Past Residency Projects

The Research Residency supports two artists annually to complete a creative research project in our downtown studio space. Explore this page to learn more about past Research Residency projects.

Sarah Lawson

Combining the creative practices of collage and zine-making along with interviews and workshops, Sarah Lawson (they/them) explored how the climate crisis is impacting individual and collective ideas of death and dying.

MaKshya Tolbert

MaKshya Tolbert (she/they) spent her residency writing and embodying a long poem anchored in shade, shared livability, and black ecological loneliness as entangled beneath Charlottesville’s rapidly changing urban tree canopy. During that period, they self-apprenticed to coiling clay, shaping tree trunks in the wake of imminent and intimate climate transition—past, present, and unfolding.

Meesha Goldberg

Meesha Goldberg’s (she/her) residency served as a confrontation with the vacant site of the Lewis, Clark, and Sacagawea monument, using performance, installation, and poetry to remix passages of the famous journals, to memorialize the brutality of empire, and express prophetic femme power and care.

Chandler Jennings

During his residency, Chandler Jennings (he/him) continued developing a prototype of his tabletop game, Conxensus: a game of storytelling & political imagination and invited the community to think through political play via guided gameplay and discussion. 

Lauren Williams

During her residency, Lauren Williams (she/her) created a series of large-scale, handwoven Overshot coverlets as she explored the history and significance—social, cultural, and political—of coverlet weaving in the US.