As Chautauqua Visual Arts’ School of Art wraps up its six-week artist residency program, the residents are preparing to share their work with the greater community.
At 2 p.m. Sunday in the Arts Quad, residents will open their studios to the community for Chautauquans to see, followed an hour later by the opening reception from 3 to 5 p.m. of the residents’ cumulative exhibition of completed works in the School of Art Gallery.
For CVA Artistic Director Erika b Hess, the residents’ exhibition is a way to showcase the artistic strides the cohort has made since they arrived during the first weekend of the season.
“The exhibition is vibrant, ambitious and full of discovery,” Hess said. “Our residents have used their time here to push boundaries, take risks and grow. The work is diverse ranging from painting and sculpture to installation and performance, and it reflects the unique voice each artist has developed during their time at Chautauqua.”
“It was the perfect time for me to be here,” said Jeremiah Meyer, one of the program’s 24 artist residents. “I have my senior thesis show in the spring, and this is the most interdisciplinary I’ve been working in my entire practice.”
For his senior thesis exhibition as part of his Bachelor of Fine Arts, Meyer, a painter, said he plans to collaborate with some of his peers to perform a live concert in which his paintings will act as a set design. For him, the interdisciplinary arts programming at Chautauqua has been a helpful asset in being proximate to so many other mediums.
“Everything that builds up to what I’m trying to achieve is all here,” Meyer said. “Being around that has been great.”
Jeremiah Meyer finalizes his work on Wednesday in the studio spaces of the Arts Quad in preperation of the School of Art’s upcoming exhibition this weekend. Tallulah Brown Van Zee/ Staff Photographer
Khalil McKnight, another resident in the School of Art, said he has been experimenting with mediums like photography and printmaking to push the boundaries of his work and explore. As a painter, he is interested in memory and history and understanding how each informs the other.
“Chautauqua is a good opportunity for me to experiment a lot more, push my work past its boundaries,” McKnight said.
Hess said the residency program serves as a space for artists to find time, space and community.
“Programs like ours give artists a dedicated period to focus solely on their practice, surrounded by peers and mentors who challenge and support them,” Hess said. “That kind of environment fosters real breakthroughs. For emerging artists, it’s often a launching pad. For more established artists, it can be a time of reinvention and renewal.”
Both McKnight and Meyer said the guest faculty have been helpful in introducing residents to new ideas, methods and techniques.
“I feel like the artists that have come in to teach workshops couldn’t have been more perfect for what I needed, what I wasn’t quite meeting by myself,” Meyer said.
McKnight said he hopes Chautauquans will take note of the growth and diversity of the art presented in the exhibition.
“There’s so many different artforms and so many different mediums. I think it shows the diversity of the community within the art department,” he said.
Meyer said his work demonstrates some of the creative risks he has taken through learning other mediums and artistic techniques from faculty.
“I’ve been asked to do things that I wouldn’t have ever done without that push. (There’s) stuff I wouldn’t normally be making, but I’ve learned so much from,” he said.
“It’s the in-between between doing something that you’re comfortable with and the after-effect of what you’re experimenting with,” McKnight said.
