After two months of deliberation, Red Bull Arts Detroit (RBAD) announced those selected for their 2019 residency and fellowship programmes. Out of 665 artists, 79 curators, and 77 writers, the committee chose nine Artists-in-Residence, six Writing Fellows, and one Curatorial Fellow. The programme is aimed at promoting the growth of the residents and fellows by providing work space (14,000 square feet of space with 24/7 access to be exact), resources, accommodations, and exposure to the Detroit arts community. 2019, though, will be the first year that RBAD has supported a writing and curating fellowship alongside their artist residencies. RBAD has also added an ongoing Micro-Grant programme which specifically seeks to support Detroit-based artists – applications are still being accepted for these positions.
The 2019 recipients of residencies and fellowships are as follows:
Artists-in-Residence – Holly Bass, Pamela Council, Kearra Amaya Gopee, Miatta Kawinzi, Claire Lachow, Tiff Massey, Michael Polakowski, Patrick Quarm, and Hui-Ying Tsai
Visiting Writing Fellows – Dana Bassett, Andrew Berardini, Brian Droitcour, William E. Jones, Jaamil Olawale Kosoko, and Ruslana Lichtzier
Curatorial Fellow – Taraneh Fazeli
This year, the selection committee was comprised of Deana Haggag, President and CEO of United States Artists; Detroit-native poet and the 2016 Yale Younger Poet recipient Airea D. Matthews; Lucy Mensah, Visiting Assistant Professor of Museum and Exhibition Studies at the University of Illinois in Chicago, and former Assistant Curator at the Detroit Institute of Arts; Laura Raicovich, independent curator, and former President and Executive Director of The Queens Museum of the City of New York; and dancer, choreographer, and 2019 Eisenhower Fellow John Michael Schert.
The RBAD was organized in 2011 as the Red Bull House of Art before it joined together with Red Bull Arts New York in 2018 to become the second location for the Red Bull Arts platform. RBAD is nestled in Detroit’s Eastern Market at the historic E&B Brewery. Thus far, the Detroit arts group has hosted 100 resident artists, and worked with numerous members of the community through exhibitions, studio assistantships, and a number of other programmes.
The most recent batch of residents and fellows offer a variety of talents from performance art to institutional intervention and critique, wearable sculpture to site-specific installations, dance to photography, ceramics to mixed media, and all the spaces in between. The topics each creative is working with explore issues that resonate in today’s society like post-colonial identity, material culture, African diaspora, economy and vitality, LGBTQ issues, and consumerism – to name only a few.
‘I love the range of this program,’ commented Selection Committee Member Deana Haggag in RBAD’s press release. She continued: ‘We’re all very excited about the first cohort of artists, writers, and curators selected to inaugurate the residency, and are animated by each of their practices individually and the breadth they represent collectively.’
