The Philadelphia Residency

The Philadelphia Residency BIG ANNOUNCEMENT COMING SOON: FULL YEAR RESIDENCY PROGRAM The Philadelphia Residency (Residency) is a three-month career-building and creation module established by Twelve Gates Arts (12G) to provide early-career artists with the physical and communal space, resources, and industry knowledge to plant roots and flourish in Philadelphia. This residency is designed for artists identifying as South Asian, South West Asian North African, (SA/SWANA), Black, Indigenous, Person of Color (BIPOC), and/or part of the Global South or Global Majority. 12G encourages artists identifying as women and/or queer to apply. In its second year, the residency offers a robust season of participatory exposure programming that not only empowers residents to seek out the skill sets and knowledge they desire, but also provides direct access to Philadelphia’s makers, writers, creators, and producers. Ultimately, the Residency is an opportunity to create, culminating in a final group exhibition. The Residency will accommodate a cohort of diverse visual creatives, offer three months of uninterrupted time, space, and resources, and a curriculum of skill-building and career-focused workshops that connect residents to the local arts ecosystem. Through its partnerships with institutions, local museums and galleries, universities, community organizations, and established makers, artists, writers, educators, critics, and curators, the Residency offers residents myriad throughways to build a sustainable individual practice in Philadelphia. The curriculum is designed to (1) create intimate introductions to established artists and directors of major presenting arts institutions; (2) provide resident-informed skill-building workshops; and (3) equip its graduates to navigate our city’s rich and resourced arts scene, such that their practice can thrive beyond the Residency. The Philadelphia Residency engages early-career artists in the city’s arts ecosystem and nurtures an artistic practice that is collaborative, dynamic, and rooted in Philadelphia. The Philadelphia Residency 2024: Team Jonathan Lyndon Chase is an interdisciplinary artist who works in painting, video, sound, and sculpture to depict queer Black love and community. Rendered through layers of bright, visceral paint, make-up and glitter, Chase’s figures are suspended in various forms of articulation amidst the backdrop of urban and domestic spaces. These dynamic compositions blend emotional and physical, internal and external states of being to challenge and subvert canonical misrepresentations and exclusion of the Black body. Tausif Noor is a critic, curator, and PhD student in History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. His writing appears in publications including the New York Times, the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, Aperture, frieze, and The Poetry Project Newsletter, as well as in various artist catalogues and edited volumes. He is the recipient of a 2022 Andy Warhol Foundation Arts Writers Grant for Short Form Writing and the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing from the Robert B. Silvers Foundation. He has previously worked at the Imperial War Museum London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the ICA Philadelphia, and is currently Curatorial Associate at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. Sadaf Padder is a Brooklyn-based independent curator, writer, and community organizer focused on excavating under-recognized contemporary art movements and histories related to the South Asian and Caribbean diasporas. She has curated across the country, from Philadelphia to Los Angeles to Martha’s Vineyard, focusing on themes of social justice, futurism, radical liberation movements, climate change, and neo-mythology to weave connections between various communities.Padder has contributed writing to Visual Aids, ARTSY, Up Mag, and HyperAllergic. She is a Create Change alumna with the Laundromat Project, a featured curator with ARTSY as well as a 2022-23 Emily J. Hall Tremaine Fellow via Hyperallergic where she presented initial research on South Asian Futurisms. She is a board member of the Vera List Center as well as a co-director of Grown in Haiti, a reforestation organization located in the mountains of Jacmel. Artists in 2024 Residency: sāgar kāmath is an interdisciplinary artist working between mediums of painting, sculpture, installation, sound, video, collage, public art, and dance. His practice investigates the multiplicities of his identities as an Indian-born American through narrative building, materiality, line, space, and movement. His research-based methodology simultaneously interrogates his body, the surrounding landscape, and colonial histories through the engagement of non-linear time. Cristhian Varela (he/him) is a multidisciplinary artist living and working in Philadelphia, PA. Cristhian’s work focuses on labor, latinidad, and the Honduran diaspora. Utilizing a research based approach to his process Cristhian explores how American imperialism has geographically, economically, and politically positioned him in the world. Yaqeen Yamani (she/her, b.1997) is a Yemeni Palestinian photographer and artist who received a BA in Media Studies and Film from the Al-Quds Bard College and is currently a Fulbright Scholar and an MFA candidate in Photography at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University. Yamani’s art practice includes photography, video, and printmaking. Her process centers material experimentation to explore themes of identity, rage, and grief. Through the use of language, image and text, Yamani’s current body of work focuses on modes of resistance, intervention, disruption, and reclamation. The Philadelphia Residency 2023