Art & Community Visual Arts Residency Program

For over twenty years, the DCCA Visual Arts Residency Program has forged relationships between nationally recognized artists and the Wilmington community-- providing innovative artists with the opportunity to develop professionally and to collaborate with under-served community groups to create unique works of art that are relevant to the participant’s lives.  The DCCA Visual Arts Residency Program has welcomed over 40 artists, collaborated with over 50 local community organizations, and brought art into the lives of hundreds of participants.  Visual Arts Residents are selected through a competitive, juried review process.  Each artist submits work samples, an extensive biography, critical reviews, and a proposal for art they will create with a Wilmington community group. Proposals are judged by the strength and innovation of artists’ work, the artists’ experience with community interaction, and the impact the project will have on the Wilmington community.

We are currently taking applications for AIR Fall 2014 - Spring 2015.
Application deadline: May 17, 2013  Download PDF Application.

Learn more about DCCA's 2010 - 2011 Visual Arts Residency Programs in our pdf catalogue.  Download here.  

For more information contact Sarah Ware, Curator of Education at 302-656-6466 ext. 7101 or sware@thedcca.org.

Sandro Del Rosario – Spring 2011

Sandro Del Rosario is an animation artist from Los Angeles by way of Italy. For the 2011 Spring residency, Del Rosario collaborated with teens from Cab Calloway School for the Arts and from West End Neighborhood House to create experimental animations. Through a series of experiments and assignments in mixed media, photography, drawing, and collage, the teens created conceptual self-portraits based on an exploration of their geographical and cultural identity.  The students then took those portraits and used them to create frame-by-frame animated videos. With Del Rosario’s help, students learned how to use digital cameras and graphic design/animation software to create the animated videos. These pieces, along with a documentary that Del Rosario made about the project, were shown during the May 2011 Art on the Town. 

 

Movable Feast: Hoyun Son & Jung-A Woo – Summer 2011

 

Lead sponsorship for Movable Feast is provided by AstraZeneca.

Summer 2011 artists Hoyun Son & Jung-A Woo collaborated with a local community health program for underserved youth and a local horticultural society to create and enact Movable Feast, a public art project that maps a diverse cultural landscape through food.  In Movable Feast the artists, youth group, and horticulture society reasearched and gathered local edible weeds; collected, mapped, and illustrated recipes from family, friends, and neighbors; and planned and designed a Feast Event to share food with the public in and around a mobile kitchen built by the community.  During the process, Movable Feast activities were documented by the participants on a collaborative website.  In addition to the Feast Event, the project will concluded with an exhibition displaying documentation of the project in a variety of media: collective “visualized” maps of recipes, videos, and drawings. Movable Feast will engaged the community in exploring the impact of globalization on our dinner tables, and examined recipes as sources of identity, culture, and history.

 

Colette Fu – Fall 2011

Colette Fu collaborated with a group of women from the Home Life Management Center of the YWCA of Delaware to create autobiographical pop-up books exploring the themes of self and body image. Based on her instruction in basic photography, paper engineering, and book binding techniques the women explored themes including body image, race, and ancestry. The project will strive to break through the barriers created by the media's portrayal of idealized women and give a voice to women exploring their own identity. Fu will use imagery in place of text for the pop-ups to allow more freedom for the group to explore personal stories and vulnerabilities. The final exhibition included the group's finished pop-up books, photography, and, where applicable, written personal narratives.    
 
The primary beneficiaries of this initiative were adult women living at the YWCA in Wilmington who deal with issues of body and self-image. These women were given tools for self-expression that will allow them to take control of their identities and images in a safe, constructive way.

For more information about the Visual Arts Residency Program, please contact Sarah Ware, Curator of Education at 302-656-6466 ext. 7101 or sware@thedcca.org.