Engaged Artist in Residence

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.

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.

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.

Meet the artists!

The Cook Center has hosted several talented artists since the Engaged Artist in Residence program began in the Fall of 2021. Read about them below.

Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’Neal

Fall 2021

Zakkiyyah Najeebah Dumas-O’Neal makes work to further understand how the specificity of her own lived experiences are connected to historical and contemporary movements that involve embodied knowledge production. She explores this through social portraiture, video assemblage, collage, drawing, and found images.

She seeks to reinforce a different kind of gaze (and gazing) which she processes through empathy, desire, love, queer identity, family, intimacy, illegibility, and poetics. Within her projects there's an overlying theme of trying to make sense of what and who she belongs to across time, location, and space. Ultimately, she intends for her work to encourage ways of being and feeling beyond the systems we inhabit.

Her exhibition, This Irrepressible Need To Fulfill Myself In Every Way Possible, was on view in December 2021. During her time at Indiana University, O'Neal worked closely with the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center, the Black Film Center & Archive and the IU Moving Image Archive.

Learn more about zakkiyyah here

TJ Shin

Spring 2022

TJ Shin (b. 1993, Seoul) is an artist and writer whose multimedia practice spans film, video, installation, and sculpture. Their work explores emergent temporalities and spatial systems of global migration, technological apparatus, and ecological networks.

Shin has exhibited at the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Queens Museum, Buffalo Institute of Contemporary Arts, Princeton University, Montclair State University Galleries, Doosan Gallery, Knockdown Center, and more. Their writing has been published in Active Cultures, Artforum, Asia Art Archive, the Brooklyn Rail, Mousse Magazine, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. They have been invited as artist-in-residence at Princeton University, Indiana University, University at Buffalo, Recess, Wave Hill, Folly Tree Arboretum, Banff Centre, and more. Their works have been reviewed in publications including Artforum, Art in America, ArtPapers, ArtAsiaPacific, C Magazine, and The New York Times.

Shin lives and works in Los Angeles.

During their time at Indiana University, Shin worked closely with the Office of the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and IU Collects.

Learn more about TJ here

Samuel Levi Jones

Fall 2022

Samuel Levi Jones was born and raised in Marion, Indiana. Trained as a photographer and multidisciplinary artist, he earned a B.A. in Communication Studies from Taylor University and a B.F.A from Herron School of Art and Design in 2009. He received his MFA in Studio Art from Mills College in 2012.

His work is informed by historical source material and early modes of representation in documentary practice. He explores the framing of power structures and struggles between exclusion and equality by desecrating historical material, then re-imagining new works. Jones investigates issues of manipulation and the rejection of control in a broad sense.

During his time at Indiana University, Jones worked closely with the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology, the Eskenazi Museum of Art and the IU Lily Library.

Learn more about Samuel here

Hale Ekinci

Spring 2023

Hale Ekinci (b. 1984) is a Turkish-American artist based in Chicago. She received her MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts & Media at Columbia College Chicago and is currently a Professor and Chair of Art & Design at North Central College. Rooted in her lived experience as an immigrant, she creates embroidered paintings, sculptures, installations, and videos, embellished with vibrant colors, patterns, and cultural artifacts. Combining Middle Eastern and Western textile craft and fine art traditions, her work explores identity, folklore, communication, and gendered labor.

Ekinci was recently the Engaged Artist-in-Residence at the Gayle Karch Cook Center at Indiana University, including a solo exhibition in Fall 2024. Previously, she was also an artist-in-residence at ACRE, Jiwar Barcelona, Momentum Berlin, Elsewhere Museum, Chicago Artists Coalition Hatch, Spudnik Press, and Facebook Chicago. Her work has been exhibited nationally at EXPO Chicago, One After 909, Woman Made Gallery, Koehnline Museum of Art, University of Illinois Springfield, Dittmar Gallery (NU), and Queens College Art Center. Her videos have been screened internationally, in New York City, Berlin, Warsaw, and Jerusalem. She is the recipient of the Fiber & Figure award by the Surface Design Association and the best in show at the South Bend Museum of Art’s 30th Biennial.

During her time at Indiana University, Ekinci worked closely with the Kinsey Institute and the IU Eskenazi School of Art, Architecture and Design.

Learn more about Hale here

Cindee Travis Klement

Fall 2023

Cindee Travis Klement (B.1957 Dell City/El Paso, Texas) is a Houston-based visual artist who works in sculpture, printmaking, and social sculpture. Her recent work addresses conservation issues, looking specifically at living soil's ability to sequester carbon, soak up rainwater, and support wildlife in urban landscapes. Klement incorporates systems thinking approaches to create a functional balance between healthy ecosystems, human economics and societal landscape norms. Her work records our natural history to the collective memory so that it will no longer be endangered knowledge.

During her time at Indiana University, Klement worked closely with Hilltop Gardens and the Environmental Resilience Institute.

Learn more about Cindee here

Julie Schenkelberg

Spring 2024

Julie Schenkelberg grew up in the post-industrial landscape of Cleveland, Ohio. Her mixed-media installations start with furniture, dishware, textiles, and marble, combined with concrete, resin, and construction materials, to transform notions of domesticity, and engage with the American Rust Belt's legacy of abandonment and decay. Using the home as a playground for formal and conceptual subversions, the work aggressively disrupts cohesion within the physical sphere. Familiar furnishings rekindle memories or premonitions of collapse, suggesting both the utter destruction of war, calamities, or urban decay, but also the uncanny juxtapositions of fragile substances such as cloth and china, with industrial materials such as rusty metal, heavy concrete, and tool-made marks such as drilled holes and chain-sawed indentations. In addition her work is greatly influenced by her eighteen years of professional experience of working in the theater as a scenic painter. She has worked in NYC at a high level and other cities for many theaters and production houses.

She won the 2014 ArtPrize Installation Juried Award for her installation "Symptomatic Constant", and has received four National Endowment for the Arts Grants, the Efroymson Contemporary Arts Fellowship, and a Harpo Foundation Grant.

She works in NYC, Cleveland and Detroit. She also frequently moves her life for months to a year at a time to work on site-specific projects and attend residencies- a nomadic life dedicated to her art practice.

During her time at Indiana University, Schenkelberg worked closely with the IU Lily Library, the Grunwald Gallery and the City of Bloomington.

Learn more about Julie here