The Kitchen Research Residency

Sharmi Basu, Will Lee, Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage of Steph Christ Collective, and Tuesday Smillie

February–July 2021

On the occasion of our 50th Anniversary, The Kitchen is pleased to initiate a new Research Residency focused on our institutional archive. Participating artists will spend six months engaging with the archive of activities from 1971 through the present as material and inspiration for their ongoing work. The artists selected for the inaugural cycle of the Research Residency in 2021 are Sharmi Basu, Will Lee, Tyler Morse and Nia Nottage of Steph Christ Collective, and Tuesday Smillie.

By granting artists unrestricted access to paper files, photographs, audiovisual materials, oral histories and more, this residency aims to open new avenues for research into our organization’s history and to create opportunities for artists to develop projects that are in dialogue with historical moments or patterns at The Kitchen. The archive of The Kitchen’s activities from 1971–1999 is in the collection of the Getty Research Institute.

Since February 2021, residents have been pursuing research into subjects that relate to their own artistic interests. Artists will share their research with fellow residents and audiences at various points during the residency.

To identify artists to participate in the Research Residency, The Kitchen worked with a nominating committee of practitioners who have long-standing relationships with the organization and whose practices are rooted in research and archival investigations: Chitra Ganesh, Andrea Geyer, Tracie Morris, Annie-B Parson, Kaneza Schaal, Sadia Shirazi, and The Blow (Melissa Dyne and Khaela Maricich).

The Kitchen Research Residency extends and adapts the programmatic goals of The Kitchen L.A.B.—an annual series of public programs that since 2012 has convened artists and writers across disciplines to unpack how the meaning of artistic and cultural terms may shift over time. At a moment when our ability to gather safely for public programs remains limited, this new residency model allows practitioners to work remotely with digitized archival materials and to have conversations with one another and with the public online about a shared reference point, which has been expanded to focus on the contents of the archive rather than a single term.

The Kitchen Research Residency is organized by Alison Burstein with The Kitchen’s Curatorial Team.

Image: Portion of The Kitchen’s archive housed on the third floor of 512 W 19th Street, 2012. Photo by Fawn Krieger.