Program Overview
The BMoCA + Swoon International Artists Residency (IAR) exists to invite artists from around the world to explore their practice within the Boulder community. In this 4-6 week long residency, visiting artists are given opportunities to meet new collaborators, and to explore new materials and practices. IAR emphasizes the importance of a meaningful, multi-layered cultural exchange and immersion into new environments as a means of enriching one’s artistry.
Swoon Art House has recently partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver to host artist residencies for notable national artists to foster collaboration between the arts community of Boulder and Denver.
The program is run as a collaborative effort between the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, the Swoon Art House, and other artists and educators in the Boulder community. The collective goal of the program’s administrative team is to give artists the time to focus and investigate their own practice, and to become involved in the Boulder community.
Mission Statement
“The BMoCA + Swoon International Artists Residency provides international creatives with the studio space, resources, time, and freedom to realize expansive works of their imagination. The residency fosters the growth of emerging and established artists, musicians, writers, curators, and other creatives by encouraging them to take risks, experiment, and explore their creativity.”
Residency Details
A typical Residency lasts 4-6 weeks, and scheduling is flexible based on individual timelines of artists. Artists are offered a generous stipend, and provided lodging at Swoon Art House. Artists are paired with community collaborators local to Boulder, CO, based on shared areas of interest and/or the technical demands of their work. In addition, there are two main events organized on behalf of each artist:
1.) an Artist Talk, in which the resident artist is able to share about their work and process with the community; and
2.) a Dinner, in which invited guests and donors of the program are gathered to honor the time and work of the artist during their residency.
Current Resident
2023 / Emir Klepo is a visual artist who specializes in the mediums of photography and film. He received his MFA from the Department of Graphic Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo and is currently a professor of photography at the Graphic Design and Multimedia Department at International Burch University. Additionally, he serves as the Dean of the Faculty of Education and Humanities at the same university.
Klepo’s work explores the significance of mementos and the fluid nature of memory. He is fascinated by how objects can hold profound meaning and evoke memories that we believed were forgotten. Through his photography and film work, Klepo seeks to capture the way in which our perceptions of the past can shift over time.
Klepo’s artistic practice also involves an exploration of the boundaries between motion and still photography. He is interested in the relationship between factual and abstract visuals and how they contribute to the narrative and contextual value of an image. He believes that this combination can create a powerful storytelling experience that engages the viewer on multiple levels.
In addition to his academic and artistic pursuits, Klepo has also achieved great success in his commercial career as an advertising, documentary, fashion photographer, and filmmaker. His unique approach to visual storytelling has earned him recognition and accolades in the industry. Klepo’s ability to seamlessly blend his artistic vision with commercial demands has made him a sought-after collaborator for a diverse range of clients.
Upcoming Residents
2024 / Asim Waqif, a Dehli-based artist, studied architecture at the School of Planning and Architecture, Delhi. After initially working as an art-director for film and television he later started making independent video and documentaries before moving into a dedicated art-practice.
His recent projects have attempted a crossover between architecture, art and design, with a strong contextual reference to contemporary urban-design and the politics of occupying/intervening/using public spaces. Some of his projects have developed within abandoned and derelict buildings in the city that act like hidden activity-spaces for marginalized people.
Concerns of ecology and anthropology often weave through his work and he has done extensive research on vernacular systems of ecological management, especially with respect to water, waste and architecture. His artworks often employ manual processes that are deliberately pain-staking and laborious while the products themselves are often temporary and sometimes even designed to decay. He has worked in sculpture, site-specific public installation, video, photography, and more recently with large-scale interactive installations that combine traditional and new media technologies.
2025 / Paula Nascimento is an architect and independent curator with degrees from the Architectural Association School of Architecture and the LSB University in London. Has collaborated with architecture studios in Oporto and London before founding Beyond Entropy Africa with Stefano Pansera. This research-based studio operated in architecture-urbanism-visual arts and geopolitics and was active between 2011 and 2016. Paula has also been a consultant on various projects, including the Angola Pavilion for Expo Milano 2015 and Expo Dubai 2020 and often collaborates with different artist institutions and collectives, both on the African continent and internationally. Between 2012 and 2020, she was a founding and active member of Colectivo Pés Descalços, a Luanda-based multi-disciplinary collective developing projects in the cultural field. Since 2019 Paula has been the curator of the African Galleries at Arco Lisbon. Currently, she is the Chair of the Artistic Committee at Nesr Art Foundation, a member of the Advisory Board of Hangar Center for Artistic Research, an associate Curator of the VII Lubumbashi Biennial, and a recipient of the 2022 Okwui Enwezor Fellowship Research Grant from the Independent Curators International.
Past Residents
2023 / Caledonia Curry, known as Swoon, is a contemporary artist and filmmaker recognized around the world for her pioneering vision of public artwork.Through intimate portraits, immersive installations and multi-year community based projects, she has spent over 20 years exploring the depths of human complexity by mobilizing her artwork to fundamentally re-envision the communities we live in toward a more just and equitable world. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition in a male-dominated field, pushing the conceptual limits of the genre and paving the way for a generation of women Street Artists.
Her recent work has been focused on the relationship of trauma and addiction. Through community partnerships that center compassion and the transformative power of art, Curry draws on her personal history growing up in an opioid addicted family as a catalyst for connection and healing. Over the past 10 years, she has founded and developed collaborative multi-year projects in Braddock and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Komye, Haiti, that address crises ranging from natural disasters to the opioid epidemic.
She is currently developing a full length narrative movie which will bring together drawing, immersive installation, stop motion animation and her collaborative work, with the traditions of storytelling through film.
Website
2019/ Tim Atkins is the author of many books, including Atkins Collected Petrarch, Deep Osaka, Koto Y Yo, On Fathers < On Daughtyrs , 25 Sonnets, Petrarch, and Horace. His poems have appeared in many anthologies, including The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem (2018) The Reality Street Book of the Sonnet, and Faber’s The Thunder Mutters (edited by Alice Oswald). He is also the author of a play: The World’s Furious Song Flows Through My Skirt, and a novel The Bath-Tub (forthcoming from Boiler House Press). He has read and performed his work in the Houses of Parliament (for Pussy Riot), in concert at the Victoria & Albert Museum, and all over North America and Europe. He has been a member of the summer faculty at The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University, and a member of Carla Harryman’s Poets’ Theatre in San Francisco. His work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Catalan, French, and Lithuanian. His current work is the long poem NOTHING CONCLUSIVE HAS YET TAKEN PLACE IN THE WORLD THE ULTIMATE WORD OF THE WORLD AND ABOUT THE WORLD HAS NOT YET BEEN SPOKEN THE WORLD IS OPEN AND FREE EVERYTHING IS STILL IN THE FUTURE AND WILL ALWAYS BE and sections are appearing in poetry journals in the USA, the UK, and Canada.
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- Images courtesy of James Tapscott
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- Images courtesy of Amalia Pica
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- Images courtesy of Tomoko Sauvage
Smilde’s work consists of installations, sculptures and photography. He explores the physical de-
construction and re-construction of materials; light, space, atmosphere and experience in relation to his architectural environment, creating a new moment between the realms of reality and the temporal. Website
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- Images courtesy of Berndnaut Smilde
Board Members
Rebecca DiDomenico was born in Greenbrae, California. She attended school at Claremont College, Tribhuvan University in Nepal and graduated from the University of Colorado with a BA in English Literature. In DiDomenico’s world, there is no separation between art and life, studio and home. Her work is concerned with the collision and interpenetration of various forms of nature, mythology, art history and metaphysics.
David Dadone comes to Boulder from Denver, where he has been a well-known figure in that city’s growing art scene. Dadone is the director at BMoCA in Boulder, CO. He was Deputy Director of the Museo de las Americas, which showcases Latin American art and culture. During David’s tenure at the Museo, he contributed to successful fundraising efforts as well as to the curation of innovative exhibitions, development of creative educational programming, and management of museum operations. Originally from Argentina, Mr. Dadone followed his passion for contemporary art to the U.S. eight years ago and recently became a citizen of this country.
Martha Russo (b. 1962, Milford, Connecticut) earned her BA in developmental biology and psychology from Princeton University in 1985. In 1984, she suffered a career-ending injury while vying for a spot on the United States Olympic Field Hockey Team. After recovering from surgery, Russo was attracted to the physical nature of sculpture. She began studying studio arts in Florence, Italy in 1983 and continued studying ceramics at Princeton University. In 1995, she earned her MFA at the University of Colorado Boulder. Russo’s sculptures and installations have been exhibited nationally at venues such as the Alan Stone Gallery in New York, Denver Art Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art/Denver, and The Santa Fe Art Institute.
Past Residencies
