COURTESY THE WATERMILL CENTER
Today, the Watermill Center announced that the artists Carrie Mae Weems, Royce Weatherly, and Carlos Bunga have been selected as the 2017 recipients of its Inga Maren Otto Fellowship. The fellowship, named after the eponymous philanthropist, who helped create the award, provides funding for a four-to-six week residency program that grants fellows a stipend, full access to Watermill’s resources, and financial support to create work for a public exhibition. Weems will be the first fellow to take up the residency, in April 2017.
In a press statement, Daneyal Mahmood, the director of of visual arts programming at the Water Mill, New York institution, described the residency program as “a place for emerging and established artists to develop ideas, experiment and exhibit their work supported by a very accomplished staff at the Center.”
Weems said that she plans to build on a body of work she premiered earlier this year at the Spoleto performance art festival in Charleston, South Carolina. “In the spirit of Robert Wilson’s work and the meaning of the Watermill Center, my residency will be dedicated to quietly reflecting on and improving aspects of my performance work Grace Notes: Reflections for Now,” she said. (Wilson is the founder of the center.)
If you are in New York and need a dose of Weems, you can catch catch her performing a site-specific piece tonight at the Onassis Cultural Center in Manhattan.