Now in residence
Hub-Bub chooses four artists to live here, serve here
JULY 18, 2011 11:00 a.m. 
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They’ll share it with the community for the next 10 months.
Camille Bonham has taught drawing, bookmaking and alternative photographic processes to such disparate groups as inmates at the New Correctional Facility in Iowa and students at the M’Adamfo Pa Community Center in Accra, Ghana.
Mark Rice has been a team leader of his own homegrown multinational corporation, has performed with local and touring musical outfits and now has turned to printmaking.
Steve Snell was once the sole art teacher in the remote Alaskan village of Yakutat.
And Eric Kocher has worked as an assistant poetry editor for “Gulf Coast” and has been published or will be published in “Boston Review,” “DIAGRAM,” “Octopus,” “The Offending Adam,” and “Washington Square Review.”
They were selected from among 125 visual artists and about 100 writers.
“They were chosen from among the top young artists in the country,” said Hub-Bub executive director Celia Cooksey. “And we’re asking them to come and immerse themselves in the Spartanburg community.”
They’ll show their work at the 2011 AiR Entry Show at the Showroom on July 21 from 7 p.m. until 9 p.m.
Kocher will present a reading of original poetry at 8 p.m.
Hub-Bub was still in its infancy when its organizers realized there was a dearth of young adult artists in Spartanburg.
They knew vibrant cities included edgy, creative people and Spartanburg’s were leaving to go to school or to pursue jobs and not coming back.
The town, they decided, needed some fresh creative blood.
So Hub-Bub’s Artists-in-Residence program started.
Three visual artists and a writer were brought in for 11 months to “live free and create.”
In addition to getting free rent in the third-floor loft studio apartments in what was an old Nash Rambler car dealership on South Daniel Morgan Avenue and time to create their own art, the artists-in-residence would be required to perform 20 hours a week of community service.
Some taught. One organized a big poetry reading. Still others curated shows at the Showroom, Hub-Bub’s entertainment venue that features music, performances and art exhibits.
Five classes have already come and gone. Some of the 20 former artists-in-residence have stayed in Spartanburg. Others have gone on to teach, open their own art studios and even use art therapy to help domestic violence and sex trafficking victims in Nepal.
“They bring a great energy to Spartanburg,” said Cheryl Mirer, who directs Hub-Bub’s artists-in-residence program.
Cooksey said Hub-Bub tries to have variety among the artists each year and from year-to-year.
The fact that many of today’s young artists – between the ages of 20 and 35 – enjoy working in more than one medium helps make the job of choosing a bit easier.
“It’s still agonizing,” she said. “It’s literally putting pieces of paper together as a group to see how they’ll all fit.”
Compatibility is important, Mirer said. “It comes down to how we think they’ll live and work together,” she said “They spend a lot of time with each other even though they have their own work space.”
Bonham grew up in Bad Homburg, Germany and Ann Arbor, Mich. She is a member of the stop-motion animation collective “Tiny Circus.” She was a resident at the New York Mills Cultural Center in 2011 and received a full fellowship to the Vermont Studio Center.
Snell grew up in Columbus, Ohio. After he graduated from Miami of Ohio, he moved to Alaska, eventually becoming Yakutat’s sole art teacher. There, he lived on a floating house in the harbor.
Now, Snell shows his adventurous side in his art, exploring the mediated and physical reality of American popular culture and his relationship to it. He utilizes forms of popular and social media and physical performance, video, sculptural installation and painting and drawing.
His work has been shown in galleries and film festivals in Ohio, Kentucky, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island.
After graduating from Indiana University, Rice became the team leader of his own homegrown multinational corporation, Goatmother Industrial. Working under different smaller companies and pseudonyms within this conglomerate, he has worked in a variety of mediums and techniques from drawing to prints to performance and video. He also maintained a deep attachment to music.
He was able to combine his pursuit of visual art and music with the founding of the Art Hospital, an exhibition space and all-ages venue for regional and national art exhibitions and music performances in Bloomington, Ind.
In 2009, he was accepted into the printmaking program at the Rhode Island School of Design.
Rice’s ideas for future projects include a printmaking seminar and a $5 Painting Show. He also wants to contribute to Spartanburg’s music community.
Kocher grew up in Baldwin, N.Y. He has taught literature, creative writing and freshman composition. He has also taught poetry to elementary school students for the organization Writers in the Schools, and has taught the past few summers at the University of Virginia’s Young Writers Workshop.
Kocher said he wants to work on a podcast that features the voices and stories he encounters in Spartanburg.
So how will the sixth AiR class distinguish itself from the rest? Only time will tell.
(The artists have already been in town for one month.)
The long, from the short of it
JANUARY 27, 2012 9:59 a.m. (2)
JANUARY 20, 2012 9:31 a.m. (0)
DECEMBER 21, 2011 2:33 p.m. (0)
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