collaborations

studioELL LLC is an artist-run social enterprise based in eastern connecticut. studioELL is a hybrid learning space that offers courses and residencies — both in-person and online — devoted to studio art practice. part critique and part studio visit, studioELL intentionally fuses elements of higher education and continuing education to reconsider the possibilities within learning and support found in community education.

we encourage critical thinking and civic action through art. we compel students, artists, academic institutions, galleries and museums to question how art is made, taught and how it can be disseminated for the benefit of all. we are a growing, evolving entity and look to each other and our communities to challenge our ideas. we blur the lines between fine art and the everyday inundation of cultural content omnipresent in the visual experiences around us.

studioELL radicalizes learning and builds support networks within the studio practice by challenging institutional ways of thinking, co-opting the languageing of these more traditional educational spaces, constructing new communal spaces for critique and development and creating systems of mutual support centered around art practice. operating out of eastern connecticut, studioELL’s reach is national and international, with a focus on local solutions and community-building in the places enrolled artists and professors live and work. though new england is the current base of activity, our professors and student-artists act as stewards, building and extending the reach of studioELL through programming and connections to other artistic communities. this organic expansion is multilayered and synchronistic in its evolution. asynchronous studio classrooms allow for more freedom; our residency-style approach keeps artists focused on their practice as they engage in critical discourse while staying connected to their everyday life. studioELL creates a sustainable system both inside and outside the studio.

studioELL.org | about

intermission museum of art (ima) was founded in 2020 by rose van mierlo and john ros, in response to the cultural, social, environmental, economic and political fissures that make themselves evermore present during times of crisis and put stress on accepted systems of operation. ima provides a space for critical thinkers to respond to these moments of friction by investigating them as meaningful sites of production, instigating dialogues which will culminate in a public archive. 

ima’s name references the question of open space: the flipping movement of a hand searching through archives, gaps in the pavement, performance interludes, tv-commercials, coffee breaks and silent pauses; all moments of unpoliced disruption that are typically un-institutional. at its core, ima therefore proposes the museum as a site of uncertainty; a building without walls; a non-hierarchical collection of interdisciplinary narratives and voices; both a guest and a host; and an exercise in cross-pollination. it resists the architectural premise of power that underwrites the white cube, democratizing the exhibition in terms of access. instead, its architectural premise is that of lateral networks; its vision decentralized and participatory.

intermissionmuseum.org | about