Crow's Shadow 2018 Golden Spot Residency Award Winners
Date on February 14, 2018 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Crow's Shadow 2018 Golden Spot Residency Award Winners (l-r): Avantika Bawa, Vanessa Renwick, and Ka'ila Farrell-Smith.
Crow's Shadow is excited to share the news of our 2018 Golden Spot residency award recipients: Avantika Bawa, Vanessa Renwick, and Ka'ila Farrell-Smith. Funded by the generous support of The Ford Family Foundation, the annual Golden Spot Awards began at Crow's Shadow in 2010 to support regional artist residencies. Each of these Oregon-based artists will spend two weeks at Crow's Shadow developing limited-edition prints, which will be hand pulled by Crow's Shadow's collaborative Master Printer, Judith Baumann. The final prints will enter our permanent collection; in previous years prints from the Golden Spot residencies have travelled extensively to galleries and cultural institutions around the region and nationally. All three of these artists will be working in the Crow's Shadow studio for the first time.
Avantika Bawa splits her time between her hometown of New Delhi, India, and her current home of Portland, Oregon. Bawa's art practice incorporates drawing, painting, sculpture, and installation, often with strong architectural elements. Her drawings are often characterized by minimalist forms and subtle interactions between the work and installation space. Bawa has a BFA in painting from Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, India, and an MFA in Painting from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Bawa is one of the co-founders of Drain a journal that explores contemporary art primarily through imagery, interviews, and creative writing. She is represented by Gallery Maskara in Mumbai, and Saltworks Gallery in Atlanta, and has attended multiple residencies including the McDowell Colony, Djerassi, Kochi Biennial Foundation, and Skowhegan among others. Bawa is a fellowship recipient for the Oregon Arts Commission. In addition to her active art practice she is also a curator and an Associate Professor of Fine Arts at Washington State University at the Vancouver, WA campus.
Vanessa Renwick is primarily known in the Northwest as an avant-garde filmmaker, often working with themes of nature and human interactions with the land. Her work in experimental cinema is punctuated by a wry sense of humor exemplified by the name of her production company, the Oregon Department of Kick Ass. Renwick's work—whether film, installation, show posters, or public interventions—is permeated by her counter-culture punk aesthetic and a sharp cultural critique. She has screened work in a wide array of locations around the world, including: The Museum of Modern Art, Light Industry, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Art Basel, Oberhausen, The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Centre Pompidou, The Andy Warhol Museum, and the International Film Festival Rotterdam, among numerous others. In 2016 she presented Next Level Fucked Up, an ambitious 7 channel video installation at the Portland Art Museum. Notably, Renwick received a Bonnie Bronson Fellowship in 2014. She is represented in Portland by PDX Contemporary Art.
Ka'ila Farrell-Smith (Klamath Modoc) is a painter and mixed-media artist based in Portland, Oregon. Her work engages with inter-tribal native communities, reflecting the mixed and sometimes conflicted heritage of multi-ethnic and indigenous families living in a post-colonial world. Her paintings and installations are deeply symbolic and frequently figurative, employing dynamic mark-making and textural explorations. Farrell-Smith is one of the directors of the Signal Fire artist residency program, and is a professor of Indigenous Nations Studies at Portland State University. Farrell-Smith has attended artist residencies at Caldera, Djerassi, Ucross, and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) among others. Farrell-Smith holds a BFA in Painting from the Pacific Northwest College of Art, and an MFA in Contemporary Art Practices Studio from Portland State University.
Link to press release PDF
Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts is located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in the foothills of Oregon's Blue Mountains. Crow's Shadow is a nonprofit 501 (c)(3) organization formed in 1992 by local artists James Lavadour (Walla Walla) and Phillip Cash Cash (Cayuse and Nez Perce). Our mission is to provide a creative conduit for educational, social, and economic opportunities for Native Americans through artistic development. Over the last 25 years Crow's Shadow has evolved into a world-class studio focused on contemporary fine art printmaking.