Our Virtual Studio

ABOUT

On June 2020, Jessica Tanto and Jennifer (Jenny) Reeves founded a global creative community for young artists. This project was initiated in response to the global COVID-19 pandemic. Jessica Tanto believes that nongkrong and chatting is a crucial process in art making. Unfortunately, the pandemic has limited many young artist's ability to meet up, chat and create art together. Hence, this virtual studio served as a safe space for creatives around the world to come together and make art in the company of others.

FORMAT OF THE STUDIO (2020)

During the start of this project, Jessica and Jenny would create weekly virtual studios on zoom and broadcast posters for the event through their Instagram pages. These virtual studios usually start of with ice-breakers to welcome new members and establish a safe space in the zoom room. It is followed by a 1 hour free-time where everyone is free to do their own art projects while chatting with each other in the call. The night generally finishes off with a collaborative artmaking session on the zoom whiteboard or a fun creative online game. 

That being said, the studio is often described as an extremely organic space as the sessions are never concretely planned and are always moulded depending on who and how many artists come. Each studio is usually visited by between 5-12 artists. This allows genuine and intimate interactions between everyone in the online studio space.

CURRENT STUDIO (2022)

After a while we realised that most of our attendees were from SouthEast Asia and Australia. Hence we decided to focus our program towards supporting artists from these regions. We re-structured our project so now we have 4 types of programs which are: Open Studio, Workshop, Artist Talk, and Collaboration. Together these 4 types of programs equip young artists in SouthEast Asia and Australia with the skills, knowledge and network to progress in their artistic journey. 

The community grew a lot in just one year and is now managed by 20 creatives across SouthEast Asia. We have more than 100 members in our active discord server, but the number increases with every weekly session. Each session is usually attended by 5-30 young artists.