Today we are announcing that Elsa Mora has stepped down from her role as Artistic Director and Curator at ArtYard, a position she has embodied since the organization’s founding with Executive Director Jill Kearney. Elsa will continue to work with ArtYard as a guest artist for special projects and workshops, a shift that will allow her to focus on her own artistic practice while remaining engaged in this organization where she is so valued and beloved.
Elsa’s departure after eight years of extraordinary service is a momentous change, and a moment to reflect on her enormous impact on the creation and development of ArtYard.
“ArtYard wouldn’t exist without Elsa Mora,” Jill said. “I will always treasure the joyful creative collaborations between us that brought ArtYard into being.”
As a champion for the organization’s vision and mission as an incubator for creative expression and catalyst for collaborations that reveal the transformational power of art, Elsa has played a leading role in conceptualizing and creating the public identity of ArtYard and its creative programming. She oversaw and managed the development of its design, website, social media, and brought her artistic talents and creativity to projects that touched nearly every aspect of the organization’s work — from an astonishing array of original costumes and constructions for its signature Hatch to the design of the ArtYard logo itself.
Over her tenure, Elsa curated eight exhibitions elevating and nurturing the work and careers of myriad artists, at times coaching them to explore deeper questions or experiment in new mediums. These exhibitions featured artists Lucia Monge, Natalie de Segonzac, Kendall Buster, Alexandre Arrechea, and Janet Ruttenberg. She served as a sounding board and problem solver to many more visiting artists in residence.
She co-curated with Jill the inaugural exhibitions at ArtYard’s first galleries at 62A Trenton Ave. Murmuration illuminated the primacy of place, the fragility of ecosystems, the unintended consequences of even benevolent impulses, and the importance of collaboration in the invention of ArtYard. Rashomon Machine featured an enormous glassine paper brain that visitors could enter from below to glimpse a hidden inner landscape. Like many ArtYard projects that ensued, this exhibition occasioned a conversation between disparate media — the documentary Life, Animated was screened in ArtYard’s new makeshift theater.
Elsa and Jill also worked together on In(animate), an exhibition featuring artists who work with natural materials such as bees wings, trees, and mud, complemented by an adjacent tongue-in-cheek Natural History Museum featuring a collection of supermarket bananas, soap ends, and a photo booth for self-portraits of community members wearing crowns made of moss and twigs. With Ulla Warchol, Elsa created for The Memory Palace: Frenchown at 150ish a scale model of the main street of Frenchtown, recounting local histories in paintings of the buildings’ facades.
Elsa’s own work was featured in Paper Weight, a solo exhibition interrupted by the pandemic shutdown that featured painstaking works made solely of paper and glue inspired by the cognitive faculties that form the mind — consciousness, perception, thinking, judgment, language, and memory.
Elsa developed her sense of wonder and possibility in her hometown of Holguín, Cuba, where her artistic journey began. A recipient of the UNESCO-Aschberg Bursaries for Artists, she moved to Los Angeles in 2001, where she first met Jill. Their meeting led to a series of conversations — they had both been independently dreaming of creating an art center, and they began to incubate ideas together, launching a creative partnership that Elsa later illustrated in the painting In the Back of Her Mind, now on view in the popup exhibition My Blue Heaven in ArtYard’s Laboratory Gallery. The pair went on to present their vision for ArtYard in a series of meetings with the Frenchtown Planning Board, seeking a variance for their first theater in the original Trenton Avenue building.
Elsa fulfilled her role as ArtYard’s Artistic Director from upstate New York until moving to Frenchtown in 2022 to offer more opportunities to her autistic son Diego, including Delaware Valley Regional High School’s FIERCE Program and Studio Route 29, a progressive art studio that centers the creative practices and perspectives of people with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Elsa’s access and inclusion advocacy, including her invitation to speak at Frenchtown Walks for Autism, played a role in bringing Studio Route 29 to Frenchtown.
“ArtYard has and will continue to have an important place in my heart,” Elsa said. “My experience there was transformational in ways that I continue to discover every single day. Thank you, Jill, for the opportunity to be part of something so special.”
These are just a few of Elsa’s contributions to ArtYard. Her art has been exhibited worldwide in art galleries and museums. She taught at the Vocational School of Arts in Camagüey, Cuba, and has been a visiting artist at the Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco State University, the Art Institute of Boston, the MoMA Design Store, and the National Gallery of Art, among others. Her work is in the permanent collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C.; the Long Beach Museum of Art, California; and the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon. Elsa has collaborated as an illustrator with such organizations as the Museum of Modern Art, Chronicle Books, The New York Review of Books, Penguin Random House, The Oprah Magazine, Cosmopolitan, and teNeues, among others.
Elsa’s belief that art saves lives coupled with her unrelenting drive to build community wherever she goes is summed up in her artist’s statement: “Whatever I write about my art today, will probably change tomorrow. As an artist, it is hard to define what and why. But there is one thing that I know for certain, which is that making art is as important to me as eating and sleeping. Other than that, I don’t have any answers, just questions. Does that make sense?”
With profound respect and gratitude, the ArtYard staff and community look forward to entering a new phase of collaboration with Elsa, one that will afford her time and space to exercise her extraordinary creative capacities in new forms.
