Derriann Pharr's Visionary Figures Anchor Studio Museum Residency Show

Derriann Pharr's "Squinching my eyes shut and wishing real hard (Honey's Dream)" (2026) draws the shape of a woman, long and animalesque, on paper whose raw, frayed edges belie the force of the composition within them. Scales and fur and flower petals, gossamer wings and morning dewdrops fill the work, which anchors Pharr's contribution to A sustained becoming: Studio Museum Artists in Residence 2026, the exhibition of the institution's inaugural resident cohort.

In a second work, "Bring My Bones Home!" (2026), a bulbous female figure coils around a tiny creature in a gesture of tender but watchful protection. Spiky sculptural elements protrude above her, guardingly. The video accompanying the exhibition shows the drawing's coiled forms in detail.

Pharr's works hang in conversation with two other practices. Simonette Quamina contributes indigo-hued dreamscapes; Taylor Simmons presents intimate oil tableaux. All three artists fill a spacious fourth-floor gallery in the Studio Museum's new 82,000-square-foot building in Harlem, installed with evident curatorial care to avoid crowding and to let each practice breathe.

The exhibition marks a milestone for the institution. A sustained becoming presents the first cohort of artists in residence since the Studio Museum opened its purpose-built Harlem home, and the generous spacing of the fourth-floor gallery signals how the new building expands what the 57-year-old program can offer its residents.

For Pharr, whose figures fuse the animal, the botanical and the human into single bodies, the setting allows the tension between delicate surface and muscular composition to register at full force. Visitors can trace that tension across the cohort's shared gallery through the run of the show.