Wexner Center for the Arts announces recipients of 2021–22 Artist Residency Awards and expansion of institutional support for artists

The Wexner Center for the Arts, the contemporary art laboratory at The Ohio State University, is excited to announce the recipients of its 2021–22 Artist Residency Awards, including Carlos Motta, New Red Order, Sa’dia Rehman, and Abby Zbikowski.

For more than three decades, artist residencies have been at the core of the Wex’s programs and its continuing mission to provide artists across disciplines with the funding and technical resources necessary to embrace both radical experimentation and community engagement with groundbreaking new projects. Each year’s Artist Residency Award recipients in film/video, performing arts, and visual arts have represented a diverse group of artists and mediums. Among the many prominent artists to date who have participated in this singular initiative are Mark Bradford, Barbara Hammer, Zoe Leonard, and Bebe Miller.

A complete list of past recipients is available here.

In addition to new awards, the Wex has extended a number of last year’s residencies in light of the pandemic, ensuring that artists retain access to time and funding regardless of the ongoing impacts of COVID-19. A number of performance residencies will take place remotely, with presentations of supported work being shared online.

The center is also proud to continue its adaptive and responsive approach to artist support by adding critical new levels of funding to its legendary Film/Video Studio; and through residency activities within the recently reconfigured Department of Learning & Public Practice. These moves come in response to the urgent need for cultural institutions to engage society’s pressing issues.

Film/Video Studio residencies offer in-kind postproduction resources to artists and filmmakers and frequently involve work with Artist Residency Award recipients across disciplines. This year’s expansion of Studio funding will develop new opportunities for artists, including the introduction of stipends and microgrants, commissions, and special projects.

The Wex’s Department of Learning & Public Practice supports Artist Residency Award recipients through the creation of public and school programs. This year, the department expands this commitment to the awards program through collaborations with four Ohio-based artists. While producing new work and developing programs and relationships across disciplines, these artists wish to embed in local communities and in various capacities, pursuing new realms for art activity, bridging the personal with the civic and the local with the global.

This year’s recipients are:

Visual Arts

Carlos Motta will create a new video that explores postcolonial subjectivity and democratic participation by examining the stakes of changing the name of the center’s home city of Columbus.

Performing Arts

Jaamil Olawale Kosoko’s Artist Residency Award has been extended through next summer. In addition to working with performing arts, plans also include an onsite visit (alongside collaborating virtually) with the center’s Film/Video Studio to work on the project Syllabus for Black Love.

Abby Zbikowski will continue work on Radioactive Practice, a genre-bending performance drawing on movement traditions such as hip-hop, modern dance, West African, tap, synchronized swimming, and soccer.

Performing Arts: virtual residencies

James Dennen has adapted his highly physical practice for COVID-19 by creating work for a new “location”: virtual reality. Remote residencies will support the improvisational theater artist’s exploration of this realm.

Jennifer Harge will collaborate with filmmaker Devin Drake on Steal. Still. The experimental film will depict a gathering of real and imagined Black ancestries—positioning itself as another kind of physicality to history, spirit, and Black life.

Awilda Rodríguez Lora will work with filmmaker Gisela Rosario and Ohio State’s Advanced Computing Center for the Arts and Design (ACCAD) to create a digital version of her performative work SUSTENTO.

Norah Zuniga Shaw will continue her ongoing performance ritual Climate Gathering with a series of experiments in digital performance that respond directly to planetary conditions of crisis and uncertainty.

Film/Video

Hope Ginsburg’s Meditation Ocean, designed as a two-year residency project, continues into 2021–22. Building on Swirling, the work is a multi-channel immersive installation that extends Ginsburg’s interest in climate change and marine ecology to include human health and well-being.

New Red Order (NRO) is also the recipient of a two-year residency. The center is providing production support for the NRO’s forthcoming work Never Settle, a promotional initiation video that lures inductees with promises of decolonization and settler remediation.

Learning & Public Practice

Kari Gunter-Seymour is a ninth-generation Appalachian and the current Poet Laureate of Ohio. She will be this year’s artist-in-residence for the center’s Pages literacy program, working closely with high school students and teachers from Central Ohio.

Tala Kanani is an interdisciplinary painter and educator in Columbus whose work is rooted in neighborhoods and cross-cultural communities. Her residency will involve community-based artmaking and art education projects in partnership with the center’s staff. 

Sa’dia Rehman, originally from Queens, NY, and now in Columbus, explores how images respond to ideas about race, empire, and labor. She’ll develop a series of public programs, engage with the area’s college and university students, and develop new work for a project that will be presented at the Wex in 2023.

Jonna Twigg is a Columbus-based multidisciplinary artist who uses books in her practice to blur boundaries between creating, community, and commerce. She will devote her residency to expansive, hands-on work with children and families.

Thanks to our funders for their support.