Residencies at Artspace
NC Emerging Artist Residencies
The NC Emerging Artist Residency provides emerging, North Carolina-based artists with a year of free studio space at Artspace, giving them time and space to explore their work in a supportive and thriving open studio environment. Artspace offers two residencies every year.
HBCU Artist Residency
This year-long residency focuses on graduates from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). Upon graduation, students often lose resources, equipment, colleagues, and mentors. This HBCU Alumni Residency seeks to remedy those issues by extending the learning process and broadening the experience for graduates to build their careers as visual artists. There are more 4-year HBCUs in North Carolina than anywhere else in the country, and the Artspace HBCU Alumni Residency aims to highlight and support the many talented artists graduating from these culturally rich institutions. This career-stimulus residency for an emerging artist includes a rent-free studio for one year with 24-hour access within a collaborative environment with 30+ other professional artists and art administrators.
Universal Access Artist Residency
The Universal Access Residency is exclusive to artists who identify as having a disability. This residency is designed to be flexible and can be easily modified to accommodate different disabilities.
The residency was initiated in 2019 and was made possible through the actions of past Operations + Finance Manager, Megan Sullivan, who received The Betty Siegel Universal Access + the Arts Award; which recognizes the substantial achievements of Arts Learning Community for Universal Access members who complete all three years of the program. Sullivan chose to use the grant included as part of the award to fill a need in our community.
CONNIE SALES is an artist, poet, and advocate living with Neuromyelitis Optica, a rare autoimmune disease affecting her optic nerves and spinal cord. They paint both using their eyes through eye gaze technology and also with their mouth, holding the pen or brush, mixing both digital and traditional mediums. Most recently, they use MouthPad technology, turning their tongue into their brush and the roof of their mouth a trackpad.
Exhibited and collected nationally and internationally, in 2019, Microsoft visited her studio, and in 2022, through the Lunar Codex project, images of her art and a video of her demonstrating painting with her eyes, headed to the moon. They are inspired by how art holds space to receive, absorb, and uncover suffering, joy, and community; all while discovering a capacity for safety and grace.
Drawing and writing began as instinct for survival. Exquisite stories of texture and shape; anxious and methodical lines of reflection and observation. The pieces move and have their being within the context of their environment.
LAMAR WHIDBEE, born and raised in Hertford, North Carolina, is an interdisciplinary artist and licensed clinical mental health counselor whose practice bridges visual art and therapeutic inquiry. After beginning his journey as a collegiate football player at Winston-Salem State University and North Carolina Central University, he shifted toward creative work, ultimately earning his MFA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his LCMHCA from NC State University.
Whidbee’s work—exhibited in galleries, museums, and public art spaces across North Carolina and several states throughout the country—explores memory, mental health, and family through mediums such as oil, acrylic, charcoal, and graphite. Grounded in both artistic rigor and counseling training, he uses art as a therapeutic tool, inviting reflection, emotional processing, and community dialogue.
I seek to cultivate spaces where creativity and care coexist, reminding us that every act of creation is also an act of becoming.
SKY DAI is a disabled, queer, emerging artist from Asheville and now living in Raleigh, NC. Sky’s oil paintings are inspired by psychic visions, dreams, ceremonies, and memories. After surviving Hurricane Helene’s flooding, and a bad accident that left them wheelchair-bound and house-bound for most of the past year, Sky dove headfirst into painting again. Sky’s figurative oil paintings with distorted perspectives reference the brain’s ability to collage fragments of memory and heal after trauma. Sky has a BFA in Fine Arts and Creative Writing from the Columbus College of Art and Design. In 2022, Sky Dai received the Emerging Young Artists Award of Excellence from The Kennedy Center in Washington D.C., and had their work purchased for the permanent collection on Capitol Hill.
Inspired by the DIY culture of Black Mountain College, I mix fashion design, painting, and performance, while employing symbology from tarot cards, religious iconography, queer culture, and domestic space.
ADRIANNE HUANG works across painting, drawing, and book arts to navigate ambiguity and complex emotional states. She is based in the Triangle and has exhibited work throughout the state and nationwide. With an educational background in Information Science, she is interested in the dissonance between the human compulsion towards definitive answers and the uncertainty and impermanence of nature. Stranger than life but more familiar than fantasy, her images serve as wish fulfillment, dream diary, self-critique, and catalog of curiosity.
My work celebrates the fading, the fleeting, and the departed, inviting viewers to pursue catharsis in the absence of certainty.
