Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency hosts Open Studios with Spring 2024 residents and alumnae

Apr. 20—The 100 West — Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency is pleased to announce its Open Studios with Spring 2024 residents María Valenzuela, Walker Walls Tarver, and Jennifer Haigh from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, April 27. Open Studios, a chance for the community to see—or hear—what residents have been crafting during their one- to two-month residencies, are free and open to the public. At 100 West Third Avenue, in Downtown Corsicana (entrance on Beaton Street at Third Avenue), doors will be open for visitors to witness the creative space and converse with residents.

Additionally, a reading at 3 p.m. will present the work of Jennifer Haigh and visiting alumna Céline Leroy. In Anteroom, Lavenne will screen her award-winning film Solar Echoes, which centers on a thermo-nuclear power plant in Andalusia, Spain—a haunting, ethereal juxtaposition with visions of the recent solar eclipse. Storefront bookstore and gallery (203 N. Commerce Street) will be open, offering more than 30 resident books that boast ties to Corsicana, resident-recommended titles, art and merchandise.

The Residency's website, www.corsicanaresidency.org/events lists details and additional events, a video archive of the residency's 10-year anniversary in 2022, and an archive of the residency's 154 artists and writers from 16 countries.

About the Residency's Winter Residents

MARÍA VALENZUELA

Santiago, Chile — 3rd Floor Studio

María Valenzuela's practice consists of a study of drawing and tracing in space that dialogues with the languages of dance, performance, experimental video, photography, and embroidery. With a BA (sculpture focus) from the University of Chile, she studied photography at the Pontifical Catholic University and the ICP New York. She also studied Visual Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and received her Masters in Documentary Creation at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Throughout her career, she has participated in video art exhibitions, performances, and projects that combined the audiovisual world with intangible oral heritage in Chile and Spain. After seven years in Spain, María proposed a new technique of hand embroidery on different supports in Chile, participating in national and international competitions and exhibitions.

In Corsicana, María has been creating a series of delicate colored-pencil drawings as well as embroideries on paper. A fluid investigation of line, a study of the possibilities of the grid, and a responsiveness to her environment inform María's work, whose organic, linear movements and pattern and variation harken to a background in dance and a sustained interest in the dialogue between color and form. www.instagram.com/majevalenz

WALKER WALLS TARVER

Montclair, New Jersey — 2nd Floor Studio

Painter Walker Walls Tarver traces her lineage through a matrilinear legacy. She is inspired by her paternal grandmother, Tinka Tarver, a painter, fiber artist, dancer, sculptor, and metalsmith as well as a disciple of Jungian theory, a remarkable cook, a housewife turned rebel, and a lifelong Texan. As such, the figure of her grandmother has always guided Walker's studio practice.

While in Corsicana, Walker has been utilizing the space to make drawings, small paintings on watercolor paper, and ultimately large-scale paintings informed by her engagement with her surroundings as well as with her grandmother's stories and the Jungian imagery therein. She is amassing a library of imagery that offers a continuation with her previous work while adding new symbolic layers to her universe of shapes that evoke the performance of womanhood and the architecture of self and family. www.walkerwallstarver.com

JENNIFER HAIGH

Boston, Massachusetts — Writing Studio

Jennifer Haigh's first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her successive books—four novels and the short story collection News From Heaven—have won numerous awards and been published in eighteen languages.Her most recent novel, Mercy Street, is the winner of the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and was named a Best Book of 2022 by the New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. Her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Boston University. / While at 100 W, Jennifer is working on the first draft of a new novel. Having completed research, she is using the intense time of the residency to open herself up to the initial process (larded with surprises) of putting words on the page. jennifer-haigh.com

About the Residency's Spring Visiting Alumnae Artists

MATHILDE LAVENNE

Lille, France — Writers House

Multivalent 100 W alumna Mathilde Lavenne, a graduate of France's prestigious Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts, is an audiovisual and new media artist and director whose work combines an exquisite sensibility to narrative with a rich and palimpsestic visual vocabulary and an engagement with emerging technologies.

In partnership with the Villa Albertine, Lavenne's current residency in Corsicana allows her to commit to a work in progress that will stretch in several stages through summer 2025. The Land I Live On, an immersive documentary, explores the local legacies of petroleum and cotton as seen through the prism of women's narratives, many of them African American and connected to a history of enslavement and capitalism. Local figures Ruby Williams and the late spiritual medium Annie Buchanan, among others, will figure in a metaverse. Having gleaned unique archival material and oral narratives, Lavenne is currently working on the storyboarding, mood boards, and graphic library that will allow her to create a prototype for the immersive documentary. Layering animated 3-D material, particle animation, mapped video sequences, and volumetric video capture, the result will create bridges and sound the hidden narratives of the invisible. / For Open Studios, Lavenne will screen her existing, award-winning film Solar Echoes, which centers on a thermo-nuclear power plant in Andalusia, Spain—a haunting, ethereal juxtaposition with visions of the recent solar eclipse. mathildelavenne.com

CÉLINE LEROY

Paris, France — 100 W Guest House

Céline is an alum of 100 W, who has translated scores of literary works—by the likes of Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, and Ross Gay—from English into French. During her residency, she worked on transposing novelist Barbara Kingsolver's first collection of poetry into French. Now she is translating Peter Heller's The Orchard, a novel set in a cabin in Vermont's Green Mountains that follows a translator of Chinese poetry who seeks solace in the rigors of nature. instagram.com/celine2405.