ARTIST RESIDENCIES | mobilemedicalmuseum

Artist Residency Program

The Mobile Medical Museum Artist Residency Program offers visual, literary and performing artists the opportunity to apply their creative work to the education of health care students and professionals, through a timely and resonant exploration of the past, present and future of health care.

Artists spend four to eight weeks in an extensive engagement with the Museum's collection to develop new work that addresses the history of health care in our region. At the end of the residency, the artist will present the new work in an exhibition, performance, or other public program coordinated by the Museum. Each artist-in-residence receives an honorarium and budget for project expenses.

2024 ARTIST RESIDENCY PROGRAM APPLICATION

Please submit the following materials by October 31, 2023. You may submit them electronically to admin@mobilemedicalmuseum.org or mail to:

Mobile Medical Museum

1664 Spring Hill Avenue

Mobile, AL 36604

Artist name and contact information
CV, résumé, or website URL
Artist statement (250 words or less)
Work samples, accompanied by numbered works list
1. Visual images: 4-6 high-res images in .JPG, .TIFF or .PDF format
2. Text: 1-6 sample texts, not to exceed 10 pages total
3. Time-based media: 1-3 samples, not to exceed 10 minutes total, in .MP4 format or link(s) to website or streaming platform
Project proposal: in 500 words or less, please describe your initial ideas for the proposed residency. What draws you to this opportunity? What work will be produced and how will it be presented to the community? How do you intend to work with the museum’s collection and resources?

Venue: The Mobile Medical Museum will be the primary venue for presenting this work. The ArtSpace Gallery at the University of South Alabama Biomedical Library may be used as a satellite venue if needed. Projects should be scaled and designed to be presented in one or both of these programming spaces. We strongly encourage you to visit the Museum and the ArtSpace Gallery before submitting your application.

Timeline:

August 15-October 31, 2023: applications are accepted.

December 2023: artist-in-residence is notified.

July-August 2024: period of artist residency.

September 2024: public program is presented.

This program has been made possible in part by a grant from the Alabama State Council on the Arts.

Current and Past Artists in Residence

2024: Douglas Baulos

My 2024 residency project is a book and exhibition called Alabama: Midnight Full of Stars. The book is a creative non-fiction project funded by the Mellon Foundation which will be published late 2024. The accompanying works of art and exhibition will be a body of work that explores Alabama medicinal plants, medical and garden tools of the deep south, and suture sewing taxonomies used in Alabama. Most of my current visual artworks are paper and cloth narratives that hopefully open into vast, imaginative space for the reader and viewer as site specific installations and framed works. In Alabama: Midnight Full of Stars, I will create a series of large paper/cloth photo/collage/drawing objects documenting endemic medicinal plants found in Baldwin and Mobile Counties. By focusing on the connections where scientific understanding, emotional experience, and diverse realities exist, I hope to inspire wonder and reverence for the natural world and encapsulate history in a different way by creating a series of works that can enlarge shared knowledge of medicinal plants of Baldwin and Mobile Counties and Alabama. I am very interested in creating works that extend ontologies between things that are seemingly irrelevant to one another to create new theories, language, or artifacts to create a common ground of reflection and understanding.

—Douglas Baulos

2023: PowerLines Poets

The PowerLines Poets are a Mobile, Alabama-based poetry troupe that has been performing together for over ten years. They use the spoken word art form to entertain, bridge gaps and bring community together. In recent years, they have developed community projects in collaboration with such organizations as the Boys and Girls Clubs of South Alabama, Family Haven/Salvation Army, the Mobile Museum of Art, and the Dora Franklin Finley African American Heritage Trail.

For their residency, they are creating new works for Our Time to Heal, a multi-media collaboration with artist April Livingston. Against a backdrop of video projections, their poems will vividly evoke the yellow fever epidemics and old grave sites of nineteenth-century Mobile and tell the story of how the community came together to rise above this pestilence. This work will be debuted at Dunbar Creative and Performing Arts Magnet School, former site of the Medical College of Alabama.

2021: Chris Lawson, Merrilee Challiss, Carey Fountain

Visual artists Chris Lawson, Merrilee Challiss and Carey Fountain created new multimedia works for a group exhibition guest-curated by elizabet elliott and co-presented by the Mobile Medical Museum and Alabama Contemporary Art Center. Titled Different/Fit: Eugenics in Alabama, 1919-1935, the exhibition featured the artists' personal responses to the eugenics movement and its abusive treatment of people who were considered socially unfit because of their intellectual disability, mental illness, addiction, racial minority status, sexual behavior and poverty.

VIEW A SHORT FILM ON THE MAKING OF THIS EXHIBITION:

2018: April Livingston

Sculptor April Livingston made three bronze sculptures to commemorate the overlooked contributions of marginalized people to the history of health care in Alabama. Motherwork is a tribute to Alabama's midwives. Eight pairs of hands, modeled by real-life midwives, doulas and obstetric nurses, form the round shape of a swollen abdomen during pregnancy. Portrait of Bessie McGhee honors an early twentieth-century midwife and traditional healer of the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. Portrait of Dr. James A. Franklin represents one of Mobile's first and most successful African-American physicians. The artworks are a part of the Museum's collection and displayed in the foyer and garden.

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