The Promise of a Promise: A Short History of Artist Residencies
Advance registration is required.
This is event is being held online. After registering, connection information will be emailed to you.
Artist residencies promise invaluable opportunities for artists to retreat to their studios, create new work, rest, or make new connections with other artists and new audiences. However, the types and models of residencies are as varied and amorphous as contemporary art practices are today. And as the availability of studio space contracts across the country, residences have become ubiquitous and have assumed a critical space in the contemporary art ecosystem as conduits for the creation of new works and communities.
Join Leah Triplett Harrington, Director of Exhibitions & Contemporary Curatorial Initiatives, as she gives an overview of residencies, the historical context of their origins in the artist colonies of the 19th century, and thoughts on the future promise of residencies.
The Art At Noon lectures are supported by the Behrend Family in memory of Rose Susan Hirschhorn Behrend, a former docent at the Academy and a great supporter of its education programs.
Image: Rosemary Ranck, Color slide of Peale House still life class, 1980, Color slides, 2 x 2 in., Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Archives.
Leah Triplett Harrington is Director of Exhibitions and Contemporary Curatorial Initiatives at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA). Previously she was a curator at Now + There, where she facilitated the Public Art Accelerator and organized large-scale public art commissions in Boston. Her writing has appeared in ArtAsiaPacific, ArtNet News, Sculpture, Public Art Dialogue, Flash Art, Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and others. She taught MFA painting and sculpture students at Boston University from 2021 to 2023.