OPEN Invitation
Rafay Rashid
September 2025
Rafay Rashid is a Providence-based artist working within the lineage of socially engaged and participatory art practices. His work blurs the boundaries between exhibition, performance, and collective care, often taking the form of gatherings, ambient installations, and improvised social spaces—offering a counterpoint to the commodification of self-care in contemporary life. Influenced by his work activating live-art spaces, Rashid’s ongoing project Wreck Room at AS220 transformed a gallery into a recovery-oriented rec center, featuring ping pong tables, open meetings, and modular spaces for rest and conversation. Emphasizing presence, interdependence, and everyday performance, his work invites audiences into co-authorship and sustained forms of engagement. Rashid has performed at institutions including the Whitney Biennial, Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, and Kaldor Public Art Projects in Sydney, often bringing elements of improvisation, music, and embodied exchange into institutional contexts. His practice foregrounds healing, play, and mutuality as essential components of aesthetic experience and reimagines the exhibition as a living social organism.
lexi welch
October/November 2025
lexi welch (b. 1991) works with image, sculpture, and sound in pursuit of the limits of representation, visibility, and selfhood. Current projects include a series of audio channels composed for subwoofers; an essay on an unrealized video about self-immolation; and a film set at the threshold to hell. Ambivalence, repetition, and homoerotics structure these inquiries. lexi holds a B.A. in Film and Electronic Arts from Bard College, an M.F.A. from the University of Pennsylvania, and attended Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2022.
https://www.lexiwelch.info
Tori Hong
January 2026
Positioned within queer theory and praxis, Tori Hong pursues an interdisciplinary art practice expressed through drawing, installation, social practice, textiles, and writing. Through her diaristic investigations, Hong invites her audience to find connection with oneself, each other, and the more-than-human world.
Hong’s artistic research explores the complex themes of Hmong and (North) Korean ancestry, self-determination, and collective survivance. She began her career in Minneapolis, MN as a self-educated, community-based artist. Hong is currently based in Providence, RI, where she received her MFA at the Rhode Island School of Design in 2025.
https://ntxoo.art
https://www.instagram.com/ntxoo.art/
Sasha de Koninck
Summer 2026
Sasha de Koninck is a visual artist, designer, and educator. While studying textiles in undergrad, she was introduced to the field of electronic textiles and wearable technology. She went straight to graduate school after completing her BFA, in order to further continue the expansion of her research. She recently completed her Ph.D. in Intermedia Art, Writing, and Performance at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she worked with Laura Devendorf and the Unstable Design Lab. Currently, she is a postdoctoral research fellow at Northeastern University in Boston, where she works with Laura Forlano in the Critical Futures Lab.
https://studiosdk.net
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OPEN Invitation is a series of exhibitions curated through a rolling open call process. Presently, we’re working with four artists per programatic year.
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