Watch Presentations from the 2019 Creative Capital Artist Retreat
We are thrilled to share artist presentation videos from the 2019 Creative Capital Artist Retreat! A central part of Creative Capital Award, the retreat is an intensive week-long gathering designed to help artists develop their ambitious and forward-thinking work. The retreat centers around artists presenting their works in progress to a group of experts and supporters from all creative disciplines who can help make their visions a reality. These presentations cover a broad range of genres and subjects, from poetry dedicated to extinct species, to a puppet installation imagining the legacy of plastic, to a performance exploring a personal connection to the trans-Atlantic slave trade—all representing a diversity of work by some of the most groundbreaking artists in the country. Enjoy these online videos, free and available to everyone.
Artist presentations below are listed in the order of appearance at the retreat. Videos are by Intrinsic Grey.
Paul Flores, Rosalba Rolón, and Yosvany Terry
We Have Iré is a multidisciplinary theater work that explores the lives of Afro-Cuban and Cuban-American transnational artists living in the United States, and their influence on and experience with American culture.
Ekene Ijeoma
The Green Book Project is a series of publications and interactive installations developed through storytelling and mapping workshops that reimagine the Negro Motorist Green Book for “traveling while Black” in today’s “New Jim Crows.”
Sheila Maldonado, Nelly Rosario, Macarena Hernández
desveladas: visual conversations from the americas was conceived as multimedia conversations among three “over-documented daughters of the Americas.”
Nathaniel Corum and Joseph Kunkel
The Northern Cheyenne Tribe in Montana have asked Kunkel and Corum to collaborate in developing a culturally responsive site for their project, Place of Gathering and Reconciliation at the Fort Robinson Breakout Site.
Meshell Ndegeocello
No More Water / The Fire Next Time: The Gospel According to James Baldwin pays homage to James Baldwin by creating a shared space for reflection, conversation, and social change.
Leslie Tai
How to Have an American Baby travels deep into the booming shadow economy catering to Chinese birth tourists who travel to the US on birthing vacations, in order to obtain US citizenship for their babies.
Alejandro Durán
Washed Up is an environmental installation and photography project that transforms the international debris washing up on Mexico’s Caribbean coast into aesthetic yet disquieting works.
Karina Aguilera Skvirsky
How to build a wall and other ruins is a series of work that absorbs the debates around the engineering feats of Inca architecture to reimagine labor and its documentation, depict the gulf between theory and practice, and insert the body into an archeological site.
Alan Ruiz
Spatial Alchemy is part of an ongoing body of work that explores the way seemingly benign architectural and environmental elements reflect or reproduce social hierarchies.
Peter Burr
Aria End employs the concept of an endlessly mutating labyrinth to create a constellation of cinematic artworks using styles and conventions common to video games.
Mallory Catlett
Inspired by the prophetic imaginations of William Burroughs and Doris Lessing, M/F Future is a pair of works that acts as an experiment in time travel.
Michèle Stephenson
Changing Same: An American Pilgrimage is a documentary experience depicting those whose lived experiences included slavery, lynching, and mass incarceration.
S. Leo Chiang
Parachute Kids is a first-person essay film exploring the filmmaker’s experience when he was sent with his two younger siblings to live in the US while his parents stayed behind in Taiwan.
Heather Dewey-Hagborg
T3511 tells the (mostly) true story of a biohacker who becomes increasingly obsessed with an anonymous donor whose saliva she purchases online.
Joseph Keckler
Let Me Die is a multitude of death scenes from the operatic canon taken from the public domain and interwoven with Keckler’s original narratives to create a new hybrid work.
Laura Doggett
Another Kind of Girl Collective is a global arts initiative created by a group of young, female Syrian artists for girls and young women living in displaced, transitory communities around the world
KCHUNG
News Body creates a site for mobile, roving broadcast that brings live interviews and reporting as well as production training to any site, event and community in southern California.
Jim Findlay
Electric Lucifer reanimates Bruce Haack’s visionary song cycle from the 1970s as a futuristic, music-driven performance for a 21st-century audience.
Erika Chong Shuch
For You is an audience engagement performance laboratory guided by the goal of expanding ideas around how performance is created and shared.
Daresha Kyi
Mama Bears explores how the lives of conservative, Christian mothers are utterly transformed when they decide to accept their LGBTQ children—no matter the cost.
Kathryn Ramey
El Signo Vacío is a cinematic essay interrogating the 120-year US occupation of Puerto Rico to reveal how US democratic narratives effectively obscure its capitalist/military domination.
Wes Hurley
Potato Dreams of America is an autobiographical film chronicling the artist’s childhood as a closeted gay kid in USSR, and his journey to the US with his mother, a prison doctor turned mail-order bride.
Ligia Bouton and Matt Donovan
Inheritance is a chamber opera housed within a multimedia environment that examines gun culture in America through the lens of Sarah Winchester’s life.
Maaza Mengiste
A Brief Portrait of Small Deaths is a story set in Berlin during the interwar years, focusing on the life of a German painter and his model, an Afro-German woman, as Nazism rises in the country.
Brandon Ballengée
Searching for the Ghosts of the Gulf seeks to activate and empower Gulf of Mexico residents through eco-actions and pop-up exhibitions in coastal Louisiana.
Zach Blas
Consisting of a queer science fiction film installation, Contra-Internet confronts the transformation of the internet into an instrument for state oppression and accelerated capitalism.
Dee Hibbert-Jones and Nomi Talisman
Run With It, an animated feature documentary film, explores the crisis in the US racial divide through the eyes of DeJaun Correia, a young black man on the Dean’s List at Morehouse College who grew up spinning quarters on death row with his uncle.
Graham Reynolds
Pancho Villa from a Safe Distance is a bilingual cross-border chamber opera about the enigmatic general, legendary bandit, and hero of the Mexican Revolution.
Bahar Behbahani
Ispahan Flowers Only Once explores the artist’s personal relationship with American scholar, Donald Wilber, and his duality as a historic expert in Persian gardens and a spy who secretly orchestrated the 1953 CIA coup in Iran.
Dao Strom
Postwar Tablefruit is a multimedia literary project that explores the diasporic identity as an ethos and confluence, both, of place and (dis)placement.
Elissa Washuta
White Magic is a personal essay collection about heartbreak, sexual violation, and the artist’s process of becoming a powerful witch.
Yara Travieso
La Medea re-imagines Euripides’ violent tragedy into a dance-theater performance and feature film á la Latin-disco-pop variety show.
Robin Frohardt
The Plastic Bag Store is a darkly comedic installation and puppet performance exploring how our descendants will interpret, and misinterpret, our plastic refuse.
Sharon Bridgforth
Centered in African-American artistic and cultural traditions, dat Black Mermaid Man Lady/Home supports the creation of spaces that activate communal wisdom and self-determination.
Navild Acosta, project co-authored by Fannie Sosa
Black Power Naps is an installation and multi-purpose separatist organizing space with a focus on rest, restoration, rejuvenation, reparation and black joy.
Guadalupe Maravilla
Silent Zoomorph will materialize into a film inspired by the meditations Guadalupe Maravilla underwent while receiving fifty three sessions of radiation while living with cancer in 2013.
Ellen Sebastian Chang and Amara Tabor-Smith
HouseFull is a site-specific dance-theater piece addressing issues facing women of color in Oakland, CA.
Royal Osiris Karaoke Ensemble
The Art of Luv is a multi-part series of performance-rituals addressing the mythologies behind popular codes of romantic conduct, deconstructing the romantic comedy genre and other contemporary romantic mythologies.
CAConrad
Resurrect Extinct Vibration is a (Soma)tic poetry ritual in nine maneuvers, including lying on the ground across the US to saturate their body with recordings of recently extinct animals, to result in a total of 108 poems.
Charlotte Brathwaite
Forgotten Paradise: Gazette’s Sun is an experiment in creative nonfiction filmmaking, installation and live performance tracing the lineage of director Charlotte Brathwaite’s family history against the backdrop of the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Brian Harnetty
Performed with sampled archives, field recordings and live musicians, Shawnee, Ohio reflects layers of history and memory in Appalachian Ohio.
Ahamefule J. Oluo
Comedian and musician Ahamefule J. Oluo’s theatrical work, Susan, tells his mother’s story as a means to tell the story of millions of women.
Ja’Tovia Gary
A quest into artist Ja’Tovia Gary’s family lineage, The Evidence of Things Not Seen delves deep into ancestral inheritance, trans-generational trauma, and mental illness.
Laura Parnes
Tour Without End is a hybrid-film installation and an archive of DIY venues for visual and performing arts, in New York City and beyond.
Elissa Blount Moorhead
As of a Now is an x-ray film projection installation which is 3D-mapped onto a vacant row house, using audiovisual narratives, oral histories, augmented reality, and artifacts which reference its former Black denizens and the building’s cultural memo.
Linda Parris-Bailey
Yankee Bajan is the story of migration, expatriation, and immigration stimulated by the current state of the state in the United States.
Marisa Morán Jahn
An artist of Chinese and Ecuadorian descent, Marisa Morán Jahn uses sculpture, film, text, installation, and performance to redistribute power.
Stephanie Dinkins
Not the Only One is a multigenerational memoir of a Black American family told from the mind of an artificial intelligence of evolving intellect.
Pocha Peña and Victor Payan
Dreamocracy in America (Nueva Dia) completes Alexis de Tocqueville’s journey into the American character by examining immigrant and refugee detention centers, Native reservations, and communities west of the 1831 US border.
LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs
Global Studies is a collection of poetry that mimes the history textbook in structure, but at a closer look, is quite the opposite—the texts examine the ambiguity of history while employing multiple languages, mistranslations and vernaculars.
MAOF
Canoas, Cayucos y Balsas proposes the construction of a fleet of Caribbean vessels, utilizing materials from native trees constructed with techniques from pre-Columbian times to the present.
Larissa FastHorse
The Lakota Project is a community-generated and -performed immersive theatrical experience created through radical engagement with the Lakota communities of South Dakota.
Tanya Aguiñiga
Art Made Between Opposite Sides is a series of works of artworks made with the commuters who spend time in both countries, and the communities along the US/Mexican border.
Alice Sheppard
Descent is both a dance experience and a radical experiment in aesthetic accessibility and audience design, enabling audiences to encounter wheeled embodiment.
Ni’Ja Whitson
The Unarrival Experiments is an interdisciplinary performance project exploring relationships between astrophysics, cosmology, Blackness, Trans embodiedness and premature death via a notion of the vaporous body.
Cornell Alston and Kaneza Schaal
JACK& is a multimedia comedy of errors and a duet for two actors ensnared in dialogue exchanges that become mental tongue twisters, structured around social trainings from prison re-entry programs to debutante balls.
Alison O’Daniel
The Tuba Thieves composed of film installations, sculptures, and performances, is the story of a Deaf drummer, running parallel to marching band students reconciling with missing sound based off real-life tuba robberies from Los Angeles schools.
Michelle Handelman
Delirium is a multichannel video installation with live performance that breaks apart hierarchical systems of control through ruptures in language and form, imagining altered states of consciousness through queer desire.
Heather Kravas
Visions of Beauty is a dance about itself and the compulsive, lopsided, angry, funny, frustrating and redemptive messiness of everything.
Yotam Mann
Interactive Music is created collaboratively between the composer and the listener, existing on the spectrum between instrument and fixed song.
Raja Feather Kelly
Wednesday, a utopia for the untold stories of queer people, is a cabaret club where film noir meets psychological thriller meets pop soap opera.
See photos and learn more about the 2019 Artist Retreat.
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