Image: Courtesy of Lenka Clayton
Residencies in Dialogue brings together contemporary artists in dialogue over new models, formats, and sites for artist residencies.
Moderated by Jia Yi Gu, the discussion brings together Mary Boo Anderson and Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf from the Ikea Residency, Lenka Clayton from An Artist Residency in Motherhood, yétúndé ọlágbajú from Level Ground, and Debra Scacco from Air to reflect on the institutional and artistic propositions of their artist-founded residency programs, and their work expanding on where and how artist residencies are sited.
Residencies are understood as artist programs where a hosting institution brings artists and creative practitioners together to live, work, and co-learn together. Temporanity alongside intensity define the residency experience, where the resident leaves their daily life and its context to join a host institution for a temporary period of time to live, work, and learn. New environments, architecture, encounters, and people offer artists a renewal towards the research and development of their practice. Sociability and co-learning are also integral to the residency experience.
This event is free and open to the public. No RSVP required.
The personal and professional life of an artist are deeply interwoven, leading to uneven access to and capacity to participate in residencies are often uneven. Lenka Clayton developed a self-directed, open-source artist residency for artists who are mothers, applying the framework of an artist residency to her own maternity. Accompanied by a manifesto, documentation, business cards, website and studio, the Artists-in-Residence-in-Motherhood hosted Clayton for three years before expanding to companion sites of motherhood in all 50 US states and 81 countries.
Residencies often require an artistic output or documentation of the live-work process by guest artists. The Residency Program by Level Ground, a Los Angeles based artist collective and production incubator creating experiments in empathy, invites artists to produce a collective learning project — the syllabus — foregrounding the co-learning that happens in residency programs. The Syllabus Project, led by staff artists yétúndé ọlágbajú and Leslie Foster, becomes the de-facto site for knowledge gathering and sharing, offering a documentation of specific expertise in topics such as Queering Grief, Linear Time, Enjoying Casual Art and Home-making 101.
Founded by Debra Scacco, the residency program Air hosts artists within climate organizations to engineer new perceptions and relationships between artistic making and thinking and climate strategies. Defined as a project of relationships, Air supporting artists as strategic thinker working at the intersection of climate and interconnectivity, providing stipend, research support and access to climate-centered organizations such as the Los Angeles Cleantech Incubator.
The Ikea Residency is “what you make of it”. Founded in 2023 by Mary Boo Anderson and Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf, the residency invites artists into creative partnership with the commercial environment of Ikea. Without permission nor formal affiliation with the corporation, the Ikea Residency probes the limits of consumerist space by inviting artists to intervene and amplify the big box environment through plein air painting, field trips into furniture, and discreet installations.
MARY BOO ANDERSON
Mary Boo Anderson is an artist, writer and educator living in Los Angeles. Her writing has been featured in Fence, Spectra and Sixth Finch among others. Her art has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the U.S. and abroad. She is also co-founder of IKEA residency, an experimental artist residency unofficially operating at the Burbank IKEA.
LENKA CLAYTON
Lenka Clayton is an interdisciplinary artist whose work considers, exaggerates, and alters the accepted rules of everyday life, extending the familiar into the realms of the poetic and absurd. In previous works, she has searched for and photographed every person mentioned by name in a German newspaper; worked with artists who identify as blind to recreate Brancusi’s Sculpture for the Blind from a spoken description; and reconstituted a lost museum from a sketch found in an archive. Clayton is the founder of An Artist Residency in Motherhood, a self-directed, open-source artist residency program that takes place inside the homes and lives of artists who are also parents. There are currently over 1,200 artists-in-residence in 82 countries.
Recent exhibitions include Rising Sun (2023) at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, Day Jobs (2023) at the Blanton Museum of Art, The Museum Collects Itself (2023) at the Mattress Factory Museum in Pittsburgh, To Begin Again (2022) at ICA Boston, The Carnegie International 57th Ed. (2018) at the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Object Temporarily Removed (2017) at The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, Apollo’s Muse (2019) at The Metropolitan Museum of Art NY and The Grand Illusion, at the Lyon Biennial, France (2020). In 2017 the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum commissioned a major new work by Clayton and collaborator Jon Rubin, entitled A talking parrot, a high school drama class, a Punjabi TV show, the oldest song in the world, a museum artwork, and a congregation’s call to action circle through New York. With the participation of six diverse venues around New York City, the artists arranged for an essential element from each site—referenced in the project’s title—to circulate from one place to the next, creating a six-month network of social and material exchange.
YÉTÚNDÉ OLÁGBAJÚ
yétúndé olágbajú (b. 1990) is a research-based artist, producer, and residency director living on Ohlone and Tongva lands (Bay Area & Los Angeles, CA). Their work roots in a single question: What must we reckon with as we build a future, together?
With no set answers or expectations, olagbaju unravels intricate connections as a means of highlighting our interdependence. They are interested in how our familial, platonic, romantic, and ecological bonds are affected by what we confront in the reckoning.Inspired by the divine and the everyday within Blackness, they use the moving-image, the sculptural, and the collaborative in order to explore possible futures.Through their social practice they have co-founded and are a member of numerous artist and worker-led collectives, each with liberatory missions and values. An advocate for non-hierarchical working structures, they embrace shared leadership models that challenge white supremacy, by actively rejecting disposability and power hoarding — two of its guiding tenets.
They hold an MFA from Mills College and are the recipient of multiple awards including a YBCA 100 award and a Headlands Center for the Arts fellowship. They were a recent award finalist with ART X Prize, organized by ART X Lagos and was a resident at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts [Deer Isle, ME] and Center for Afrofuturist Studies [Iowa City, IA]. They begin a commission and year-long residency at 500 Capp Street in winter 2023.
DEBRA SCACCO
Debra Scacco's research-based practice spans the creation of studio works, installations, public art, curating, teaching, writing, community engagement and oral history. Rooted in personal experiences of immigration, she re-envisions the visible and invisible lines that seek to establish boundaries of access and understanding. She is Founding Director of climate-focused creative research program Air Projects , Co-Director of Getty Pacific Standard Time project Brackish Water Los Angeles, and Co-Founder of art worker mutual aid cooperative Contemporary Art League . She is an organizing member of Artists Commit , an artist-led collective committed to a climate-conscious, resilient, and equitable future.Her efforts to lateralize knowledge and engage students in interdisciplinary research and an active studio practice include teaching at institutions including California State University Dominguez Hills and Occidental College.
ZOË BLAIR-SCHLAGENHAUF
Zoë Blair-Schlagenhauf is a curator, writer, graphic designer, and comedian living in Los Angeles. She works as the gallery manager for Tierra del Sol, a non-profit that supports adults with developmental disabilities through creative pathways to education and employment. She ghost-writes artist statements, articles, and lectures on Modern architecture. She is also co-founder of IKEA residency, an experimental artist residency unofficially operating at the Burbank IKEA.
This program is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. (DCA)
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