A Reference Letter for the Revolution: The 2025 Fellowship Exhibition

Alison Pitman Kuo , Curator

(Bronx, NY – August 6, 2025) En Foco is thrilled to announce the opening of A Reference Letter for the Revolution: The 2025 Fellowship Exhibition, featuring the work of fifteen lens-based artists of color selected for the prestigious En Foco Artist Fellowship, now in its tenth year. The exhibition will showcase the exceptional work of Ashley Peña, Dean Majd, Destiny Mata, Jarrett Murphy, Jeremy Dennis, Juan “Wamoo” Álvarez, Suede, Kalada Halliday, Kalena Burwell, María José Maldonado, Néstor Pérez-Moilère, Stephanie Ayala, Wayne Liu, Yukai Chen, and Zain Alam. Curated by artist Alison Kuo, the exhibition will be on view from September 12 to October 13, 2025, at WallWorks NY, located at 710 Tiffany Street in The Bronx, New York. An opening reception will take place on September 18, 2025, from 6 to 8 PM, where the new Nueva Luz issue will also be available for purchase. RSVP for the opening reception. Viewing is available from Wednesday to Friday by booking an appointment at https://www.wallworksny.com/book-online. For additional times, email info@enfoco.org.

A Reference Letter for the Revolution highlights themes of connectivity, accountability, and cultural resilience. The diverse cohort creates powerful work spanning photography, video, and interdisciplinary media, addressing subjects from immigrant community documentation and colonial critique to transgender ancestry and queer self-portraiture. These visionary artists represent what Kuo describes as “the children of freedom fighters and the parents of liberation,” offering transformative models of healing and social change through their innovative visual storytelling.People of the Asian diaspora are intimately familiar with the tension that pulls us between static notions of home and the reality of constant change and migration. These perceptions of home often exist in the past tense—the blurry, distant parts of that past colored by shifting memories, longing, and grief. Meanwhile, the immediate present may exist in direct contrast to the past, strengthening feelings of what once was, even if those memories fade.

Photographs are always imbued with the perspectives of their makers, whether intentional or not. Behind every image is a sentiment influenced by the photographer’s relationship to that space and those subjects. Similarly, the images in this exhibition speak to all that happened before the photograph was taken. These artists of the Asian diaspora approach the present moment informed by memories of time that has passed through and is woven into physical space. Each of these photographs evokes a ghostly familiarity, as though the photographer is becoming acquainted with their own shadows. 

A Reference Letter for the Revolution

By Alison Kuo

The En Foco fellows of 2025 are scintillating. Their work makes my spine tingle and my heart ache. I can’t stop thinking about them. While I staunchly believe that artists are not responsible for healing us or teaching us, I marvel at the way that these fifteen fellows have crafted living models of connectivity, accountability, repair, recovery, growth, and ways of thriving. They show us how we have been, how we persist, and how we can be. 

Destiny Mata’s ongoing series Lower East Side Yearbook: A Living Archive is bursting with exuberant collages, playful portraits, archival images, and oral histories of a neighborhood that has been a bedrock of immigrant culture and artistic innovation in New York for centuries. It’s also a playbook and pedagogical template for public housing advocacy that is bound to be influential for years to come. 

Jeremy Dennis wants to make you laugh at the absurdities of our contemporary grappling with American colonialism and attempted genocide of Native people, but he’s also fine if not everyone gets it. His Rise series tableaus skewer ideas of violence and fear of the “other.” Dennis dresses himself in a long wig and a generic version of Northeastern Native regalia and improvises an encounter with another person, often as he’s meeting them for the first time. The project dares the viewer to question: Who is the real source of danger and tension in these images?

Ashley Peña makes captivating portraits in the coastal waters of the Dominican Republic. Her subjects exude a deep peacefulness and quiet confidence in a velvety, textured ocean. The artist’s sense of materiality is so deft that she incorporates pebbles of black tempered fire glass into the surface of her photograph Fall and You’ll Land Softly, a bold composition made with tactical balance and precision.

Zain Alam creates intimately felt representations of the rituals of daily Muslim life. His first three-channel video installation, Meter & Light, immerses viewers in rhythms of the daytime. His second work in the series, now in development, is entitled Night. This issue of Nueva Luz offers some first glimpses of his innovative shoot in The Catacombs of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

Suede uses Super 8 mm filmmaking to document his expeditions in the waterways of his native borough of the Bronx. He takes sculptures made from reclaimed wooden NYPD barricades—the series is called Ichthus after the Greek word for fish—and tows them behind his boat. Suede is concerned with over-policing, gentrification, and how people move, or are prevented from moving, through the city. On the water, he embodies the indomitable spirit of the artist both as explorer and humble subject of natural and manmade forces. 

Yukai Chen’s self-portraits remix traditional Chinese archetypes with contemporary Southeast Asian pop culture that exude a youthful sensibility. His sets feel like meticulously constructed bedroom fantasy-scapes that could be whisked away and hidden from prying eyes at a moment’s notice. Though there is nothing obviously illicit about them to a Western audience, in modern China, they are coded as subversive. Taking his cues from the tradition of gender swapping in Chinese opera and the gender fluidity of Guanyin, the goddess of compassion, Chen uses self-portraiture to play with ambiguous gender presentation. In this way, he illuminates the resilient queerness of his cultural heritage.

María José Maldonado is on a mission to correct an error. Their 2023 short film My Fierce Aunt Bianca, a tribute to her late trailblazing “transcestor,” was followed by AIDS Couldn’t Take Our Memories in early 2025. For the En Foco Fellowship, Maldonado is shooting the next installment, Her Dying Wish. The film will document their compassionate negotiations with Bianca’s parents, who are slowly warming up to the idea of changing the name on her tombstone to reflect her true gender identity. 

Dean Majd and the community of young Palestinian Americans with whom he shares his art-life are no strangers to pain, hard coping mechanisms, and wounds that don’t want to heal. Majd juxtaposes a picture of his longtime muse, CJ, bathing in the Atlantic Ocean with an aerial photograph of the same landscape entitled Heaven’s Charm. For the artist, this pairing of images, both bathed in golden light, serves as an anode to CJ’s passage towards healing, tinged with a semi-ironic reference to Christian salvation narratives. 

Wayne Liu is still processing the fallout from his family’s forced migration out of Mainland China in 1949. Like so many, they left for Taiwan, then made their way to the United States when Liu was a young child and rarely spoke of the past. Liu visited China in 2008, shooting approximately eighteen thousand frames of 35mm film, some of which he has developed over and over, dodging and burning them in the darkroom, feeling his way through memories that might or might not belong to his lineage. He installs the final prints in constellations of unframed photos adhered to the wall and dripping down into piles on the floor that are reminiscent of the collapsed buildings he photographed in his father’s home province of Sichuan. He arrived there just after a catastrophic earthquake, a timely event in terms of things meant to be buried rather than rediscovered. 

Stephanie Ayala builds ornate, metal structures to house her works that traverse metaphors, referencing gates or barriers between her family’s roots in the Caribbean and home in the South Bronx. The metal sculptures also recall the shape and material for altars, possibly a reference to their strong relationships and shared traditions.
In Patas de Pollo / Y la verdad os hará libres (And the truth shall make you free), her grandfather holds chicken feet, an ingredient used in sancocho, which her family prepares with root vegetables and fish. Like the sancocho, Ayala’s works are stewed until they’ve achieved a complex flavor. The patina of the wood, the bends and curls of the metal adornments, and the emotional weight of immigrant family photos work together to tell a story that is much more than its parts.

Juan “Wamoo” Álvarez channels his sensibilities as a sample-based musician and video gamer to synthesize heavily textured audiovisual collages. His work hangs in the glitch, which he calls “the clearest line between humans and technology.” The Tranquilo video series addresses our collective anxiety around the uncertainty of living as tiny blips in the vastness of the universe. 

Kalada Halliday is the kind of public school English teacher who will be invited to share in his students’ greatest accomplishments in life. He sees them so well, and in return, they allow him and his camera to see them in their most precious and fleeting teenage experiences. The photographs cut close to the bone with the pangs of formative years, yet they also tell us so much about what is happening in the world at this precise moment when we are confronting the collapse of Western neoliberal optimism.

Jarrett Murphy hikes through the frames of his long exposure night-time landscapes without ever appearing in the final image. Super-bright flashlight in hand, he illuminates fields of snowy mounds, grassy meadows, and even a forest that has just been burnt in a wildfire. We don’t see the artist in the final image, but we feel his presence in the vistas he’s chosen to show us, an invitation to step into the crisp stillness of the moment he’s preserved. 

Kalena Burwell, known artistically as Perle, came to photography through early studies in the New York fashion industry and family connections in the ballroom scene—always there to witness fabulous moments behind the scenes and on the runway. With remarkable precision, Perle captures the grandeur of the ballroom stage: Its royal court of judges, ecstatic performers, and thronging audience. Their intimate knowledge of the nuances of these relationships allows them to render the interconnected dynamics between each subject.

After years of grappling with body image, eating habits, dysmorphia, and depression, Néstor Pérez-Molière turned to radical queer self-portraiture to study ecologies of care (or lack thereof) within cis-male communities. He casts himself in all the relational roles he explores, often within natural settings that evoke the psychically fraught landscape of the Garden of Eden. A former professional botanist, Pérez-Molière is drawn to plants like poison ivy and the surprisingly toxic bluebell flower that have “an edge hidden in plain sight.”

These artists are the children of freedom fighters and the parents of the liberation, and they embody the complexity of the human experience. To those who came here to love and support them in return: Let’s do it.