The Hamptons

The Watermill Center announced that Iranian filmmaker Zeinab Shahidi Marnani, Mexican-born visual artist G.T. Pellizzi, and Chilean painter Basco Vazko have been selected as the inaugural recipients of The Center’s Inga Maren Otto Fellowship. Created with a generous $960K gift from philanthropist Inga Maren Otto, the fellowship provides support for emerging and mid-career artists who have demonstrated exceptional creative ability in the arts.

“Maren Otto has been a devoted supporter of The Watermill Center and our mission to support extraordinary emerging artists from across the globe over the last ten years,” said Watermill’s Founder and Artistic Director, Robert Wilson. “She is a true humanitarian—passionate about the arts, architecture and humanities. Her support in establishing the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship helps to ensure that some of the most brilliant young artists are afforded the time and space to collaborate and create new works.”

The program represents the depth and breadth of Watermill’s commitment to supporting projects that integrate genres and art forms from diverse viewpoints and that break from traditional forms of representation. Through a four to six week residency at The Watermill Center, each fellow is provided with blocks of time in which they can exercise as much creative freedom as possible to develop new works.

Recipients of the Inga Maren Otto Fellowship have access to Watermill’s unparalleled collection of art and artifacts, as well as housing, work space and other resources. Each fellow also receives a stipend, travel expenses, and financial support to
present a public exhibition or performance of the work created during the residency. Basco Vazko will be the first fellow to take up residency at Watermill in February 2016, followed by G.T. Pellizzi in June 2016, and Zeinab Shahidi Marnani in September 2016.

The fellows were nominated and selected by a committee composed of artists, academics, and cultural leaders across all disciplines, including Wilson, Andreas Beitin (Director of the ZKM | Museum of Contemporary Art), Kristy Edmunds (Executive and Artistic Director, Center for the Art of Performance at UCLA), Alanna Heiss (Founder and Director of Clocktower Productions), John Jasperse (American choreographer and dancer), Jay Sanders (Curator of Performance at the Whitney Museum), and William Wagner (Managing Director of The Watermill Center).

About Zeinab Shahidi Marnani
Zeinab Shahidi Marnani (b. 1983 in Isfahan, Iran) lives and works in Tehran and New York. She holds a MFA in sculpture from Yale School of Art. In 2015, she was an artist-in-residence at The International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York. She is also a recipient of the The Alice Kimball English Traveling Fellowship and former resident at Akrai Residency (Palazzola, 2013). Her work has been shown at the Thomas Erben Gallery in New York; ALLGOLD at the MoMA PS1 Print Shop in New York; design transfer gallery (UDK) in Berlin; the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Arts in Iran; and Devi Art Foundation in Gurgaon, India.

About Giandomenico Tonatiuh Pellizzi
G.T. Pellizzi (b. 1978 in Tlayacapan, Mexico) studied philosophy at St. Johns College and graduated from The Channin School of Architecture at the Cooper Union. From 2001-2011, Pellizzi co-founded and was involved in various art collectives, including The Bruce High Quality Foundation, with whom he exhibited at the Whitney Museum, MoMA PS1, Centre Pompidou, PAC Murcia, and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, as well as various art galleries in New York, Zurich, Berlin and London. In the past year, he has had solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery in New York, Harmony Murphy Gallery in Los Angeles, and Revolver Galeria in Lima. He has also participated in exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume in Paris, the Museo del Barrio Biennial in New York, the Biennial of the Americas in Denver, and the Kunsthalle of Vienna. Pellizzi lives between New York and Mexico.

About Basco Vazko
Basco Vazko (b. 1983 Santiago, Chile) currently lives in Santiago and works as a painter. Since 1998 Vazko has painted public pieces in major cities across the globe, including his native Santiago, Paris, Sao Paulo, and New York, among other cities. Vazko was one of the featured artists at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain’s “Born in the Streets”, a groundbreaking international exhibition documenting the most important global street artists. His work has been featured in the New York Times, T Magazine, and a host of other global publications.

Founded by avant-garde visionary Robert Wilson in 2006, The Watermill Center is an interdisciplinary laboratory for the arts and humanities located in Water Mill, NY. The Watermill Center is dedicated to supporting artists at all stages of their career through its Artists-in-Residence Program, International Summer Program, and the newly-established Inga Maren Otto Fellowship. These unparalleled global residency programs are complemented by public events such as exhibitions, performances, open rehearsals, lectures, seminars and symposia, educational programs with schools and other local institutions, as well as tours of the building and grounds.

The Watermill Center itself is a 20,000 square foot flexible working space that includes a 6,000 volume research library, galleries, rehearsal and staging spaces, workshops, offices, and residences situated on eight-and-a-half acres of artist-designed and landscaped grounds. The Watermill Center Collection of almost 8,000 art and artifact pieces spanning the history of humankind is integrated into all aspects of the building and grounds as a reminder that the history of each civilization is told by its artists.
watermillcenter.org

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