Wexner Center Announces Residency Awards for 2007-‘08

Columbus, OH—The Wexner Center is pleased to announce its 2007–’08 Residency Award recipients in all programming areas. An essential part of the Wexner Center’s role as a creative research laboratory for artists, 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. Many past Residency Award recipients have gone on to receive such prestigious awards in the arts as the MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, the Gish Prize, the Hugo Boss Award, and even a Tony award.

The coming year features an acclaimed visual artist working on a long-term, multi-part exhibition/performance project with local teens; the return of a favorite theater company from the UK to begin developing a brand new work; and the first full-length feature film ever produced with the support of a Residency Award.

“Our Residency Award program underscores the very essence of what the Wexner Center is and does,” says Wexner Center Director Sherri Geldin. “Through these Awards, offered in all artistic media in keeping with the Wexner Center’s cross-disciplinary nature, we offer crucial resources to artists at pivotal points in their creative production, often making possible innovative new work that would otherwise remain unrealized. At the same time, artist residencies offer opportunities for students and faculty to participate in the creative process through meaningful engagement with the artists.”

Next season’s recipients in the three programming areas are:

VISUAL ARTS: KERRY JAMES MARSHALL Internationally renowned artist Kerry James Marshall will be engaging a group of local teens this fall and winter to help bring his Residency Award project—which involves performance, sculpture, puppetry, and more—to fruition. Marshall, who creates work in a multitude of media but who is best known as a painter, explores the everyday lived reality of African Americans and the relative dearth of images of black people in the history of Western art. His expansive narrative Rythm Mastr—a story of love, vengeance, and redemption in the inner city and featuring African-American superheroes based on traditional African sculpture and stories—has been realized in comic strip form. For his Wexner Center Residency Award project, he will work with local youth to bring Rythm Mastr to life in the Wexner Center galleries.

To achieve this, Marshall is currently creating large-scale puppets in the Japanese tradition of Bunraku; in this tradition, the puppets are attached to rods and manipulated by multiple puppeteers. This summer, as part of his Residency Award, Marshall is traveling to Japan for about a month to observe and learn this ancient craft. In late September, Marshall will select 20 teenagers from the Columbus community to be trained as puppeteers and to rehearse and perform Rythm Mastr. Students are encouraged to apply regardless of their previous level of experience with the arts, and Marshall is looking especially (but not exclusively) for urban youth and African-American teens; click here (http://www.wexarts.org/learn/for_teens/Rythm_Mastr/) for the application and details. This group, selected by Marshall after going through a set of “challenges” based on candidates’ ability to focus and work as a team, will rehearse intensely with Marshall beginning in November and will perform the piece for the public with the puppets in a Wexner Center gallery in February. Students will be paid a stipend of $1,000 for their participation. From February 2 through April 13, the puppets will be displayed in the Wexner Center gallery as sculpture, alongside drawings and video documentation of the live performance, in the exhibition Kerry James Marshall: Every Beat of My Heart.

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 work is on view at the current Documenta exhibition (a major international contemporary art show held every five years in Kassel, Germany), and has also been shown at the Whitney Biennial, 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: IMPROBABLE

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott, and Lee Simpson of England’s ever-inventive Improbable (aka Improbable Theatre) will return to the Wexner Center to develop a new work. As with its residency here in 2003 that launched The Hanging Man (resulting in the U.S. premiere of that show), the group will use this new opportunity for creative support to begin developing a new project—this time, a small-scale show in the vein of 70 Hill Lane and Spirit, two Improbable shows that were presented in the Wexner Center’s intimate Performance Space. Improbable’s residency will be squeezed into a busy schedule that includes directing and designing a new Broadway musical based on the cartoons and characters of The Addams Family.

Formed in the mid-1990s, Improbable, called “one of the brilliant faces of British theatre” by London’s Observer, has won many awards through the years and has toured around the world, including three times to the Wexner Center. Several members of the group were also involved in the wildly successful Shockheaded Peter, which had its U.S. premiere at the Wexner Center. The company is known as much for its quirky and humorous storytelling as for its imaginative visual effects. Visit http://www.pomegranatearts.com/project-improbable_theatre/index.html for more information on the company.

MEDIA ARTS: JENNIFER REEDER, PATRICK KEILLER, and APRIL MARTIN

Ohio State University alumna Jennifer Reeder is here this summer shooting and editing a feature-length narrative, Accidents at Home and How they Happen, for release in 2008. This psychological thriller with a darkly comic bent is the story of how a young Mexican-American woman’s suicide prompts her estranged sister to confront and re-enact an adolescent trauma. In addition to directing the film, Reeder also serves as screenwriter; the cast and crew is comprised primarily of Ohioans. Best known for her acclaimed White Trash Girl series, Reeder is currently an associate professor of digital cinema and new media in the School of Art and Design at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Her work has been shown at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, at Lincoln Center, and in the 2000 Whitney Biennial in New York. In 2005, the screenplay for Accidents at Home... was selected for the Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers mentorship program. More information is available at www.jenniferreeder.com. A blog about Reeder’s project can be found on the Wexner Center’s web site at www.wexarts.org/wexblog.

Two additional artists have been named Residency Award recipients in media arts for this season: Patrick Keiller—known for documentary films that combine footage of British rural and urban landscapes with poetic and witty voice-overs—is developing the film The City of the Future, using footage from the beginnings of cinema to explore present-day and future urban landscapes. During his residency, Keiller will introduce screenings of his works and present his research related to this project, with special outreach to students and faculty at Ohio State’s Knowlton School of Architecture. And Cincinnati-based filmmaker April Martin continues editing a documentary in the Center’s Art & Tech studios about the history of race riots and police brutality in Cincinnati. The center will screen the film sometime in 2008 with an introduction by and conversation with the filmmaker.

Past Wexner Center Residency Award recipients over the years have included (note: this is not a complete list):

• 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: Jennifer Reeder, Deborah Stratman, Phil Collins, Tom Kalin, Judith Barry, Todd Haynes, Julie Dash, Isaac Julien, Tacita Dean, Miranda July, Cheryl Dunn, Rineke Dijkstra, Sadie Benning, William Wegman, and Sowon Kwon