SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Artpace announced the opening of new exhibitions by the Spring International Artists-in-Residence, who began their residencies on January 23. Now that their eight-week residency has concluded, they revealed exhibitions of the work each created at Artpace.
The exhibitions that opened on March 21st are: Until Total Liberation, Sama Alshaibi (Tucson, AZ); thick by San Antonio-based Jennifer Ling Datchuk; and Like Gold Dust, Roshini Kempadoo (London, UK).
Incorporating elements of printmaking, photography, sculpture, installation, video, and sound, the three resident artists work will be on display through May 19th. The artists were selected for the program by New York-based guest curator Deborah Willis.
At the conclusion of the exhibition, all work will be returned to the resident artists. Much of the work produced through Artpace residencies goes on to be shown around the world or sold into public or private collections.
Deborah Willis, Ph.D., is the Guest Curator for the Spring 2019 IAIR program. Willis is the chair of the Department of Photography & Imaging at the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University. She is the previous recipient of the Guggenheim, Fletcher, and MacArthur fellowships, the Infinity Award in Writing from the International Center for Photography, and the Anonymous Was a Woman Award. Named one of the "100 Most Important People in Photography" by American Photography magazine, she is one of the nation's leading historians of African American photography and curators of African American culture.
Sama Alshaibi is a multimedia artist born in Basra to an Iraqi father and Palestinian mother and based in Tucson, Arizona. She employs the use of photography, video/object hybrids, and installation. Her practice explores spaces of conflict and migration to tease out issues of citizenship and power. Frequently featuring herself as a protagonist within her works, she applies the body as an allegorical device to investigate geographical metaphors which exist between spaces of political and social oppression. She was honored with the prestigious Fulbright Scholar Fellowship in 2014 as part of a yearlong residency at the Palestine Museum in Ramallah. Her work has been exhibited at the Venice Biennale (Venice, 2013), the Honolulu Biennale (Hawaii, 2017), Marta Herford Museum (Germany, 2017), and the Qalandia International Biennial (Haifa, 2016).
Jennifer Ling Datchuk is a sculptor and artist born in Warren, Ohio, raised in Brooklyn, New York, and based in San Antonio, Texas. Her mother came to the United States in the early 1970s from China; her father was born to Russian and Irish immigrant parents and raised in Ohio. Trained in ceramics, the artist works with porcelain and other materials often associated with traditional women’s work, such as textiles and hair, to discuss fragility, beauty, femininity, intersectionality, identity, and personal history. She holds an MFA in Artisanry from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and a BFA in Crafts from Kent State University. She has received grants from Artpace, the Artist Foundation of San Antonio and the Linda Lighton International Artist Exchange Program to research porcelain clay as a conceptual material. She was awarded a residency through the Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum to conduct her studio practice at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin, Germany and has participated in residencies at the Pottery Workshop in Jingdezhen, China, Vermont Studio Center, and the European Ceramic Work Center in the Netherlands. In 2017, she received the Emerging Voices award from the American Craft Council.
Roshini Kempadoo is a multimedia artist, photographer and scholar. Her research, multimedia, and photographic projects combine factual and fictional re-imaginings of contemporary experiences, histories and memories. Roshini has been active in documenting Caribbean communities, events, rights issues, and individuals in the UK and the Caribbean. She was instrumental in setting up Autograph, the Association of Black Photographers in the late 1980s, and worked as a documentary photographer for Format Picture Agency (1983 – 2003). Her photography and artworks are created using montage, layering, narration, and interactive techniques of production. Her recent work includes photographs and screen-based interactive art installations which fictionalize Caribbean archive material, objects, and spaces. She is represented by Autograph ABP, London.
