(Im)Migration Lines

(Im)Migration Lines with Iviva Olenick

Artist-in-Residence: Iviva Olenick

October 2018 – June 2019

The Wyckoff House Museum is thrilled to present a culminating exhibition of work by our 2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence, Iviva Olenick. Iviva’s residency permeated many aspects of our cultural organization. She worked closely with our garden team to cultivate dye plants like indigo, and process textile fibers from flax. She participated in many education programs, including a partnership with Midwood Active Adult Center, our Teen Apprenticeship Program, Teen Thursdays, and public programs. Her work was influenced and inspired by objects and documents found in the historic house and its archives. Her work, alongside two pieces by her students from Midwood Active Adults, were included in the 2018 exhibition Nou La–We Reach, presented by the Brooklyn Arts Council and curated by Desiree Gordon. Her residency exemplifies the exciting potential that artist collaboration can offer to idiosyncratic sites like the Wyckoff House.

Iviva’s artworks, created during this year-and-a-half residency, interrogate and expand the narrative of this small Dutch farmhouse. Her work elegantly weaves together the stories of the many generations of immigrants, colonists, migrants, and residents of the surrounding area. She does not shy away from interrogating both the consonance and dissonance of the diverse peoples and stories that have inhabited this home and this land. We invite you to use her textile-based artworks, alongside those presented by some of her students, as a new lens through which to view the Wyckoff House and our collective histories.

The residency and exhibit are co-curated by Iviva Olenick and Melissa Branfman. Meet Iviva below. 

Ivia Olenick

Meet Iviva Olenick, our 2017-2018 Artist-in-Residence. Iviva  is a Brooklyn-born and based artist and educator with a BA in French Literature and Psychology from Binghamton University, and an AAS in Textile/Surface Design from FIT. She exhibits her work with Muriel Guepin Gallery, NYC and Brooklyn Workshop Gallery, Brooklyn. Her work has appeared at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Sugar Hill Children’s Museum of Art and Storytelling, NYC; Brooklyn Arts Council; the Center for Book Arts, NYC. Iviva is an educator for the New Museum, the Studio Museum in Harlem, Hannah Senesh Day School, the Center for Arts Education, Rush Philanthropic Arts Foundation and UrbanGlass.