Fellows

As of 2023, 221A’s Fellowship Program is a 18-month studio placement program. The program focuses on artists who are historically excluded from access to cultural space to create new works on the subject of Infrastructure.

Why Infrastructure?

The Fellowship program positions artists as unique in being able to make visible the effects of infrastructure, but also in providing alternative design fictions of what infrastructure could be. By appearing apolitical infrastructure is underestimated in the way in which it can hardwire (uneven) relationships to eachother and the environment. 221A takes its inspiration from Chinatown, a neighbourhood that blossomed despite defacto segregation and created a social imaginary for people who were historically excluded from dominant culture. Working from the conditions of renewed calls for Indigenous sovereignty and social justice, a housing affordability crisis, sweeping digital adaptation, and climate change, Fellows provide the conceptual charge and community discourse for 221A while sharing findings with peer organizations and policy makers towards social, cultural and ecological commons.

Call for Nominations in 2023

Fellows receive a comfortable stipend and a private work space for a period of 18 months culminating into a presentation of their work both in-person and online.

221A is preparing for an open call for nominations in Summer 2023, that with three Fellow placements beginning in Autumn 2023.

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Zasha Colah:
The Scorched-Earthly

November 2020 - September 2021

Zasha Colah researches contemporary collective forms of cultural production and artistic imagination under prolonged militarized situations; and how acts of imagination become collective. She segues between at least two terrains: the region of Northeast India bordering Bangladesh, Myanmar/Burma and China, and the Pacific Northwest Coast of North America. These artificially segmented terrains coalesce in this research to perceive the intersections of law, artistic imagination, constitutions, and the infrastructure of disobedient, ungoverned terrains.

Christina Battle:
Imagining New Systems of Exchange

October 2020 - August 2023

Christina Battle is an Artist whose research and work consider the parameters of disaster – looking to it as action, as more than mere event, and instead as a framework operating within larger systems of power. Her Fellowship with 221A seeks to imagine beyond capitalist cycles of economic breakdown and towards new systems of exchange, drawing from strategies of spread observed in plants and fungi, as well as in online spaces.

Fellow Archive

Architects for Social Housing:
For a Socialist Architecture (Ask These Questions)

July 2019 - December 2019

Architects for Social Housing (ASH) is a Community Interest Company from London, England, that organizes working collectives for individual projects. Their unifying principle is that refurbishing and increasing the housing capacity on London’s council estates, rather than demolishing and redeveloping them as properties for market sale, is a more sustainable solution to the housing needs of London’s communities. 

T’uy’t’tanat-Cease Wyss:
x̱aw̓s shew̓áy̓ New Growth «新生林»

June 2018 – August 2019

T’uy’tanat Cease Wyss is a media artist and ethnobotanist. Her Fellowship with 221A will lead a transformation of Semi­-Public 半公開 at 271 Union Street, converting the site’s compacted road base gravel to a communal garden designed with permaculture systems and plants that are indigenous to the bioregion of the Pacific Northwest Coast and the unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, Tsleil-Waututh, and Stó:lō Nations.

Jenn Jackson:
sum of the parts

March – July 2018

Throughout the spring season of 2018, 221A hosts sum of the parts, a curatorial research project by Jackson which brings together a selection of films, performances and installations by Deanna Bowen, Felix Kalmenson, Divya Mehra, Krista Belle Stewart and Casey Wei, who present compelling excavations of the past, by drawing from familial, historic, and archival sources—visualizing narratives of race and class, and their recognition within official records.

Amy Nugent:
The Sculpture Fund

March 2018 – August 2019

Amy Nugent is a Vancouver-based cultural worker and resource developer. As the former president of Artspeak’s board, she has been recognized with a 2016 Mayor’s Arts Award from the City of Vancouver. Her own research over the past five years has focused on the history and restitution of sculptors Frances Loring (1887–1968) and Florence Wyle (1881–1968), the current state of Canadian art collections and the limited acquisition funds to support them.

Juli Majer

January 2018 – May 2018

Juli Majer is a visual artist from Vancouver. Titled Science Fiction and the Other, Majer’s fellowship project will convene a series of public readings, studies, and screenings at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library.

William Dereume:
Comix for Community Solidarity

January 2018 – April 2019

William Dereume is a cartoonist from Vancouver. Through his fellowship with 221A, Dereume will develop a social infrastructure program that brings together artists, their institutions, and communities of struggle.

Yu Su

August 2017 – January, 2018

Kaifeng-born Yu Su comes from a classical piano background and works as a sound artist and music composer in Vancouver. Yu Su’s fellowship assembles artists, musicians, and researchers to develop a speculative sound archive at Pollyanna 圖書館 Library.

Josh Gabert-Doyon

August 2017 – January 2018

Josh Gabert-Doyon is a writer, photographer, and documentary radio producer. His fellowship assembles a provisional research collective—W.W.A.S.—to study the historic transformations of Vancouver’s storied Woodward’s building. Since September 2017, the collective (Brit Bachmann, Gabi Dao, Josh Gabert-Doyon, and Byron Peters) has occupied Pollyanna 圖書館 Library to plan and carry out an investigation into Woodward’s as an epicentre of local class struggle.