We are pleased to award Rising: Climate in Crisis Residencies to Virginia Hanusik, MILAGROS, and Yudith Nieto. Rising Residencies invite artists to examine the severity of the climate crisis and be agents of change to guide our collective understanding, response, and vision as we shape our shared future.

Virginia Hanusik will continue work on The Place We Keep, a series exploring the inequality of disaster relief and preservation in communities along the Gulf Coast experiencing the impacts of climate change through a compilation of photographs, oral histories, and public programming on the perpetuation of environmental injustice in the region.

MILAGROS (Felici Asteinza and Joey Fillastre) will design and build an installation using reclaimed objects found in the Mississippi River presented using the interpretive language of National Parks. Audiences will be guided to view the installation as a local ecosystem made of petroleum products, and the project will function both as an aesthetic endeavor and as an appeal to clean and protect one of our country’s most diverse and significant waterways.

Yudith Azareth Nieto plans to create a series of opportunities for communities to come together to have conversations about the ways we are collaborating to build strong longterm networks of solidarity when natural and industrial disasters happen in already overburdened and impacted communities of color. They will endeavor to create tools for emergency preparedness, just recovery, and relief communication. The short term goal is to get folks together to envision what continued long term solidarity looks like amongst us and create a visual installation or short video/narration where we drive the direction of our story and vision. With this residency Yudith seeks to create a narration of how these ever changing landscapes remind us of the connections we have to ourselves, language, culture, and each other. Through the sharing of stories she seeks to create collages of sound and visual representations of the interconnectedness of our shared experiences due to the changing climate, landscapes, and political difficulties that forced our migrations. She will also produce a zine to go along with this media project to explain a short summary and possibly connect to an ongoing on the ground effort. The center point of this effort will be the survival stories that emerge from our traumas of having to leave our native regions which now fuel the courage to thrive in a new place and create platforms of engagement for our collective liberation.

Program Note: Due to pandemic scheduling shifts, we have extended our current residency season through June 2022 and awarded residencies to the above waitlisted artists from our spring 2020 jury process. We will be releasing the next call for proposals for Rising: Climate in Crisis Residencies in fall 2021.