Envision: The Michigan Artist Initiative 2027

In the summer 2026, Stamps Gallery announced an open call for artwork, inviting emerging and mid-career contemporary artists from Michigan working in all types of media to apply.

A shortlist of three artists were selected by a prominent national panel of jurors: Rehema Barber, Chief Curator, Kalamazoo Institute of Art; Laura Mott, Chief Curator, Cranbrook Art Museum; and artist Sara Nickleson, winner of the 2025 Envision: Michigan Artist Initiative Award.

Meet the shortlisted finalist artists for Envision: The Michigan Artist Initiative 2027:

• Mandy Cano Villalobos is a visual artist whose work spans installation, textiles, sculpture, and performance, influenced by her migrant upbringing which engages notions of home, death, belonging, and cultural identity. Self-dubbed a ​“cultural scrapper”, she mainly works with castoff objects – broken jewelry, orphaned toys, stained clothing, etc. – to craft opulent works that harness material memories steeped in human touch. Cano Villalobos has exhibited internationally, including with drj (Berlin, Germany), Proyecto H (Mexico City), Marisa Newman Projects (New York, NY), Bridge Projects (Los Angeles, CA), Modern Art Gallery (Veszprém, Hungary), Casa Pauly (Puerto Montt, Chile), among others. She received her MFA from The George Washington University in Washington, DC. and currently lives and works in Grand Rapids, MI.

• Abhishek Narula is an artist working across sculpture, installation, sound, and video with a creative practice that takes the form of interventions, working with what is already present by reorienting and disrupting familiar objects and sites to open formal and poetic possibilities within them. Narula’s work has been exhibited at venues including the Science Gallery Detroit, Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology (New London, CT), the Hyde Park Art Center (Chicago, IL), and the International Symposium on Electronic Art (Vancouver, B.C., Canada). A Lecturer and Robotics Designer in the University of Michigan’s Robotics Department in Ann Arbor, Narula received his MFA in Studio Art from the Stamps School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan, and his MS and BS in Electrical Engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology.

• Joey Quiñones is a fiber artist, ceramicist, and mixed media sculptor with work focused on African American and Caribbean history, particularly the development of queer Afro-Latine identity. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally at venues such as the Palais de Tokyo (Paris, France), the Akron Art Museum, the Shepherd (Detroit, MI), and The Sculpture Center (Cleveland, OH). Joey has an MFA in Studio Art from Indiana University, Bloomington and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa. They are currently the Artist-in-Residence/Head of the Fiber Department at Cranbrook Academy of Art in Bloomfield Hills, MI.

The artists will exhibit their work at Stamps Gallery from June 10 to July 31, 2027, receiving logistical and curatorial support from the professional staff at Stamps Gallery, as well as an artist fee and stipend to produce new work. 

The jury will select a winner, who will be announced at the exhibition’s opening reception and awarded a $5,000 cash prize.