The True Inspiration Artist in Residence (AiR) is open to emerging and professional artists and designers who reside in North America and hold an MFA (or have a record of equivalent professional achievement). The program recognizes the importance of interdisciplinary practices and welcomes artists and designers working in all media. The program awards one Residency each academic year to an artist or designer interested in developing a body of work in collaboration with Furman’s students and faculty. Inaugurated in 2016 as part of The Furman Advantage, a university-wide program that aims to build educational value through tailored student experiences, the Residency provides Furman’s students with the opportunity to directly witness, partake in, and engage with practicing artists and designers as they bring a defined work from ideation to realization. The Resident not only receives a generous stipend, but a private studio in the Roe Art Building, and a solo exhibition at the Thompson Gallery of Art at the conclusion of their Residency.
Artist in Residence 2024, Danni O'Brien
Danni OʼBrien is an environmentally conscious artist who creates whimsical sculptures from found materials and common detritus. Her works are fantastical, absurd, and uncanny ruminations on bodies, machines, conspicuous consumption, dystopian survival, and queer-futurism.
The Art of Danni O'Brien
Artist in Residence 2023, Claire Whitehurst
Claire Whitehurst explores queer entanglement, memory and time through color, form, surfaces and composition in her paintings. She draws from the physical and emotional landscape of the deep South, exploring queer narrative, memory, time and identity through color, form, surface and composition. Born in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, she received her BFA from the University of Mississippi in 2015 and her MFA in painting from the University of Iowa in 2020 while being a recipient of the Stanley Fellowship at the University of Iowa in 2018. She lived and worked in the Dordogne region of southern France where she studied polychromatic cave paintings and engravings. She has exhibited in galleries and museums nationally and internationally, and her work has been featured in numerous publications She has participated in solo exhibitions in New Orleans, Louisiana, Iowa City, Iowa, Oxford, Mississippi and Los Angeles, California. She now lives and works in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“My work is about the creation of intimate spaces and how to find them. Growing up queer in the American South, my time was spent inventing places to escape. I relay that same task into my studio practice where I find overlap between mediums and use them as passageways to direct visual and poetic narrative. My formal choices reflect the biological world and hint towards the body and the landscape, while ultimately eluding any direct representation. My paintings, prints and sculptures also reference one another, while maintaining an ability to stand on their own. I use wall sculptures as stencils for paintings and those paintings as references for a print or book form. I use translation of mediums as a way of shape shifting, and I relate this to ideas of the self, and the negotiation of where and when to hide or to seek.” – Claire Whitehurst
The Art of Claire Whitehurst
