Rice professor selected for coveted artist-in-residence award

Rice professor selected for coveted artist-in-residence award
Visual and dramatic arts’ Sperandio chosen for Chester Grosvenor Museum work

BY JESSICA STARK
Rice News staff

It made headlines throughout the county town of Chester, England, when the local Grosvenor Museum won a coveted artist-in-residence award funding a visit from and work by international art star duo Simon Grennan and Christopher Sperandio, assistant professor of visual and dramatic arts at Rice University.
 
The Leverhulme Trust awarded the prize to the Grosvenor to have the artists work with the museum for a year and produce seven new artworks that bring together objects from the museum’s social history collection and items discovered through the social networks of contemporary Chester or commissioned by the artists.

The goal of the residency is for the artists to research, reflect and then convey the impact material culture has on society. 

“We plan to creatively employ contradiction, shifts in context and humor,” Sperandio said. “We want to illuminate the relationship between each object from the collection and the material from daily life.”

For example, the artists might choose to use a 19th-century Chester Union marching banner backlit by contemporary commercial shop lights.

“The idea is to refigure an object’s past meaning by juxtaposing it with something contemporary to open avenues for new trains of thought about past and present,” Sperandio said.

To accomplish that, he and Grennan will conduct rigorous field research, immersing themselves in the life of the city and its people. The duo plans to begin research in early February and install their first piece in April.

As part of their residency, Sperandio and Grennan will give four public lectures about each new work, focusing on the process of research and creative association.

The duo’s collaborative work explores the numerous margins between mass and museum cultures. The artists have collaborated on projects for the Museum of Modern Art and P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center. Sperandio and Grennan are founding members of Kartoon Kings, a site dedicated to the production and creation of works of art across audiences and media boundaries.