Looking Back: Beam Center Artist in Residence Program, Summer 2022
Having just completed its third year, Beam Center hosted six artists during our summer 2022 Artist in Residence program on Governors Island. As the weather changes and we prepare for a new season of programming, it seems like a perfect time to look back at some of the amazing work artists produced during their residencies. We welcomed a variety of artists and practices, including painters, writers, and sculptors, and hosted two Open Studio events to allow the public to see their work. Two Artists in Residence, Serena Seshadri (painter) and Jimmy Fay (writer) shared their perspectives on the residency and the program overall. Check out their reflections below to learn more about their experiences and the work they produced during their residencies.
Serena Seshadri
Serena Seshadri is a South Asian multi-disciplinary artist working primarily with photography, oil paint, charcoal, and ink. Her art focuses on the textured lives of women of color through depictions of lived-in bodies that hold powerful histories.
While in residence, Serena built upon a series of paintings that she started previously, focusing on large bodies of color and showing them in different forms and positions. Through these paintings she wanted to visualize different positions of bodies that can sometimes be viewed as painful, expressive, sensual, and freeing. Elaborating more, Serena said, “I wanted to show these bodies not through an outside perspective but more from the way we might want to be seen and in colors that are just vibrant and explosive.”
Speaking about the ways in which Beam’s Artist in Residence program helped her work, Serena said, “I am used to working within a frame of a single canvas, and I mostly do things in series, but I never had a full space to be able to work in and to be able to take advantage of the physical space.” Serena makes her art specific to the space and the environment in which she is working and incorporates an entire space as an art piece, not just the paintings she hangs on the wall. She said, “I was very excited to be able to use a whole room to do an exhibit, not just to showcase several pieces independent of that space.”
Along with the paintings Serena also created pseudo-kaleidoscopes, which created an illusion of the paintings being viewed through water. When the paintings were viewed through the kaleidoscopes, they were seen in a warped way that was both beautiful and distorting. Speaking about the purpose of creating the illusion of being seen through water, Serena said, “I wanted to show a little bit about the distortive perspective that brown bodies face when viewed from any lens. I wanted to create these vintage points to show what it feels like to be seen that way. At the same time, I wanted it to feel like you were also kind of under water because that’s where I feel safest.”
Speaking further on the impact of her residency on her artistic practice, Serena said the experience helped her to trust herself while creating the things she set out to create. She said, “I never had such an intense period of time where I created art everyday. It got me in a mindset of working fast and trusting my gut which is typically the way I like to do art but it's not always possible.”
Jimmy Fay
Jimmy Fay is a writer, director, and performer based in Brooklyn, NY. Most recently, they directed a production of Twelfth Night set in a queer bar featuring an all queer/trans cast, with support from the Mellon Foundation.
While in Residence at Beam, Jimmy wrote a play called The Colossal Cigarette, which takes the audience on a journey through a hundred years and a thousand miles in a frenzied search of queer permanence. Jimmy said they had wanted to write this piece for a while but needed a space where they could separate from both their apartment and their work when needed and return to either when desired. A residency on Governors Island, then, was the “perfect place.” Jimmy continued to say, “I have been part of group residencies working on theater stuff upstate in this rural town which was great, but what was nice about the Beam residency was that since I am based in New York, I could just go home and keep living my life. It was a residency where I didn’t have to abandon my whole life to do it.”
Throughout the residency, Jimmy said they learned about the importance of “deep focus” on their work and what removing themselves from their everyday lives does. They said, “It’s important to get to a space where it’s just me and my brain and the page, and I really do get a lot more done like that.”
In addition to learning about deep focus, Jimmy was also able to distinguish the creative world to which they belonged. “As a writer, you can either think of yourself as part of the literary world or the art world, and they are really two different worlds. And I think what I learned is that I really prefer my writing to be in the context of art as opposed to the context of literature, which is so isolationist, so individual. As opposed to art, which to me is more collaborative.”
For both Serena and Jimmy, the environment in which Beam’s Artist in Residence program operates was powerful for their work. According to both artists, knowing that they were surrounded by artists working separately in their rooms but collectively and creatively in a space helped them to focus on their work even more. They said that Governors Island is a beautiful place to create art thanks to its unique proximity to and distinctiveness from the rest of the city.
When thinking of advice for future artists in residence, Serena added that if someone were applying for Beam’s Artist in Residence program they should “have a seed of an idea but don’t feel too wedded to what you went in thinking you were going to do…let the experience shape what you create.”
Here are some works created by other artists at our Artist in Residence Program
Beam Center would like to thank all of the artists who participated in this summer’s Artist in Residence program. You can learn more about all six artists here. We’d also like to extend our gratitude to the Trust for Governors Island for hosting Beam as one of the Organizations in Residence during 2022.
Stay tuned for more information about our 2023 Artist in Residence Program!
