FRUITION: The Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood 2024
August 2 – October 20, 2024
Installation images of FRUITION: The Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood 2024.
Photo credit: John Carlano.
Front row: Sarah Watlington, Brittany Rudolf, and Melissa Engler
Not pictured: WARP Wood Scholar Fellow Folayemi Wilson
The Museum’s annual summer exhibition represents the culmination of the Windgate Wood Arts Residency Program (WARP-Wood), a two-month arts residency program. In this exhibition, the resident Fellows present work created during the residency, which emphasizes research, exploration, and the opportunity to work in a collaborative environment. Now in its twenty-seventh year, this renowned residency offers artists specializing in the material of wood the opportunity to test their vision and skill, while developing connections with colleagues, collectors, the Museum, and the wider city of Philadelphia.
Nearly all of the nine fellows in the 2024 cohort applied for the residency in 2019. In the intervening five years, development and divergence have left them in the precise position of NOW, which is both undeniably correct and undeniably by chance. The work in the aptly named FRUITION exhibition is based on seeds of ideas planted over a stretch of time that has enriched outcomes and, at times, reshaped the artists’ ways of making.
This year’s WARP Wood Fellows, listed here, bring immersive installations, sculpture, studio furniture, object design, and research to the Museum’s exhibition space.
2024 Windgate Resident Fellows
Artists:
Chance Coalter | San Diego, CA
Melissa Engler | Asheville, NC
Jamie Herman | Layton, NJ
J Prud’homme | San Francisco, CA
Sara Tabbert | Fairbanks, AK
Sarah Watlington | Los Angeles, CA
Student Artist:
Brittany Rudolf | Portland, OR
Documentary Artist:
Molly Nemer
Scholar:
Folayemi Wilson
This year’s Scholar for the 2024 Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood is Folayemi Wilson, who celebrates the Black imagination as a technology of resistance and self-determination. Her work explores the Black Atlantic experience through sculptural, multimedia installations presenting speculative fictions that reference history, integrating inspiration from American vernacular architecture, literature, and science fiction. Her writing and reviews have appeared in NKA, Journal of Contemporary African Art, and Expansions, a publication of the 2021 Venice Architecture Biennale. Her work is in the collection of the National Museum of African American History & Culture.
During her participation in WARP Wood, Wilson posed the question: What is a Tree? to the eight other Fellows.
The following is an essay by Folayemi Wilson based on her own research of the culture of forests and the physiology of trees, along with the responses from the Fellows.
Follow along on the WARP Wood Blog.
Meet the 2024 WARP Wood Fellows! Join us for the WARP Wood Open Studio Day, in memory of Lee Bender, on July 13, 2024, at NextFab North.
Opening reception with the Windgate Resident Fellows | Aug 2, 5:30-8 PM | Gallery talk, 6-7 PM
Shop the exhibition by clicking HERE.
This year’s Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood and Exhibition is generously supported by the Cambium Circle Members of the Museum for Art in Wood, donors to the Windgate Arts Residency Program in Wood appeal, the Phil F. Brown Fund, Bresler Foundation, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Philadelphia Cultural Fund, the Klorfine Foundation, and Windgate Foundation. In-kind support was provided by Boomerang, Inc. Additional support was provided by a grant from the Alaska State Council on the Arts Career Opportunity. The Museum received in-kind support from Boomerang, Inc. Special thanks to the WARP Wood committee, the organizing committee of the Echo Lake Collaborative Conference, the Organic Recycling Center in the Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, and Debbra Soffer in memory of Michael Soffer.
