{"id":1825,"date":"2017-11-16T13:42:29","date_gmt":"2017-11-16T13:42:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/media-archive.blackartinamerica.com\/?p=1825"},"modified":"2017-11-16T13:42:29","modified_gmt":"2017-11-16T13:42:29","slug":"wexner-center-announces-artist-residency-awards-for-2017-18","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/earthexhibitions.org\/media-archive\/?p=1825","title":{"rendered":"Wexner Center Announces Artist Residency Awards for 2017-18"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Wexner Center Announces Artist Residency Awards for 2017-18<\/h1>\n<\/div>\n
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Columbus, OH\u2014<\/em>The Wexner Center for the Arts at the Ohio State University announces its\u00a0Wexner Center Artist Residency Award<\/strong>\u00a0recipients for 2017\u201318.<\/p>\n

A total of $200,000 is invested each year in the work of contemporary artists across the center\u2019s three program areas\u2014visual arts, performing arts, and film\/video. Chosen by the center\u2019s curators and director, the artists who receive this distinction propel the center\u2019s mission as a laboratory for the exploration and advancement of contemporary art, complementing Ohio State\u2019s work as a leading research institution.<\/p>\n

In addition to a financial award, residency artists benefit from technical, professional, and creative support, as well as space on-site to develop new work and extraordinary freedom to determine the shape and timing of the residency. In turn, as a requirement of the residency, they work with Wexner Center staff to engage with faculty experts and students, sharing their experience and creative processes in an educational setting. A list of past Artist Residency Award recipients is available\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The recipients for 2017\u201318 are:<\/p>\n

VISUAL ARTS: MICKALENE THOMAS<\/strong>
\n\"Mickalene<\/h3>\n

Acclaimed Brooklyn-based artist Mickalene Thomas creates arresting portraits in a variety of media, variously depicting her sitters through paintings, photographs, collages, tableaux installations, and videos meant to reveal how gender and identity are constructed, upheld, and mediated.<\/p>\n

Culling from art history, media, and popular culture, she produces work that deconstructs and lays bare the highly charged connections among sitter, artist, and viewer. The sitters\u2014almost exclusively women of color\u2014who recur in Thomas\u2019s compositions often convey a spirit of strength and self-confidence, whether depicted in the mode of classically composed 19th-century odalisques, assured Afro-adorned vixens of blaxploitation films, or a powerful maternal figure.<\/em>Across this archetypal array, it is both the contradictions and the kinships that make the black female body such fertile terrain for Thomas\u2019s ongoing investigations. By casting herself, her late mother, and other formidable women in her life\u2014lovers, friends, and celebrities\u2014as models, muses, and collaborators, she particularizes her distinctive oeuvre of portraiture. In Thomas\u2019s own words, \u201cThe person who has that authority of the gaze is always the sitter. I think the sitter\u2019s the most powerful person who resides in that space of how they\u2019re going to deliver the gaze.\u201d<\/p>\n

Thomas\u2019s residency project at the Wex is still evolving.\u00a0It will culminate in fall 2018 with the presentation of a major exhibition of paintings and related works being organized by Senior Curator of Exhibitions Michael Goodson<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

(Image \u00a9 Lyndsy Welgos)<\/p>\n

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PERFORMING ARTS: IMPROBABLE<\/strong>
\n\"Tyrone<\/h3>\n

British theater ensemble Improbable has a long and fertile history with the Wex, beginning with its first US tour in 1999 with the production\u00a070 Hill Lane<\/em>. A previous Artist Residency Award recipient from 2002\u20134 and 2007\u20139, the thought-provoking, 21-year-old company presented the US premiere of\u00a0The Hanging Man<\/em>\u00a0in 2003 and the world premiere of\u00a0Panic<\/em>\u00a0in 2009 at the center.<\/p>\n

The 2017\u201318 Artist Residency Award supports Improbable\u2019s work on\u00a0Opening Skinner\u2019s Box<\/em><\/strong>, which was co-commissioned by the Wexner Center and will be presented in its Performance Space\u00a0March 29\u2013April 1, 2018<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Inspired by the Lauren Slater book of the same name, the production, in the words of the company, is \u201ca whistle-stop tour of the scientific quest to make sense of what we are and who we are, told through 10 great psychological experiments and the stories of the people who created them.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Image: from\u00a0Opening Skinner’s Box<\/em>, featuring Tyrone Huggins & company. Photo by Topher McGrillis)<\/p>\n

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PERFORMING ARTS: FAYE DRISCOLL<\/strong>
\n\"\"<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Wexner Center continues its relationship with the Bessie Award\u2013winning choreographer and 2016\u201317 Artist Residency Award winner Faye Driscoll through the completion of her captivating trilogy,\u00a0Thank You for Coming<\/em><\/strong>.\u00a0 The final work, the Wex-commissioned\u00a0Thank You for Coming: Space<\/em><\/strong>, brings her vital experiment in exploring new, interactive modes of personal storytelling full circle. Driscoll will present a work-in-progress performance and the completed piece at the Wexner Center on dates to be announced.<\/p>\n

(Image: portrait of the artist by Ann Hamilton)<\/p>\n

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FILM\/VIDEO: BARBARA HAMMER<\/strong>
\n\"Barbara<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A two-year Artist Residency Award from the Wexner Center is just one part of a string of remarkable career achievements for Barbara Hammer over the past year.<\/p>\n

The influential visual artist and queer cinema pioneer presented the multichannel installation\u00a0Evidentiary Bodies<\/em>\u00a0at the Whitney Museum in November 2016. It\u2019s now on view at New York\u2019s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art. She was recently the subject of a retrospective at the New York Film Festival. Her 1990 film,\u00a0Sanctus,<\/em>\u00a0is being featured at the 2017 Venice Biennale; it\u2019s also on view at the Wexner Center through the month of November. A program of recently restored films from early in her career will be screened at the Wex in February 2018 during the annual restoration festival,\u00a0Cinema Revival<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Earlier this year, she announced the creation of the Barbara Hammer Lesbian Experimental Filmmaking Grant in conjunction with the New York City nonprofit Queer | Art, and her archive was acquired by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library at Yale University.<\/p>\n

In the first phase of her residency, Hammer will complete a project with the working title\u00a0Empathy<\/em><\/strong>. Created from footage shot in Hammer\u2019s New York studio over a year\u2019s time, in which the artist captured projections of her body and on her body, the work will be edited by Paul Hill of the Wexner Center\u2019s Film\/Video Studio, who\u2019ll be traveling to New York to collaborate with Hammer in her studio.<\/p>\n

In the words of the artist, \u201cIn these horrific times when lies are blatantly exclaimed as truths, when fear makes us withdraw from each other, when difference is maligned as xenophobia and when atrocities are committed in the name of spectacle, we must find and practice a quiet way of compassion, sympathy, and generosity through empathy.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the second phase of Hammer\u2019s residency in 2018\u201319, she\u2019ll revisit three unfinished works from earlier in her career: an as-yet untitled film begun in 1998 on the dunes of Provincetown, Massachusetts; a film begun in 1993 addressing AIDS and the deaf community; and a film from the 1970s exploring indigenous peoples in a Guatemalan market.<\/p>\n

(Image courtesy of the artist)<\/p>\n

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FILM\/VIDEO: PENNY LANE<\/strong>
\n\"Portrait<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A growing force in the field of nonfiction filmmaking, Penny Lane has won accolades at film festivals around the US including the Best Documentary prize at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival for her feature,\u00a0Nuts!<\/em><\/p>\n

With Artist Residency Award assistance, Lane returns with her latest project to the issue of reproductive rights, the focus of her 2005 documentary short\u00a0Abortion Stories<\/em>. Currently titled\u00a0Norma<\/em>,<\/strong>\u00a0the feature-length work will explore the life of Norma McCorvey, the woman chosen by chance to be the most famous plaintiff in American history. As \u201cJane Roe\u201d in the case of\u00a0Roe v. Wade<\/em>, McCorvey was cast as the lead in an epic and deeply divisive historical drama. Then, after becoming an icon of the pro-choice movement, McCorvey switched sides and became an outspoken opponent of abortion rights. Relying on archival material as in her 2013 feature debut,\u00a0Our Nixon<\/em>, and including excerpts from McCorvey\u2019s two published memoirs, Lane traces McCorvey\u2019s struggle to reveal the real-life story behind a legal fiction.<\/p>\n

Lane will also utilize the Film\/Video Studio for the sound design and mix of her new experimental short,\u00a0Normal Appearances<\/em><\/strong>, which explores the strange ritualistic structure of the reality dating show\u00a0The Bachelor<\/em>.<\/p>\n

(Photo by Les Stone, courtesy of the artist)<\/p>\n

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FILM\/VIDEO: KEVIN JEROME EVERSON<\/strong>
\n\"Kevin<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Ohio-born filmmaker Kevin Jerome Everson has entered the second phase of his two-year residency with the Wexner Center, having completed a number of films including\u00a0Rhino<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(2018), an experimental enactment of the last days of the 16th-century Duke of Florence, Alessandro de\u2019 Medici. He\u2019s now creating an ambitious new body of films focused on specific people, places, and histories of his hometown of Mansfield.<\/p>\n

The first films in this series are\u00a0IFO<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(2017),\u00a0Round Seven<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(2018), and\u00a0A Good Fight<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0(2018). They cover subjects as varied as Mansfield boxer Art McKnight and his 1978 fight against Sugar Ray Leonard at the Hara Arena in Dayton, the closing of Mansfield Tire, and a famous alleged UFO sighting in the area. Everson is also working on a related, multichannel gallery installation,\u00a0Richland Blue<\/em><\/strong>, featuring elements of each of the films as well as related objects and photographs.<\/p>\n

(Photo by Sandy Williams III)<\/p>\n

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FILM\/VIDEO: JENNIFER REEDER<\/strong>
\n\"Photo<\/strong><\/h3>\n

A Columbus native, Chicago-based filmmaker Jennifer Reeder is a frequent guest of the Wexner Center, with postproduction residencies in the Film\/Video Studio and appearances coinciding with the presentation of her work, including the area premiere of her award-winning first feature,\u00a0Signature Move<\/em>, in April 2017.<\/p>\n

The Artist Residency Award will support the creation of Reeder\u2019s next feature,\u00a0As With Knives and Skin<\/em><\/strong>. It follows the investigation of a young girl\u2019s disappearance in the rural Midwest, led by an inexperienced local sheriff. Unusual coping techniques develop among the traumatized small-town residents with each new secret revealed. In the words of the artist, \u201cThis mystical teen noir presents coming of age as a lifelong process and examines the profound impact of grief.\u201d<\/p>\n

(Image: Jennifer Reeder introducing\u00a0Signature Move<\/em>\u00a0at the Wexner Center, April 19, 2017. Photo by Brooke LaValley)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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