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Tue, Sep 13, 2022
The Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University is excited to share the recipients of Wexner Center Artist Residency Awards for the coming year. The awards, which are bestowed annually, exemplify the center’s mission: to offer unique experiences across multiple disciplines and to fuel the creative expression behind them. Wex Artist Residency Awards recognize the exceptional talents of individuals in the fields of Film/Video, Learning & Public Practice, Performing Arts, and Visual Arts through significant financial and technical assistance for the creation of new work. Examples of work supported by past Wex Artist Residency Awards include Evidentiary Bodies, the only multichannel installation realized by the late Barbara Hammer; drummer and composer Mark Lomax, III’s 12-album project 400: An Afrikan Epic; Syllabus for Black Love by jaamil olawale kosoko, which was presented at the Wex over the summer in an exhibition guest curated by the artist; and Hope Ginsburg’s Meditation Ocean, an immersive installation that will debut at the center in winter 2023. A complete list of past recipients is available here.
Clockwise from top left: Ruun Nuur and Zeinabu irene Davis, Kari Gunter-Seymour, Tali Keren, Cadine Navarro, Sa'dia Rehman, Tanya Lukin Linklater, Jonas N. T. Becker, Tere O'Connor, Jennifer Kidwell, Ain Gordon, and Alex Strada
Photo credits: Ruun Nuur and Zeinabu irene Davis photo: David Filipi; Kari Gunter-Seymour, image courtesy of the artist; Tali Keren, image courtesy of Rotem Linial; Cadine Navarro photo: Sophie Ansel; Sa'dia Rehman, image courtesy of the artist; Tanya Lukin Linklater photo: Liz Lott; Jonas N. T. Becker photo: Marzena Abrahamik; Tere O’ Connor photo: Natalie Fiol; Jennifer Kidwell photo: Denise Allen; Ain Gordon photo: Paula Court; Alex Strada photo: Alex Gallitano
Film/Video: Zeinabu irene Davis Davis (she/her) is an independent filmmaker who works in narrative, experimental, and documentary genres. Her work is passionately concerned with the depiction of women of African descent and, like many of her fellow filmmakers in the L.A. Rebellion movement, she develops projects around ideas of collaboration, community, and mentorship. Davis’s Artist Residency Award project is a new hybrid documentary, Stars of the Northern Sky, which tells the stories of the legal trials of three enslaved women in the North: Sojourner Truth, Phyllis Wheatley, and Marie Joseph Angelique. Film/Video: Ruun Nuur Nuur (she/her) is a Columbus-based filmmaker, activist, curator, and critic. She is cofounder of the nomadic microcinema NO EVIL EYE and was coproducer on the recent documentary They Won’t Call It Murder (2022).
The Artist Residency Award will support Nuur's effort to initiate an archival project around a recently rediscovered film. Nuur is also working on a documentary about Somail playwright, teacher and filmmaker Said Salah Ahmed.
Learning & Public Practice: Kari Gunter-Seymour Gunter-Seymour (she/her) is in her second term as the Poet Laureate of Ohio. Winner of the 2020 Ohio Poet of the Year Award for her collection A Place So Deep Inside America It Can’t Be Seen, Gunter-Seymour is the founder and executive director of the Women of Appalachia Project (WOAP) and editor of its anthology series, Women Speak. Gunter-Seymour will serve for a second academic year as writer-in-residence with the Wex's Pages program, continuing work alongside educators, students, and Learning & Public Practice staff on arts-integrated programming in high schools across central Ohio. Learning & Public Practice: Tali Keren Keren (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and educator born in Jerusalem and based in Brooklyn. Her performances, videos, and installations center on the formation of political ideology, historical mythologies, and the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism.
Working closely with fellow Learning & Public Practice Artist Residency Award recipient Alex Strada, Keren will develop research and a series of public programs; engage with K-12, college and university students; and and work towards developing a project with the Wex.
Learning & Public Practice: Cadine Navarro A tri-cultural artist, teacher and entrepreneur born and raised in Japan by an American mother and a French father, Navarro (she/her) has found home in seven countries across three continents. This experience has inspired her to construct identity as ‘kin’ with all beings, the leitmotif and driving force behind initiatives she takes to connect her work to persons and place.
Her residency will include research, a series of public programs, and engagement with the central Ohio community, to include K-12 students, and college and university students.
Learning & Public Practice: Sa’dia Rehman Rehman (they/them/she/her) explores how contemporary and historical images communicate, consolidate and contest ideas about race, empire and labor. Through techniques such as wall drawing, cut outs and assemblage, Rehman pulls apart and puts together images, historical records, and mass media to interrogate their resonances.
Rehman, who also received Artist Residency Award support for 2021–22, will continue their work with the center on a series of public programs, engagement with college and university students, and development of a commissioned work that will be presented at the Wex in 2023.
Learning & Public Practice: Alex Strada Strada (she/her) is an artist, filmmaker, and educator based in New York City. Spanning film/video, sound, performance, installation, and social practice, her work explores labor, collectivity, critical legal studies, and political imagination. She has presented work internationally at venues including the Queens Museum and the Museum of the Moving Image.
Strada will collaborate with Tali Keren on a residency that will include research and a series of public programs; engagement with K-12, college and university students; and work towards developing a project with the Wex.
Performing Arts: Ain Gordon Gordon (he/him) is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer, director, and actor. His work frequently sources overlooked and marginalized histories and the nearly obscured lives inhabiting such spaces.
Relics and Their Humans, Gordon’s Residency Award project, is a theatrical tribute to two couples from Dover, Ohio; a work of “sonic portraiture” comprising music, transcribed interviews, original text, and home movies. It’s the second collaboration between Gordon and composer, writer, and performer Josh Quillen of the ensemble Sō Percussion.
Gordon will be in residence at the center in spring 2023 and will present a lecture and demonstration on March 20.
Performing Arts: Jennifer Kidwell Kidwell (she/her) is a Philadelphia-based performing artist whose work addresses the complexities of race and notions of American history with sharp intelligence and wry humor.
The Artist Residency Award supports Those With Two Clocks, co-created with Jess Conda and Mel Krodman as Tall Order. The work-in-progress sends up hetero-masculinity with body-flaying sketches and punch lines that poke at hierarchical power structures.
Those With Two Clocks was developed during a creative residency in the Wex’s Performance Space this summer. The award also supports development of a separate project that Kidwell describes as metal musical sculptures that are “played” by rain.
Performing Arts: Tere O’Connor The chief concern of O'Connor (he/him) is, in his words, “endlessly evolving, flowering complexity.” The award-winning choreographer has created over 40 works and toured throughout the US, Europe, South America, and Canada. In October 2014, O’Connor was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
For the Artist Residency Award-supported project Rivulets, O’Connor chooses freedom and attempts to jettison unison entirely in a new work for eight dancers. Rivulets will be presented at the Wex in Fall 2023; O’Connor will give an artist talk in advance of this engagement in Spring 2023.
Visual Arts: Jonas N.T. Becker Born in West Virginia, Becker (he/him) reconfigures our understanding of place by highlighting the intersection of cultural, environmental, and economic oppression. His current body of work explores forms of extraction in the Appalachian region.
Becker’s two-year Wex residency will support Better or Equal Use, a series of photographs that use coal dust to depict redevelopment projects—from prisons to big box stores—on former mining sites in Appalachia; a new episodic film, developed with the Wexner Center Film/Video Studio, on generational political beliefs; and a series of programs. His residency will culminate in a Wex solo exhibition in 2025. Visual Arts: Tanya Lukin Linklater Lukin Linklater (she/her) is a multidisciplinary Indigenous artist. Her Alutiiq homelands are in the Kodiak archipelago of Alaska, and she now lives in the Nbisiing Anishinaabeg territory in Ontario. Lukin Linklater’s work traces the expansive ways Indigenous knowledges, histories, and structures have been embodied and sustained, and in turn, highlights the complexities of their presence in institutional settings.
Building on her iterative body of work, My mind is with the weather, her Wex residency will support outdoor open rehearsals in Ohio and a new work for camera, which will feature in a solo exhibition at the Wex in 2024, Lukin Linklater’s first in the US.
