Tabitha Nikolai, When is never enough, 2020, ASCII art from Chronophasia, Courtesy of the Artist / garima thakur, pack of wolves, 2018, Courtesy of the Artist / sidony o’neal, meet cute 3_ super farmacia, 2019, image courtesy of Fourteen30 Contemporary
Administered by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (PICA) as part ofThe Ford Family Foundation’s Golden Spot Residency Program, we are pleased to announce the 2020/2021 Golden Spot Residency recipients sidony o’neal, Tabitha Nikolai, and garima thakur. These Oregon-based visual artists have been working with Artistic Director / Curator of Visual Art, Kristan Kennedy on realizing research and development projects that will extend into the summer of 2021.
These artists will be offered support for travel, research materials, and access to other professionals such as fabricators, technicians, writers, designers, coders, and translators who can inform their projects. This is a funded opportunity that will allow these three artists to dive deeply into creating work.
PICA’s residency programs are a platform to expand upon the research and community engagement that we conduct on an ongoing basis. These residencies are a way for PICA’s curators to meet artists in their practice and push their unique ideas forward. In particular, the three artists named above are exploring personhood, identity, and the translation of experience through complex works involving new technology, language, and immersive experiences. o’neal proposes an ambitious series of overlapping sculptures, poetry, a multi-channel sound installation, and a publication that are informed by political and social asylum, blackness and the unthought, outside/the (un)natural world, game sites, and generated/extended landscapes. Nikolai continues their work investigating what they call “our cyber cultural experience” through constructing new structures, landscapes, and costumes that exist in and out of virtual and real-world settings. thakur is continuing research for an eventual project about the Bengal famine and is mapping out ways to construct a new kind of bioscope / moving picture social sculpture. Please join us in congratulating these artists.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
sidony o’neal (b. 1988) is an artist and writer based in Portland, OR. Recent exhibitions include Sculpture Center, Fourteen30 Contemporary, and the Institute for New Connotative Action. Performances as a part of non-band DEAD THOROUGHBRED have been presented at PICA, Kunstverein Düsseldorf, Volksbühne Berlin, Performance Space New York, and If I Can’t Dance (Amsterdam). o’neal’s writing has been published at Arts.Black and the journal of Women & Performance. o’neal is the recipient of the Oregon Arts Commission’s 2020 Joan Shipley Award. o’neal is represented by Fourteen30 Contemporary, Portland, OR.
Tabitha Nikolai is a trashgender gutter elf and low-level cybermage raised in Salt Lake City, Utah, and based in Portland, OR. She creates the things that would have better sustained her younger self--simulations of a more livable future, and the obstacles that intervene. These look like: fictive text, video games, cosplay, and earnest rites of suburban occult. Currently, she teaches and manages galleries for the Portland State University School of Art + Design. Her work has been shown at the Portland Institute for Contemporary Art, the Utah Museum of Contemporary Art, Vox Populi in Philadelphia, Ganka Gallery in Tokyo, and has been covered by i-D Magazine, the New York Times, and Art in America. She hopes you’re doing okay.
garima thakur is an interdisciplinary artist born and raised in New Delhi. She works with histories, narratives and multitudinous realities of assimilation, alienation, and collectivism. She is currently stationed in Portland, OR, and works as an assistant professor of interaction media and graphic design at Western Oregon University.
ABOUT THE FORD FAMILY FOUNDATION
The Ford Family Foundation is a private, non-profit foundation with headquarters in Roseburg, Oregon. Roseburg lies in southern Oregon where the North Umpqua and the South Umpqua rivers join — timber country.
The Foundation makes grants to public charities and agencies predominantly benefiting communities in rural Oregon and Siskiyou County, Calif. Our heritage comes from these communities and the men and women who created them.
In addition, the Foundation designs, manages, and funds programs that aim to improve the wellbeing of children, families, and communities in our region, including a scholarship program for students attending college or university. Our mission is “successful citizens and vital rural communities,” and we invest in both people and
places to achieve that mission. Learn more at www.tfff.org.