Artist-in-Residence
Engaging the Social through an Artist-in-Residence Program in the Archives
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathy Carbone
Although artist-in-residence programs in which artists interact and collaborate with people and phenomena within corporate, industrial, academic, governmental, institutional, or other community settings have been in existence for over half a century, the embrace of residency programs in archives is somewhat more novel in comparison to other environs. This paper explores the ways in which an artist-in-residence program at the City of Portland Archives & Records Center (PARC) in Portland, Oregon, USA marshals a socially engaged art practice framework to activate innovative modes of collaboration that foster generative art-making and social interactions and participations between people and archives. Through reflections by PARC archivists and two artists about their experiences in PARC’s inaugural residency program, this paper explores the ways in which PARC’s program engenders new social and cultural roles for archives and inventive modes of art and community engagements. This paper also contemplates how the archival poetry practices of investigative and documentary poet Kaia Sand, who during her residency utilized and transformed police surveillance records to honor women struggling for rights and pay homage to the courage of activists, creates multiple fields of interactions and processes of becoming-together between past and present, diverse community members, and archives and poetry.
Social Life of Artist Residencies: Working with People and Places Not Your Own
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Marnie Badham
This paper will examine the world-wide explosion of artist residencies and diversity of forms over the last 2 decades, from traditional institutional models of patronage and seclusion to contemporary forms of social practice projects making art with local communities to explore contemporary global concerns including mass migration, climate change and conflict. Offering a broad ranging typology of residencies as social form, this paper examines the historical contexts, stakeholder motivations and the social value versus the potential for harm of these creative interventions in the public realm. The paper first examines the social roots of residencies through artist colonies, communes and retreats developed through patronage and new social economies. Next, the paper examines the relationship between artistic, institutional and community motivations alongside the social aims and the potential for harm when outsider artists are invited to engage with communities not their own. Finally, in the ‘social turn’ in residencies theorised by examining a spectrum of contemporary international artist residency programs from the on the move "itinerant and transnational artist" lifestyle and the recent return to the "localvore" with artists seeking a more sustainable approach by merging life and practice.
Exploring the Benefits of Artist-in-Residence Programs in Western Australian Schools
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sara O'Neill, Lisa Paris
Where many secondary schools employ specialist art teachers to deliver their education programs in Western Australia, the same cannot be said for primary schools. In both government and independent sectors it is most often the case that visual arts (and the arts generally) are taught by primary generalist teachers whose pre-service training encompassed only minor studies in the arts disciplines. Consequently there is often a variable quality of art education provided to primary students. As a strategy to support quality arts education outcomes for children in the primary years Artist in Residence programs have been shown to have merit. This paper presents an overview of the Curtin Artist in Residence program that has operated in Western Australia since 2007 and provides case studies (from both primary and secondary school contexts) in which the enrichment and inclusion benefits of artists working in schools are examined.
