Donde La Mente Puede Respirar
By Elga Wimmer
Vanitas Creative Culture
Publicado 26 agosto, 2023
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https://www.vanitas.es/donde-la-mente-puede-respirar/
Artist residencies in the 21st century
Artist residencies are popping up everywhere, often competing with long-established institutions. Nestled in rolling hills and medieval villages overlooking vineyards, acres of gardens, and pristine beach areas, these new centers of creativity for artists offer a welcome respite from the shared studios, noisy cities, and fierce art market competition that have come to define the artist experience.
Lia Porto, artist in residence and guest Annina Nosei at Art Omi Photo by Elga Wimmer
Here we take a look at local artist residencies in Upstate New York and Long Island, as well as internationally, from the remote area of Asti in Italy to as far away as Kenya, on the beaches of Dakar.
Art Omi is one of the first artist residencies I visited with John Weber, a board member and prominent New York art dealer and gallerist in the 1990s. With relatively few artists at the time, you could really get to know each artist, discover some of tomorrow's great talents, while after hours, dancing the night away in a two-story open-air red barn, a converted dairy farm, which still houses most of the studios today.
Altynai Osmoeva “Dinar: Bread is Gold,” hanging sculpture, handmade flatbreads (7 pieces), gold leaf, and felt. Collection Art Omi, 2023. Photo by Elga Wimmer
The artists, from diverse disciplines, countries, and backgrounds, shared meals, exchanged ideas, collaborated on projects, and attended workshops, all while participating in a shared, art-driven everyday life. The residency was founded in 1992 by Francis Greenburger, a real estate developer, literary agent, and art enthusiast. Greenburger wanted to connect with artists beyond the gallery and museum experience to gain firsthand experience and possibly collect artworks originally created by tomorrow's rising stars.
2019 Kehinde Wiley Photo by Mamadou Gomis
Greenburger was also very interested in writers, in the literary sense, as his father was a literary agent. The residence was expanded to include residences for writers, musicians, architects, and dancers, and a sculpture and architectural park was added to the sixty-acre property in Columbia County, the Berkshires, and the Albany area. The stunning beauty and serenity of the area reminds me of the idyllic regions of Bavaria and Austria, with charming town names like Kinderhook and Germantown.
Artists in Residence Photo by Elga Wimmer
A particularly prominent group of artists participated in this year's Art Omi, supported by grants. For example, Oscar Debs, originally from Lebanon, is a recipient of the Francis J. Greenburger Fellowship to Mitigate Religious and Ethnic Conflict. During his residency, Art Omi worked with the concept of the arc at the intersection of two carbon torches from a film projection.
Performance The Bear by UBU @Watermill Center photo by Elga Wimmer
Sandra Carol Lapage of Brazil, a Pollock Krasner Foundation and Repaint History Artist Fund fellow, repurposed aluminum trays and empty coffee pods to create large, floating sculptures reminiscent of Cai Quo Quiang's Phenix, made from construction site waste in China. Altynai Osmoeva of Kyrgyzstan, a Larkin Dawn Fellow, ponders how historical tradition and cultural heritage can be translated into the present day, such as how women in her country were highly valued for achieving a perfect circle with handcrafted dishes and kneading bread dough.
Upon entering the grounds of this year's prestigious Watermill Center's 30th Summer Benefit Gala, visitors were directed where to go by the character of the Bear from Robert Wilson's adaptation of the surrealist play UBU. Indeed, one needs directions, as the Watermill Center comprises some ten acres of landscaped grounds, a sculpture collection,
Barbara Hoffman (art attorney), artists Coco Fusco and Elia Alba at Watermill Center Summer Benefit photo
20,000 square feet of multipurpose interiors featuring artist residencies, a theater production archive, a library, and outdoor stages. This ingenious and playful gesture set the tone for the event from the start.
The Watermill Center was founded in 1992 by Robert Wilson as a laboratory for the arts. Performance artists come from all over the world to make art in its residencies. Drawing on a strong association with performance, the 2023 Annual Summer Benefit Gala focused on the role of the body in art-making (The Body). On the way to the main building, lit by glowing torches competing with the setting sun, the cast bronze sculptures of American artist Liz Glynn (The Myth of Singularity), a 2022 Watermill Center resident, lined the path, resembling guardians of Dante's Inferno, or a darker version of Rodin's Burghers of Calais.
Richard Humann, “Subirdia,” stainless steel, speaker, MP3 files. Collection (Re)Create, Castelnuovo Calcea, Piedmont, Italy, 2022
They were followed by the organic sculpture by Afra Al Dhaheri (Abu Dhabi), made of thick threads growing from a tree and forming large woolen petals on the grass (Tangle, Untwist, Rewind – Sweat for Years to Come). Ascending the stairs leading to the main building, the visitor encounters Ola Maciejewska (Poland, France), who stages a dance performance called The Second Body, semi-nude, snaking, sliding, and circling a large piece of melted ice in an open space in the center of the main building. This led to a large open area, covered in gravel, where a police car with sirens blazing is seen being dismembered by several local mechanics, hand drills, and sparks flying.
Performance artist Regina José Galindo (Guatemala), who orchestrated this provocative performance, first sat in the car, then stood amid its dismembered pieces scattered on the gravel around her, thus reducing this iconic image of the ubiquitous police car to less than the sum of its parts.
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Gloria MacLean and Shipra Saraogi in performance of (Re)Create, Castelnuovo Calcea, Piedmont, Italy, 2022
Galindo has been known for her politically engaged body art, since it was presented at the 2001 Venice Biennale, for which she was awarded the Golden Lion for Best Young Artist in 2005. It focuses on human rights issues and reflects on the social, political, and cultural violence that has affected and continues to affect her native Guatemala.
On a lighter note, several dancers from different companies, not resident artists, paid tribute to Simone Forti, performing four of his works, which incorporated elements of free jazz, with dancers seemingly colliding with each other, in an organic flow of movements, hypnotic and mesmerizing.
The (Re)Create Residency, founded in 2007 by New York-based art lawyer and arts patron Gale Elston, is uniquely located in the town of Castelnuovo, located in Italy's Asti region, which dates back to the year 1000. The medieval fortress castle that gives the town its name and the surrounding vineyards are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Wine culture has shaped this stunning landscape over the centuries. This residency is unique in that, while it encourages artists to contemplate and explore, participating artists are not required to specifically create artworks during their residency.
In the summer of 2022, Ken Hiratsuka (New York) created a site-specific work, painting a circular, mandala-like figure directly onto the stones of the residence’s terrace, in blue and pink colors that reflected the sky. His partner, dancer and choreographer Gloria McLean, choreographed for her and a younger dancer, Shipra Saraogi, in response to the setting—a wonderful vista of rolling vineyard-covered hills, with castles in the distance—and to Hiratsuka’s mystical floor painting.
Richard Humann (New York), also a 2022 artist-in-residence, created a birdhouse-shaped sculpture using a very minimalist language. The sculpture, which sits on a post in nature, is equipped with speakers that project domestic noises, such as the creaking of a door hinge, the sound of footsteps on the stairs, and typical cooking sounds. The work relates to communication, perceptions of domestic life, and the dichotomy of all sentient and social creatures.
During her 2022 (Re)Create Residency, Olga Kisseleva (France) continued developing her Eden project, titled Eden (Re)Create. The artist has been working for many years on the communication of plant species through molecular broadcasting. Although this communication has been established between trees of the same species, it can also be attributed to various living organisms, primarily insects and animals, including, of course, humans. With the help of modern technology, the Eden project transforms encrypted communication into a complete and open network.
At Eden (Re)Create, Kisseleva establishes a connection between regional vineyards, with others in France, such as in Nizza, Grinzane, and Cavour. She also works with the white poplars of nearby Guarene (Parco d'Arte Sandretto Re Rebaudengo) and connects them with the white poplars of Babyn Yar (Kyiv, Ukraine), referencing historical turmoil. Here, Kisseleva has created a Garden of Remembrance connecting the poplars of Guarene with their poplar siblings in war-torn Ukraine—an artistic gesture of healing through the language of nature.
The artist residency in Senegal's capital, Dakar, titled Black | Rock Senegal, is the work of Los Angeles-born artist Kehinde Wiley, currently based in New York and Beijing. Wiley is known for his naturalistic portraits, most notably his 2018 presidential portrait of Barack Obama, which hangs in the National Portrait Gallery. At 19, Wiley traveled via Dakar to Nigeria, where he reunited with his estranged father and experienced a life-changing emotional connection to his African heritage.
Some 25 years later, in 2014, Wiley founded the Black | Rock Senegal artist residency, a luxury retreat for artists with all the amenities and services of a luxury resort, replete with a status-conferring infinity pool and overlooking Dakar’s Atlantic coast. The residence takes its name from the volcanic black pebbles indigenous to the region. Designed by Senegalese architect Abib Djenne, the Black | Rock complex stands in stark contrast to the surrounding dusty roads dotted with bare, half-built housing blocks and includes an opulent residence for Wiley, three apartments with adjacent studios for visiting artists, as well as a spa, gym, library, and a professional chef’s kitchen.
Dakar is teeming with young local talent—artists, architects, fashion designers, filmmakers, musicians, and writers. Inspiration is everywhere, from music to dance to local customs. Moreover, contemplative silence, quiet time for research and artistic creation, can be found within the artists' spacious studios and in the landscape, largely defined by the Atlantic coast.
Kehinde Wiley had his first opportunity as an artist-in-residence at the Studio Museum of Harlem in New York. This experience—gaining exposure, meeting other artists, curators, and writers—would inspire him to create his own artist residency, following his success as an artist.
In its nearly decade of existence to date, Black | Rock has an impressive student body of artists who have achieved success in the art world. To name a few, Leonard Pongo (Belgium/Kongo) works in installation, photography, textiles, and video; Pamela Castro (Brazil), painting; Enam Gbewongo (London), textiles and performance; Adrian L. Burrell (Oakland, CA), multimedia storyteller; and Katherina Olschbaur (Austria, USA, CA), drawings and paintings. The 2022 Dakar Biennale (founded in 1989) showcased many of Black | Rock’s former residents.
Today's artist residencies are the new "schools" or "movements" of yesteryear, places where artistic endeavor is nurtured. Where once the Cedar Tavern in New York or the Café de Flore in Paris served as meeting places where artists of all backgrounds could gather, exchange ideas, and gain inspiration, the proliferation of artist residency programs around the world has taken this need for a human touch, for making that essential connection, to a whole new level.
Co-published by MintheArtworld