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Artist Residency Program
The Mobile Medical Museum Artist Residency Program offers visual 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.
The application for the 2024 Artist Residency will be available August 15, 2023. Check this site for details.
Current and Past Artists in Residence
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.