About Residency

Rina Chen’s living notebook on digital craft and design.

Artist Residencies: Privilege, Paradox, and Possibility

Overview

Artist residencies are rare interruptions to the capitalist “grind,” offering time and space to think, make, and reflect. To many people outside the arts, this arrangement can seem puzzling: a place where individuals are invited simply to explore ideas and create work.

Yet during a recent presentation on artist residencies, a student raised an important critique. These creative havens, they argued, often rest on deeper historical foundations—colonial land dispossession and traditions of aristocratic patronage. In response, the presenting faculty member suggested that residencies can also serve as sites for reflection and transformation, where artists engage with local histories and contribute to ongoing processes of cultural and social re-examination.

This tension made me curious about what residencies really are, and why they continue to exist.

Encountering the Idea of a Residency

When I first heard the term artist residency, it felt somewhat mysterious. Was it a living space? A learning environment? A workplace? Or a communal retreat?

For someone unfamiliar with the arts ecosystem, residencies initially sounded exclusive and competitive rather than approachable.

As I learned more, however, I discovered that the category “residency” covers a surprisingly wide range of programs.

Some residencies pay artists to attend, while others require artists to pay participation fees, somewhat similar to a retreat program. Some prioritize emerging artists and limit repeat participation in order to create opportunities for newcomers. Others focus on highly competitive applications aimed at established practitioners.

Residencies are organized by many different kinds of institutions. Some are hosted by scientific organizations or national parks, while others are run by small groups of individuals who simply want to invite artists to gather and work together for a period of time.

Many institutions, often located in historically significant or scenic locations, actively invite artists and designers to stay and create work during their visit. In most other professions, such arrangements are rare.

The Privilege of the “Productive Pause”

Whether it is an Arctic expedition residency or a studio in Paris at the Cité internationale des arts, residencies offer something unusual: a temporary suspension of everyday routines.

These programs create a space where artists can focus on experimentation, research, and reflection without the immediate pressures of productivity that shape most forms of labor.

A well-known example is the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, where writers, musicians, and visual artists gather for intensive periods of work. The novelist Yann Martel is often associated with Banff during the period when he was developing ideas that eventually became the novel Life of Pi.

Artists often argue that creative work benefits from new surroundings, solitude, and time for self-directed exploration. Yet this observation could arguably apply to many people beyond the arts. The fact that artists are sometimes granted these opportunities reflects particular historical and cultural priorities about which forms of labor society chooses to support.

The Colonial Shadow

At the same time, residencies are not neutral spaces.

Many contemporary residency programs emerged from older traditions of cultural patronage and elite travel. In the nineteenth century, European artists often embarked on the “Grand Tour,” traveling across regions in order to sketch landscapes, study classical art, and produce cultural interpretations of distant places.

In Canada, the locations of some residencies also raise difficult historical questions. National parks such as Banff were created through policies that displaced Indigenous communities in order to establish a vision of untouched wilderness. These landscapes were then framed as sites for tourism, recreation, and artistic inspiration.

This history does not invalidate the creative work produced in such places, but it does complicate the context in which that work occurs.

Similarly, some cultural institutions—particularly in regions shaped by resource extraction—have historically benefited from corporate wealth tied to industries such as oil and gas. Creative freedom, in many cases, has been indirectly supported by economic systems that involve environmental and social trade-offs.

Recognizing these entanglements is part of understanding the broader ecology in which artistic production takes place.

The Light

Despite these complexities, residencies can also create meaningful opportunities for learning and connection.

Artists who spend time in a particular location often engage deeply with the surrounding landscape, local communities, and historical narratives of that place. Some residencies now actively encourage participants to explore Indigenous histories, ecological relationships, or collaborative community practices.

Art has long existed within systems of patronage and institutional support. Artists frequently navigate a paradoxical position—facing economic precarity while also benefiting from occasional moments of generosity and institutional backing.

Perhaps the value of residencies lies not in pretending they exist outside history, but in approaching them with awareness. When artists recognize the privileges and conditions that make these opportunities possible, they can also reflect on how their work relates to the places and communities that host them.

In that sense, residencies reveal a broader paradox. They are products of unequal histories, yet they can also become spaces where new conversations about culture, land, and responsibility begin.

If You Are Interested in Residencies

For artists and designers in Canada, a number of residency opportunities are available each year.

Examples include programs such as:

  • Woodhaven Artist Residency (Okanagan)

  • Haliburton School of Art + Design Residency

  • Third Space at OCAD University

Many programs also offer grants or bursaries to support participation. For example, some student funding programs provide research or travel bursaries for residency experiences.

Internationally, one of the most comprehensive directories of residency opportunities can be found at:

https://resartis.org/open-calls/

Social media accounts dedicated to open calls can also help track upcoming application deadlines.

References

  • Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. * Kim, M. M. (2023). The Measure of Han. OCAD University Open Research Repository. Link
  • Woodhaven Artist-in-Residence (Okanagan): FCCS UBC Events
  • Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity: Notes on self-directed thematic residencies and “Life of Pi.”
  • Toronto Open Calls: City of Toronto Residencies
  • Doris McCarthy Gallery (UofT): Residencies List
  • MOCA Digital Futures: Inaugural Press Release
  • Cité internationale des arts (Paris): Calls for Application
  • Hannah Rowen: Research on “tides in the body” via Arctic Circle residency.
  • Geographic Residencies: Fogo Island, Chilkoot Trail, Gros Morne National Park, and the CERN Particle Collider (Geneva).