Are Artists the New Interpreters of Scientific Innovation?
When we think of artist residencies today, we think of the MacDowell Colony, in the woods of New Hampshire, and of the Skowhegan School, in Maine. There’s the Rome Prize fellowship, at the city’s American Academy, and Donald Judd’s Chinati Foundation, in Marfa. To be an artist in residence means removing yourself from the noise and obligations of regular life, and instead getting to concentrate on your creative life, often in a beautiful locale.
But once, an artist residency meant something very different: being embedded squarely within regular life, an experience meant both to inspire artists and to infuse what were seen as artless environments with creativity. In 1966, an artist named Barbara Steveni and her husband, John Latham, the influential British conceptual artist, started the Artist Placement Group, or A.P.G., in London, the goal of which was to embed artists in industrial and government organizations, to allow them to both learn about and to have a voice in the world of business and science — and then, when possible, organize exhibitions of work inspired by those experiences. . .