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About the Artist-in-Residence Program
The Fabric Workshop and Museum (FWM) invites contemporary artists to
create new work using experimental materials and techniques. This
internationally acclaimed Artist in Residence Program hosts emerging
and established regional, national and international contemporary
artists who have a demonstrated commitment to innovation and exploration.
To that end, the FWM supports artistic experimentation by providing fees
and materials to artists, and employing its facilities and staff to
address their creative needs.
Artists-in-residence are drawn from all disciplines, including painting,
sculpture, architecture and design, conceptual and installation art,
performance and video. Working collaboratively with the FWM’s staff of
printers and technicians, artists are introduced to new techniques,
materials, and resources, and are thus able to realize projects that
would not otherwise be possible. Through this collaborative creative
process, artists stretch the boundaries not only of their own work,
and of the creative possibility of the various media, but also of the
larger development of contemporary art.
Current Artists in Residence
Jonathan Bepler | New York
Jonathan Bepler composed the music for Mathew Barney's epic Cremaster series. As a composer and performer, Bepler has collaborated with numerous artists, choreographers and musicians. Recent projects include a live performance featuring characters and music from the Cremaster films, a collaboration with musician and composer John Zorn and audio installations and sound performances at PS1 and the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York City. The artist is capitalizing on the opportunity of an FWM residency to experiment with his work. He is considering ideas that range from creating instruments that operate themselves to a performance with a Philadelphia orchestra, band, or children's choir. At Bepler's request, FWM project staff have researched Philadelphia's historic and current music scenes, both mainstream and alternative. During his next visit to FWM he will work with studio technicians and video and sound engineers on staff to develop the project further.
Mark Bradford | Los Angeles
Mark Bradford creates paintings that recall modernist style but which are grounded in the materials of his local urban environment: South-Central L.A. His work is primarily based on notions of ethnicity and beauty as defined by the community of his youth. Bradford experiments with materials drawn from local beauty salons and other local businesses and hangouts that hold significant meaning to the South-Central social scene. For his residency, Bradford has proposed collaborating with FWM to create his first large-scale sculptural piece. Bradford was announced as the 2006 recipient of the Whitney Museum of American Art's prestigious Bucksbaum award, currently the largest award in the world designated for an individual in the visual arts. As part of the award, Bradford will have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, which is tentatively scheduled for 2008. His FWM Watts Towers project will be a key element of this exhibition. Bradford's work has recently exhibited at REDCAT, Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, Pomona College of Art, and The Studio Museum in Harlem.
Arturo Herrera | New York
Arturo Herrera's biomorphic drawings, collages, and sculptural installations are united in their use of the artists' mark as a powerfully evocative and conceptual tool. Herrera's work ranges from psychologically charged juxtapositions of suggestive line drawings with collaged fragments of Disney characters, to coolly executed site-specific installations and sculptures of linear elements. In addition to solo projects at The Whitney Museum of American Art, UCLA Hammer Museum and the Art Institute of Chicago, Herrera is a recipient of awards from the Lois Comfort Tiffany and Pollack-Krasner Foundations.
Thomas Hirschhorn | Paris
Using a glut of shabby materials and poetically messy installation, Hirschhorn fashions space-transforming environments out of duct tape, tin foil, cardboard and other cultural ephemera. His often participatory projects confront politics, philosophy, creativity, and pop culture with a sheer accumulation of material. Hirschhorn made his New York solo debut with the 2002 installation Cavemanman at Barbara Gladstone Gallery.
William Kentridge | Johannesburg, South Africa
South African artist William Kentridge has gained international renown for his expressive animations based on heavily worked charcoal drawings. Kentridge's probing films deal with the intersection of history and personal identity, and draw heavily on his native South Africa's past using the very act of drawing and representation as means to deal with personal and collective memory. Kentridge's recent solo exhibitions include a 2001-02 traveling exhibition at The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and The Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
Sharon Lockhart | California
Sharon Lockhart is internationally recognized for her photographic and cinematic work that addresses the nature of filmmaking and cinematography in relation to cultures foreign to her. Her films (often documenting staged events) have tackled subject matter ranging from Japanese high school girl's basketball practice, to a Mexican laborer repairing the floor of the National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City. Lockhart was included in this year's Whitney Biennial, and has had recent solo exhibitions in Berlin, Tokyo and New York.
Inigo Manglano-Ovalle | Chicago
Inigo Manglano Ovalle, awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 2001, has gained recognition over the last several years for installation work that has involved such diverse material as human genetic research data, sensory deprivation tanks, car sound systems, video installations and more recently, architectural and natural models. Manglano-Ovalle employs weather systems and surveillance as a metaphor to describe our ever-changing, interconnected global culture. Recent exhibitions include a 2003 solo exhibition at Max Protetch Gallery in New York City, and a national traveling exhibition organized by the Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.
Julie Mehretu | New York
Julie Mehretu's "psychogeographic paintings" explode the visual elements of maps, urban planning, architectural drawing and various cultural signifiers. These dizzying compositions become maps of urban identity within the context of globalization. Included in this year's Whitney Biennial, Mehretu's recent solo exhibitions include The Matrix, University of California Berkeley Art Museum; The Walker Art Center, MN; and White Cube, London.
Senga Nengudi | Denver, Colorado
Senga Nengudi gained attention in the 1970's for her minimalist installations of fabric and became a major influence on a generation of African American avant-garde artists. Her conceptual use of humble materials has dealt with Eastern and African philosophy, and is influenced by performance, dance, poetry and sound. Senga Nengudi is pursuing a new direction in her work as a result of her residency at FWM, working on a new sound and video installation using ambient noise and images from textile weaving mills in Philadelphia. Several visits by Nengudi and FWM staff to local mills have produced a bank of collected video images and field recordings. These will be edited to emphasize their surprising rhythmic, musical, and kinesthetic aspects. The proposed installation also includes physical ephemera from the mills such as jacquard loom punch cards, mill ends of thread, and empty spools. Nengudi is also exploring unusual surfaces for video projection, such as water, textiles and skin-like materials.
Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero | Puerto Rico
Ana Rosa Rivera Marrero satirizes and unravels the mythological associations of the feminine and Caribbean. She has been working with FWM studio staff to complete a series of three large-scale sculptures, collectively titled Façade (working title), that incorporate traditional modes of pattern making and sewing with colonial architecture. These column-like structures include layers of different fabric, each symbolic of a historic era of trade and colonial occupation. Much of Rivera's work combines sculpture and performance. Façade's components are designed as mobile, adaptable units to be used as architecture or props for performance. With this work she has transformed the rigid masculine authority of the column into a distinctly feminine form. Requiring many hours of labor to develop and fabricate, the sculptures "in-progress" have been on view in FWM's studio for over eight months. The completed works will be presented by Rivera in an installation and performance. Marrero's solo exhibitions and performances have been staged at el Museo del Barrio in New York City, and the Sala San Juan Bautista de la Casa Municipal in San Juan, Puerto Rico among other venues.
Judith Schaechter | Philadelphia
Judith Schaechter's stained glass work features often macabre scenes based on the artist's idle doodling. These whimsical decorative motifs, set in glass, reflect Schaechter's "interests in sex and death, with romance and violence the obvious runners up." Based on the complex pattern and design that is present in each of her compositions, Schaechter was invited to participate in the FWM's ongoing Yardage Program. Schaechter is a recipient of numerous awards including a Pew Fellowship in the Arts and a Joan Mitchell Foundation Award. The project is currently underway with expectations that it will be completed by fall 2004.
Jean Shin | New York
Jean Shin is collaborating with FWM to create an interactive textile and projected video installation which examines digital communication and modern life. Shin has developed an interactive "fabric" using thousands of computer keyboard keys embedded in a continuous textile measuring approximately 25 feet long by 46 inches wide. The embedded keys spell out the e-mail correspondence between Shin and the FWM project staff, Coordinator Abigail Lutz and Construction Technician/Studio Assistant Andrea Landau. The key-embedded cloth is supported by an armature (please see the attached drawing of the project). The front of the armature holds the cloth in a desk-like position. The first three rows of embedded keys will be wired to operate like a working computer keyboard. The technology for the "active" keyboard is being created by the FWM in collaboration with the artist and moey inc., a renown interactive technology research and development company known for creating innovative, dynamic and powerful technology based exhibits. The end of the armature holds the cloth, no longer embedded with keys, upright so it can be used as a projection screen. Viewers can participate in the installation by typing on the first three rows of "active keys" at the beginning of the cloth. Their text is instantaneously projected on the end of the cloth in a font which mimics the appearance of computer keys. Thus the viewer's text becomes a virtual continuation of the key-embedded cloth. Earlier viewers' typed entries will appear below the new entry, providing a seamless continuation of the actual to the virtual keyed cloth. In addition to the room-sized interactive sculpture, Shin has also developed a playful video work in which keyboard keys appear to play like the keys on a player piano, endlessly rising and falling in a video loop like pistons. Shin's collaboration with FWM will be on view in the museum's onsite galleries in fall 2006. Also this fall, other works by Shin will be exhibited at the Asia Society in New York, and the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, Washington.
Shahzia Sikander | New York
Shahzia Sikander is creating an edition of three mixed-media works on paper based on a large-scale, silkscreen print. Each work features elaborate gouache hand painting over oil-based printing inks, making each piece in the edition unique. Inspired by the traditional manuscript form, The Illustrated Page Series (2005-6) each measure approximately 80 x 60 inches and consist of two abstracted, ornament-filled landscape images. A custom designed framing device presents the work as a relief suggesting the two pages of an open book. With this work, Sikander continues to explore the hybrid imagery and visual vocabulary that have uniquely situated her work between genres and cultures. Trained in the ancient art of Pakistani miniature painting, a practice rooted in meticulous attention to detail and replication of canonical iconography, Sikander expands the tradition by adding contemporary content. By utilizing the process of silkscreening, Sikander has been able to magnify the imagery of the miniature paintings for which she has become well known. During the creation of this piece a sample print with different hand-painted experiments was on view to visitors in the gallery, demonstrating various miniature painting and gouache techniques. Sikander spent more than eight days painting in FWM's public studios to create the first work in the edition of three, which was shown in FWM's galleries (April - June 2006) alongside a selection of Sikander's other recent works on paper and a digital video animation Dissonance to Detour (2006), which was recently shown at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Miami Art Museum who commissioned the work in conjunction with their New Work series. The artist is currently hand painting the two remaining works in the edition and is expected to complete them by December 1, 2006.
Francesco Simeti | Italy
Sicilian artist Francesco Simeti, whose work was included in last year's On the Wall, was also invited to participate in the FWM Yardage Program. Simeti's work addresses the political, cultural and media reaction to world events. As an Italian living in New York, Simeti has created pieces that use American media imagery in response to conflicts in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and the United States since the terrorist attacks of 9/11. A participant in exhibitions in Europe and the United States, Simeti recently had a solo exhibition at Esso Gallery in New York.
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