Artist Residency Awards for 2015–16
Wexner Center for the Arts
The Ohio State University
1871 N. High Street
Columbus, OH 43210
T +614 292 3535
wexarts.org
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The Wexner Center is pleased to announce its 2015–16 Wexner Center Artist Residency Awards. An essential part of the center’s role as a creative research laboratory for artists, the Artist Residency Award program also complements The Ohio State University’s mission as a leading research institution. Artist Residency Awards in amounts of 25,000–100,000 USD are allocated annually in three areas: visual arts (including architecture and design), performing arts, and film/video. Chosen by the center’s curators and director, residency artists receive significant financial resources, along with technical, intellectual, and professional support—as well as space—to develop new work on-site.
Director Sherri Geldin says, “For 25 years, we’ve hosted among the most generous and sustained artist residency programs of any cultural institution in the country. With substantial funding and full access to the center’s professional and technical resources—as well as to a vast array of expertise across the university—artists have developed and produced seminal works in their respective fields and sometimes explored entirely new creative disciplines and practices. Even a cursory scan at the roster of artists who have benefitted from our residencies reveals how robust and wide-ranging the Wex has been from its inception as a catalyst to the production of important new work by emerging and established artists alike.”
This year’s recipients are:
Visual Arts: Sarah Oppenheimer
The New York-based Oppenheimer’s residency represents a continuation of the project conceived during her 2014–15 residency: a site-specific installation that directly responds and draws attention to the center’s distinctive design by Peter Eisenman. Oppenheimer will create a mechanical, rotating pivot system affecting the way visitors perceive the thresholds, sightlines, and interwoven grids of the center’s galleries. To fully research and realize the project, Oppenheimer is working with students and faculty at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture and College of Engineering. She has also engaged Columbus-based architect Jerome Scott, who was a young associate in the Eisenman office when the center was designed and who served as a design consultant for the center’s 2003–05 renovation.
Performing Arts: Improbable
This is the third Wexner Center Artist Residency Award for the theater ensemble Improbable. Past residencies supported development of The Hanging Man, which had its US premiere at the center in 2003, and Panic, in 2009. The Wexner Center’s relationship with Improbable extends back to presenting their breakthrough 70 Hill Lane in 1999, as well as presenting the US premiere in 2000 of the internationally acclaimed music theater production Shockheaded Peter, directed and designed by Improbable’s Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch, and featuring the Tiger Lillies. That this London-based ensemble finds a second creative home at the Wexner Center is a point of pride for the center’s performing arts program.
Opening Skinner’s Box, their residency project, illuminates surprising truths about human nature and covers a famous series of psychological experiments—including those of controversial behaviorist B. F. Skinner—and delves into the stories behind them. It will be spearheaded by Improbable co-artistic directors McDermott and Lee Simpson and shaped by their trademark mix of clever wit, penetrating insight, and inventive stagecraft.
A work-in-progress discussion will take place July 16 at the Wexner Center.
Film/Video: Kelly Reichardt
This is the first Wexner Center Artist Residency Award for acclaimed filmmaker Kelly Reichardt (Old Joy, Wendy and Lucy, Meek’s Cutoff, Night Moves), who will receive post-production support for her upcoming film. Currently untitled, it stars Laura Dern, Kristen Stewart, James LeGros, Jared Harris, and Lily Gladstone and is based on the short stories of award-winning author Maile Meloy.
Reichardt is a familiar face to the Wexner Center’s internationally recognized Film/Video program, having screened several of her feature length and short works at the center. The center also provided Reichardt with editing support in 2004 through its ongoing Film/Video Studio program, which accommodates approximately 20 film/video makers per year in a dedicated studio on the center’s premises, perhaps the only one of its kind imbedded in an arts institution.
More on Wexner Center Artist Residency Awards here.
Press Contacts
Erik Pepple
T +614 292 9840 / epepple [at] wexarts.org
Jennifer Wray
T +614 247 6241 / jwray [at] wexarts.org
