Artists in Residence

Culture and Community at the Penn Center National Historic Landmark District offers artist residencies each year. To be selected, projects must engage with, or partner with, one or more of the Sea Island communities. Projects may also build from material or archival holdings in Penn Center, or other relevant museums, archives, or collections. Outcomes—readings, exhibitions, performances or installations—will be mounted at Penn Center, or another suitable site, which may be in coordination with the annual Penn Center Heritage Festival. Calls for proposals for artist residencies will be issued in the autumn of each year.

 

2022 Artists in Residence

Tamika Galanis and Anina Major

The first Penn Center artist residencies will be held by Anina Major and Tamika Galanis, who will collaborate on an installation that will be presented in July 2022. Galanis and Major, both from The Bahamas and based in Durham, NC and New York City, respectively, are multimedia artists whose work interrogates popular conceptions of place: Major’s through investigating “the relationship between self and place as a site of negotiation,” and Galanis’s by examining “the complexities of living in a place shrouded in tourism’s ideal during the age of climate concerns.”

The two artists made their first visit to Penn Center in December 2021 to introduce themselves to its unique surrounding environment and culture. “Our introductory week at the Penn Center and on St. Helena Island was transformative for me,” Galanis said. “It was the opportunity for ideas that we knew to be true in spirit alone up to that point to materialize – through fellowshipping with the community; grounding ourselves in the actual landscape; and getting really excited about the idea of an exchange between the two cultures, and what that would look like or mean.”