The Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency has announced its residents for 2023, and has already welcomed its new winter cohort to the program. The Corsicana, Texas-based nonprofit, which is often referred to as 100 West after the address of its founding building, is entering its eleventh year of operation. According to its website, the program “advances the production and presentation of new work and ideas by an international community of artists and writers by providing an arena of generous support and historic space.” This year’s group is composed of six visual artists and six writers representing five states as well as Germany, Kuwait, France, the United Kingdom, and the Dominican Republic.
The winter group includes four residents. According to a press release from the residency, Philadelphia-based author Leigh N. Gallagher, “will work on her current novel about a writer’s nostalgic obsession with a dead poet, and her futile quest to reclaim the bohemian culture of a lost San Francisco.” Visual artist José Morbán will spend his time “producing a series of works related to El Sisal, a prison camp during the dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo during the 1950s” in his native Dominican Republic. Writer Barrak Alzaid, of Kuwait, “will complete revisions on his memoir, Fabulous: A Memoir of Family Fracture and Healing, and then continue with a new project, Are We Then Yet?, a speculative fiction novel set in the Arabian Gulf.” Finally, Austin-based multimedia artist Virginia L. Montgomery (VLM) “will raise native Texas moths” in her studio to create a new body of work.
VLM, “O, Luna, ” 2021, installation.
Ms. Montgomery told Glasstire that her experience in Corsicana had thus far been “happy, cozy, and serene.” She described her accommodations as “the third floor of a beautiful old 19th century building that was once occupied by quirky symbolist theater-enthusiasts in a fraternal order called the Odd Fellows,” and said she was currently “working on an 8 foot frottage drawing of a luna moth and listening to a podcast on positivity.” She described her cohort as “brilliant” and said that residency director Kyle Hobratschk had “been a wonderful host.” She also praised “small town Corsicana” on its “world famous fruitcakes” and “the sounds of nearby rumbling trains.”
Later this year, the residency will welcome writers Elissa Altman (Newtown, Connecticut), Martin Jackson (Berlin, Germany), and Jameson Rich (Brooklyn, New York); visual artists Sabrina Basten (Berlin, Germany), Johnny DeFeo (Arroyo Hondo, New Mexico), Mathilde Lavenne (Paris, France), and Eugene Macki (London, United Kingdom); and composer Gregory Mertl (New Milford, Connecticut).
Open studio events at the residency occur on the last Saturday afternoon of each residency cycle from 12 pm until 4 pm. They are free and open to the public. The winter group will host visitors on Saturday, February 25, an event about which Montgomery speculated, “maybe by then my moths will have hatched.”
For more information on the Open Studios and other programs, visit the residency’s website.
