S E E D by Murjoni Merriweather Torrents: New Links to Black Futures 2024 Capital Artist Residency: Allana Clarke Amber Robles-Gordon: Project Development Mobile Arts Program
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2023/2024 Capital Artist Resident: Allana Clarke

 

Photo credit: Tim Johnson

“I‘m incredibly thrilled to become a resident artist at CulturalDC, to share in the mission of connectivity and community building through art. As an artist, the systems in which we often exist can feel exclusionary and siloed from our larger society. CulturalDC recognizes that and, with intentionality, creates space for artists who work in unconventional ways to engage directly with audiences in a more collaborative and generative way. I could not be more excited to join this visionary organization as a resident artist.”
— Allana Clarke

Residency Period

Allana Clarke’s residency in Washington, DC was during the Summer of 2024. Housing during her stay was provided by Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners. Her residency will culminate with an exhibition in CulturalDC’s Mobile Art Gallery. 

About

Clarke is a Trinidadian-American artist based in Detroit, MI. Her practice is built upon uncertainty, curiosity, a will to heal, and an insistence upon freedom. Fluidly moving through photography, sculptural and text-based works, video, and performance, her research-based practice incorporates socio-political and art historical texts to contend with ideas of Blackness, the binding nature of bodily signification, and the possibility to create non-totalizing identifying structures.  

Clarke received her BFA in photography from New Jersey City University in 2011 and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Practice from MICA’s Mount Royal School of Art in 2014. She is an assistant professor at Wayne State University in Detroit. Clarke has been an artist in residence at the  Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture, The Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and Yaddo. She has received several grants, including The Toby Devan Lewis Fellowship, Franklin Furnace Fund, and a Puffin Foundation Grant. Her work has been screened and performed at Gibney Dance in NY, Invisible Export NY, New School Glassbox Studio NY, FRAC in Nantes, France, SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin, and was featured in the Bauhaus Centennial edition Bauhaus Now: Is Modernity an Attitude. She recently completed a 2020-21 NXTHVN fellowship, a mentorship program co-founded by artist Titus Kaphar. Clarke is represented by Galerie Thomas Zander in Cologne, Germany. 

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Capital Artist Residency

 
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Umar Rashid in his studio provided by CulturalDC. Photo by Isaac Maiselman

The Capital Artist Residency is an annual initiative dedicated to supporting artists of color whose work contributes to a regional and national artistic dialogue.

This program sponsors, promotes, and houses at least one visual or multidisciplinary BIPOC artist each year in Washington, D.C. – offering a creative space tailored for the artist to develop and amplify their unique perspective from a national platform.

Artist Benefits

  • Family-friendly housing for 1-3 months

  • Studio or rehearsal space for 1-3months

  • Childcare coordination

  • Stipend

  • 8-week + exhibit in CulturalDC’s Mobile Art Gallery or a vacant space activation

  • Additional opportunities include curator visits, artist talks, podcasts, engagement events, etc.

Please note: The nomination process will open in Fall 2024 for the 2025 Capital Artist Residency. Please do not send unsolicited proposals at this time.

2022/2023 Capital Artist Resident: Nyugen E. Smith

 

Photo credit: Sean Pressley

Residency Reflection from Nyugen:

“My time as the Capital Artist in Residence was spent in deep discovery, experimentation, and community building in collaboration with CulturalDC. What made this possible is the organization's commitment to truly supporting the artist by way of a generous stipend, providing comfortable housing at no cost to the artist, a sizeable studio, and a collaborative approach to coordinating intimate social events with members of the CulturalDC community which includes collectors, curators, prominent local artists, and board members. Together, these offerings made it possible for me to truly make the most of the time spent in residence, developing a whole new body of work that I presented in the Mobile Art Gallery and a performance in the Source Theater created in collaboration with a local musician.”

“I am grateful for the experience and for the relationships I’ve established with the CUDC team and the Washington DC community”
— Nyugen E. Smith

Residency Focus

During my time as artist in residence, I will create new works on paper and sculpture as part of my on-going Bundle House series. Bundlehouse/Bundle House/BUNDLEHOUSE/BUNDLE HOUSE, a name/term I coined in 2005, is about rebuilding one’s home, one’s life and community after life as they knew it, had been dramatically altered. I think about climate change, natural and man-made disasters, famine, war, pandemics, and genocide as examples of events that would affect a place so deeply, as to cause displacement and forced migration; dramatically changing lives in what sometimes feel like an instant.”

—Nyugen E. Smith

Performances and Exhibition

Nyugen E. Smith’s residency culminated with performances at the Source Theatre and an exhibition in the Mobile Art Gallery, Bundlehouse: Ancient Future Memory. The performance was adapted from a portion of Smith’s original short story, While You Sleep. Inspired by a statement from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite, While You Sleep is about ritualistic practices necessary to prevent millions of enslaved Africans, having perished in the transatlantic journey, from returning to haunt the living. The exhibition in the Mobile Art Gallery was a continuation of Smith’s Bundle House series, a name he coined in 2005. Bundle House is about rebuilding one’s home, one’s life and community after life as they knew it, had been dramatically altered.

Residency Period

From October 2022 to January 2023, Nyugen E. Smith stayed in Washington, DC, housing provided by Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners. His residency culminated with performances at the Source Theatre and an exhibition in the Mobile Art Gallery in January 12 - March 12, 2023.

About

Smith is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist based in Jersey City, NJ. Through performance, found object sculpture, mixed media drawing, painting, video, photo, and writing, Smith deepens his knowledge of the historical and present-day conditions of Black African descendants in the diaspora. Trauma, spiritual practices, language, violence, memory, architecture, landscape, and climate change are primary concerns in his practice.  

Smith holds a BA, Fine Art from Seton Hall University and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. His work has been presented at the Museum of Latin American Art, Peréz Art Museum, Museum of Cultural History, Norway, Nordic Black Theater, Norway, Newark Museum, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, among others. Nyugen is the recipient of the Creative Capital award, Leonore Annenberg Performing and Visual Arts Fund, Franklin Furnace Fund, Dr. Doris Derby Award,  New Jersey State Council on the Arts grant, and Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant.

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Inaugural Capital Artist Resident: Umar Rashid

 
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Picture Credit: Isaac Maiselman

“I’m very pleased and excited to have been selected for this inaugural residency. In this year of transformation and a huge inauguration in this country in particular, this opportunity is right on time!  A return to normalcy, if not entirely normal, is a welcome boon. Ever since I met the late, incomparable Peggy Cooper Cafritz in 2009, the city of Washington D.C. has been a beneficent source of inspiration and power for me. I look forward to creating another chapter of my sprawling, global narrative there, this summer.”
— Umar Rashid

Residency Focus

Given the global and cosmopolitan atmosphere of the nation's capital, intertwined with the history of colonial commerce throughout the centuries, Rashid created works based on the international colonial diet. As we know, (or at least we should) a great many ubiquitous foodstuffs that seem so commonplace originated in the Americas. From tomatoes and corn to potatoes and chocolate, the culinary arsenal of the world has been shaped by brutal economic practices. Or, in another word, Culinarialism.

Residency Period

Umar and his family stayed in Washington, D.C. for a month in 2021 at the âme apartment in a unit provided by Jair Lynch Real Estate Partners. âme – ‘soul’ in French – was previously a women’s hotel during World War II and a dormitory building operated by Howard University from 1969 to 2014. His exhibit will open in Fall 2021 in the Mobile Art Gallery in Southeast D.C.

About

Umar Rashid is a Los Angeles-based artist who re-imagines 18th century colonial history, conjuring a fictional cast of subjects within his own original, ongoing narrative that includes a rebel fighting force of freed slaves, militiamen, dikes, lords and tribesmen. Rashid paints ink and acrylic scenes onto coffee and tea-stained paper, detailing colonial uprisings against the imaginary superpowers Frengland and Fenoscandia. His images contain a mashup of historical and cultural references combining elements of 18th and 19th century colonial portraiture and folk art with visual signifiers of contemporary urban culture, including jewelry and body art associated with present-day gangsters and hipsters. Rashid wryly points to the instability of public histories and confronts issues of race, power and greed.

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