Artist-In-Residence Program

The Momentary invites visual artists from around the world to take up residence in one of our three dedicated studio spaces and work on projects in the middle of the Heartland, encouraging them to create work that engages with the landscape of Northwest Arkansas and how our connection to the land informs our varied identities. The artists-in-residence program also includes performing and culinary artists who may occupy spaces outside of the studios.

The program is currently invitation only.

RUMWOLF: JAN 3—23, 2023

Rumwolf is a multi-disciplinary visual installation artist, musician, and filmmaker based in the Ozarks. His practice focuses on the relationship between art, emotion, and technology expressed through themes of humor, pop culture, and nostalgia. Often using his large collection of ephemera, Rumwolf combines found objects and ready-mades with contemporary forms of projection mapping, multi-media sculpture, animation, and video art along with traditional forms of painting and illustration. Rumwolf works professionally as a director, producer, consultant, and production specialist in the performance and live production field as well as commercially as a freelance graphics and sound designer.

In his various roles, Rumwolf plays an active part in the Northwest Arkansas art community and beyond. In 2020, he collaborated with vertical dance group BANDALOOP for the Momentary’s grand opening festival Time Being, and again for a repeat performance in the fall of 2021. In the same year, he was a resident artist at CACHE Studios and began his ongoing “Maker in Residency” at the Amazeum Interactive Children’s Museum. In 2022, he worked as the production manager for the Live in America festival, a project by Fusebox Festival in partnership with the Momentary. He was commissioned by Brooklyn-based performing arts collective TRIBE as an installation consultant for the world premiere of Touch of Red at MASS MoCA. He also produced the 2022 Black Apple Awards for The Idle Class Magazine in addition to being featured as an artist and curator for the event. Rumwolf was a featured artist for the University of Arkansas’s 150-year anniversary program contributing his video mapping sculpture The Great Glass Elevator. Additionally, Rumwolf was awarded a CXF curator’s grant from CACHE and supported by the Tyson Family Foundation, which he used to mount the interactive art gallery POP A.V. at The Medium. Most recently, he directed and produced the original performance art installation Jay Benham’s Kiowa Ledger Art, presented at the University of Arkansas’s multicultural center. He lives in Bentonville with his daughter Lyric.

During his residency at the Momentary, Rumwolf will begin development of a new performance piece planned for a 2024 premiere. Anchored by a suite of songs composed by Rumwolf in 2021–2022, the show will combine elements of installation and narrative fiction with varying time-based performance techniques. Working closely with the Momentary’s production team, Rumwolf will continue to experiment with video and projection mapping methods using LED wall technology to be implemented in the design of the piece.

Auriea Harvey: Jul 31—Sep 3, 2022

Rome-based visual artist Auriea Harvey is a pioneering net artist and video game designer, creating simulations and sculptures that bridge physical and digital space. She has exhibited her hybrid-media sculpture and works on paper with bitforms gallery, Transfer Gallery, Feral File, Steve Turner Gallery, MEET Digital Culture Center (Milan), and König Gallery (Berlin). Harvey’s work can be found in the permanent collections of the Walker Art Center, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the RF.C Collection, and Rhizome’s Net Art Anthology. Her video games and VR works have had international success, including exhibitions at the Tinguely Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum (London), the New Museum, Brooklyn Academy of Music, and ZKM, Karlsruhe. She is the recipient of a Creative Capital grant and a winner of the Independent Games Festival Nuovo Award.

While in residence at the Momentary, Harvey will be evolving several digital sculptures based on her research to date and with an upcoming installation in mind. She hopes to work with a local foundry to discover options for combining or transforming her 3D-printed sculptures into various materials.

WILL RAWLS: AUG 9-20, 2022

New York-based choreographer, performer, curator, and writer Will Rawls explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. His choreographic work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Danspace Project, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1, among others. Rawls is a recipient of a “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

While in residence, Rawls and his company of dancers and designers will be staging the new work [siccer] to be premiered at the Momentary in April 2023.

About [siccer]: Building from the editorial term for a misspelled word, “[sic]”, [siccer] is a dance and film project challenging widespread citation and misrepresentation of black bodies. Exploring the restlessness of gesture and language as strategies of black performance, [siccer] cultivates elusiveness and abstraction to resist the “racial gristmill” of mass media.

MATTY DAVIS: JUL 6-31, 2022

Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer whose work uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy in ways that collaboratively explore perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. Working across sculpture, drawing, and publishing, his projects predominantly manifest in performance and dance, which he values as shared space in which to be transformatively alive. Matty’s work has been presented throughout the US and abroad, including at the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas, the Art Institute of Chicago, Bozar (Brussels), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Max Ernst Museum (Brühl, DE), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Pioneer Works (NYC), among many distinct site-specific locations. In 2019, Matty was named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine.

While in residence at the Momentary, Matty will work closely with local performers and non-performers to explore the parameters of a new work that lies at the intersection of publishing and live performance. This research is part of an ongoing trajectory that radically questions what choreography can contain and how it contains us. Structured in the fleeting, magical spirit of a shooting star, it seeks to hold and feel the pursuits of others, and others in their pursuits.

JAMES HARRISON MONACO: JUN 20-25, 2022

James Harrison Monaco tells stories with music. He considers that to be one of the oldest art forms in the world, and he’s always looking for new and innovative ways to do it.

He’s obsessed by stories of travel, translation, immigration, borders, memory, quiet violence, quiet grace, global loneliness, and time.

His work often combines extensive research in a handful of languages with an unabashed amount of melodrama. He’s also a translator of Spanish and Italian, he’s a music composer, and he writes prose, fiction, and non-fiction.

He works solo, and he works in a lot of collaborative forms—most notably as one half of the music-storytelling duo Jerome & James (jamesandjerome.org).

His theater projects have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin, Andrew Scoville, and Annie Tippe. Recent projects by James & Jerome include: The Conversationalists (The Bushwick Starr), Ink (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under The Radar Festival, Williams College, etc.), Piano Tales (Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, etc.), Aaron/Marie (Under The Radar Festival, Ars Nova), and They Ran and Ran and Ran (HERE Arts). Other storytelling projects include Travels (in development), Tales for Telling (Ars Nova) and Reception (HERE Arts, The New Ohio).

Monaco is a New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and he’s received residencies with The Public Theater, The Sundance Institute, BAM, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others. He and JJJJJerome Ellis are currently Ars Nova commissioned artists, and he’s a collaborating writer, composer, and performer on The TEAM’s upcoming project Reconstruction: Still Working But The Devil Might Be Inside.

While in residence at the Momentary, Monaco will work with production designer Shawn Duan to create new work in conversation with a selection of artworks from the Crystal Bridges collection. Along with director Annie Tippee, the team will return August 6-7, 2022 to premiere the newly commissioned work.

Milka Djordjevich: MAR 28—APR 30, 2022

Milka Djordjevich is a choreographer, performer, and educator whose work questions preconceived notions of what dance should or should not be. While in residence at the Momentary, Milka along with writer and editor Dot Armstrong and dancer Dorothy Dubrule, will be creating CORPS, the handbook, a living document complementing Djordjevich’s eponymous performance. CORPS, making its regional debut at the Momentary May 13 & 14, explores how labor and gender are addressed under the lens of regimented movement. The work is a continuation of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of dance practices preoccupied with producing neutrality and anonymity.

CORPS, the handbook, will make visible the research and process of CORPS. Alongside original writing and edited conversations with dancers and collaborators, the handbook will notate the choreographic system the company is developing with a glossary of movement etymology, a songbook of original music, and choreographic primers for the reader to engage in.

Holly Wilson: Mar 28—Apr 30, 2022

Multi-media artist Holly Wilson creates figures which serve as her storytellers to the world, conveying stories of the sacred and precious, capturing moments of our day, our vulnerabilities and our strengths. During her residency, Wilson will be working on a new sculpture exploring and addressing the intersections of how colonialism has affected Indigenous land in the Ozarks.

ANDREA CARLSON: FEB 16—MAR 14, 2022

Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) is a visual artist currently living in the unceded Potawatomi shoreline of Chicago, Illinois. Carlson’s current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient.

During her residency at the Momentary, Carlson created a new outdoor sculpture for the Momentary’s campus that will be featured in the new exhibition A Divided Landscape.

Justin Favela : Oct 1—31,  2021

Based in Las Vegas, Nevada, and known for large-scale installations and sculptures that manifest his interactions with American pop culture and the Latinx experience, Justin Favela has exhibited his work both internationally and across the United States. His installations have been commissioned by museums including the El Museo del Barrio in New York and Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Arkansas. He is the recipient of the 2018 Alan Turing LGTBIQ Award for International Artist. Favela hosts two culture-oriented podcasts, Latinos Who Lunch and The Art People Podcast. He holds a BFA in fine art from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

JUSTIN CABRILLOS : Jul 6—25, 2021

Justin Cabrillos is a choreographer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He was a 2017 Movement Research artist-in-residence, a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz under the mentorship of Tino Seghal, and a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum. His work has been commissioned by the IN>TIME Series in Chicago, Danspace Project, and The Chocolate Factory Theater. Cabrillos has shown work at the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roulette, and Movement Research at Judson Church. As a performer, he has worked with Every house has a door, Julian Barnett, Jen Rosenblit, and Jeremy Shaw. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington, Seattle.

During his residency at the Momentary, Cabrillos offered a series of workshops for local participants interested in exploring how emotions move through the body and between bodies, culminating in a public-facing performance. Simultaneously, he developed a new work and shared the progress with a live audience on his final night in residence.

RASHAWN GRIFFIN : JUL 1—SEP 14,  2021

Rashawn Griffin uses diverse materials such as bed sheets, tassels, food, and flora to create large-scale sculpture and paintings.  After receiving a MFA from Yale University in 2005, he has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad.  Often pushing the boundaries between object and installation, his work challenges viewers to engage in their own past experiences when confronting his art.  A haunting installation in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, is punctuated by a live audio feed from a field in Kansas, where the artist was raised.  A lumbering garbage bag man/sculpture wanders through a field in “To bring love/terrible things”, highlighting his exploration of place, site specificity, and identity.  Griffin’s installations explore the relationship between architecture and the traditions of painting with a series of stretched fabric walls; as the picture becomes the space, the pictorial space highlights the architecture.

Living and working in Olathe, KS, he was a 2006 resident of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s AIR program. Along with the 2008 Whitney Biennial, his work has been exhibited widely, including a two-person exhibition at the Studio Museum with artist Senga Nengudi (RSVP), as well as “Freeway Balconies” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, and “THREADS:  Textiles and Fiber in the works of African American Artists” at EK Projects in Beijing, China.  Recently the subject of the solo exhibition “A hole-in-the-wall country” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, as well as participating in the exhibition “Minimal Baroque” at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark, and in December his work will be featured in “The Regional”, a biennial of midwest-based artists opening at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati in December, before traveling to the Kemper Museum in Kansas City.

During his residency at the Momentary, Griffin will work on a large-scale painting and a series of new drawings for upcoming exhibitions opening later this year (2021).

Nick Vaughan + Jake Margolin : ApR 27—May 4, 2020

Houston-based interdisciplinary artists Nick Vaughan and Jake Margolin were the Momentary’s first virtual artists-in-residence. Over the course of a week, Vaughan and Margolin continued developing their Arkansas-centered project, The Ballad(s) of Jesse. Part of their 50 States Project, The Ballad(s) of Jesse is inspired by a Harrison-based, 1920s interracial same-sex couple and explores the murkiness of queer histories that have been casually or intentionally erased.

Ariel RenÉ Jackson : Sep 9—Oct 21, 2019

Ariel René Jackson considers the effect that recalling past experiences has on understanding present conditions of belonging. During her residency, Jackson worked on how identity and landscape collide, looking at sundown towns and the confederate statue. She filmed a pop-up performance at the confederate statue on the downtown Bentonville square and will be part of a larger cross-disciplinary artwork.

Jackson currently lives and works in Austin, TX where she completed her MFA at The University of Texas at Austin.

Imani Uzuri : Aug 16—22, 2019

Composer, librettist, and vocalist Imani Uzuri composes and researches music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family. During her residency, Uzuri developed her forthcoming chamber opera, Hush Arbor (The Opera), a mercurial musical meditation exploring themes of death, transcendence, impermanence, and liminality (standing at the threshhold) that will premiere at the Momentary in 2022. This work is inspired by hidden gathering places called “hush arbors” created by enslaved African Americans in wooded areas in the American South to secretly worship, commune, and strategize rebellion.

Flutronix : May 4—10, 2019

Flutronix, Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, is two distinguished flutists and composers known for their “unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu” (The Wall Street Journal). During their residency, Flutronix worked on Discourse, a musical conversation across the community to encourage community members to share stories of common experiences across our various identities.

Will Rawls : Apr 16—May 31, 2019

New York-based choreographer, performance artist, curator, and writer Will Rawls focuses on relationship and transitions between dance and language in order to consider the poetics of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. During his residency, Rawls worked on a dance piece exploring cursor movement.

“When one puts finger to cursor, which way will the language run, towards radical differences or the submission to the same old story? A cursor is polyamorous. It’s more comfortable that way. Can a dance unfold like a cursor, moving back and forth, up and down in space, revising and even misspelling our perceptions, perhaps for our own good?”

Rawls is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.

Ebony G. Patterson : Apr 1—Jun 28, 2019 & Sep 1—15, 2019

Visual and mixed media artist Ebony G. Patteron lives and works between Kingston, Jamaica and Lexington, KY. During her residency, Patterson planted a garden at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as a test site to explore survival and colonialism.