Wexner Center Announces Residency Awards for 2006-‘07

Columbus, OH—The Wexner Center is pleased to announce its 2006–’07 Residency Award recipients in all programming areas. An essential part of the Wexner Center’s role as a creative research laboratory for artists and audiences, the Residency Award program also helps to fulfill The Ohio State University’s mission as a leading research institution. Residency Awards are given annually in the three programming areas at the Wexner Center: visual arts (including architecture and design), performing arts, and media arts (film and 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.

“Artist residencies are at the very heart of our mission to support the creation of innovative new work across all artistic media,” says Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin. “Through these Awards, we offer crucial resources to artists at pivotal points in their creative production, often making possible bold and ambitious new work that would otherwise remain unrealized. Many of our past residency recipients have gone on to receive such prestigious national and international awards in the arts as the MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ grant and the Gish Prize. At the same time, artist residencies offer Ohio State students and faculty opportunities to participate in the creative process through meaningful and sustained engagement with the artists over time.”

This year’s recipients in the three programming areas are:

VISUAL ARTS: KERRY JAMES MARSHALL A painter, photographer, master draftsman, cartoonist, video maker, and sculptor, Kerry James Marshall explores the everyday lived reality of African Americans and the relative dearth of images of black people in the history of Western art. Most recently, Marshall has developed the comic strip Rhythm Master, which features the first inner-city African American superhero. For his Wexner Center Residency Award project, he will create African American superheroes based on traditional African sculpture and in the form of puppets in the Japanese tradition of Bunraku. These puppets are attached to the bodies of the puppeteers, giving them a life-like scale and dimension. During Marshall’s residency he will travel to Osaka, Japan (the traditional home of Bunraku theater) to meet with legendary Bunraku troupe Otome-bunraku to observe and absorb this ancient craft. Over the course of this long-term residency, he will then fabricate the puppets and ultimately produce and premiere a Bunraku play, which will revolve around the life of African Americans living in public housing projects in Chicago. Marshall’s works are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles), the Studio Museum of Harlem, the Walker Arts Center, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among many other museums. His works has been shown at the Whitney Biennial, Documenta, the 2003 Venice Biennale, and in other exhibitions from coast to coast and overseas—including Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art, which was on view at the Wexner Center in 2004. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Marshall is based in Chicago.

Kerry James Marshall’s Residency Award is presented with support from the Nimoy Foundation and Greater Columbus Arts Council.

PERFORMING ARTS: SITI COMPANY Innovative theater director Anne Bogart and her SITI Company will develop a new show, Radio Macbeth, for their Wexner Center Residency Award project. Furthering their interests in new approaches to Shakespeare (following their production of A Midsummer's Night Dream) and in

the radio play concept that began with their stage adaptation of Orson Welles’s radio production The War of the Worlds, Bogart and codirector Darron L. West will turn their attention to applying such ideas to Macbeth. The Residency will entail on-site development and completion of the show in early February, followed by the world premiere at the Wexner Center February 14–18. While in town, the OSU Department of Theatre will sponsor a teaching residency with SITI Company to further explore SITI's creative methodology; Bogart and SITI's designers will also offer open rehearsals and workshops for theater students at Ohio State. This Residency Award project sustains the Wexner Center's longtime partnership with the company and marks the sixth SITI production commissioned by and developed in a creative residency at the Wexner Center, including such notable efforts as Death and the Ploughman, Room (based on the writings of Virginia Woolf), Score (about Leonard Bernstein), among others, all of which then toured around the country. Visit www.siti.org for more information on the company.

MEDIA ARTS: DEBORAH STRATMAN AND JENNIFER REEVES A video and filmmaker, Chicago-based Deborah Stratman will be here this fall to pursue two works-in-progress, both to be shot as 16mm films: one focusing on pre-teen girl fire-starters in rural southern Illinois and the culture of juvenile detention facilities, and one based on an incident from the life of Marine Lt. Col. William H. Rankin, taken from his autobiography, about how he survived a parachute descent suddenly drawn into the eye of a hurricane. She will likely return in 2007 to work with OSU students. Stratman, presently adjunct assistant professor in Art & Architecture at the University of Illinois, Chicago, was a 2003 Guggenheim Fellow; her work has been showcased in festivals in Rotterdam, Vienna, Thessaloniki, and Vancouver as well as widely throughout the U.S., including in the 2004 Whitney Biennial. In her past work, she has investigated cultural phenomena ranging from drag racing in inner-city Chicago (The BLVD), to the role privacy, safety, convenience, and surveillance play in our everyday lives in In Order Not to Be Here, which was included in the Wexner Center exhibition Vanishing Point in 2005.

For her Wexner Center Residency Award project, acclaimed filmmaker Jennifer Reeves, known for her experimental techniques, will complete post-production in the Wexner Center’s Art & Technology facility on two multiple-projection film and music performances that extend her interest in expanding the possibilities of 16mm film. The first, When It was Blue, screened as a work-in-progress at The Museum of Modern Art in New York with a live score by Icelandic musician Skúli Sverrisson. The second, Light Mood Work Disorder, is a collaboration with musician Anthony Burr that features four projections screened simultaneously on two screens with live music by Burr; this project will be presented at the Wexner Center during her residency in the first half of 2007. Reeves, born in Ceylon, is based in New York. Her debut feature The Time We Killed, which tells the story of a woman who tries to ignore the post-9/11 world outside of her New York apartment, won major prizes at the Berlin and Tribeca Film Festivals, and was included in the 2006 Whitney Biennial.

Anne Bogart of SITI Company Photo by Dixie Sheridan

Deborah Stratman Photo by Jacob Ross

Jennifer Reeves Photo by Bill Wu

Past Wexner Center Residency Award recipients over the years have included:

• In visual arts: Zoe Leonard, Josiah McElheny, Maya Lin, Ann Hamilton, Barbara Kruger, Lorna Simpson, Barbara Bloom, Alexis Smith, Shirin Neshat, Lee Mingwei, Greg Lynn & Fabian Marcaccio, and Hussein Chalayan

• In performing arts: The Builders Association, da da kamera, Twyla Tharp, Elizabeth Streb/Ringside, Mark Morris Dance Group, The Wooster Group, Anne Bogart/SITI Company, Improbable Theatre, and (collectively) Michael Curry, G.W. Mercier, Donald Holder, and Molly Anderson (all creative collaborators of Julie Taymor)

• In media arts: Phil Collins, Tom Kalin, Judith Barry, Todd Haynes, Julie Dash, Isaac Julien, Tacita Dean, Miranda July, Cheryl Dunn, Rineke Dijkstra, Sadie Benning, and Sowon Kwon