Salina Art Center

Past Artists in Residence

Carrie Scanga
June 5-26, 2010
As the culminating event of her Salina Art Center residency, Carrie Scanga invited community members to The Warehouse on a Friday afternoon for The Big Blow Up.  Those that attended participated by blowing up folded tracing paper forms that collectively completed the sculpture she had been building during her residency.  Scanga resides and works in Brunswick, Maine, and is an Assistant Professor of Art at Bowdoin College.

For more information about Carrie Scanga and her art, please visit www.carriescanga.com.

Ernesto Pujol
April 29-May 27, 2010
Dreaming Kansas
For his month-long residency, artist Ernesto Pujol unearthed the history, culture, and natural landscape of Kansas through two gestures. The first was the Great Prairie Drawdown, which invited the community of Salina to explore and document their local environment by drawing indigenous plants, insects, birds, and other animals. The drawings were then judged by a panel of Kansas field naturalists and purchased for $1 each. Partnering with The Land Institute to promote awareness of the preservation and restoration of the prairie, the collected drawings will be the body of a forthcoming online Field Journal illustrating the fauna and flora of Kansas.

Pujol’s second gesture involved a sunset-to-sunrise group performance titled Farmers Dream. The durational, public performance unfolded with a group of silent performers dressed in white engaging antique farm tools as a visual metaphor for Kansas’s history and culture of farming. Like a dream, the performance embodied the humble appearance and disappearance of this small, poetic, and ephemeral spiritual community of labor—a vanishing way of life.

Please visit http://www.dreamingkansas.com for more details, updates, and images of Pujol’s residency at the Salina Art Center. For more information about the artist, please visit http://www.ernestopujol.org.

Ernesto Pujol’s residency was generously supported, in part, by a grant from the Good Works Foundation.

Jason Peters

May 4-July 24, 2009
Exhibition:  Open And as Pointed as Possible, June 5-August 16, 2009
During his residency, Brooklyn-based artist Jason Peters created art with everyday objects:  plastic buckets, tires, chairs, and surprise materials found in Salina industry and agribusiness.  These then became modules of larger forms relating organically to the Salina Art Center’s exhibition space, and were included in his SAC exhibition. Peters’s sculptures are often defined as dystopic, futuristic, spectacular, and just plain beautiful.  They undulate, twist, and climb up and over each other, seemingly with their own energy.

In conjunction with The Smoky Hill River Fesitval, a tree in Oakdale Park became the relational boundary and support for Peters’s creation of Meandering, a site specific artwork.  This work, which was illuminated at night, “meandered” through the tree creating a spectacular experience for festival-goers.

Jeff Schmuki

February 15-April 11, 2009
Sustainability was the focus of inter-disciplinary artist Jeff Schmuki’s work during his Art Center residency. When Hurricane Katrina destroyed his home and studio in Gulfport, many of this works were lost in the storm and Schmuki spent the following year-and-a-half as an artist-in-residence at various venues throughout the country.  He was motivated by concerns about the detrimental results of unbridled consumption, resource depletion, and insensitive development.

During his residency, Jeff Schmuki interacted with the community during open studios and a variety of programs in the schools. He also participated in a public conversation about sustainable design through a panel discussion with urban planner, Stephen Hardy, and Salina Art Center exhibition artist, Robert Bubp.

Max-Carlos Martinez

August 4-September 26, 2008
Exhibition: Don’t Fence Me In, September 12-November 16, 2008
With renovations to The Warehouse complete, Brooklyn painter Max-Carlos Martinez was the first artist to live and work in the space. During his residency Martinez worked on two painting projects, an autobiographical series of small portraits that was the extension of a series began in 1992, and a collection of large scale paintings on paper that explored American history. 

His residency was accompanied by an exhibition in the Salina Art Center galleries and included outreach activities at the Lincoln Art Center and Kansas Wesleyan University. 

Matthew Burke
June 2-15, 2008. and July 10-31, 2008
Exhibition:  About Abstraction:  New Approaches by Contemporary Artists, September 12 – November 16, 2008
Lawrence artist Matthew Burke’s residency included two components. In June, he served as a featured artist for the Smoky Hill River Festival, using the Art Center as headquarters for constructing large wood forms as the structural base for a sculpture representing the Massasauga rattlesnake, a species found in Salina. Eight Salina middle and high school students worked as his construction assistants during the first week of the residency. The resulting sectional snake forms were transported the next week to the Oakdale Park grounds, and the 40-foot sculpture was completed on-site by attendees at the three-day festival. Participants of all ages filled in the body of the snake by weaving thin strips of native hardwoods, hand-milled by the artist, into the prepared framework, creating a dramatic installation on the riverbank.  On Burke’s return to Salina in July, he became the first artist to use the workspace at The Warehouse. New work created during this phase of the residency incorporated some of the wood from the disassembled snake sculpture.

Jon Rappleye
October-November, 2007
Exhibition:  Strange World, September 8-December 16, 2007
Because construction on the Warehouse had just begun, John Rappleye’s working studio was set up in the education wing of the Art Center, visible to the public through the front glass wall, and accessible to community visitors during gallery hours. Rappleye’s paintings evoke ideas of homespun fairy tales, combining investigations of cultural folklore with his own personal mythology. Within fantastic worlds abounding with flora, fauna, and hybrid creatures, the New Jersey artist explores the impacts of technology on ecology. Animals inhabit unfamiliar terrains, tree trunks assume strange anthropomorphic shapes, and skies range in color from verdant green to industrial yellow. Through his paintings, Rappleye utilizes nature as a vehicle to explore the boundaries of reality and artifice, leaving mankind’s impact on the environment blurred and open to question.