Jul 1–Aug 17, 2026

Ada Friedman

Echo Arts

Echo Arts is an experiment in process-driven art-making led by artist Ada Friedman. This summer, Friedman takes on the site of KAJE—a converted industrial exhibition space in Gowanus, Brooklyn—as a model for Echo Arts, the in-development artist residency she founded in 2025, located in the rural Texas Hill Country on a small portion of former grounds of Echo Hill Ranch, the noncompetitive, child-centered, Jewish summer camp established by her grandparents in 1953. 

For Friedman, Echo Hill is not simply one physical place, but a philosophy of living that prioritizes collectivity and asks the slowest camper to lead the hike and set the pace. It is a group of social and creative conditions that her grandmother Minnie Samet Friedman spoke of being replicable anywhere. This exhibition takes up that premise, using embodied research to bring an artist residency into being across space and time.

For two decades, people have entered my studio, looked around, and said which is the “Art”? As in, where does the studio-making end and the Art begin? Does this matter? Yes and no. I show my process in the finished work. I make meaning by deepening and developing relationships with fellow artists, artworks, places, materials, and beyond. Long-run experiential learner here. Ghosts, hills, brownstones, my cat Star, stars in the sky––the amazing Texas sky––these are all great company, but what could happen if my own artist-built-environment reflected on itself outwardly? My staging of Echo Arts at KAJE is a proposal that parallel play can help the work along, further informing its meaning by cheering lonely makers on and up, and creating something new.

Friedman has invited a set of artists, collaborators, friends, and the public, to engage four interactive modalities within the overarching Echo Arts exhibition framework:

• Studio Residencies =
Guest Artists will use KAJE as a temporary studio, working distinctly, but alongside Friedman
• Sunday Open Rehearsal Programs =
Studio Residency related events
• Tuesday Evening Drop-in Drawing =
Performative figure, still-life happening, drawing sessions

• Saturday Evening Programs =
Visiting Artist events, installation activations

As the exhibition shifts between occupants, temporal structures, and degrees of interactivity—as things come and go—traces of one another’s actions and effects provide context and direction to Friedman’s big picture plan for the residency program she is developing in Texas. However distant or unusual the Hill Country may be from post-industrial Gowanus, Friedman’s flexible proposal is looking to travel, staging activity that oscillates sympathetically, coincidentally, divergently, and through any other such relationship yet to be known.

An opening reception for Echo Arts will be held on Saturday, July 11, 2026 from 6-9pm, including a launch event for Star, Friedman’s first monograph designed and published by Hassla, New York.

Echo Arts Studio Resident lineup includes:
Alina Tenser, JUL 2—JUL 16
Theadora Frost in collaboration with Jake Manning, JUL 20—AUG 2
Kyle Marshall and Edo Tastic, AUG 3—AUG 16

Additional participating artists and program details to be announced.

BIOS

Ada Friedman has had recent solo and two person exhibitions at the Ana Mendieta Gallery, University of Iowa, Iowa City; Kendra Jayne Patrick, Bern, Switzerland; and David Peter Francis, New York. Her plays have been staged in New York at Essex Flowers, All Saints Church, and Safe Gallery. She holds an MFA in Painting from Bard College, and has taught studio art at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Connecticut State Community College Housatonic, among others. Friedman has participated in residencies including Shandaken Projects, New York, and Clay Break at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and was a founding member of the artist-run cooperative gallery Essex Flowers in New York. She was the 2025-2026 Grant Wood Fellow in Painting & Drawing at the University of Iowa and currently lives and works between Brooklyn, New York and the Texas Hill Country.

Echo Arts is an artist-run studio residency, performance, and arts-education space in the Texas Hill Country. They give artists time and funding to make their work, fostering open dialogue, community, and presenting opportunities. Echo Arts believes that making art is a vehicle for a kinder, more just world.