Connecting campus and community
The Cook Center's Engaged Artist-in-Residence program brings two working artists to the Bloomington campus each year to work and interact with IU students and community members through a series of workshops, outreach projects, and exhibitions. Fall semester residencies are devoted to artists working in the Midwest, while Spring semester residencies feature artists with ties to the Arts & Humanities Council's Global Remixed festival.
The residencies are designed to advance a model of “engaged” artistic practice that supports artists whose careers can be significantly furthered by access to IU’s resources in curation, collections, and research, and who can, in turn, activate those resources in new ways and demonstrate new engaged modes of artistic exchange for the campus’s largely rural, Midwestern community.
In its pilot year, the Engaged Artist-in-Residence Program is currently managed by a committee of faculty, staff, and curators, which includes:
- Ed Dallis-Comentale, director of the IU Arts and Humanities Council and the Gayle Karch Cook Center;
- Elliott Reichert, curator of contemporary art at the Eskenazi Museum of Art;
- Betsy Stirratt, director of the Grunwald Gallery of Art;
- Natalia Almanza, program coordinator for the IU Arts & Humanities Council and the Gayle Karch Cook Center.
The Engaged Artist-in-Residence program is made possible thanks to support from IU's Women's Philanthropy Leadership Council. The Arts and Humanities Council is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in response to the COVID-19 pandemic
(Above: An installation in the Cook Center Process Gallery featuring work from the inaugural Engaged Artist-In-Residence, zakkiyyah najeebah dumas o'neal.)