Mission
The Residency Project (TRP) provides time and space in support of creative research and artistic experimentation, with an emphasis on creating opportunities for historically underrepresented artists—women, BIPOC and LGBTQ+ artists, artists with disabilities, and parents—as well as artists who actively pursue environmentally sustainable practices.
Values
Four core values are at the root of all our work:
Creative Experimentation
We encourage artists to research, explore, experiment, and play with new concepts and modes of making and/or engaging.
TRP embraces risk-taking, failure, and process over product.
Equity, Diversity, & Inclusion
TRP welcomes program participants of all races, ethnicities, national origins/citizenship, religious affiliations, gender identities, and sexual orientations.
More deeply, we actively support the inclusion of creative practitioners from diverse demographic, aesthetic, and philosophical backgrounds.
Social Justice
The Residency Project questions how existing structures prevent equity and access for all. We ask ourselves “Who is being excluded?” and we examine our own practices through a lens of social justice.
Environmental Justice
TRP partakes in sustainable and zero-waste practices, and we emphasize opportunities for artists who do the same.
We also seek collaborative partnerships with like-minded organizations.
Click here to learn more about our commitment to intersectional environmentalism.
Ethos
The Residency Project (TRP) is an artist residency and project space founded in 2018.
The Residency project is the brainchild of artist Sarah Umles, who stewards the project with the immense support of her husband Matthew and her extended family. TRP’s “family” includes its residents & fellows, financial contributors, moral supporters, and any and all community members who engage with the project. TRP is a manifestation of Umles’s practice as an interdisciplinary artist. Her socially-engaged work teeters between arts administration, curatorial practice, performance, and interactive installation.
The Residency Project is not envisioned as an organization. It’s imagined as an organism.
The Residency Project lives and breathes, and it evolves with each artist-in-residence. Through the framework of The Residency Project, Umles invites co-authorship as to what an artist residency is and can be. Each artist who engages with the project shapes TRP’s identity through the creative work they undertake during and long after their residency. Underpinned by Joseph Beuys’ concept of social sculpture and Nicolas Bourriaud’s concept of relational aesthetics, The Residency Project is an embodied investigation into how, through human interaction and intentional living, we can engage alternative social models not built upon the tenets of capitalism or colonialist notions of land ownership. While place is deeply important to The Residency Project’s work, TRP is envisioned as an itinerant project that can move to, pop-up in, and respond to new spaces and geographies.
If you have a space or program that you’d like to activate with an artist residency or if you’d like to collaborate otherwise, please get in touch!
The Residency Project is a member of
Southwest Artist Residency Cohort
and an official partner of
