2024 Workspace Residency Exhibition

Crystal Z Campbell, Jonathan Sánchez Noa, Simonette Quamina, and Ye Zhu

On View: June 30 - August 6, 2025

Dieu Donné is excited to present Workspace Residency 2024, an exhibition showcasing the innovative works in handmade paper by our 2024 Workspace Residents: Crystal Z Campbell, Simonette Quamina, Jonathan Sánchez Noa, and Ye Zhu. Throughout their year-long residencies, these artists embraced experimentation and pushed the boundaries of hand papermaking.

About the Artists

Crystal Z Campbell is a multidisciplinary artist, experimental filmmaker, and writer of Black, Filipinx, and Chinese descents whose works center the underloved and public secrets. Campbell's Post Masters series explores the traces of US colonialism in the Philippines through skins of manila rope, manila envelopes, and abaca.

Simonette Quamina was born in Ontario Canada, and spent her early childhood living between South America, the Caribbean and New York City. Her diverse upbringing is constantly woven into the narratives of her monochromatic large-scale drawings, prints, and collages. They revaluate one’s perception of racial and social norms, while simultaneously challenging preconceived romanticized ideas of the Caribbean within an art historical context. At Dieu Donné, Quamina explored the relationship of color and allowed the process of the handmade paper to inform the direction of her work. Colored pulp became a substitute for seamlessly collaging the images together. Relying on intricately cut stencils and silkscreens, blocks of color were applied to the paper and the images later completed through an etching press.

Jonathan Sánchez Noa is a multidisciplinary artist working with installation, papermaking, and sculpture. Born in Havana, Cuba, he creates artworks that examine how histories of colonial extractivism have impacted notions of race, identity, and climate. He utilizes Cuban tobacco as a medium to reconstruct narratives of displacement in relation to cultural and religious significance. At Dieu Donné, Sánchez Noa developed new methodologies to be able to integrate culturally significant materials such as cascarilla, cacao, and tobacco into his artworks. With a focus on natural dyes, he pigmented paper from materials like cochineal, osage, madder, and logwood, later embedding imagery through pulp silkscreening during the wet papermaking process. He also created a body of work through pulp casting techniques that used tobacco leaves as the main medium to bring together personal and diasporic histories with symbolism.

Ye Zhu was inspired by his own experiences with art in religious spaces, Zhu is interested in the power of scale to influence the viewer’s body, allowing the artwork to unite the effects of architecture, storytelling, and iconography. Zhu looks to spaces of worship to learn how knowledge and worldviews can be transmitted through visual experiences. At Dieu Donné, Zhu created sculptural reliefs inspired by his mother’s backyard garden. When Zhu was growing up in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, the lush garden was, for him, a place of wonder and curiosity — his own sanctuary in NYC. The vine plants grew on makeshift trellises of lumber, metal, plastics, and electronic parts — a natural composition of vegetables, technologies, toys, and living things.