We are honored to host artist Adele Kenworthy from February through May 2022 as she explores community care as an embodied journey towards collective liberation. She is our fourth Artist-Organizer-in-Residence.
Kenworthy is inviting artists and cultural workers to join her in sharing practices of care, delving deeper into questions such as, "Who is allowed to be a community? What can inheritance rooted in joy look like? Why is joy and beauty subversive for some but a commodity for others? How can we empower BIPOC communities to hold contradictions in public spaces—to hold both joy and justice in the same breath?"
Please mark your calendars for an Open Studio with Adele Kenworthy on Saturday, April 30 from 11 am–3 pm. RSVP to attend here. Please note that capacity is limited. Attendees are expected to be masked.
About the Artist
Adele Kenworthy (she/they) is a socially engaged artist-organizer who creates botanical interventions in public spaces. She explores how flowers have dyed, draped, and nourished social movements and daily reimagines what it means for socially engaged art to exist as embodied practices of self and community care. She is currently exploring what it means to cultivate a dialogue that includes the reframing and recontextualization of Asian American artists and the colonized histories of their motherlands and navigating ways for AAPI artists to openly investigate those inherited legacies in their own art practices. Her art practice and community are located on the traditional lands of the Piscataway and Nacotchtank (Anacostan) people, also referred to as Washington, DC.
Follow her on Instagram @themeowingbird for updates.
About this Residency Program
Early in the pandemic, we began using our gallery space as a residency to support and make visible artist-organized exchange and research. This is not WPA's first residence program—in the 1980s we had a designated apartment and studio space designed by the artist David Ireland. More recently, following our conversion to an artist-driven program model, we shared our space in 2018 with three artist mothers and their children for Artist Mother Studio, a project organized by the artist Amy Hughes Braden in 2018. Since the fall of 2020, we have hosted four Artist-Organizers-in-Residence: Brittney Washington, Bilphena Yahwon, Mikhail Ilyin, and currently Adele Kenworthy.
Photos by Alexandra Silverthorne
Dates
February–May 2022
Location
Photo gallery
