Summer 2025 Artistic Research Residency Program Open Call

The Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO) is calling on artists to present research proposals for the Summer 2025 Artistic Research Residency Program. 

Artists have been instrumental in shaping the Puerto Rican identity, untangling our daily experiences, and crafting possible futures. It is for that reason that we aim to provide an artistic residency in which the creative results are informed and inspired by research using materials from the CENTRO Library and Archives as inspiration. For this summer residency, we are seeking proposals that fall under our 2024-2025 annual theme: Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico. This call is open to all artistic disciplines.

Theme description: Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico

The CENTRO library and archive of the Puerto Rican Diaspora is the only archival repository in the United States committed to documenting Puerto Rican communities in the United States. From this standpoint, we are uniquely positioned to invite scholars to reflect on how archives, archival theory and practice allow us to reframe the present past of Puerto Rico and Puerto Rican communities as well as help us imagine and build Boricua futures.

The theme: Archives: Memory & the Present Past of Puerto Rico, invites researchers to engage with the word “archives” as concept,  practice, and theory by bringing together some of the most important framings of historically inflected research.  The theme contends with the material and theoretical importance of the archive in contemporary scholarship and research practices while opening a space to engage with contestation, archival reckoning, archival architecture, facilities, and accessibility, and quotidian interventions and forms of archival refusal. 

At a time when Puerto Rican Studies is seeing a resurgence in the United States, this is an opportunity to examine the roots of the field as we also contemplate what lies ahead. Both archival studies and archival structures in the Puerto Rican context, can be contentious and precarious. Thinking about the promises, betrayals, and possibilities of the archive in material and theoretical contexts opens a space for us to consider questions such as: How do we engage with institutional archives that continue to uphold colonial fantasies of race and gender? What are the material and theoretical relations between archives, memory, and temporality (e.g. notions of past, present, future)? What do we gain from challenges to various prominent historical archival practices like reading “archives against the grain,” which challenge the dominant historical consciousness and praxis of European empires? How do we approach memory and cultural preservation in times of austerity and natural disasters? These questions, and others will guide our discussions during this year-long seminar, where we will be considering different uses of the archive and explore how these spaces, collections, and practices can be transformed through a decolonial, feminist, and queer lens. 

Possible Topics:

  • Archival Silences
  • Memory and preservation
  • Archives and Affect
  • Embodiment 
  • Afro-Boricua archives 
  • Feminist Archives and archival practices
  • Queer Archives
  • Community Archives
  • Family Archives
  • Oral Histories
  • Archiving performance
  • Archives and Accessibility
  • Archiving through disaster
  • Tropical Archives 
  • Born digital archives
  • Archiving social media
  • Information/Right to Information (FOIA and other types of access to public information)
  • Archives and Accountability
  • Processing and new archival technologies
  • Metadata and Algorithms
  • Archival Engineering and Structures

Eligibility:

This call is aimed at artists over 21 years of age. The artist must should be able to work at CENTRO Library & Archives location (2180 3rd Ave, 1st Floor, Rm. 120 New York, NY 10035) during weekdays. 

Submission Guidelines:

The application form will ask you to provide the following:

  1. CV (maximum 3 pages) 
  2. A digital portfolio (can be a link to your website or an online platform) or samples of your work.
  3. Proposal:
  1. Description
  2. Collection(s) to be used
  3. Timeline of the residency
  4. Timeline of the final project (not covered by the residency)

Terms:

  1. This is a three month long residency and will start on May 15, 2025 and will end by August 15, 2025. The artist agrees to investigate in the Library and Archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and its digital collections, with the intention of informing the development of their artistic project.The artist must register at least 10 visits to the Library and Archives as part of the residency. 
  2. The Center for Puerto Rican Studies will provide a work space for the artist to carry out their research and will offer preferential and personalized support.
  3. The artist agrees to coordinate with local artists and area residents for conversations, panels, interviews, or other types of interaction that extends their research outside the walls of the archive and traditional sources of information.
  4. The artist will share their findings of their research process at a midterm meeting scheduled by and with the CENTRO staff.
  5. At the end of the residency, the artist will publicly present the research process, an advance or the finished work and will participate in one or more panels coordinated with CENTRO.
  6. The selected artist will deliver a digital document with the documentation of their artistic research. The document must include a narrative of the important findings, documentation of the creative process and audiovisual material. Copies of this digital document will become part of the archives of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies.
  7. The artist has the option of presenting their work directly in the community and can also make use of some spaces available in CENTRO and Hunter College.
  8. The artists will receive an amount of $5,000 ($2,500 at the beginning of the residency and $2,500 at the end) for research conducting to the creation of an artistic project.
  9. All project expenses must be covered by the amount awarded for the commission. This includes the fees of the artist, materials and equipment necessary for the execution of the work. 

Sending the application implies acceptance of all the conditions established in this call.

Complete the Application Form here

Amount: $5,000

Residency Duration: May 15, 2025 – August 15, 2025

Deadline:  March 1, 2025 at 11:59 pm.

Submissions must be received on or before the provided deadline.