School of Latitudes #1

August 17 – September 11

a four week creative residency in Houston, Texas

Deadline to apply: July 15

Applicants must live in the Houston area

lat·i·tudes (noun) - freedom of action and thought; freedom from normal restraints, limitations, or regulations

labotanica is accepting applications for School of Latitudes, a four-week creative residency beginning in August 2010. Participants will be provided with practical tools to make art and develop new creative infrastructures in Houston through studio visits, workshops, lectures/ discussions by cultural leaders, movie screenings, collective readings, and field trips. The residency will culminate in an exhibition and publication documenting the start of these new projects.

The theme of the first session of School of Latitudes is “artists as activators”. The residency locates artists as active agents of change and explores integrative approaches to making art in our community. 

School of Latitudes explores new approaches to creating and presenting art that are artist-driven, DIY, and that locate creativity in all sorts of environments and places. Individuals should submit proposals for new creative projects. These could be far-ranging such as new art of all media, publications, landscapes, new partnerships and organizations, new policies, but all must be rooted in the communities of Houston. The residency is not about completing these projects, but simply exploring, launching and testing out these ideas, all the while using labotanica as a hub to do this.

To Apply: Submit a brief project description, biography, and work samples online at http://labotanica.org/latitudesapplication.html. Applicants must live in the Houston area and commit to meeting 3 times per week on Tuesdays (6-9pm), Thursdays (6-9pm) and Saturdays (1-5pm) for the duration of the residency. Additionally, participating artists will present one public presentation to the community throughout the residency. Artists of all cultural and creative backgrounds are encouraged to apply. There is a $10 application fee and if accepted a $35 materials fee.

Jurors: Elia Arce, artist; Valerie Cassel Oliver, Curator at Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston; Jamal Cyrus, artist; Zoya Tommy, Director of PG CONTEMPORARY

Questions? la (at) labotanica (dot)org

About Jurors:

Elia Arce is a pioneer performance artist working in a wide variety of media, including video installation, performance art, experimental theater, writing, photo performance, video and sculptural performance. Her work has been performed extensively at national and international venues. She has been published and has received considerable critical attention in Ms. Magazine, Latina Magazine, High Performance, Heresis, Conjunto, Artlies, ArtWeek, Out of Character, The Other Los Angelesses and ArtForum amongst others. Arce has received awards from The Rockefeller Foundation, The Durfee Foundation, The J. Paul Getty Foundation and the NEA. In Houston, she founded and facilitated the Performance Art Lab which became an independent performance collective. As a 2008-2010 New Voices Fellow (a Ford Foundation Initiative) and an artist-in-resident at DiverseWorks, she created the Gulf Coast Art Corridor, a social sculpture project: gulfcoastartcorridor.blogspot.com. And earlier this year she was awarded an American Masterpiece Award by the National Performance Network. A dual citizen of Costa Rica and the US, Arce is based in both countries.

Valerie Cassel Oliver is Curator at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where she has organized Splat Boom Pow! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art (2003); Double Consciousness: Black Conceptual Art since 1970 (2005); Black Light/White Noise: Sound and Light in Contemporary Art (2007); and most recently Cinema Remixed and Reloaded: Black Women Artists and the Moving Image (with Dr. Andrea Barnwell Brownlee, Spelman College Museum of Fine Arts, 2008). Her forthcoming exhibition projects include the retrospective Benjamin Patterson: Born in the State of Flux/us (2010) and the survey Donald Moffett: Twenty Years (2011), which she is co-organizing with Eric Shiner at the Warhol Museum. Cassel Oliver is the recipient of a 2006 Getty Curatorial Research Fellowship and was among the ten fellows selected for the Center for Curatorial Leadership Program in 2009. She serves on the editorial boards for Artl!es and Callaloo: A Journal of African Diaspora Arts and Letters; as an adviser for RxArt, New York, and Charlotte Street Foundation; and she is on the board of directors for Project Row Houses, Houston.

Jamal Cyrus was born in 1973 in Houston, Texas. Cyrus received an MFA in Combined Media from the University of Pennsylvania (2008), a BFA in Photography from the University of Houston (2004) and has studied at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (2005). His work has been included in exhibitions at institutions such as The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York,The Menil Collection, Houston, The High Museum, Atlanta, Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp, Museum of London Docklands, London and, CTRL gallery, Houston. In his sculptures, videos, and drawings he highlights the complexities of history through an interrogation of oral, visual, and textual sources. Cyrus’s narratives – both real and fictional – explore the subterranean world of Popular culture in search of its underlying realities and hidden meanings.

Zoya Tommy is an artist and gallerist. She has participated in exhibitions throughout the U.S. and the Caribbean and has been curating exhibitions in Houston for the past year. She received her MFA from the University of Houston in painting and received a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. Currently She resides in Houston, Texas and runs PG Contemporary Gallery promoting artist from the Caribbean and around the world; exhibiting at alternate spaces in Houston.

labotanica is a resource and a laboratory. labotanica uses flexible, open-ended formats to frame new art forms and dialogues that are independent, bold, experimental and out of the box. labotanica is a pilot project within Project Row Houses’ Artist Residency and Incubation program.