92NY Names This Year’s Jewelry Artist in Residence

By Karen Dybis | June 08, 2026

Sayo Ota, an emerging artist from Japan, is the next jewelry artist in residence at the 92nd St Y (92NY), the New York City cultural institution has announced.

Ota (pictured) will be based at the 92NY’s recently renovated jewelry studios from Aug. 17 through Sept. 30, the eighth residency for its Jewelry Center.

In her art, Ota explores how objects of adornment can represent power, identity, intimacy, social relationships, colonial histories, and transnational exchanges. Her materials include urushi, or Japanese lacquer, as well as unconventional objects like bath bombs. She is also a trained goldsmith.

Ota has focused in particular on the Arctic as a lived environment and a geopolitical construct. She has spent time in Greenland for research, studying cultural and social history at the University of Greenland.

“During my time in New York, I am interested in exploring the cultural and material connections between Greenland and the city,” Ota said in a statement. “This includes research into the history of an Inughuaq child who was brought from north Greenland to New York at the end of the 19th century, and how this story continues to exist within institutional archives and cultural memory.”

92ny artist work — *From Sayo Ota’s Wrest, her graduate exhibition at Tokyo University of the Arts University Museum (photo: Lemmart)*

The artist said she plans to visit the collection of Greenlandic meteorites at New York’s American Museum of Natural History, as she considers how both human lives and material objects have been displaced, collected, and recontextualized.

Ota earned an MFA in global art practice from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2024 and a BFA in in medium- and material-based art from the Oslo National Academy of the Arts in 2018. She was recognized with the Purchase Prize for her graduate work and received the FKDS Award as an undergrad.

The 92NY Jewelry Center artist in resident was selected by a jury composed of Jonathan Wahl, the center’s director; 92NY board member Kathy Chazen, who provides support for the residency; Susan Grant Lewin, a collector; Kellie Riggs, jewelry designer and curator; and Marina Elenskaya, director of the Netherlands-based jewelry magazine and platform Current Obsession.

Honorable mentions for this year’s residency went to Benedict Fischer, of the Netherlands, and Minyeol Cho from Korea.

Previous recipients of the Jewelry Center residency were Bettina Speckner (2025), Shin-Ryeong Kim (2024), Sungho Cho (2023), Alexander Blank (2022), Claudia Lepik (2019), Ineke Heerkens (2018), and Göran Kling (2017).

(Photo courtesy 92NY)