2026 Jewelry Residency

The 92nd Street Y, New York is pleased to announce the selection of the Jewelry Center’s eighth annual Jewelry Artist in Residence, Sayo Ota of Japan. She will work at 92NY’s recently renovated jewelry studios August 17 through September 30, 2026.

Sayo Ota is an emerging artist and trained goldsmith from Japan who works at the intersection of contemporary art, craft, and material-based research, approaching jewelry as an expanded and critical medium. Her practice engages materials as carriers of cultural memory, social relationships, and historical entanglements, exploring how objects of adornment mediate identity, intimacy, and power. She is particularly interested in transnational exchange, colonial histories, and the Arctic as both a lived environment and a geopolitical construct.

This focus shapes her methodology, especially through extended research stays in Greenland supported by international grants, fostering a practice attentive to place, material circulation, and the layered histories embedded in both natural and industrial materials. She holds an MFA in Global Art Practice from Tokyo University of the Arts and a BFA in Medium- and Material-Based Art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts, complemented by studies in cultural and social history at the University of Greenland. Her interdisciplinary practice spans jewelry, installation, printmaking, and text. Her work has been recognized with the Purchase Prize for Best MFA Graduate in Tokyo and the FKDS Award for Best BFA Graduate in Oslo, along with multiple grants and residencies across Scandinavia and Japan. In parallel, she contributes to public discourse through teaching, writing, and workshops.

“During my time in New York, I am interested in exploring the cultural and material connections between Greenland and the city,” Ota said in her artist statement. “This includes research into the history of an Inughuaq child who was brought from North Greenland to New York at the end of the nineteenth century, and how this story continues to exist within institutional archives and cultural memory. In parallel, I will examine collections such as the Greenlandic meteorites held at the American Museum of Natural History, considering how both human lives and material objects have been displaced, collected, and recontextualized.”

Ota was chosen for the 92NY International Jewelry Residency program by a distinguished jury including Susan Grant Lewin, collector; Kellie Riggs, curator; Marina Elenskaya, Director, Current Obsession; Jonathan Wahl, Director of 92NY's Jewelry Center, and Kathy Chazen, 92NY Board member. Honorable mentions went to Benedict Fischer from the Netherlands and Minyeol Cho from Korea.

The 92NY Jewelry Residency is supported by 92NY Board member, Kathy Chazen. Previous recipients of the Jewelry Center Artist Residency have included Bettina Speckner (2025), Shin-Ryeong Kim (2024), Sungho Cho (2023), Alexander Blank (2022), Claudia Lepik (2019), Ineke Heerkens (2018), and Göran Kling (2017).