Contemporary at Blue Star has selected Miles Friday, Brandy Gonzalez, Anthony Rundblade, and Andrea Willems as the 2025-2026 Berlin Residents at Künstlerhause Bethaanien.
Brandy Gonzalez, Miles Friday, Anthony Rundblade, and Andrea Willems, with the Contemporary’s Executive Director Mary Heathcott.
Since 2013, the Contemporary has selected four Bexar County artists to participate in three-month-long residencies in Berlin, Germany at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien. The Berlin Residents receive a studio and living space, as well as access to workshops, exhibition opportunities, and studio visits with international curators. They will also be featured in BE magazine, a dual language, internationally distributed publication. Additionally, with support from the City of San Antonio’s Global Engagement Office, the artists will travel to Darmstadt, Germany, a sister city of San Antonio, where they will meet artists and cultural leaders.
Exterior view of Künstlerhaus Bethanien (KB), courtesy of KB.
In a press release, Heyd Fontenot, a Berlin Residency alum, explained, “[I’ve] witnessed first-hand the level of support that artists receive at Künstlerhaus Bethanien. It’s profoundly different and does not compare to other residencies that I’ve now completed… The network at Künstlerhaus Bethanien is on a completely different level, both in terms of the fellow artist peers within the residency, the vital introductions provided to guest curators, and the practical facilities. I’ve also realized the long-term advantages of being an alum of Künstlerhaus Bethanien. It has made me understand more clearly that what the Contemporary offers with this program is not simply ‘a trip to Berlin for a Texas artist.’”
Residents are selected through an annual open call. This year’s selection panel included Dr. Angelika Jansen Brown, an independent curator and Contemporary at Blue Star Advisory Council member; Jimmy James Canales, a Berlin Residency program alum, artist, and Texas State University faculty; Roberto Jose Gonzalez, an artist, curator, and artist mentor; Sharmila Wood, an independent curator and director; and Jacqueline Saragoza McGilvray, the Curator and Exhibitions Director at The Contemporary.
Learn more about the 2025-2026 Berlin Residency artists below, via biographies provided by The Contemporary.
2025-2026 Berlin Residents
Miles Friday
Miles Jefferson Friday is a composer and educator who aims to construct communities where sound can serve as a site for critical inquiry to be realized, not just in the abstract, but in practice. Within this guiding principle, Mr. Friday’s creative output acts as a form of project-based research, where he utilizes music technologies and engages with theoretical scholarship as a means of exploring personal subjectivities of auditory reception, re-thinking instruments and/as objects, and proposing ways in which sound-based practice can operate more dynamically and equitably.
Creating work in acoustic, electronic, digital, installation, and instrument-building-based media, Mr. Friday aims to treat music composition not as a singular, codified medium, but as a methodology that has the capacity to house a wide spectrum of artistic inquiries in sound, technology, and related arts.
Mr. Friday’s works have been performed across the United States and internationally by various ensembles. He has also won awards and honors including the ASCAP Morton Gould Young Composer Award, the Twisted Spruce Symposium Composition Competition Prize, the Otto R. Stahl Memorial Award, the Wayne Brewster Barlow Prize, the Kuttner String Quartet Composition Competition, and the Robert Avalon Young Composer Competition.
Brandy Gonzalez
Brandy González was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Ms. González completed her BFA in Drawing with a minor in Sculpture from Southern Methodist University, where she received the Zelle Award for outstanding artistic merit. She then taught art for eight years in the public school system during which she completed her MA in Education from Texas Tech University (TTU) in 2013.
In May 2016, she completed her MFA, also from TTU, majoring in Printmaking with a secondary in Painting. Ms. González was selected for the inaugural print fellowship at the Charles Adams Studio Project in Lubbock. There she taught printmaking classes to the community and was the print shop technician.
Ms. González’s work can be seen throughout San Antonio, including downtown on the Kress building, inside the Oxbow building in the Historic Pearl, and at Poet’s Point, a pocket park. Additionally, her largest mural adorns the walls at the new NOLA brunch spot on Broadway. Ms. González’s work is in museum and university collections, including in the National Museum of Mexican Art in Chicago, Illinois.
Currently, Ms. Gonzalez is the Advanced Art Teacher at Clark High School and an Adjunct Professor at Northwest Vista College. She also works for Lassen College in Susanville, California, teaching an Art Appreciation correspondence class to an incarcerated population as part of the “You Save Them” program.
Anthony Rundblade
Anthony Rundblade is an artist based in San Antonio, TX, working primarily in sculpture, installation, and print. He earned his BFA in Printmaking from The University of Texas at San Antonio and his MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Texas at Austin. Prior to his MFA candidacy, Rundblade served as Studio Technician and Studio Manager at Artpace San Antonio (2014–2019), where he supported the creative processes of resident artists and deepened his understanding of collaborative art practices.
Rundblade’s work explores the grotesque as a lens to examine contemporary cultural and social shifts. Through material experimentation and the manipulation of found objects, he creates installations and sculptures that challenge perceptions of the familiar, inviting viewers to question the realities they take for granted. His practice is deeply informed by themes of inversion, distortion, and the uncanny, often drawing on the Carnivalesque and the writings of Mikhail Bakhtin to explore ideas of Joyous Anarchy and the subversion of social hierarchies.
Materiality is central to Rundblade’s practice. He often works with found objects, transforming them through mold making, material shifts, and subtle recontextualization. By altering the familiar — whether through casting, replication, or placement — he creates uncanny forms that destabilize expectations and invite viewers to reconsider the mundane. This process of material transformation mirrors his broader interest in the Grotesque, as he explores how objects and ideas shift from the margins of understanding into the banal fabric of everyday life. Rundblade has exhibited his work in solo exhibitions as well as collaborative and group exhibitions.
Andrea Willems
Andrea Willems is a painter whose work conveys personal narratives with themes around loss, place, and memory through landscape, still life, and abstraction. Much of her work is based on her own personal experiences and takes on an otherworldly quality by contrasting thin veils of paint, matte black grounds, colorful layers, and thick impasto smears.
Willems earned her BFA from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago in 2004 and is an alumnus of the New York Studio Program. In 2023, she received the Denis Diderot grant. Her work is a part of the Galerie Diderot collection in Orquevaux, France and the Department of Arts & Culture in San Antonio, Texas, and is held in private collections across Australia, New York, and California.
