The Chinati Foundation Announces 2024 Artists in Residence
Farah Al Qasimi, Morgan Bassichis, Willie Binnie, Carmina Escobar, Troy Montes Michie, and Charisse Pearlina Weston join more than 175 artists who have lived and worked on the grounds of the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Texas.
Clockwise from top left: Farah Al Qasimi, courtesy of Ally Caple; Morgan Bassichis, courtesy of Mario de Lopez; Willie Binnie, courtesy of Ivy Dement; Troy Montes Michie, courtesy of Hao Nguyen; Charisse Pearlina Weston, courtesy of the artist; and Carmina Escobar, courtesy of Laura Pardo.
The Chinati Foundation/La Fundación Chinati is pleased to announce its 2024 Artists in Residence: Farah Al Qasimi, Morgan Bassichis, Willie Binnie, Carmina Escobar, Troy Montes Michie, and Charisse Pearlina Weston. This year, each artist will spend up to two months living and working among the art, architecture, and land at Chinati.
The foundation’s Artist in Residence (AIR) Program was established by Donald Judd in 1989 and remains fundamental to the artist-centered mission that Judd imagined for Chinati. Since its inception, more than 175 artists from more than 25 countries have participated in the residency program, which does not require that artists produce new work but offers time and space for the development of ideas. Many artists conclude their time in Marfa with an open studio presentation, talk, or performance that is free and open to the public.
Past AIRs include Eric N. Mack (2023), Dionne Lee (2022), Sarah Crowner (2022), Jessi Reaves (2021), Rosy Keyser (2017), Matt Connors (2015), Hernan Bas (2013), Ester Partegás (2012), Steven Roden (2010), Charline von Heyl (2008), Christopher Wool (2006), Maureen Gallace (2005), Matthew Day Jackson (2004), and Katharina Grosse (1999), among others. Ingólfur Arnarsson (1992) and John Wesley (1989), both of whom have work permanently installed at Chinati, were Artists in Residence. A full list is available here.
About the 2024 Artists in Residence:
Farah Al Qasimi makes photographs, films, and music. Often working with large-scale vinyl imagery and a multiplicity of photographic prints and screens, Al Qasimi is interested in the internet and its hierarchies of information and emotion. She also loves the complexity of storytelling and value building in children’s cartoons, and many of her video works include primary narrators who are anthropomorphized. She has a highly collaborative practice and has worked with hand-sewn puppets, falcons, African land snails, exorcists, and, most recently, a Jack Sparrow impersonator.
Farah Al Qasimi (born 1991 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) received her MFA from the Yale School of Art and has participated in residencies at the Delfina Foundation, London, and the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Maine. She is a recipient of the New York NADA Artadia Prize, the Aaron Siskind Individual Photographer’s Fellowship, and the 2020 Capricious Photo Award.
Morgan Bassichis is a comedic performer who has been described as “fiercely hilarious” by The New Yorker. Their work often uses humor, music, and popular education to activate lineages of Jewish anti-zionist thought and queer radicalism.
Morgan Bassichis’ (born 1983 in Newton, Massachusetts; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) exhibition More Little Ditties was co-presented by the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the Institute for Contemporary Art at Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond. Their recent performances include A Crowded Field (Abrons Arts Center, 2023), Questions to Ask Beforehand (Bridget Donahue, 2022), Don’t Rain on My Bat Mitzvah (co-created with Ira Khonen Temple, Creative Time, 2021), Nibbling the Hand That Feeds Me (the Whitney Museum of American Art, 2019), and Klezmer for Beginners (co-created with Ethan Philbrick, Abrons Arts Center, 2019). Morgan wrote the introduction to the 2019 Nightboat Books edition of 1977 cult classic, The Faggots & Their Friends Between Revolutions, and is the author of The Odd Years and co-editor with Jay Saper and Rachel Valinsky of Questions to Ask Before Your Bat Mitzvah, both published by Wendy’s Subway. Morgan has released two albums: March is for Marches with Ethan Philbrick (Triple Canopy, 2019) and More Protest Songs! Live From St. Mark’s Church (Danspace Project, 2018). They were last in Marfa in 2021 as part of a residency at Ballroom Marfa with artist DonChristian Jones organized by Daisy Nam.
Willie Binnie’s work confronts the American mythos—the imagery enshrouding a land with a complex, often dark and troubling, past and present, cloaked in a smoke screen of stoic heroism—as well as larger concerns surrounding notions of power, nationalism, bigotry, war, land, death, and the visual markers connected to each. His art prods the complicated and often paradoxical nature of these issues to examine the social constructs that underpin them.
Scottish American artist Willie Binnie (born 1985 in Dallas, Texas; lives and works in Williamstown, Massachusetts) has been a visiting lecturer at Williams College since 2019. He received his BA from Pitzer College, in 2008, and his MFA from Southern Methodist University, in 2014. His work has been exhibited nationally and internationally, with notable exhibitions including Lure of the Dark: Contemporary Painters Conjure the Night at MASS MoCA (2018), North Adams, Massachusetts; the deCordova Museum 2019 Biennial, Lincoln, Massachusetts; and the inaugural exhibition at the Bunker, the Collection of Beth Rudin DeWoody, West Palm Beach, Florida (2019). He has completed residencies at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, Captiva, Florida (2014), and at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts, Omaha, Nebraska (2020). Binnie co-founded Beefhaus, an artist-run project space and community center in the Expo Park neighborhood of Dallas, which supported exhibitions, screenings, and performances from 2013 to 2018. In the wake of Hurricanes Irma and Maria, in 2017, he co-founded the Puerto Rican artist residency program at MASS MoCA—an ongoing, fully funded fellowship for visual artists and writers from Puerto Rico.
Carmina Escobar is an extreme vocalist, improviser, sound, and intermedia artist. Escobar investigates and expresses emotions, politics, states of alienation, and the possibilities of interpersonal connection. Through voice performances, installations, and video pieces, she seeks to challenge our understandings of musicality, gender, queerness, race, the spoken word, and the foundations of human communication. As an immigrant from Mexico, key to her practice is the exploration of interstitial states of being—suspensions between worlds, politics, and borders.
Carmina Escobar (born 1981 in Mexico City; lives and works in Los Angeles, California) has presented her work in Mexico, Cuba, Europe, the United States, and Canada at festivals and venues such as Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA, Fabrica de Arte, CTM Festival, REDCAT, the Broad, the Kitchen, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others. Escobar has been an artist in residence at Montalvo Arts Center, STEIM, Binaural Portugal, OMI, Electroacoustic Music Studio, Fonoteca Nacional, Indexical, MacDowell, Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, and the Hermitage. Escobar has received numerous awards. She is co-founder of Boss Witch Productions as well as Liminar ensemble and Howl Space. Escobar is a faculty member of the VoiceArt program at CalArts.
Troy Montes Michie is an interdisciplinary painter and educator. Using collage as his methodology, Montes Michie engages with archives to reveal the complexity of the gaze and trouble the representation of powerful groups targeted for oppression. Employing an array of materials, Montes Michie investigates the influence of print media in mass culture, disrupting modes of consumption that historically erase and fetishize specific communities.
Troy Montes Michie (born 1985 in El Paso, Texas; lives and works in New York, New York) has had solo exhibitions including Rock of Eye at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston and the California African American Museum, Los Angeles, and Dishwater Holds No Images at Company Gallery, New York City. Other recent group exhibitions include those at ICA Los Angeles; the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; the Momentary, Arkansas; Philbrook Museum of Art, Oklahoma; among many others. His work was featured in the 2019 Whitney Biennial. Awards and residencies include Recess Art, the Emerging Artist Grant, and Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. His work is included in numerous public collections, including the Philbrook Museum, Oklahoma; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; RISD Museum, Rhode Island; Ulster Museum, North Ireland; and the Zabludowicz Collection, London. He is a lecturer in visual arts at Princeton University.
Charisse Pearlina Weston is a conceptual artist and writer whose practice is grounded in a deep material investigation of poetics and the autobiographical in the service of Black people.
Charisse Pearlina Weston (born 1988 in Houston, Texas; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) received a BA from the University of North Texas, a MSc in Modern Art: History, Curating, and Criticism from the University of Edinburgh’s Edinburgh College of Art, and an MFA in Studio Art, with Critical Theory emphasis, from the University of California-Irvine, in 2019. She is an alumna of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Weston was a Studio Museum in Harlem 2022–23 Artist in Residence, a 2023 Jerome Hill Fellow, and a 2023 Hodder Fellow at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University. She has exhibited in group exhibitions at the Contemporary Art Museum Houston (2020), Jack Shainman Gallery (2022, 2023), Black Melancholia at the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College (2022) and MoMA PS1. She has mounted solo exhibitions at Project Row Houses (2014), Recess (2021), the Moody Center of the Arts at Rice University (2021) and the Queens Museum. Weston has received numerous awards and fellowships. Her hybrid manuscript Awaiting was published in March 2023.
Chinati’s Artist in Residence Program is currently nomination-based. In making the final selection, Chinati considers the diversity of experiences, backgrounds, and approaches that artists bring to the program, which is generously supported by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation.