Artist Residency: A.I.R. Studio Paducah

July 1, 2022

A.I.R. Studio Paducah Residency

July 1 – 31, 2022

A.I.R. Studio
621 Madison Street
Paducah, KY

A.I.R. Studio Paducah, founded by artist Alonzo Davis, is situated in the heart of the LowerTown Arts District in Paducah, Kentucky. The studio, located at 621 Madison Street, was originally the private home of a traveling salesman, a watchman and a laundromat owner successively. Since it’s renovation in 2004, A.I.R. Paducah has hosted creatives from around the country and abroad have passed through A.I.R. doors to make the most of the space, including a large working studio, well equipped living accommodations, a sculpture garden and a storefront display gallery space. For more information about the space and the residency program, visit: https://airstudiopaducah.com/

The Project:
During my month long residence in July 2022 at A.I.R. Paducah, I focused on expanding Portraits of Home from a series of 12 works to a series of 32 works in preparation for the series scheduled display in September at the Gerald Ford Museum as part of ArtPrize 2022.

Portraits of Home is an ongoing series of small oval ink on panel paintings first begun in 2018 and has been previously featured in its various iterations in exhibitions at Marshall University, ROY G BIV and Workhouse Arts. An offshoot of Homesickness Series, the series is a study of the connections between architecture and portraiture and the connections between the homes of a city and the individual human stories they contained. Each individual work is a portrait of an endangered or lost home within the cities of Detroit and Highland Park, and serves to memorialize threatened histories or serve as stark reminders of the absence left behind by the physical erasure of markers of history in the name of blight removal or gentrification.