Past Artists-In-Residence

Check out our calendar for information on studio visits, artist conversations, and showcases of works-in-progress.

claire rousay

December 1 – December 6, 2024

claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones, and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex. Her recent album’s narrative arc is guided by delicate musical gestures and artistic vulnerability, audaciously synthesizing disparate and unexpected influences. rousay crafted the songs in various homes, bedrooms, hotels, and other private places, the feeling of time and energy spent alone radiating from each passage.

The album is a collection of heart-rending, incisive pop songs that explore universal feelings with subtlety and remarkable vision. rousay’s vocals and guitar take center stage on sentiment. Her intimate, diaristic lyrics contrast with her mechanical-inflected vocal effects, emphasizing a powerful desire for connection, a deep yearning and a lingering sense of separation. The spare guitar playing and laconic tempo both drive the songs and exude a sense of resignation. Her delicate mastery of nuance draws on her explorative musical past that she, with sincerity and admiration, seamlessly interweaves into her adventurous textures and distinctive compositions.

“I want to belong to the worlds and communities I look up to. Same as someone using a Fender guitar or dressing like Kurt Cobain. Emulate your heroes,” says rousay. From a sprawling math-rock duo, to an array of emo-inflected rock outfits to a hired hand in evangelical worship bands, rousay worked as a percussionist for over a decade before shifting her focus to the solo collage work she’s known for. sentiment folds those experiences into her compositions. rousay explains, “As the drummer in an evangelical rock band, it’s your job, with the singers, to manipulate the crowd. You start building on the drums and you know it’s one bigger chorus and then we’re out and you can see the tears, people just start crying. I still feel a version of that when playing my own shows now.” The album balances the poetic soul of her influences with a documentarian heart, rousay capturing moments of her life while living alone in houses across the country, learning to play guitar, and reconnecting with pop music. “I have been on a quest to communicate my feelings and ideas as clearly as possible lately. Pop seemed like the way to do that this time,” says rousay.

The confessional nature of sampled fragments of conversation give her pieces a specificity and sense of intimacy that is both immediate and curious. rousay’s innate ability to conjure pure feeling from sound derives from her delightful embrace of pop forms, the vulnerability found in field recordings, minimalistic arrangements and innovative sound choices. The resulting songs of sentiment are as anthemic as they are breathtakingly personal. sentiment is blissfully, achingly melancholic, and an undeniably sensual listening experience.

Rebekah Danae

October 23 – November 27, 2024

As a whimsical feminist from the vermillion Texas desert, Rebekah Danae’s worldview hasn’t shattered but surrealized. Danae’s interdisciplinary practice spans oil painting, leatherwork, physical & social sculpture—manifesting as a spiritual dialogue that creates culture and community for the new world, from the old world, about the space in between. Formed in the rugged landscapes of Oklahoma and West Texas, Danae’s artistic process is a passionate love affair and creative rebellion, both crucible and muse.

Based in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and raised in Midland, Texas, Danae holds a BFA from Baylor University and began her career in education and community organizing in North Tulsa. Through her work, Danae and A Creative House orchestrate a movement in the middle of the country, made up of a diverse creative choir. Far from a lone ranger, Danae works collaboratively across a curated network—from the punk underground, homegrown rappers and producers, luxury interior designers, rodeo cowboys, and rural bootmakers, to philanthropic, political, and educational leaders. Her approach has the intended impact of critical regional culture-shaping from the current white supremacy that is prevalent regionally today and toward a co-created futurist Oklahoma, the liberated West.

While in residence, Danae will explore the intersection of art and ritual with a site-specific installation of The Infinity Barn and through the development of Performance 02 for the Momentary’s INVERSE Festival. As a nomadic installation and performance art venue, each build of The Infinity Barn acts to catalyze personal evolution and collective community imagining. The barn sculpture is both a physical and metaphorical incubator for Danae’s artistic journey that transcends conventional boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience. During residency, Danae is eager to deepen the symbiotic relationship between her work and the Northwest Arkansas community through the reciprocal exchange of ideas and experiences while contributing meaningfully to the cultural landscape of a futurist Northwest Arkansas.

Mekko Harjo

October 9 – November 9, 2024

Mekko Harjo’s work weaves personal narrative into expansive considerations of Indigenous resurgence. With his research-driven output, Harjo examines subcultures, small histories and anti-capitalist temporalities across a range of ephemeral and physical mediums. Inspired by the misuse and appropriation of consumer technology, the artist collages elements of installation art, spoken-word performance, and familial exposé into conceptually intricate renderings. Harjo’s practice promotes a discourse on the role of individual agency in navigating the shifting peripheries of Indigenous identity under late-capitalism.

Mekko Harjo is an artist based in New York and a member of the Quapaw Nation of Oklahoma. While in residence, Mekko will continue his research into Indigenous resurgent action, nightlife, and tribal culture, while spending time reconnecting to ancestral lands stretching throughout Arkansas and Oklahoma.

Na’Tosha De’Von

August 14 – September 8, 2024

Na’Tosha De’Von, was born in Chicago IL, and raised in Mississippi. She holds a bachelor of arts degree in theatre and speech communication from Thee Jackson State University, and an MFA in Acting from the University of Arkansas.

Na’Tosha began her career in acting and poetry by way of God’s design, believing that the premise of her art is to expose and heal. Through her poetry, she has worked with prominent figures fighting for social injustice and human rights including: Dr. Cornell West, Danny Glover, Ilyasah Shabazz, Myrlie Evers, and Common. Her acting career has led her to appear in several Walmart and Tyson commercials. She can be seen in the series Chase the Lion on the TBN television network. She is also featured in the feature film Freedom’s Path. Na’Tosha has worked extensively with theatre companies both regional and non-regional, focusing on both classical and non-classical text.

Na’Tosha is a casting assistant for Actors Casting Agency (ACA) in Arkansas. She is a published poet, with works in notable literary sites including Literary Sanctuary. Na’Tosha has been awarded the 2022 Artist 360 grant, the 2020 Sipp cultural creative grant, and more recently the Artist and Writers residency at the Chateau d’Orquevaux in France for their 2024/2025 class. Locally, she completed her musical theatre directing debut with the record-breaking Beauty and the Beast at Arts One Presents theatre. With her art, Na’Tosha desires to inspire and mentor younger artists who hold similar backgrounds to her. She wants to instill in young artists that with hard work and creativity, anything is possible.

While in residence, Na’Tosha will work to realize a new book of poetry and photography exploring the trauma of grief and joyful healing.

Justin Cabrillos

July 25 — August 7, 2024

Justin Cabrillos is a choreographer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. His work has been commissioned by The Chocolate Factory Theater, Danspace Project, and the IN>TIME Series in Chicago. Cabrillos has presented work at the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roulette, Movement Research at Judson Church, and Links Hall in Chicago. He has had residencies at Movement Research, Ucross, Yaddo, Zero Point Berlin in Germany, The Center for Performance Research, and the Momentary in Arkansas. He was a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz in Vienna under the mentorship of Tino Seghal and a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum. As a performer, he is currently working with Ursula Eagley, and he has worked with Jen Rosenblit, Julie Mayo, Every House Has a Door, and Jeremy Shaw. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington, Seattle. He teaches Literature, Composition, and Creative Writing at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

While in residence, Justin will be staging his latest solo performance, Unnamed.
Unnamed investigates emotional intensities. This solo hosts a barrage of emotions and conjures Nicholas Cage’s outbursts in a single body, in order to unravel the social rules for emotional expression. In a memorable scene in the movie Vampire’s Kiss Cage yells at his therapist over a disagreement about filing papers. He yells, “What could be easier. It’s simple: A, B, C, D…” proceeding to recite the entire alphabet, as he violently flings his arms. Inspired by Cage’s outbursts, the piece puts emotions and contradictory ideas in conflict with their physical expression. In the piece, audiences are invited to inhabit a vast emotional landscape contained in a single body; names or gestures distinguishing one emotion from the next, no longer apply.

Christopher Alexander Chukwueke

May 27 — July 7, 2024

Christopher is a NYC-based actor who proudly hails from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was last seen on a season 13 episode of the CBS hit Blue Bloods. Prior to that, he was in TheatreSquared’s most recent adaptation of the Dickens classic A Christmas Carol and their production of MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67. Additionally, he starred on the ABC hit Emergence (which premiered Fall 2019) and on the internationally popular show The Blacklist. Before doing conservatory study at Michael Howard Studios, Christopher received his BBA in Finance at Howard University in Washington DC and completed the Summer Conservatory at Michael Howard Studios.

He credits his passion for acting to a lifelong love of helping and teaching others through storytelling. Outside of his creative pursuits, Christopher is also an entrepreneur. He is the founder of a natural, shea butter-based moisturizer, called Isu Body Butter, which is inspired by skincare methods utilized in his ancestral home in the Isuikwuato region of Nigeria. Christopher currently resides in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.

While in residence, Christopher will work across multiple projects. On the literary front, he will be writing and contributing to two works; “Our Own Black Shining Prince,” a one-man show highlighting a moment in the life of actor, writer, producer, director, and activist Ossie Davis and a one-act play created during the pandemic in which an early-twenties white couple visiting New Orleans to help clean up after Hurricane Katrina analyze and debate their own privilege. In partnership with fellow resident Tenisi Davis, Christopher will be working towards the inaugural Kanini Festival on October 11 to 13 at the Momentary, produced by their company Moja Productions. Finally, Christopher will use time in residency to explore his painting practice.

Tenisi Davis

May 27 — July 2, 2024

Born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Tenisi is an actor, director, dancer, writer, activist, and producer. Named one of New England and Tri-State area’s “40 Under 40,” this multi-talented individual started acting in plays and reciting poetry at the age of seven. He received his formal training from the Performing Art Center of Connecticut, Alvin Ailey Foundation, Housatonic Community College under Professor Geoffrey Sheehan, and the Music and Art Center for Humanity where he accepted the Cultural Arts Award from the President of the United States. Tenisi has performed on major television networks, commercials, films, and plays including: CBS’s Blue Bloods, NBC’s The Blacklist, Marvel’s Daredevil, TheatreSquared’s production of MacArthur “Genius” Fellow Dominique Morisseau’s Detroit ’67, A Time to Kill, Oshun at the National Black Theater in Harlem, and Pass Over at Collective Consciousness Theatre. Most recently he was honored by The NAACP and Black Caucus for his work on the acclaimed one-man play Frederick Douglass: An American Slave at the Klein Memorial Auditorium in Bridgeport. Tenisi has not only received recognition from Congress, the Senate, and the Governor of Connecticut but also received a Proclamation and the Key to the City of Bridgeport for his outstanding community work and exceptional performance in theatre, film, and television.

Tenisi first started dancing and drumming at the age of seven with the Ralphola Taylor Center’s African Dance Ensemble and Hip-Hop Troupe. Tenisi has danced with the MACH Dance 2 program, performed with the Ailey 2 dance company, The Cleo Parker Robinson Dance Company, the Arts and Ideas Festival in New Haven, and the Sankofa Kuumba Dance Ensemble in Hartford. He has studied African drum and dance with masters Baba Tunisi “Jack” Davis, Jami Ayinde, Kemoko Sano, Abdoulaye Sylla, and Lansana Toure. Tenisi has also performed with Tunisi’s Compound, Fotoba, and shared the stage with Ballet Merveilles de Guinée.

“I have been a performer my whole life. I have also been an activist for my community. By creating Moja Productions and ReBirth Arts Collective with my partners I have found a way to mesh the two. The arts have truly saved my life and created another avenue for me to exercise my energy. I just want to be able to perform and put on shows and events that will inspire someone else and possibly change or save their lives as well.”

While in residence, Tenisi will be working across three projects. We Are Only Dead, If We Are Forgotten is a performance-art project that demands we look in the mirror and examine how well we know ourselves. This project’s call to action inspires audiences to bravely explore lineage as it may influence the development of a better self and reveal non-duplicable keys to unlocking doors to the future. Carefully integrating theater, film, dance, music, visual art, and elements of poetry, We Are Only Dead, If We Are Forgotten beautifully recounts the painful narratives of siblings Amari and Asata Freeman on their historical and dramatic odyssey to deepen their sense of identity, purpose, and connection to the past. Secondly, 4-4-1 is an immersive exploration through sound and spoken word, a heartfelt ode to Davis’s father, Baba Tunisi, a revered freedom fighter in America’s race wars of the early 1960s. This project celebrates his legacy and the profound influence he had on Davis’s life and art. Inspired by Baba’s encouragement to merge Davis’s creative talents, the work will weave experiences, lessons, and emotion through poetry, lyricism, and music, resulting in a sonic journey. This project aspires to be a universal anthem of inspiration, echoing Baba Tunisi’s enduring spirit and impacting humanity across the globe. Finally, in partnership with fellow resident Christopher Alexander Chukwueke, Tenisi will be working towards the inaugural Kanini Festival, on October 11 to 13 at the Momentary, produced by their company Moja Productions.

Flyover Contemporary Dance

JAN 17 — April 7, 2024

Flyover Contemporary Dance is a group of contemporary dance professionals dedicated to bringing high quality dance to Northwest Arkansas. FCD believes that the rich artistic potential residing within the so-called “flyover states” deserves recognition and celebration on the national stage and beyond. The group creates choreography that is inherently collaborative, that transcends individual limitations and generates art that is greater than the sum of its parts. Flyover Contemporary Dance aims to foster a deep sense of community within the local dance scene, providing a platform for emerging and established dance artists to grow and flourish via purposeful place-making.

While in residence, FCD will create a new work to premiere at the Momentary in April 2024.

Veronica Santiago Moniello

FEB 1 – MAR 3, 2024

Veronica Santiago Moniello (she/her/hers) is a Venezuelan choreographer and dancer currently based in New York. Her dance practice explores performance, guidance, curatorship, production, drifts, film, improvisation, somatic experiences, and site-specificity.

She holds a Master of Fine Arts in performance from the Dance and Theater program at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), and a BA in Dance Making from Folkwang Universität der Künste in Germany, where she had the opportunity to experience Pina Bausch’s “Le Sacre Du Printemps” repertoire.

While in residence at the Momentary, Santiago Moniello will be creating a new work -Open Heart- in response to Richard Mosse’s Broken Spectre, currently on view at the Momentary as part of the Enduring Amazon exhibition. Her artistic research aims to craft panoramas to portray the environmental catastrophe in the Amazon and it’s impact on the Yanomami indigenous territory through dance.

Rin Peisert

NOV 24—DEC 3, 2023; JAN 19—28, 2024

Rin Peisert is an interdisciplinary artist who works with people, time, and space to investigate conditions for interdependence and sincerity. Her artistic research is primarily concerned with consciousness as it relates to the body, as well as endurance, spectatorship, and the reciprocal gaze. Her site responsive actions use intervention as a tool to reorganize behavior and to exaggerate the quotidian in pursuit of profundity within the mundane. Peisert’s work has been seen at Shanghai Duolun Museum of Modern Art, Power Station of Art Shanghai, the Momentary, and Defibrillator Gallery, as well as under bridges, on rooftops, in a bomb shelter, and at a market for arranged marriages. Peisert has an MFA in Art Practice from School of Visual Arts, New York City. She co-produces a series of graphic and instructional scores called, Image of Thought and she is the Performing Arts Curatorial Artist-in-Residence at Elastic Arts, curating the series titled, Relative Intensity Noise. In addition to her art practice, Peisert initiates art events by producing, directing, and curating salons, exhibitions, and concerts, in the performance art, butoh, experimental sound, and noise music communities. While in residence, Rin will be developing Relative Intensity Noise for Momentous, the one-night experience of electronic sound coming to the Momentary on March 9, 2024.

Hall, Meehan, Thomson Visiting Artists: NOV 8 – 20, 2023

Live in America Festival Facilitator Ben Hall with friends Sean Meehan and David Thomson
Based on a dream…

This residency is based on the impetus to exchange and engage in organic conversations between old friends with overlapping concerns and open-ended dreams. It is an opportunity to be with each other and to work independently and collaboratively. It’s about hanging together and seeing what catches our spirits.

Working together and separately, we’ll exchange recipes, laugh, play, and wander. Rest and travel excursions are embedded in our work ethic. Rhythms, questions, and contradictions will abound.

This residency is in partnership with Live in America Springdale. With this collaboration, LiA and the Mo are continuing to nurture the relationships they fostered during the 2022 Live in America Festival.

Sean Meehan

Sean Meehan is a drummer whose work incorporates contemporary composition, improvisation, hybrids of these, and interdisciplinary collaboration. His work has been presented at a number of prestigious institutions including Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts (New York), INSTAL Festival (Scotland), Goethe House (Hanoi), and The Whitney Biennial, but he more frequently performs in artist-run venues and festivals.

Meehan has released a number of recordings as well as a series of objects intended to encourage meditation on sound. These include Audio, a boxed set of four cassette-like objects, and Field Recordings Vol. 3, a folio of printed matter that suggest and intone various sounds and sound events.

Trained as an urban planner Meehan also makes urbanist super 8 films in the tradition of planners such as William H. Whyte and Kevin Lynch who utilized that medium for their groundbreaking research. This work has informed a 20-year collaboration with Tamio Shiraishi on their annual summer concert series situated in a variety of marginal, heterotopic spaces throughout New York City. These were documented on two vinyl records (In the City (Fuestron), and Annual Summer Concerts (JD Stereo). The pair was invited by Scotland-based presenting organization ARIKA to, with the help of an embedded cartographer, develop a similarly motivated tour throughout the United Kingdom.

He is currently writing an analysis of New Deal architecture in the South Bronx, a long-form solo drum recording, a collaboration with cellist Theresa Wong, and a split 7” recording with Michelle Ellsworth.

Meehan is the grateful recipient of a 2020 artist award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.

David Thomson

David Thomson is a Caribbean-American interdisciplinary artist whose practice centers on the interrogation of presence and absence in the performance of identity, using image, writing, performance, and installation as containers of inquiry. Thomson’s performance work has been presented and supported by The Kitchen, Danspace Project, Movement Research, Performance Space NY, The Invisible Dog, and The Lunder Institute of American Art. Awards and fellowships include US Artist, NYFA, Yaddo, MacDowell, Rauschenberg, and the Foundation for Contemporary Arts. He has had the pleasure of working and collaborating with Bebe Miller, Trisha Brown, Ralph Lemon, Tracie Morris, Sekou Sundiata, Marina Abramović, Kaneza Schaal, Deborah Hay, and Okwui Okpokwasili among many others. Recent projects include collaborating on Matthew Barney’s film installation, Secondary; a published essay in Yvonne Rainer’s Remembering a Dance: Parts of Some Sextets, 1965/2019 (Performa), and he is one of the contributing artists in Cane: A New Critical Edition (the3rdthing.press) for the 100th anniversary of Jean Toomer’s 1923 novel. In 2017, he initiated The Artist Sustainability Project to expand the practice and discourse of financial, artistic, and personal empowerment.

Ben Hall

Ben Hall is a writer and composer based in and from Detroit, Michigan. He was profiled in Fred Moten’s 2017 book, Black and Blur, and frequently works as a critic with a research focus on the visionary American composers Milford Graves and Bill Dixon. He formerly served as a senior research fellow at the Center for the Advancement of Public Action at Bennington College from 2018-2022. He is currently compiling material for the forthcoming Black Liberation Music Guide.

La Pocha Nostra

OCT 16 – NOV 6, 2023

La Pocha Nostra is a transdisciplinary arts organization & 501-c3 non-profit that provides a support network and forum for artists of various disciplines, generations, gender complexities, and ethnic backgrounds. La Pocha is devoted to erasing the borders between art and politics, art practice and theory, artist and spectator. For 30 years, LPN has intensely focused on the notion of collaboration across national borders, race, gender, and generations as an act of radical citizen diplomacy and as a means to create “ephemeral communities” of rebel artists.

La Pocha Nostra (Balitronica, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Emma Tramposch, and EmaLee Arroyo) will be in residence at the Momentary in October 2023. During this time, they will be engaging in multiple focus areas: scheming and advancing projects and programs for 2024 and beyond, editing new films, designing an interactive format for their “living archives” platform, and developing a site specific-performance to open this year’s INVERSE Performance Art Festival.

NEW ORLEANS VISITING ARTISTS: SEP 22 – OCT 6, 2023

Delving into play, making music, and photographing The Magician. New forms of merrymaking and collaboration. Live in America Festival Facilitator Jay Pennington brings a crew of New Orleans artists to make magic in Northwest Arkansas.

This residency is in partnership with Live in America Springdale. With this collaboration, LiA and the Mo are continuing to nurture the relationships they fostered during the 2022 Live in America Festival.

RUSTY LAZER

Rusty/Jay is a lifelong musician, a decades-long resident of New Orleans, and the co-founder of New Orleans Airlift and its flagship project, Music Box Village. He brought New Orleans artists Big Freedia and Nicky Da B to prominence internationally as a manager, DJ, and producer. His practice has been rooted in connection, collaboration, exploration, and investigation and sprinkled with a healthy dose of practicality and improvisation. In his latest phase, he’s turning away from the sprawling, community-focused artwork he’s known for and producing new music and experiences while learning to be somewhat singular creatively, unifying facets of his past adventures and identities into a kind of internal self-collaboration.

JAMI GIROUARD

Jami Girouard is a New Orleans-based artist interested in world-building through the exploration of different aesthetic modalities, including but not limited to lighting, textile, costume design, and interior decor. Jami will be using her time at the residency to delve into a sense of play by stepping back from the pressures to produce for capitalistic consumption and following where creative curiosity leads.

THE FLOOZIES

The Floozies are a collaborative partnership between artists Margot Couture and Libbie Allen. They bring a revolving cast of characters to life through performance, costuming, and a commitment to the practice of Play. Drawing from regional folklore, Couture and Allen imagine the other-than-human entities that surround them and invite these beings out to be seen.

The Floozies will be using their time at Live in America Springdale and the Momentary to bring to life the archetypal figure, The Magician. In Tarot, The Magician is the first character the fool meets on his journey and symbolizes manifestation. Using oversized props, costumes, smoke, mirrors, and the surrounding woods, they will create a photography series, engaging with people from the community by inviting them to participate as characters in the photos.

Margot Couture is a painter and multimedia artist whose work depicts bizarre characters, masked figures, and archetypal imagery. She is heavily inspired by New Orleans, her home, and its rich history of Carnival. For over a decade, she has produced underground parades and parties whose themes have explored issues of identity, rebellion, and sexuality. Her current work is a window into this world. In 2008 she received her BFA in Painting and Printmaking from VCU School of the Arts.

Libbie Allen works across mediums exploring the web of relationality that is life on Earth. Allen’s work is informed by her interest in myth, dreams, and the unknown, and is inspired by how women connect to nature through intuition. Using printmaking, photography, embroidery, painting, and natural dye, she aims to weave corporeal experiences with ephemeral manifestations of spirit. Allen received a BS in the Arts from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2008. Her work has been shown in the Ogden Museum of Art and is in the permanent collection at the Alexandria Museum of Art. She lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

JEFFERSON PINDER: AUG 17-24, 2023

Jefferson Pinder (b. 1970, Washington, DC) has produced highly praised performance-based and multidisciplinary work for over a decade. His work has been featured in numerous solo and group shows, including exhibitions at The Studio Museum in Harlem, the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford, Connecticut, The High Museum in Atlanta, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, and Tate Modern in London, UK.
In 2016, Pinder won a USA Joyce Fellowship Award for performance. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017, as well as the Moving Image Acquisition Award. Most recently, he was named a 2021 Smithsonian Artist Research Fellow.

Pinder received a BA in Theatre and an MFA in Mixed Media from the University of Maryland, and studied at the Asolo Theatre Conservatory in Sarasota, FL. He was an assistant professor at the University of Maryland from 2003 to 2011. He is currently a professor of Sculpture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

While in residence at the Momentary, Pinder will continue development of his new work, Belly of the Beast, to premiere at the Momentary in spring of 2024.

RUMWOLF: JUN 6—27, 2023

Rumwolf is a multi-disciplinary visual installation artist, musician, and filmmaker based in the Ozarks. His practice focuses on the relationship between art, emotion, and technology expressed through themes of humor, pop culture, and nostalgia. Often using his large collection of ephemera, Rumwolf combines found objects and ready-mades with contemporary forms of projection mapping, multi-media sculpture, animation, and video art along with traditional forms of painting and illustration. Rumwolf works professionally as a director, producer, consultant, and production specialist in the performance and live production field as well as commercially as a freelance graphics and sound designer.

In his various roles, Rumwolf plays an active part in the Northwest Arkansas art community and beyond. In 2020, he collaborated with vertical dance group BANDALOOP for the Momentary’s grand opening festival Time Being, and again for a repeat performance in the fall of 2021. In the same year, he was a resident artist at CACHE Studios and began his ongoing “Maker in Residency” at the Amazeum Interactive Children’s Museum. In 2022, he worked as the production manager for the Live in America festival, a project by Fusebox Festival in partnership with the Momentary. He was commissioned by Brooklyn-based performing arts collective TRIBE as an installation consultant for the world premiere of Touch of Red at MASS MoCA. He also produced the 2022 Black Apple Awards for The Idle Class Magazine in addition to being featured as an artist and curator for the event. Rumwolf was a featured artist for the University of Arkansas’s 150-year anniversary program contributing his video mapping sculpture The Great Glass Elevator. Additionally, Rumwolf was awarded a CXF curator’s grant from CACHE and supported by the Tyson Family Foundation, which he used to mount the interactive art gallery POP A.V. at The Medium. Most recently, he directed and produced the original performance art installation Jay Benham’s Kiowa Ledger Art, presented at the University of Arkansas’s multicultural center. He lives in Bentonville with his daughter Lyric.

During his residency at the Momentary, Rumwolf will begin development of a new performance piece planned for a 2024 premiere. Anchored by a suite of songs composed by Rumwolf in 2021–2022, the show will combine elements of installation and narrative fiction with varying time-based performance techniques. Working closely with the Momentary’s production team, Rumwolf will continue to experiment with video and projection mapping methods using LED wall technology to be implemented in the design of the piece.

Moheb Soliman, Joshua Theroux, and Company: MAY 18 — JUN 1, 2023

Moheb Soliman is an interdisciplinary poet from Egypt and the Midwest whose work is oriented by issues of nature, identity, and place. He has presented writing, performance, installation, and video projects at diverse literary, art, and public spaces in the US and Canada with support from the Joyce Foundation, Banff Centre, Walker Art Center, National Park Service, Tulsa Artist Fellowship, and others. Moheb’s debut poetry book HOMES (Coffee House Press, 2021) explores modernity, nature, identity, and belonging in the Great Lakes bioregion/borderland and has been a finalist for multiple awards. His recent “conceptual country music video” We’re Back! is part of ongoing collaborative work about middle America and marginal fantasies of the mainstream. Based in Minneapolis, Moheb is a current Milkweed Fellow and previously was Program Director for the Arab American lit and film organization Mizna. www.mohebsoliman.info

Josh Theroux is a Los Angeles-based musician. He has composed and performed music for a variety of films, and in a range of performance art contexts. He writes and records songs and experimental music under the moniker The Labrador Current. He was born and raised in Michigan.

Preetika Rajgariah: MAR 19 – APR 30, 2023

Preetika Rajgariah is a multidisciplinary artist whose works examine the complicated intersections of cultural + queer identity, nostalgia, and capitalist consumption while referencing her traditional upbringing as an Indian-born American. She has been in residence at Oxbow School of Art, ACRE, Vermont Studio Center, and the School of Visual Arts NYC, and she has exhibited and performed in spaces such as Material Art Fair in CDMX, Untitled at Miami Basel, the Asia Society Texas Center, Roots & Culture, the Donnelley Foundation in Chicago, SOMArts in San Francisco, Women & Their Work in Austin, and Diverseworks Houston. She received her MFA from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and currently lives and works in Houston, TX.

During her residency at the Momentary, Preetika will expand on a series of self-portraiture, focusing on motherland mythologies and where they align and intersect with her personal, queer narrative. She also plans on reintroducing classical Indian dance, bharatanatyam (an artform she was immersed in as a youth), to her daily routine and performance practice.

RUMWOLF: JAN 3—23, 2023

Rumwolf is a multi-disciplinary visual installation artist, musician, and filmmaker based in the Ozarks. His practice focuses on the relationship between art, emotion, and technology expressed through themes of humor, pop culture, and nostalgia. Often using his large collection of ephemera, Rumwolf combines found objects and ready-mades with contemporary forms of projection mapping, multi-media sculpture, animation, and video art along with traditional forms of painting and illustration. Rumwolf works professionally as a director, producer, consultant, and production specialist in the performance and live production field as well as commercially as a freelance graphics and sound designer.

In his various roles, Rumwolf plays an active part in the Northwest Arkansas art community and beyond. In 2020, he collaborated with vertical dance group BANDALOOP for the Momentary’s grand opening festival Time Being, and again for a repeat performance in the fall of 2021. In the same year, he was a resident artist at CACHE Studios and began his ongoing “Maker in Residency” at the Amazeum Interactive Children’s Museum. In 2022, he worked as the production manager for the Live in America festival, a project by Fusebox Festival in partnership with the Momentary. He was commissioned by Brooklyn-based performing arts collective TRIBE as an installation consultant for the world premiere of Touch of Red at MASS MoCA. He also produced the 2022 Black Apple Awards for The Idle Class Magazine in addition to being featured as an artist and curator for the event. Rumwolf was a featured artist for the University of Arkansas’s 150-year anniversary program contributing his video mapping sculpture The Great Glass Elevator. Additionally, Rumwolf was awarded a CXF curator’s grant from CACHE and supported by the Tyson Family Foundation, which he used to mount the interactive art gallery POP A.V. at The Medium. Most recently, he directed and produced the original performance art installation Jay Benham’s Kiowa Ledger Art, presented at the University of Arkansas’s multicultural center. He lives in Bentonville with his daughter Lyric.

During his residency at the Momentary, Rumwolf will begin development of a new performance piece planned for a 2024 premiere. Anchored by a suite of songs composed by Rumwolf in 2021–2022, the show will combine elements of installation and narrative fiction with varying time-based performance techniques. Working closely with the Momentary’s production team, Rumwolf will continue to experiment with video and projection mapping methods using LED wall technology to be implemented in the design of the piece.

WILL RAWLS: AUG 9-20, 2022

New York-based choreographer, performer, curator, and writer Will Rawls explores the relationship between dance and language through the prisms of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. His choreographic work has appeared at the Museum of Modern Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Danspace Project, New Museum of Contemporary Art, Issue Project Room, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and MoMA PS1, among others. Rawls is a recipient of a “Bessie” New York Dance and Performance Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University.

While in residence, Rawls and his company of dancers and designers will be staging the new work [siccer] to be premiered at the Momentary in April 2023.

About [siccer]: Building from the editorial term for a misspelled word, “[sic]”, [siccer] is a dance and film project challenging widespread citation and misrepresentation of black bodies. Exploring the restlessness of gesture and language as strategies of black performance, [siccer] cultivates elusiveness and abstraction to resist the “racial gristmill” of mass media.

MATTY DAVIS: JUL 6-31, 2022

Matty Davis is an artist and choreographer whose work uses embodied forms of risk, trust, and empathy in ways that collaboratively explore perennial questions of mortality, desire, and how to deal with one another and survive together. Working across sculpture, drawing, and publishing, his projects predominantly manifest in performance and dance, which he values as shared space in which to be transformatively alive. Matty’s work has been presented throughout the US and abroad, including at the Fine Arts Center Gallery at the University of Arkansas, the Art Institute of Chicago, Bozar (Brussels), the Palais de Tokyo (Paris), the Max Ernst Museum (Brühl, DE), Steppenwolf Theater (Chicago), Pioneer Works (NYC), among many distinct site-specific locations. In 2019, Matty was named one of “25 to Watch” by Dance Magazine.

While in residence at the Momentary, Matty will work closely with local performers and non-performers to explore the parameters of a new work that lies at the intersection of publishing and live performance. This research is part of an ongoing trajectory that radically questions what choreography can contain and how it contains us. Structured in the fleeting, magical spirit of a shooting star, it seeks to hold and feel the pursuits of others, and others in their pursuits.

JAMES HARRISON MONACO: JUN 20-25, 2022

James Harrison Monaco tells stories with music. He considers that to be one of the oldest art forms in the world, and he’s always looking for new and innovative ways to do it.

He’s obsessed by stories of travel, translation, immigration, borders, memory, quiet violence, quiet grace, global loneliness, and time.

His work often combines extensive research in a handful of languages with an unabashed amount of melodrama. He’s also a translator of Spanish and Italian, he’s a music composer, and he writes prose, fiction, and non-fiction.

He works solo, and he works in a lot of collaborative forms—most notably as one half of the music-storytelling duo Jerome & James (jamesandjerome.org).

His theater projects have often been directed by Rachel Chavkin, Andrew Scoville, and Annie Tippe. Recent projects by James & Jerome include: The Conversationalists (The Bushwick Starr), Ink (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Under The Radar Festival, Williams College, etc.), Piano Tales (Lincoln Center, MASS MoCA, Joe’s Pub, La MaMa, etc.), Aaron/Marie (Under The Radar Festival, Ars Nova), and They Ran and Ran and Ran (HERE Arts). Other storytelling projects include Travels (in development), Tales for Telling (Ars Nova) and Reception (HERE Arts, The New Ohio).

Monaco is a New Writer in Residence at Lincoln Center Theater, and he’s received residencies with The Public Theater, The Sundance Institute, BAM, The Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts, New York Theatre Workshop, BRIC, and Berkeley Repertory Theatre, among others. He and JJJJJerome Ellis are currently Ars Nova commissioned artists, and he’s a collaborating writer, composer, and performer on The TEAM’s upcoming project Reconstruction: Still Working But The Devil Might Be Inside.

While in residence at the Momentary, Monaco will work with production designer Shawn Duan to create new work in conversation with a selection of artworks from the Crystal Bridges collection. Along with director Annie Tippee, the team will return August 6-7, 2022 to premiere the newly commissioned work.

Milka Djordjevich: MAR 28—APR 30, 2022

Milka Djordjevich is a choreographer, performer, and educator whose work questions preconceived notions of what dance should or should not be. While in residence at the Momentary, Milka along with writer and editor Dot Armstrong and dancer Dorothy Dubrule, will be creating CORPS, the handbook, a living document complementing Djordjevich’s eponymous performance. CORPS, making its regional debut at the Momentary May 13 & 14, explores how labor and gender are addressed under the lens of regimented movement. The work is a continuation of Djordjevich’s ongoing questioning of dance practices preoccupied with producing neutrality and anonymity.

CORPS, the handbook, will make visible the research and process of CORPS. Alongside original writing and edited conversations with dancers and collaborators, the handbook will notate the choreographic system the company is developing with a glossary of movement etymology, a songbook of original music, and choreographic primers for the reader to engage in.

Holly Wilson: Mar 28—Apr 30, 2022

Multi-media artist Holly Wilson creates figures which serve as her storytellers to the world, conveying stories of the sacred and precious, capturing moments of our day, our vulnerabilities and our strengths. During her residency, Wilson will be working on a new sculpture exploring and addressing the intersections of how colonialism has affected Indigenous land in the Ozarks.

ANDREA CARLSON: FEB 16—MAR 14, 2022

Andrea Carlson (Ojibwe) is a visual artist currently living in the unceded Potawatomi shoreline of Chicago, Illinois. Carlson’s current research activities include Indigenous Futurism and assimilation metaphors in film. Her work has been acquired by institutions such as the Denver Art Museum, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the National Gallery of Canada. Carlson was a 2008 McKnight Fellow and a 2017 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors grant recipient.

During her residency at the Momentary, Carlson created a new outdoor sculpture for the Momentary’s campus that will be featured in the new exhibition A Divided Landscape.

JUSTIN CABRILLOS : Jul 6—25, 2021

Justin Cabrillos is a choreographer, artist, and writer based in Brooklyn. He was a 2017 Movement Research artist-in-residence, a 2016 danceWEB scholar at ImPulsTanz under the mentorship of Tino Seghal, and a recipient of a Greenhouse grant from the Chicago Dancemaker’s Forum. His work has been commissioned by the IN>TIME Series in Chicago, Danspace Project, and The Chocolate Factory Theater. Cabrillos has shown work at the Cultural Center of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Roulette, and Movement Research at Judson Church. As a performer, he has worked with Every house has a door, Julian Barnett, Jen Rosenblit, and Jeremy Shaw. He holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MA in English literature from the University of Washington, Seattle.

During his residency at the Momentary, Cabrillos offered a series of workshops for local participants interested in exploring how emotions move through the body and between bodies, culminating in a public-facing performance. Simultaneously, he developed a new work and shared the progress with a live audience on his final night in residence.

RASHAWN GRIFFIN : JUL 1—SEP 14,  2021

Rashawn Griffin uses diverse materials such as bed sheets, tassels, food, and flora to create large-scale sculpture and paintings.  After receiving a MFA from Yale University in 2005, he has exhibited in multiple solo and group exhibitions in the United States and abroad.  Often pushing the boundaries between object and installation, his work challenges viewers to engage in their own past experiences when confronting his art.  A haunting installation in the 2008 Whitney Biennial, for example, is punctuated by a live audio feed from a field in Kansas, where the artist was raised.  A lumbering garbage bag man/sculpture wanders through a field in “To bring love/terrible things”, highlighting his exploration of place, site specificity, and identity.  Griffin’s installations explore the relationship between architecture and the traditions of painting with a series of stretched fabric walls; as the picture becomes the space, the pictorial space highlights the architecture.

Living and working in Olathe, KS, he was a 2006 resident of the Studio Museum in Harlem’s AIR program. Along with the 2008 Whitney Biennial, his work has been exhibited widely, including a two-person exhibition at the Studio Museum with artist Senga Nengudi (RSVP), as well as “Freeway Balconies” at the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, and “THREADS:  Textiles and Fiber in the works of African American Artists” at EK Projects in Beijing, China.  Recently the subject of the solo exhibition “A hole-in-the-wall country” at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, as well as participating in the exhibition “Minimal Baroque” at Rønnebæksholm in Næstved, Denmark, and in December his work will be featured in “The Regional”, a biennial of midwest-based artists opening at the Contemporary Arts Center Cincinnati in December, before traveling to the Kemper Museum in Kansas City.

During his residency at the Momentary, Griffin will work on a large-scale painting and a series of new drawings for upcoming exhibitions opening later this year (2021).

Imani Uzuri : Aug 16—22, 2019

Composer, librettist, and vocalist Imani Uzuri composes and researches music that reflects her rural North Carolina roots where she grew up singing Spirituals and line-singing hymns with her grandmother and extended family. During her residency, Uzuri developed her forthcoming chamber opera, Hush Arbor (The Opera), a mercurial musical meditation exploring themes of death, transcendence, impermanence, and liminality (standing at the threshhold) that will premiere at the Momentary in 2022. This work is inspired by hidden gathering places called “hush arbors” created by enslaved African Americans in wooded areas in the American South to secretly worship, commune, and strategize rebellion.

Flutronix : May 4—10, 2019

Flutronix, Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, is two distinguished flutists and composers known for their “unique blend of classical music, hip-hop, electronic programming and soulful vocals reminiscent of neo-R&B stars like Erykah Badu” (The Wall Street Journal). During their residency, Flutronix worked on Discourse, a musical conversation across the community to encourage community members to share stories of common experiences across our various identities.

Will Rawls : Apr 16—May 31, 2019

New York-based choreographer, performance artist, curator, and writer Will Rawls focuses on relationship and transitions between dance and language in order to consider the poetics of blackness, abstraction, and opacity. During his residency, Rawls worked on a dance piece exploring cursor movement.

“When one puts finger to cursor, which way will the language run, towards radical differences or the submission to the same old story? A cursor is polyamorous. It’s more comfortable that way. Can a dance unfold like a cursor, moving back and forth, up and down in space, revising and even misspelling our perceptions, perhaps for our own good?”

Rawls is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Robert Rauschenberg Residency, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts grant.

Ebony G. Patterson : Apr 1—Jun 28, 2019 & Sep 1—15, 2019

Visual and mixed media artist Ebony G. Patteron lives and works between Kingston, Jamaica and Lexington, KY. During her residency, Patterson planted a garden at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art as a test site to explore survival and colonialism.