Watermill Center Residency
Justin Ginsberg participates at The Watermill Center Residency
On August 21- 27, Art & Art History Professor Justin Ginsberg will participate in a collaborative week-long residency with members of the esteemed group ESTAR(SER), hosted by The Watermill Center in New York. Funded by a grant through Princeton University, the residency team will be approaching this week through an (auto-) interrogative lens, asking key questions about the nature of attention, care and community. The resulting new piece of documentary theater produced during the residency will be presented at the Frye Museum in Seattle on September 9, 2023.
Founded in 1992 by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities situated on ten acres of Shinnecock ancestral territory on Long Island’s East End. With an emphasis on creativity and collaboration, The Center offers year-round artist residencies and education programs, providing a global community with the time, space, and freedom to create and inspire. The Center’s facilities enable Artists-in-Residence to integrate resources from the humanities and research from the sciences into contemporary artistic practice. Through year-round public programs, The Watermill Center demystifies the artistic process by facilitating unique insight into the creative process of a rotating roster of national and international artists.
ESTAR(SER) stands for the Esthetical Society for Transcendental and Applied Realization and the Society for Esthetic Realizers. This international academic group focuses on the history of esthetics and contemporary issues of attention, exploring how an individual can consciously maintain sustained attention to a person, place, object, or idea. Through readings, seminars, discussions, and practice, the group implements structures and protocols to re-learn ways in which we can reclaim our attention. The researchers and collaborators of the group include Graham Burnett, Associate Professor of the History of Science at Princeton University; Jeff Dolven, Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at Princeton University; Leonard Nalencz, an Assistant Professor at St. Vincent’s College and Bard College; Jessica Palinski, editorial coordinator at David Zwirner Books; writer Sal Randolph among others.
Curator and Writer Gabriel Pérez-Barreiro