“Unconventional Residency Programs” Panel Discussion
Hand in Glove Conference 2011
The Geolofts, Chicago, IL
Panelists: Stephanie Sherman (Elsewhere Artist Collaborative/Greensboro, NC), Nancy Zatudil (PLAND/Taos, NM), Ryan Pierce (Signal Fire/OR), Stephanie Jemison (Project Row Houses/Houston, TX)
Moderator: Elizabeth Chodos (Ox-Bow Residency Program/Chicago)
Residencies serve artists from every discipline, providing studio space, facilities, and time to complete work. They also serve as postgraduate institutions where artists can continue working out ideas in a social setting and meet new collaborators. Today there are many unconventional residencies operating under independent organizational models and at radically different scales, offering a range of experiences from community engagement in urban settings to temporary campsites in the woods. All of them nurture especially strong connections between the artists in the residency and the people who manage it. Panelists will discuss their successes and challenges regarding how residencies today are taking on especially active roles in shaping artists’ work.
Stephanie Sherman presents Elsewhere Artist Collaborative:
Stephanie Sherman and George Sheer started Elsewhere in the site of George’s late grandmother Sylvia’s overstocked thrift store. The three-story building in Greensboro, North Carolina was stocked to the brim with toys, books, clothing, dishes, house-wares, and general knick-knacks, which, after Sylvia’s death, the family didn’t know quite what to do with. George and Stephanie moved into the building, challenging themselves with what it would mean to apply literary theorists’ abstract ideas of schemas and organizing systems to this very real house filled with very tangible clutter.
Initially Elsewhere was defined as a store in which nothing was for sale, but the public was confused by how to interact with such a space. Stephanie and George began to invite artists to live, work, and play in the space with them, and Elsewhere quickly transformed into a living museum.
Elsewhere encourages applicants to come without preconceived ideas of what they will create, and to instead respond to the environment and see where it leads them. The artists are challenged to create inviting and productive exchange with the community, and the building’s storefront is used as a site for this discourse.
Nancy Zatusdil presents PLAND
Practice Liberating Art through Necessary Dislocation is the commanding statement behind PLAND’s acronym. This multidisciplinary organization and residency program was founded by three women from San Francisco, Nancy Zustadil, and sisters Erin and Nina Elder, who together bought a plot of land in Taos, New Mexico.
They invited residents to their land, and described PLAND as both an experimental idea and a way to create a space by being in it. They asked potential residents, What is your idea of hard work? What is your experience with communal living and/or collaboration? Are you prepared to be dazzled? Are you afraid of the dark?
Together, the founders and residents taught themselves to live off-the-grid and began constructing a house. PLAND offers residents the access to a totally pared-down existence, and the freedom to simply “be.” Residents have the chance to ask themselves, What does it mean to live in a place? What is involved with cultivating a life? They are faced with the challenges of being in an environment where they are obliged to utilize practices of sustainability in order to survive.
Ryan Pierce presents Signal Fire
Signal Fire was founded by artist Ryan Pierce and activist Amy Harwood as a way to facilitate wilderness experiences for artists of all disciplines. The program invites artists and activists to share unique wilderness experiences on Oregon’s public land. Signal Fire is based heavily in bioregionalism—the idea that if human systems were restructured around the health of natural systems, we could live in a more sustainable world.
Signal Fire offers various opportunities for artists, from a residency program where artists are given a tent and supplies and invited to live on Oregon’s public land, to week-long content driven backpacking trips, where participants discuss shared readings. Signal Fire’s programs are based less on giving artists space to create their work, and instead on providing them with an experience which will potentially alter their view of the world, and change the way they create work in the future.
Stephanie Jemison presents Project Row Houses
Stephanie Jemison speaks about her experiences with both traditional and nontraditional residency programs. She questions the traditional residency model’s premise of mapping intellectual travel onto physical travel, and the historical roots of this idea in 19th century politics of travel and the corresponding dichotomies of familiar/foreign and home/away. Jemison brings up the relationship between geography, travel, commerce, and art tourism, especially with regards to the biennial model, which encourages portable artworks made and purchased by global citizens who lack commitment to a particular place.
Jemison contrasts the biennial model with Project Row Houses, a radically local organization she has worked with in Houston, Texas. Project Row Houses was created by a group of African-American artists who strove to create a positive, creative presence within their own community. The organization is housed in 22 shotgun houses in Houston’s 3rd Ward, and offers an array of unconventional services to single mothers, urban kids, and local artists.
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