Sara Douglas looks into Creative Time’s Global Residency Program:
What these artists craved, they told Pasternak, was a break from the art-world circuit that would allow them to delve into their ideas rather than constantly having to respond to this or that biennial, or gallery, or museum commission. “What came up over and over again was their desire to make work that is important,” says Pasternak (left), and conveys “a sense of participation, of community, and understanding the times we live in.” According to Thompson, who came to Creative Time from MASS MoCA three years ago, the residency program they created in response is “like a Fulbright, but without as much paperwork.”
Each selected artist is given a travel stipend of $25,000, will the money provided in full by the Rockefeller Foundation’s New York City Cultural Innovation Fund. Of the six artists selected for the first round, Biggers is going to Brazil and other regions of South America; Werthein will travel to a remote area of China where there was once a language, now lost, spoken only by the region’s women; and Jacir will study underground political movements in Italy as a way of exploring larger Leftist movements in Europe. Raad and Lin, meanwhile, have decided to use their grants to take an entire year off and travel with their families — Raad to the Arabian Gulf to study the emergence of a new visual-arts infrastructure there, and Lin to tour the Everglades, China, and Poland’s Bialowieska Forest to observe and document disappearing species. So far there has only been one hitch: K8 Hardy’s planned June trip to Chile to investigate feminist communities there has been postponed because of the recent earthquake.
Creative Time Goes Global (ArtInfo.com)