The residency supports the creation of new work through provision of a stipend, studio and living space on Hope’s campus. In addition to the time and space the residency offers, the artist in residence engages with the department’s students through a series of encounters, which might include workshops, studio conversations, critiques or assistantships. The artist concludes their residency with a month-long solo exhibition and public lecture at the college’s De Pree Art Gallery.

Fellows Receive

Studio

The artist in residence is provided with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week access to a private studio, housed in the De Pree Art Center on Hope’s campus. The 1,308 square foot, air-conditioned, south-facing studio offers outstanding natural and track lighting, hardwood floors, tall ceilings and a Mac-adaptable projector and screen. Proposals that utilize other department studios and facilities, including an intaglio print shop, darkroom, Mac lab, fully-equipped ceramics and sculpture studio are welcome. Access to these additional department facilities is granted based on prior experience and the artist in residence’s proposal.

Stipend

The residency supports the selected artist through a financial stipend.

On-Campus Housing

The residency further supports the selected artist by providing on-campus housing in a residential cottage minutes away (walking distance) from the studio. 

The Strand Cottage is a two-story, three-bedroom, air-conditioned cottage located at Lincoln and 15th Street. There is a stackable washer and dryer located in the main floor bathroom. The main-floor bedroom has two twin beds, two desks and two dressers. The second-floor bedrooms each have one twin bed, a dresser and a desk.

View location and additional photos  All furniture (i.e., living, dining and bedroom) is provided. A linen packet is provided upon arrival, which includes pillows, pillow cases, sheets, towels and blankets. Additional comforters and lamps are provided.

Basic kitchen furnishings, including a microwave, toaster and all necessary utensils, pots and pans, dining ware, kitchen linens, etc. are provided. A detailed inventory is available.

Wi-Fi is provided.

Exhibition

The residency concludes with a solo exhibition in the department’s 1,300 square foot De Pree Art Gallery, to coincide with the start of the academic year.

As part of the residency’s goal to create opportunities for our students and the larger campus community, the department hosts an artist’s lecture, closing reception and related programming in September.

• De Pree Gallery Floor Plan (PDF) 

2024 – Christina Kerns

Christina Kerns is a photographic artist working with alternative printing techniques, net art and printed matter. She received her BFA in photography with a minor in art history from Pratt Institute and an MFA in interdisciplinary art from the University of Pennsylvania, PennDesign. 

Kerns’s work explores the role of photography in constructing and preserving personal identity in a Post-Internet world. Her work often references the translation from a virtual to a physical space, through material gestures. She is currently an associate professor at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania and lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She has exhibited nationally and internationally in New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, London, Berlin, Australia and more.

Visit Christina Kerns’s website

2023 – Daniel Callis

Daniel Callis (born in Long Beach, CA) is an artist and educator living in Southern California. He is a practicing studio artist and professor of painting and transdisciplinary studies at Biola University, La Mirada, CA. 

Working within a variety of media and visual traditions, his artwork explores the poetics found at the intersection of materials and process. Callis's work speaks to personal and cultural histories that are continually updated, altered, deconstructed and reconstructed. Each work archives conversations between method and material, structure and concept.

In addition to his individual studio practice, Callis has collaborated extensively, including partnering with individuals with physical and developmental disabilities, working with a field biologist in Baja, Mexico, a sociologist in Las Vegas, a theologian from Duke Divinity School, a poet/musician from California; and a performance artist/puppeteer from Rhode Island.

Visit Daniel Callis's website

2022 – Nick Fagan

Nick Fagan’s artwork is a material reaction to his experiences with mental health, disability, religion and labor. With his personal history in mind, the artist’s practice spans topics including the spirituality of banal objects, ritual and transformation, the abstraction of language, and the humor and duality of masculinity.

Language exists in Fagan’s work along a spectrum of somewhat readable text to a tangle of unrecognizable forms resulting in abstract, illegible groupings. This abstraction stems from the artist’s experience with dyslexia and seeing language as a confusion of symbols. The artist’s transformation of text-like forms into abstract shapes embeds them with cultural signifiers related to cartoons and animation, Gilded Age architecture and male anatomy. By creating playful curves, flaccid forms and soft colors within a larger-than-life scale, Fagan references manhood according to the duality found between strength and humility.

Visit Nick Fagan's website

2020/21 – Shauna Merriman

Shauna Merriman is a sculpture, ceramic and installation artist who uses clay for its geologic
properties. Building work from native resources tied to geographic borders and collective history, she uses materials, industry and sites as community points of connection. In Appalachia, she harvested Acid Mine Drainage yellow iron and used Logan Sewer Pipe’s clay to create work for Material Histories, Cultures of Resistance. Her recent exhibition in China came out of local clay, glazes and obsolete refractory brick. Merriman works in off-spaces and with industrial remnants due to her interest in so-called leftovers, evolving resources and discarded places. Landscapes and bodily topographies contextualize and record experiences that erode, slip and shift.

Currently, Merriman is pursuing work about extraction and re-routing. Her research interests include Lake Michigan’s basin resources and Holland’s underground pipes that divert 762 gallons per minute of coal station by-product.  

Merriman earned her MFA from The Ohio State University and BFA from The New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University. Before accepting a teaching position in 2020 at Albion College, Michigan, she taught at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden, the University of Connecticut and Connecticut College. Merriman has participated in residencies in Germany, at Lanzhou City University in Gansu, China, Belden Brick Factory and Ohio University. She has exhibited in China and throughout Germany and the U.S. As a studio artist living in Germany for several years, Merriman was part of an artist initiative and project space, geh8, working with the community and other artist spaces to organize site-specific exhibitions, performance, sound art and interdisciplinary symposia.

Images from the 2021 Borgeson exhibition 

Visit Shauna Merriman's website

Hope College press release for the 2021 AIR exhibition

2019 – Leekyung Kang

Through installations and digital mediums, Leekyung Kang creates spatial illusions by capturing unseen architectural spaces between the second and third dimensions. Influenced by Kang’s training as a painter and printmaker, the work focuses on the materiality of each medium. She utilizes diverse perspectives within architectural contexts that challenge the perception of space. In her exploration of the processes of mechanical reproduction, Kang often inserts errors or glitches from digital processes into her analog films and prints.

Kang earned her MFA from Rhode Island School of Design and BFA from Seoul National University. She has taught at Rhode Island School of Design, Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and Idaho State University. She has participated in several residencies internationally including the Fountainhead fellowship at Virginia Commonwealth University in Qatar and the Vermont Studio Center. Her work has been exhibited in South Korea, Doha, Qatar and throughout the U.S.

Images of the 2019 Borgeson exhibition 

Visit Leekyung Kang's website

Hope College press release for the 2019 AIR exhibition, Ecstasy on the Surface

2018 – Caleb Kortokrax

Caleb Paul Kortokrax (b. 1987) is an American painter living and working in Baltimore, Maryland.

Rooted in the interdisciplinary spirit, his paintings are an exercise in unlearning and relearning how to see.

Kortokrax received his MFA from Maryland Institute College of Art’s LeRoy E. Hoffberger School of Painting and his BSFA in studio art and art education from Valparaiso University. Recent solo exhibitions include:

• Carroll Community College in Westminster, Maryland
• Stevenson University in Stevenson, Maryland
• Brauer Museum of Art (portrait unveiling) in Valparaiso, Indiana
• Canterbury Salon in Baltimore, Maryland

The recent body of work builds bridges between disparate painting traditions and time periods. In the process of making a painting, he resamples quality material traditions of the past into the current omnidimensional state of imagery. Through combining past and present visual signals in his studio process, he reanimates the painted image — similar to a DJ giving renewed vigor to an old sound sample by placing it in a fresh context. He uses the image and the physical surface of the paintings to navigate a way that offers more possibilities and more cross-pollination, not particularly favoring any one style or dogma.

Images of the 2018 Borgeson exhibition 

Visit Caleb Kortokrax's website

Hope College press release for the 2018 AIR exhibition, Gang Chant

2017 – Nancy McCormack

In her multi-disciplinary practice, Nancy McCormack explores issues surrounding constructed identity and the performance of the self. She is best known for her interactive performance projects which often involve printmaking techniques and engaging viewers in the creative process, connecting their actions to an aesthetic object, and as a result, revealing something about themselves. 

Nancy grew up in Southeastern Massachusetts and pursued a career teaching and producing exhibitions throughout the United States, Europe and Turkey. She received her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design and her MFA from The City College of New York. Over the years, Nancy also worked extensively as a bookbinder and in rare book and paper conservation.

In her current body of work, Nancy is interested in addressing the aesthetics of cultural identity and how it relates to the natural world, specifically, how and why we construct and portray ourselves the way we do, what that says about contemporary culture and what it looks like from a global perspective.

Images of the 2017 Borgeson exhibition 

Visit Nancy McCormack's website

Hope College press release for the 2017 AIR exhibition, Out of Nature

2016 - Chris Cox

Chris Cox is a photographer and artist born in Toledo, Ohio. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

He earned his BFA from Hope College in 2012, where he returned as the inaugural 2016 Borgeson Artist-in-Residence. Chris earned an MFA in photography from Cranbrook Academy of Art in 2016. Most recently, he has held solo exhibitions at Neon Heater Gallery in Findlay, Ohio, Clement Gallery at the University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, and De Pree Gallery at Hope College, Holland, Michigan. His publication Future Research (revisited) has been acquired by multiple institutions including Toledo Museum of Art and Cranbrook Art Museum.

His ongoing body of work utilizes the tools of photographic production to address the increasingly mediated environment. Using his personal archive as source material, the work questions the nature of image production, circulation and distribution. It situates itself within the saturated field of image politics while exploiting our collective understanding of images.

Images of the 2016 Borgeson exhibition 

Hope College press release for the 2016 AIR exhibition, Infinite Replica

The artist-in-residence program was created through the generosity and enthusiasm of Hope alumni Clarke ’72 and Nancy Rayner ’72 Borgeson.