Zoonotic Masquerade is a mashup of digital research and personal experiences, owing its entirety to friendship through collaborative art making. This issue is haunted and inspired by the Zoonotic, hosts of pathogens that jump from animal to human, from the wild into the civilized realms. A continuous masquerade of both necessary and false facades carries us from the primal to the political and back again.
To celebrate the publication, the event will feature work by several artists offering a range of significant perspectives on the surreal and all-too-real unfoldings of the past year.
>>> At A Distance #4
We got to soft launch The 6 Foot Zine: Zoonotic Masquerade in this timely Alastria Press Online Exhibition!
The entry is listed under Vegetarian Tiger Productions, my collaboration with artist Patricia Brace.
September 2020
purchase exhibition catalog here
>>> Broadcast #19: What Will Carry Us Forward?
Vegetarian Tiger Productions, my collaboration with artist Patricia Brace, was featured in Broadcasts: Art in the Age of Social Distancing on June 20.
SPACE Gallery, Portland, Maine | Online Exhibition
Online exhibition curated by Nato Thompson
UMass Dartmouth, University Art Gallery | Online Exhibition
June 1 - August 31, 2020
Virtual opening reception June 11 6-8pm
>>> Glimpse
Group exhibition curated by Evonne Davis and Jo-El Lopez
Gallery Aferro | 73 Market St, Newark, NJ
Feb 22 - July 10, 2020
Opening reception February 22, 7-10pm
2019
>>> Interview published on ART SPIEL, December 23, 2019
Etty Yaniv interviews me about my work and process of the past few years
https://artspiel.org/milcah-bassel-poetic-documents/
>>> IN PRINT Art Book Fair, Jerusalem , Israel
Governing Vessels, newly released artist book, travels to my hometown! Go check it out at -
Hansen House | Dubnov 2, Jerusalem
Dec 18 7pm - Dec 20 3pm
>>> Legends and Legacy: Revolutions in Hand Papermaking
Curated by Cynthia Nourse Thompson | University of the Arts | The Rosenwald-Wolf Gallery | Philadelphia PA
September 19 - October 4, 2019
Reception: Saturday, September 21, 5:30pm - 7:00pm
Artists include: Donald Baechler, Laurence Barker, Milcah Bassel, Willie Birch, Chuck Close, Gail Deery, Leonardo Drew, Maria Gutierrez, Daniel Heidkamp, Jonathan Lasker, Katherine Mojzsis, Roxy Paine, Juan Sanchez, Kate Shepherd, Jessica Stockholder, Barbara Takenaga, Mary Temple, Mickalene Thomas and Paul Wong.
>>> Mark your calendars for JULY 21
And join me at the Rubin Museum Annual Block Party
I’ll be engaging the public with Netwalk: A Collective Garment. Come wear it and walk the block with family, friends, and strangers.
July 21, 1 - 4pm
17th St between 6/7th Ave., Chelsea, NY
Free and open to the public
>>> New Book Art: Workspace Residents 2018
The 2018 Workspace Residents will be exhibiting projects completed during a year-long Residency at the Center for Book Arts:
International Woman of Mystery II: Amru Sani, by Shelly Bahl; Governing Vessels, by Milcah Bassel; Force Field Series, by Charlotte Becket; The Inclining Dial, by Alix Pentecost Farren; Sunny Garden in Blue: Stories from the Caribbean to Brooklyn,by Bundith Phunsombatlert.
April 18 - June 29, 2019
Opening Reception: April 18, 6:30pm
Artist Talks: May 23, 6:30pm
Center for Book Arts
28 West 27th Street, 3rd Floor.
New York, NY
>>> I’ve been awarded a New Jersey State Council on the Arts Individual Artist Fellowship for 2019!
Tremendously honored and excited for the impact it will have on my production in the months ahead.
>>> Father Tongue (Genesis 1) featured in Hand Papermaking Magazine, Winter 2018, Pulp The Patriarchy issue.
>>> Invitation To Play: Open, Close, Open featured in Volume 7 of Emergency Index; An Annual Document of Performance Practice, published by Ugly Duckling Presse.