Wexner Center for the Arts: About Us: Artist's Residencies -

Artist's Residencies: 2007-08

A program that makes the Wexner Center unique.

Residencies at the Wexner Center offer support to artists and often provide opportunities for interaction with the Ohio State community and the public at large. They are an essential part of our mandate to be a creative research laboratory for all the arts.

Wexner Center Residency Awards are our most substantial and high-profile residencies. They are given annually in our main program areas--performing arts, media arts (film/video), and visual arts--with some projects extending over two or more years. Residency Award recipients for 2007-08 are visual artist Kerry James Marshall, film- and videomakers Jennifer Reeder and April Martin, and innovative theater group Improbable (formerly Improbable Theatre).

Other artists participating in exhibitions and performances also may receive commissions and often engage in residency activities--workshops, master classes, and discussion sessions with students or the community--during their time at the center. In addition, about 20 visiting filmmakers and video artists from around the world are invited to use the facilities of our Art & Technology studio and editing suite each year.

Visual Arts: Kerry James Marshall

Internationally renowned artist Kerry James Marshall engaged a group of local teens during fall 2007 and winter 2008 to help bring his residency award project--involving performance, sculpture, puppetry, and more--to fruition. Marshall, who creates work in a multitude of media but 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 Rythm Mastr narrative--a story of love, vengeance, and redemption in the inner city featuring African American superheroes based on traditional African sculpture and stories--was originally realized in comic strip form. For his residency project, which he began working on during the first year of his residency in 2006-07, he decided to bring a segment of one Rythm Mastr story to life in the Wexner Center galleries in a series of performances using Japanese style Bunraku puppetry. Marshall’s exhibition Every Beat of My Heart is on display in the galleries from February 2 until April 13 and features the stage set and puppets used in the performances along with a series of Rythm Mastr "dailies." Photographs of the teenage performers and a video documentary that includes a complete performance are on view in the lower lobby.

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 in Harlem, the Walker Arts Center, and the Columbus Museum of Art, among many other museums. His work was on view at the 2007 Documenta exhibition 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, presented by the Wexner Center in 2004. A recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, Marshall is based in Chicago.

Media Arts: Jennifer Reeder and April Martin

Ohio State University alumna Jennifer Reeder shot her first feature-length narrative, Accidents at Home and How They Happen, in summer 2007 in and around Columbus and then edited it at the center’s Art & Tech studio. The most ambitious project ever undertaken by the center’s Art & Tech staff, Accidents at Home has its world premiere March 1. This psychological thriller with a darkly comic bent is the story of a young woman who returns to her hometown to pick up the pieces after learning that her twin sister has committed suicide. In addition to directing the video, Reeder also served as screenwriter; the cast and crew are mostly 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. 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. A blog about Reeder’s project can be found on the Wexner Center’s blog here.

Cincinnati-based filmmaker April Martin has also been named a media arts residency award recipient for 2007–08. She's editing a documentary about the history of race riots and police brutality in Cincinnati in the Art & Tech studios. Martin and Art & Tech editor Paul Hill recently made a trip to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., to search for historical film footage of Cincinnati for the project. Martin also has confirmed that Grammy-nominated poet, activist, and Cincinnati native Nikki Giovanni will take part in the film’s narration. Martin began working on this project over two years ago in the Art & Tech studio, she plans to finish the film in summer 2008. Watch for information about a fall screening.

While Martin was at the Wexner Center, she also pitched in to film the video documenting fellow residency recipient Kerry James Marshall’s Every Beat of My Heart performances. The video is on view in the lower lobby in conjunction with Marshall's exhibition.

Performing Arts: Improbable

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving 2007, Julian Crouch, Phelim McDermott, and Lee Simpson of England’s ever-inventive Improbable (aka Improbable Theatre) returned to the Wexner Center to begin developing a new work, with the working title Panic. As with the group’s residency here in 2003 that launched The Hanging Man (and resulted in the U.S. premiere of that show), the group used this opportunity at the very start of a 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. According to Improbable, the “random thoughts” the group is mulling over for Panic include “the Great God Pan, Michael Chekhov, bees, middle age, and brown paper.”

Formed in the mid-1990s, Improbable has been called "one of the brilliant faces of British theatre" by London's Observer. 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. Click here for more information on the company.

Improbable’s residency was squeezed into a busy schedule that includes directing and designing a new Broadway musical based on the cartoons and characters of The Addams Family. The Wexner Center plans to present Panic once it is completed, so keep watching for updates.