All About Artist Residencies
We interviewed Christopher Squier about some FAQs regarding artist residencies. Here are his expert answers!
Christopher is teaching Going Digital: An Online Course for Residency Applicants this Summer.
Image Description: Artist and instructor Christopher Squier smiles at the camera against a background of purple flowers.
Art School: Let’s start with the basics. What is an artist residency?
Christopher Squier: Residencies are professional opportunities for artists and creatives to focus on their practice. They are usually juried, and often involve travel. Many offer perks like studio space, stipends, networking opportunities with professionals in the field and exhibition opportunities.
They can serve a variety of purposes and cater to artists, writers, filmmakers, performers and many other varieties of makers and creatives. Generally, residencies are organized around individual artists, collectives or collaborating artists, and groups of artists who choose to take time away from their everyday life to focus on their ideas, experiment with new processes or techniques, and put time toward the completion of a project.
Whether you’re taking time off from a job, a studio practice/recent exhibition, or simply aiming to jump back into a creative field, the main resources residencies provide are time and separation from an everyday routine. The point is often to disrupt an established method of making art, find inspiration in a new landscape or community, and spend an intensive, focused period of time on your practice without interruption. However, while many residencies are goal-oriented and culminate in an exhibition, open studios, or public presentation, there are many that aim to defy the everyday expectation that artists should be productive in visible and material ways.
AS: What are your top five tips for getting into a residency?
CS:
Research your residency
Residencies combine a variety of potential upsides and pitfalls for artists and often exist in a gray area between more clearly defined creative programs: a writers’ retreat, a conference, an exhibition space, or even a school providing faculty, hands-on education, and facilities. Determining the focus and scope of work that their residency is looking for is crucial to crafting an application that checks all the boxes. Are you proposing a social practice or interactive project to a rural residency without much audience? Is your preferred medium oil painting but the residency doesn’t have the correct waste disposal for oily rags and mineral spirits? It’s important to know your residency (and if possible, jury!) before applying to avoid submitting applications for residencies that don’t fit your portfolio or interests.
Focus on clarity
Compose your application with as much clarity as possible. This requires a strong commitment to presenting your work in clear terms, without muddying the water. Use strongly-phrased statements that say what you mean. And don’t shy away from complexity. Each idea in your artist statement, work description, and project proposal is a chance to engage one of your jurors in the project you’re proposing and get them excited about your particular approach to thinking, questioning, and making art.
Be brief
Needless to say, jurors don’t have much time to sift through the many applications they receive. The chances are low that they can locate that glimmer of a brilliant idea hidden in the third paragraph of your artist statement. Instead, keep it brief and organize your strongest ideas at the beginning of each statement.
Provide excellent images
Images compose the core of every application and therefore should occupy the majority of your attention and time as you prepare your submission. Clear, high-quality images that meet the application guidelines are essential, whereas a poor quality image is likely to distract jurors and cause frustration. Most application portals give preference to images as well. Make sure your lighting is balanced and neutral and provide a variety of shots (individual work and installation imagery) to give a sense of scale and detail. If you have an opportunity to organize the images in order, highlight your best images first.
Don’t stray from your style
Often, artists are asked to write a project proposal detailing what they intend to use the residency for. Applying with one body of work and proposing a completely different project for the residency is likely to raise red flags. Don’t stray from your existing ideas or style. Instead, this is a great chance to propose a logical progression from your work to something new and exciting, but still recognizable. Consider this an opportunity to explain how your experience in the residency could offer something new to your career, serve as a launching pad to a new idea or medium, or provide the environment or facilities to realize a project you’ve had in mind for some time. If you have something else in mind when you arrive, it’s always fine to change your mind later.
Image credit: Christopher Squier
Image Description: View of La Fragua Artist Residency in Belalcázar (a small village outside Córdoba, Spain), a brick and stucco building with sculptural experiments in the front courtyard.
AS: What do you think is the most common mistake artists make when applying to residencies?
CS: In my experience, it can be frustrating to be rejected by residency after residency. The experience of applying to residencies is often a process of many years; I have been rejected by residencies which ultimately accepted me after a few years while other residencies that did accept me sometimes took years to respond to an application. The most common mistake many artists encounter (myself included) is setting expectations for an immediate acceptance. We tend to forget that artist residences are set up and run by other artists and therefore there’s no formula or set way of running one. Each residency is an individual experience.
That said, residencies across the world rely on a few major software systems for applications and the jury process: Slideroom, Call for Entry, Google Forms, and artist website submissions. Each application portal has its own way of presenting artists and its own set of requirements for uploading text and images. Learning how each of these accepts and presents your information can help you quickly create a new application when a call goes out. Knowing how your application will appear on Slideroom or whether a jury will be looking at your website is one key aspect of making a visually-striking and conceptually-rich impact when your work pops up on screen.
Image: Christopher Squier, Undulation: Sula Island Lighthouse, 2019. Resin, fiberglass, and photo print on polyester. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Image Description: A photographic print that stands on its own in a wavy shape against a neutral beige background. The photo shows shades of blue, black, and gray in abstracted shapes.
AS: Let's say an artist has been accepted to a residency. How should they prepare for it?
CS: The key to preparing for a residency is knowing what’s provided and what you need to bring yourself. The biggest limitation upon arriving at a residency is finding ways to work without the studio tools and materials you’re used to.
The struggle of a blank slate and the difficulty of starting new work completely from scratch can be intimidating. I’ve started bringing a few finished pieces with me to residencies so that I have something to look at and think about while I’m getting set up. I also recommend planning on projects that use common and accessible materials—like drawing, photography, and digital work—or bringing specialized materials with you, whether those are block printing knives and carvers or paint brushes.
If you have a lot of materials that you’ll need, consider shipping a box of supplies ahead of time so that they’re on location waiting for you when you arrive. Similarly, you should plan what to do with your work at the end of the residency. Can it fit in your suitcase? Does it require a portfolio box? Make sure you bring (or can borrow) a professional camera to document your work, as many sculptures, installations, and large drawings and paintings will be difficult to take with you.
You can even ask the residency if they have room for new work to be donated to their collection. Or gift your artwork to someone in the community who was helpful. If you’re working with a gallery, they may be able to pay for the cost of shipping the work back.
Finally, think about your needs and your audience. Just because you’ve isolated yourself from your everyday life doesn’t mean you shouldn’t find other ways to connect with people. I know an artist who crowd-funded the costs of her residency and spent part of the time making unique works of art, collages, and small sculptures which she sent back to everyone who had helped her realize her goal of attending. Other times, the residency may have a stipend to fly out curators and museum professionals. The relative quiet and serenity of a residency might represent a unique draw to bring people for studio visits and dinners.
Image: Christopher Squier, Undulations, 2018. Installation view at R/SF projects (San Francisco). Resin, fiberglass, and photo print on polyester. Photo by Rob Canali. Image courtesy of the artist.
Image Description: A gallery installation of wall mounted prints and prints that have been turned into sculptures on the floor.
AS: Have you ever applied to a residency as an artist collaborative?
CS: I never applied as a collective. However, I attended Untitled Residency in Shanghai with my occasional collaborator and friend Hadar Kleiman. After she had been accepted to the residency, she inquired if they had room for additional artists and encouraged me to apply. With residencies like this one which are organized by a small team or an individual and which don’t have to contend with the bureaucracy of a large pool of applicants, a recommendation by another artist who’s attending can be a good way to take part at the last minute.
For us, it was a really wonderful chance to spend a month together and learn more about each other’s artistic practices. For part of our exhibition at the end of the month, we chose to collaborate on a series of ceramic bas-relief impressions taken from plaques and architectural features of the town. This created a unique series of sculptures which contain the memory of the time we spent working together and the neighborhood of Zhujiajiao we called home for the month.
Image: Hadar Kleiman and Christopher Squier, Bas-relief of Zhujiajiao, 2019. Ceramic. Photo courtesy of the artists.
Image Description: A ceramic relief sculpture hangs on a light beige wall. The sculpture is orange red at the top and fades to sea blue at the bottom. Concentric curly lines are inscribed into the surface and there is a diamond pattern inscription at the top.
AS: What should artists look for when deciding what residencies to apply to?
CS: The residencies available to artists are so diverse and different from one another that it’s hard to limit this to just one or two categories.
For some artists, the length of time, the location, and the accommodations will matter. For others, facilities and studio equipment could be a deciding factor. Some introduce you to local crafts and historic techniques through workshops. There are residencies where dozens of artists meet and others in which you might be the only artist in residence at a certain point in time. Sometimes, organizers coordinate a residency session around a conceptual topic or socially-relevant issue. Or are intentional about the community they bring together.
Do you want to be with recent graduates or artists at all stages of their careers? Do you want a diversity of artists, performers, musicians, and writers or would you prefer to meet visual artists? Instruction or just time alone to work? Some residencies are interdisciplinary and include scientists, geologists, or biologists studying the natural landscapes, flora, and fauna. There are so many factors to consider when looking for the residencies that make sense for you.
AS: What projects are you currently working on?
CS: At Untitled Residency, I started a series of drawings based on imagery from the queer American photographer Berenice Abbott’s series Documenting Science. The series of drawings replicate photographic exposures of light waves captured with Abbott’s patented ripple tank “camera” during the anti-Communist and right-wing fervor of the McCarthy era. A photography assistant to Man Ray, Abbott’s photographic style played with distortion and realism in ways that felt prescient in the Trump world of hyper-normalisation and perversions of truth. The photos echoed processes of interference, evasion, and clandestine activity at play in public discourse in Abbott’s time and our own. As the Covid-19 pandemic intensified, I left San Francisco to live with friends throughout Southern California in a self-described residency, continuing to make drawings and ceramics.
Abbott considered this series depicting scientific phenomena to be one of the most important yet unacknowledged in her career. By representing these images in new media, I have been aiming to draw attention to the history of a photographer whose work extended the definition of “documentation” beyond the typical boundaries of documentary photography, and which subtly yet elegantly described the world (both physical and political) she found herself in. This imagery today continues to point to and unseat complex metaphors of political and economic struggle: the invisible hand, black sites, election “interference,” political “resistance,” the promise of a “Blue Wave” in U.S. government, and generally the “wave” motion of political engagement, activism, and reactionaries.
As filmmaker Claude Chabrol said of French New Wave cinema, “There is no new wave, only the sea." While making these drawings, I’ve been asking myself what a world looks like activated by this idea of waves and interference patterns. How do we navigate this sea?
Image: Christopher Squier, Strange and unadorned: wave interference study no. 7, no. 13, and no. 11, 2020. Graphite on paper. 39 x 27 cm. Photo courtesy of the artist.
Image Description: Three abstract graphite on paper drawings, depicting overlapping concentric circles that form moiré patterns. The drawings are inspired by waves and interference patterns.
About Christopher:
Christopher Squier has attended a half dozen residencies around the world and near home, including places like China, Norway, and Spain as well as in Oregon and California. Squier is an interdisciplinary artist whose work bridges sculpture, digital imagery, and installation to explore optics and the role of light in contemporary visual culture. As a curator and arts professional, he has held posts at Embark Gallery, the San Francisco Art Institute’s Walter and McBean Galleries, and the CCA Wattis Institute. He is currently the Director of the Carl Heidenreich Foundation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the work of a German American exile artist.