ELLINA KEVORKIAN
Artist + Supporting Artists
Artist-in-Residence Programs
Conceived of and organized by Ellina Kevorkian. In addition to open-call residency opportunities, themed artist residencies allow for more interdisciplinary engagement and to function as an experimental curatorial platform. From around the world, like-minded artists dealing with relational subject matter were brought to themed artist-in-residence programs. Residency themes are topical and reflect an awareness of current issues in contemporary art.
Artists working in all disciplines were invited to apply. Applications were reviewed by a curated panel of nationally-recognized arts professionals from around the world. Informal to formal settings were provided to allow for natural discourse among the cohort, encouraging an authentic exchange across disciplines.
Artist Family Residencies
Franconia Sculpture Park | 2022
Few and far between opportunities exist for artists with children. The Artist Family Residency invited Artist Parents and Artist Youth to be in process together for a two week process-based residency at Franconia. Coinciding with our Youth Installation Summer Camps, Artist Youth had the option to attend camp for free during the day or join the Artist Parent on-site for research. For artist parents, this was a self-directed residency. The Artist Family benefits both from the individual creative process and also through togetherness while exploring the connection between art and ecology. A culminating Parents & Community sharing of Summer Camp Works provides a joined capstone experience for the Artist Family.
Writer Residencies
Franconia Sculpture Park | 2021 - 2023
Writers span a range of arts-focused disciplines and receive a financial stipend, full room & board, and a two-week residency at the 50-acre outdoor sculpture park. Writers immerse themselves in the new environment and embrace the time and space to move forward in their work. Residents with an interest or practice in art writing will have the possibility to publish a piece with Mn Artists, the Walker Museum’s platform for interdisciplinary arts writing. An online reading completes the residency.
Authority, Visibility, and Public Space
Franconia Sculpture Park | 2021
After facing devastating losses to personal mobility and access to public space during the COVID-19 epidemic and from city-wide attempts to control public protest and social unrest following the killing of George Floyd, Franconia Sculpture Park asks, “what role does visibility play in the presence of authority and power?”
Applicants were asked to express an interest in the investigation and creation of work that explores the issues of authority and public access of public space, interpreted or recognized through its motifs, assumptions of, and relationships to, public squares, plazas, parks, media, and the internet; public monuments, iconography, memorialization; commemorative events, celebrations, and parades; counter monuments and anti-monuments; individual and collective bodies in protest; memorialization ceremonies, civil disobedience; public interventions of government property, landmarks, and the natural landscape; sound intervention; the public expression of identity both camouflaged and singular; the presence or absence of mourning and grief; public rituals; the transference and legitimizing of facts and falsehoods.
Public Art Is Critical
Franconia Sculpture Park | 2021
This five-day intensive promotes dialogue and scholarship through togetherness. The Public Art Is Critical platform nurtures critically-needed time and space to connect BIPOC artists, curators, scholars, and writers who create ephemeral, permanent, or community-engaged art projects for public view. Cohorts will benefit from the dedicated time given to dialogue around an imminent planned public art project. Franconia Sculpture Park offers critically-needed BIPOC space for public art residents to engage in non-hierarchical roundtable dialogue. Residents plan, discuss, and workshop a project scheduled for presentation and other grant-funded projects.
Franconia Sculpture Park practices solidarity and a spirit of mutuality by partnering with other organizations that support public art in the Twin Cities arts ecology – we support both the artist and the organization. Partnering organizations with broad, diverse networks and programs that prioritize BIPOC practitioners in the field will work together to support the growing public art sector and strengthen our field’s ecology to better support BIPOC artists with increased opportunities for engagement.
PARTICIPATING RESIDENTS:
This year, Franconia Sculpture Park partners with We Are Still Here collaborators, a multi-year collaborative partnership between All My Relations Arts, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute (NACDI), and Hennepin Theatre Trust to bring large-scale, high-profile public artworks to the Hennepin Theatre District and the American Indian Cultural Corridor. This Indigenous public art cohort promotes native truth-telling for the built environment along Hennepin Avenue. The cohort is working and learning together for over 24 months, creating art for digital billboards, animations, projections, building-size banners, and murals. Their work will culminate in a final project that will be celebrated during both the reopening of Hennepin Avenue after four years of reconstruction and Hennepin Theatre District’s centennial celebration in 2022. The We Are Still Here Cohort is mentored by Red Lake artist Jonathan Thunder, a multi-disciplinary artist known for his surreal painting, animations, and experimental films, installations, and illustration works.
Juleana Enright (Oglala Lakota Tribe of South Dakota) (they/them) is a queer, Indigenous writer, curator, theatre artist, and DJ living in Minneapolis. Angela Two Stars (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate) Angela is a public artist and curator. She is the director of All My Relations Arts, a project of the Native American Community Development Institute in Minneapolis, MN. Sheldon Starr (Oglala Sioux Tribe) is most creative in abstract painting and graphic design. Missy Whiteman (Northern Arapaho and Kickapoo) is an Emmy-nominated writer, director, producer, and multimedia artist.
Liveness Is Critical
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts | April 27–May 6, 2016
This innovative residency program dedicated to critical discourse exploring interdisciplinary performance in contemporary art, including work that traverses the theater, dance, and performance fields. Artistic Director for Residency Programs Ellina Kevorkian curated an intensive ten-day residency program that focused on advancing peer-to-peer dialogue and scholarship among nationally recognized performance artists, curators, scholars, and writers by increasing exposure to various modes of thinking. The Liveness Is Critical platform nurtured the local and national performance ecosystem by supporting artists, curators, scholars, and writers who use the body, temporality, action, and the element of liveness in their work. This curated residency sought to highlight the critical and theoretical underpinnings that surround performance production, presentation, and scholarship. Using the Bemis Center model of providing time and space to support process and inquiry, Kevorkian stated, “I wanted to put the spotlight on the action of idea-generation for live art.”
Participating Residents: Travis Chamberlain, independent theater director and associate curator of performance, New Museum; Denise Chapman, theater artist and associate director, Performing Arts Collective, the Union for Contemporary Art; Shoshona Currier, performance curator, City of Chicago; Emily Johnson, choreographer and artistic director, Emily Johnson/Catalyst; Abigail Levine, choreographer and visiting faculty in dance, Wesleyan University, Daniel Sack, writer, editor, and assistant professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Juliana Snapper, performance artist, opera singer, and PhD candidate in musicology, University of California, San Diego.
Invitational Residencies
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
These one-month curated residencies brought artists who, working at a national-level of recognition, were only able to attend for shorter amounts of time, allowing time and space to focus on research and development. This provided the general artists-in-residence and the invitational resident opportunities for engagement, work-sharing, and network-building.
(left: Wendy Red Star, right: Ellina Kevorkian)
Participating Residents: Wendy Red Star, Micol Hebron, Emily Johnson, Alexandra Grant, Brad Kalhammer.
Photo: Colin Conces
Sci-Fi & The Human Condition
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts | September 7–November 18, 2016.
This cohort of artists showed interest in the human condition when exploring issues of race, class, and gender through futuristic lenses. Artists demonstrated an interest in the research, development, or execution of work that explores the theme of science fiction, defined or identified through its motifs and relationship to past sci-fi film and literature, magical realism, dystopian and utopian futures, robots, alternate timelines, transhumanism and bodily transformation, space opera, afrofuturism, futuristic identity as explored by costume and dress, the post-apocalyptic world, threats to territory and frontier, outer space, and investigations in artificial intelligence.
Participating Artists: Seth Alter, Olalekan Jeyifous, Miatta Kawinzi, Kelsey Tait Jarboe, Sean Capone, Sonya Dyer, Annie Ewaskio, Jess Johnson, Jakob Kudsk Steensen, Katharine Hawthorne.
Art, Empathy, & Ethos
The Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts | September 20–November 17, 2017
Through this call, the Bemis Center will construct a cohort of artists whose artistic practices take diverse approaches to negotiating, understanding, and communicating empathy. Applicants should have demonstrated experience in the research, development, or execution of work that explores empathy and its various manifestations, from social justice and human rights, to environmental conservation and global warming.
Examples include: ethnocultural differences; consideration of immigrant communities; authentic and inauthentic selves; psychic and new agist mediums and culture; neuroaesthetics, biohacks (including consumables, wearables, and smart clothing); understanding animals; natural resources, energy, and the environment; consideration of viewers and spectatorship; labor economies in service industries; white privilege; correlation between poverty and access to human rights; psychoanalytic and cognitive behavioral psychologies; love and loss; embodied and somatic performance; kinesthesia; gender identification; social practice and working with underrepresented communities (elderly, persons with physical disabilities, or mental illness); cybernetics and social media; and medical and legal practice.
Curator-in-Residence
The Bemis Center for Contemporary ArtsThe inaugural Curator-in-Residence, the first of its kind in the region, will participate in a one-year, fully subsidized live/work residency as part of the Bemis Center’s Artist-in-Residence Program. They will originate and present three exhibitions and related public programs inclusive of local and national artists. The curator-in-residence provides networking and critical support to artists-in-residence.
2017 Curator-in-Residence Risa Puleo