Guest Artists Space (G.A.S.) Foundation and Yinka Shonibare Foundation (Y.S.F.) are pleased to announce a new residency exchange partnership with Floating Museum through The Burroughs Residency in Chicago, United States. This initiative expands both organisations' commitment to supporting alumni and nurturing transnational exchange between artists, cultural practitioners, and communities across Nigeria and the United States.
Launched in 2024 by Floating Museum, The Burroughs Residency is a translocal programme inspired by the legacy of Dr Margaret Burroughs, a poet, printmaker, activist, and advocate whose models of cultural facilitation and archiving are embedded within Chicago’s cultural infrastructure. In line with the Museum's organizational vision of creating a “museum without walls,” The Burroughs envisions a “residency without walls,” that supports creatives of colour and strengthens local and global creative communities.
As part of this partnership, G.A.S./Y.S.F. and Floating Museum each selected residents to participate in a fully funded exchange programme. Candidates were identified through a closed call across both organisations’ alumni networks and previous Burroughs programme participants, based on the strength of their practices and their alignment with the aims of the programme. Final selections were made by Belinda Holden, CEO of Yinka Shonibare Foundation, and Moni Aisida, Executive Director of Guest Artists Space Foundation, alongside Ashwaty Chennat, Burroughs Residency Manager, and Bianca Marks, Burroughs Deputy Director.
Today, we are pleased to announce the inaugural 2026 cohort. The Burroughs residents are Kosisochukwu Nnebe, a conceptual artist, researcher and writer and Dr Phokeng Setai, an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner; the residents joining G.A.S. are Bweza Itaagi, an urban farmer, community cultivator and horticulturist and Erika Allen, a multidisciplinary social change artist.
Kosisochukwu and Phokeng will be hosted at Dr. Burroughs' historic home in Bronzeville, where they will engage with Chicago's wider cultural ecosystem through visits, exchanges, and encounters with local practitioners and organisations. In exchange, Erika and Bweza whose residencies are funded by the Terra Foundation For American Art will be hosted at the G.A.S. Farm House in Ikise, where they will develop research-led and site-responsive practices in dialogue with local communities.
This initiative reflects G.A.S. and Y.S.F.'s ongoing commitment to supporting and engaging their alumni through international exchange, residencies, and collaborative opportunities.
About the Recipients
Bweze Itaagi
Nyabweza “Bweza” Itaagi stewards the Englewood Nature Trail and Agro-Eco District with Grow Greater Englewood, and is the owner and co-founder of Sistas In The Village farm. She is an urban farmer, community cultivator, and horticulturist. She earned a master's degree in Sustainable Urban Development from DePaul University and has worked with organizations focused on urban agriculture, city planning, community empowerment, and Earth stewardship. A first-generation Ugandan American, Bweza integrates East African farming traditions in Chicago. She sees farming as a spiritual practice that heals communities and builds collective power. Her work connects communities across continents, fostering solidarity and resilience through agriculture and shared cultural heritage.
Image of Bweza Itaagi.
Erika Allen
Erika Allen is a multidisciplinary social change artist whose philosophy of "Ecological Alchemy" uses healing arts to confront structural oppression. Her practice reclaims food, culture, and spirit through traditional indigenous African and folk arts, transforming the Urbs in Horto (city in a garden) ethos into a vehicle for food justice and liberation. Working in five-dimensional forms with a core focus on painting, Allen’s work has been featured at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) Chicago and the South Side Community Art Center (SSAC).She Founded Growing Power's Chicago Office, which transitioned into Urban Growers Collective and is a co-founding partner with Green Era Sustainability. She integrates creative and therapeutic techniques to build circular economies and climate resiliency.
Allen holds a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, an MA in Art Psychotherapy, and a Ph.D. in Public Health from the University of Illinois. A Leadership in Society Fellow at the University of Chicago Graham School (2025–2026), Allen’s career serves as a blueprint for multidisciplinary modality weaving through the intersection of art, soil, and communal healing.
Image of Erika Allen.
Kosisochukwu Nnebe
Kosisochukwu Nnebe is a Nigerian-Canadian conceptual artist, researcher, and writer. Nnebe’s practice mobilizes vernacular forms and everyday infrastructures—foodways, nail salons, native languages—to construct counter-archives of Blackness rooted in anti-imperial relationality. In their play with spatiality and coded visual lexicons, her work demonstrates how social positionings shape regimes of perception and legibility. Cutting across installation, sculpture and lens-based media, they establish their own conditions for legibility: Black women’s emotional lives, labour, and knowledge emerge not as subjects to be deciphered but as the epistemic ground through which meaning itself becomes possible. Nnebe is a 2025 alumnus of the Jan van Eyck Academie and a 2023 Awardee of the G.A.S. Fellowship started by Yinka Shonibare CBE RE. Her work has been exhibited internationally including: Framer Framed (Amsterdam), NADA New York, the Art Museum of Toronto, and the Bowling Green State University Gallery. Institutional acquisitions include KADIST International, the Canada Council for the Arts, the Ottawa Art Gallery, and the Agnes Etherington Art Centre.
Image of Kosisochukwu Nnebe. Photo: Vladim Vilain.
Dr Phokeng Setai
Dr Phokeng Setai is an interdisciplinary cultural practitioner whose work engages contemporary art through both scholarly research, exhibition-making and socially engaged artistic practice. With a sharp eye for emerging modes of cultural production, his practice considers how artistic and curatorial strategies shape knowledge production, pedagogy, and public engagement within African contexts. In early 2024, he completed a PhD in Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape, based at the Centre for Humanities Research. His doctoral research examined contemporary African curatorial strategies and pedagogies, focusing on the relationship between exhibition-making and critical inquiry. Dr Setai has participated in international cultural programmes including RAW Material Company (Dakar), Independent Curators International (New York), Fundación Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Madrid), and G.A.S. Lagos, experiences that inform his transnational outlook.
Dr Setai is co-founder of Exhibition Match, an initiative that draws on the culture of football to create new audiences for contemporary art through socially engaged formats. The project reflects his interest in interdisciplinary approaches and alternative modes of participation—a product of his belief that creativity thrives where disciplines collide. In 2024, he joined Zeitz MOCAA as Assistant Curator, contributing to exhibitions, research, and public programming. His writing has appeared in The Thinker, The Sole Adventurer, ArtThrob and most recently, Africa Is a Country. His research interests include curatorial practice; contemporary art in relation to urbanism and architecture; experimental music and sound ecologies; design; and the cultural infrastructures that sustain artistic production on the Continent.
Image of Dr Phokeng Setai. Photo: Remie G.
About Floating Museum
Floating Museum is a collective of artists and cultural workers who critique institutional structures by reconsidering their purpose and reimagining their forms as mobile, temporal, and collaborative. Working with communities to surface unseen histories and lived realities, Floating Museum’s projects often take the form of mobile sculptures activated through site-specific and historically resonant performances. Past projects include the Floating Monuments series (for Mecca, The Garden, Founders); River Assembly, an installation and public program series staged on a barge that floated along the Chicago River; and Cultural Transit Assembly, which brought installations and programming to Chicago’s public train system. Floating Museum understands its role as building infrastructure that amplifies hyperlocal practices within global art contexts while also strengthening local creative economies.
About Terra Foundation for American Art
The Terra Foundation for American Art, established in 1978 and having offices in Chicago and Paris, supports organizations and individuals locally and globally with the aim of offering intercultural dialogues and encouraging transformative practices that expand narratives of American art, through the foundation’s grant program, collection, and initiatives.
