Realizing they had created a white community of artists within a Black neighborhood (“It didn’t feel right,” Ockel said), the Shipyard Trust for the Arts began its artist-in-residence program in 1995 to draw in creators from the surrounding community.
The first participant in the program, Malik Seneferu, had never heard of the concept of an artist in residence. “I thought I was going to live there,” he said. Seneferu—who calls himself a renaissance artist, proficient in every genre—has since made 10,000 pieces of art at the shipyard, continuing to rent a studio after his residency was complete. Growing up in Hunters Point, nicknamed “The Hill,” he has a deep connection to the topography, which he uses in his series “From the Hill and Beyond.”
As a teenager, Seneferu would watch the sunrise from his bedroom and dream of what could be beyond the hills. “I’ve always loved imaginative landscapes,” he said.
