A Transformation Framework for Artist Residencies, based on Internal Critiques, Alternative Histories, and Emerging Practices

Artist Residencies are an increasingly essential infrastructure for creative production across the globe, supporting time and space for experimental or exploratory work, facilitating development of international networks and intercultural exchange, and, given the financial precarity most artists experience, serving as temporary sources of income, or at least accommodation. While the field has been researched intensively by practitioners in arts and policy circles, especially in Europe (where funding for culture is most robust), it has garnered little attention from disciplines such as history, sociology, or cultural studies. Our project begins to fill this gap by bringing together experts in the history and political economy of cultural institutions with stakeholders and early-career scholars undertaking practice-based PhD research on artist residencies. Methodologically, the project enacts a dialogue between more traditional forms of scholarly inquiry – emphasizing systemic and comparative analysis – and the experimental methods that have developed among scholar- practitioners.

The project asks how artist residencies can respond to today’s challenges around labor, ecology, and social and global justice, while maintaining their central mission of supporting art and artists. The project has three parts. Through a meta-analysis of the robust internal critiques of residencies produced by individuals and groups in the past decade, followed by interviews with relevant authors and practitioners, we assess how residencies conceive of contemporary challenges, and how they have responded. In phase two, we explore the historical development of artist residencies, using data from our partner organization TransArtists. Acknowledging problems of definition (What is an artist residency?), this phase also explores counterhistories of travel and retreat that might help shape the residencies of the future. Phase three concretizes this future through an analysis of alternative and emergent residency practices, based on auto-ethnographies and artistic research.