WELCOMING NYC ARTISTS TO CREATE AT GREEN-WOOD
About
The year-long residency provides one artist in the visual and/or performing arts with a studio space and honorarium to create a site-specific installation or performance at The Green-Wood Cemetery. The residency is open to emerging artists living and working in New York City.
The selected artist will be provided a $8,000 honorarium, private studio space in the landmarked Fort Hamilton Gatehouse, and access to the Cemetery’s professional staff and archives and historical collections. The site-specific work at the end of the residency should be inspired by Green-Wood’s expansive landscape, historic monuments, and compelling history.
CLICK HERE FOR 2024–2025 APPLICATION
CURRENT Resident: ADAM TENDLER
A recipient of the Lincoln Center Award for Emerging Artists and described in The New York Times as “joyfully rocking out at his keyboard,” Adam Tendler is an internationally recognized interpreter of living, modern and classical composers. A pioneer of DIY culture in concert music who has commissioned and premiered major works by Christian Wolff and Devonté Hynes alike.
Tendler, who is renowned for personal, intimate performances, emphasizes his interest in exploring a work that draws from his community (his multicultural family and friends as well as the LGBTQ+ communities) and their diverse ideas about spirituality, mortality, and fate. The residency, which will run until June 2024 will culminate with a final project to debut in the summer. Audiences will be treated to several public classes and workshops throughout the residency.
2022–2023 Resident: ROWAN RENEE
Rowan Renee’s work interrogates the intersection of Queer identities and the law, investigating the impact of intergenerational trauma, gender-based violence, and the criminal justice system. The residency provided them access to the Cemetery’s archives and historical collections and an opportunity to craft a body of work focused on themes of ritual care, death, ancestry, and the afterlife.
Renee born in West Palm Beach, Florida and currently lives and works in Brooklyn. Their work has been featured at Five Myles and Pioneer Works in Brooklyn as well as at Aperture Foundation in Manhattan and the Anchorage Museum of Art in Alaska. In addition to holding a 2020 artist residency at Red Bull House of Art in Detroit, they have received awards from the Aaron Siskind Foundation and Harpo Foundation. Renee holds an MFA from the University of Michigan, and they earned a BFA with honors from the Parsons School of Design at the New School in New York City. Learn more on their website.
Their residency at Green-Wood culminated with The Perimeter Path, an immersive installation in the Historic Chapel which incorporated hundreds of components meticulously crafted in marble, steel, glass, and stone. Inspired by Renee’s research into the public burial lots around the Cemetery’s perimeter, The Perimeter Path encouraged us to consider how race and class influence memorialization. Click here to learn more.
2021–2022 Resident: Heidi Lau
Heidi Lau was chosen from among nearly one thousand candidates who applied for the inaugural year of the residency program, and was featured in the New Yorker, New York Daily News, L’Officiel Art, and Smithsonian Magazine, to name a few.
Lau, who grew up in Macau (on China’s southern coast), currently lives in Chinatown, Manhattan and works in Ridgewood, Queens. Her ceramic work is often modeled after tokens of remembrance, including ritual objects, funerary monuments, and fossilized creatures. Taoist mythology, folk superstitions, and Macau’s colonial history provide essential source material for her exploration of displacement and nostalgia as the condition of contemporary existence.
Lau’s work has been exhibited in local and international institutions including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; the Bronx Museum of the Arts, New York; the Museum of Chinese in America, New York; the Macau Museum of Art; and others. In 2019, she represented Macau at the 58th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, Venice. Her practice has been supported by the Emerging Artist Fellowship at Socrates Sculpture Park, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Process Space, the Martin Wong Foundation Scholarship, and the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptor Grant, among other awards and residencies.
Lau’s residency culminated in a site-specific installation of sculptures in the Cemetery’s Catacombs. Gardens as Cosmic Terrains was influenced by Lau’s research into the cosmological setting within Chinese gardens, where the arrangement of arches, pathways, and vistas acts as a metaphor for time, space, and matter—as well as a portal to access both memories and the spirit world. Click here to learn more.