Open Studio with Adele Kenworthy & Spring Book Browse

We are excited to host an Open Studio with our current Artist-Organizer-in-Residence, Adele Kenworthy. This is an opportunity to meet the artist and learn about her socially engaged practice working with flowers and plant matter. You are also invited to browse the current offerings on our shelves, as part of WPA books+editions.

Kenworthy is using this residency to invite 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?"

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

We decided to use our gallery space as a residency to support artist-organized exchange and research during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is not WPA's first residence program—in the 1980s we had a designated apartment and studio space designed by David Ireland. More recently, following our conversion to an artist-driven program model, we shared our space with three artist mothers and their children for Artist Mother Studio, which was organized by Amy Hughes Braden in 2018. In 2021, we hosted three Artist-Organizers-in-Residence: Brittney Washington, Bilphena Yahwon, and Mikhail Ilyin.