Clockwise from top left: James Olley, Evelyn Sorochan-Ruland, Jazmyn Pettigrew, Gregory Pepper, Steph Yates, Alison Judd, Tyler Muzzin, and Annie Dunning.
The Boarding House Arts Incubator is a one-year studio residency program designed to provide artists based in the Guelph area with a variety of resources to help them advance their professional careers. Artists are selected through a competitive process in response to a Call for Proposals. This program supports a breadth of artistic practices ranging from media-based work to painting to socially engaged art.
The Arts Incubator design includes professional development workshops on topics ranging from grant proposal writing to business planning to negotiating with private dealers. Specific programming is developed based on the participants’ personal goals, which could include planning meetings, panel discussions, studio visits with curators, talks by visiting artists, and group critiques.
This program is a partnership between Musagetes, Boarding House Arts, and the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph. The residency runs from January 2015 to May 2016. Participants in the Arts Incubator are Annie Dunning, Alison Judd, Tyler Muzzin, James Olley, Gregory Pepper, Jazmyn Pettigrew, Evelyn Sorochan-Ruland, and Steph Yates. The Mentoring Committee is comprised of professionals with a broad range of skills and perspectives: art writing and criticism, art education, curatorial practice, media arts, research, fundraising, grant writing, gallery management and studio practice. Mentors are Alissa Firth-Eagland, Renann Isaacs, Judy Nasby, Scott McGovern, Kirk Roberts, and Ron Shuebrook.
Art is transformational when its inherent dialogue supersedes the boundaries of discipline, sector and domain. The shared studio environment of the Arts Incubator creates the right conditions for potential collaborations and cross-pollination of ideas. We support the artists by offering shared studio space in an important new cultural hub in a historic building in downtown Guelph: Boarding House Arts. This removes the expenses of renting space that can often be prohibitive to emerging and mid-career artists.
Most importantly, the Arts Incubator focuses on professional development of individual artists by providing mentorship, participant-specific workshops, and curatorial feedback. Musagetes values the ability to work iteratively, a process in which each step of the way builds on what came before. For artists committed to lifelong learning, each day in the studio can be both a new opportunity and a chance to respond to previous experiments. The Arts Incubator is a space for a group of enthusiastic and dedicated individuals to share thoughts and professional strategies.