RAMP: A New Exchange with the Cleveland Institute of Art
Two Cleveland Institute of Art faculty artists and two Flux Factory community artists will take part in the residency exchange program in summer and fall 2026
The Cleveland Institute of Art (CIA) and Flux Factory are excited to announce the first artists selected to participate in the Regional Artist Mobility Program (RAMP), a new initiative to strengthen inter-regional exchange between U.S. artists by supporting professional development, facilitating creative dialogue and building cooperation among artists from different regions.
Two CIA faculty artists—interdisciplinary artist and designer Rachel Ferber , an assistant professor in the Foundation program for first-year students, and painter Mike Meier , an assistant professor in the Painting program—will spend six weeks with Flux Factory in May and June 2026. Their residency will provide unparalleled opportunities for professional development as they explore New York’s art institutions and galleries, meet their NYC colleagues, create new work and share their work at Flux IV.
Two Flux Factory community artists—textile artist and designer Itala Aguilera and interdisciplinary artist and former actor Li-Ming Hu —will spend six weeks in residence at CIA in September and October 2026. During their residencies, they will be immersed in the Cleveland arts community, meet with CIA students, create new work and share their creative practices with the local community. Each of these four artists were chosen through an open call conducted by Flux Factory and CIA. They were selected based on the quality of their work, potential benefit of participation in the residency program, and commitment to sharing their skills and knowledge with students and the local arts community.
Flux Factory and CIA’s Exhibitions + Galleries department will organize public programs, including the group exhibition scheduled to open in November 2026 in CIA’s Reinberger Gallery.
Meet the RAMP artists:
Itala Aguilera, studied Fashion and Textile Design at CENTRO in her hometown, Mexico City, before her practice shifted to the visual arts. In 2022, Aguilera joined Flux Factory, where she would later co-curate The Golden Colonel and produce—with support from a New York State Council on the Arts grant—her solo show, Tierra Mojada (Wet Land). She also exhibited and performed at the Textile Arts Center. “I’m excited to work on new pieces in the different workshops at CIA, and to learn how to use the new tools I will have access to”, Aguilera says. “I am hoping to find new opportunities for collaboration with the CIA students and the artistic community in Cleveland.”
Rachel Ferber is an interdisciplinary artist, designer and educator. She integrates domestic waste and found forms into videos, sculptures and textiles that explore sticky intersections of power, performance and sustainability through the lens of commodified private space. In addition, she runs an experimental natural dye project called The Dye Bath and is one half of the art and design initiative NEW NEW NEW.
“I’m really honored to have this time at Flux Factory—this opportunity is such a gift. I’m especially excited to work with Materials for the Arts, connect with the other Flux artists and immerse myself in all the arts and culture that New York offers,” Ferber says. “During my residency, I will continue the development of ephemeral pigments derived from food scraps and am planning a multimedia performance-workshop hybrid that activates these forms through play and experimentation.”
Li-Ming Hu is an artist, recovering actor and sometime writer born in Aotearoa/New Zealand currently based in Queens, New York. Often employing a carnivalesque sensibility, her work engages with the imperatives of high-performance culture, drawing on her background in the entertainment industry to explore the production and performance of subjectivity within contemporary cultural economies. “I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to participate in this residency and excited to use this time to experiment with new processes and engage with arts communities in Cleveland,” Hu says.
Mike Meier’s work examines media, art history and popular culture to explore the American psyche. He earned a BFA from the Cleveland Institute of Art and an MFA from Washington University in St. Louis. His practice merges fine art traditions with raw, reactionary energy, drawing on satire, emotional intensity and cultural critique to probe power, violence and belief systems as American identity. I’m excited to be included in the inaugural residency collaboration between Flux Factory and the Cleveland Institute of Art. I hope to draw from this dynamic experience to enrich student instruction and support as a professor working across multiple practices, while engaging my professional studio work in new and expanded ways,” Meier says. I’m especially grateful to CIA’s Reinberger Gallery team and the Flux Factory team for making this exchange possible. This kind of support for artists is paramount to sustainability and growth as a creative professional, and it’s a real privilege to participate in something like this. I look forward to the future of RAMP and what it will afford to our community at CIA.”
The Regional Artist Mobility Program is made possible with the support of The Kettering Family Foundation.