AGO X RBC Emerging Artists Program 2024

AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence Program Open Call and Upcoming Events

Call for Applications: 2024 AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence

Theme: Movement
A Three-Month Residency for Early Career Artists
Deadline for Submissions: October 24, 2023, 5:00 PM ET
To submit your application, visit:
2024 AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence Program | Art Gallery of Ontario

Are you an early career artist looking for mentorship and the chance to develop your artwork at the Art Gallery of Ontario?

The 2024 AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence Program will support three artist projects, each to be developed over a three-month residency and shared with AGO visitors. Artists are asked to respond to the theme of movement in their proposals. We invite artists to think about the movement of people, ideas and places; how movement mingles with, enhances or engages the museum context; and how personal experience shapes their project in the context of the AGO.

We are looking for early career artists and collectives interested in creating and developing artworks from a broad range of art practices (maker and/or social experiences, experience design, live performances, etc.) This residency is hybrid, with opportunities to connect in person and online with AGO staff and audiences. Three consecutive three-month residencies will run between January and October 2024.

Artists are invited to take inspiration from a specific AGO collecting area, artwork, or genre, a current or upcoming exhibition or an area of expertise within the museum, including conservation, library & archives, and/or education & public programs.

Engagement with AGO audiences — whether broadly defined or specific to one’s area or research-creation – is at the heart of this residency. Proposals must explain how AGO visitors, staff and other collaborators will interact or engage with the project.

Selected artists will receive:

• Mentorship for early career artists to further their proposal (meetings with the AGO mentors are taken in person, and may be undertaken remotely based on residency plan)
• Daily access to the Anne Lind Artist-in-Residence Studio exclusively used by the artist (applicants to describe expected use of on-site studio)
• An artist fee of $10,000 CDN (inclusive of travel, if applicable, and per diem), and an additional fee for materials, production and presentation costs for the project to be determined collaboratively during the residency period

Who should apply:

• Artists who have experience in working with large public audiences and/or maker projects is an asset
• Artists, individuals, and/or artist collectives who self-identify as ‘emerging’ and are in the early stages of their artistic career
• Artists residing in Canada
• Practicing professional artists with two (2) or more years of experience
• Applicants from underrepresented communities are encouraged to apply. We welcome applications by populations who have not been equitably represented in museums, including Black, Indigenous, artists of colour, LGBTQ2+, women and persons with disabilities

Please note that we do not accept applications via email or applications sent after the deadline. We encourage you to submit your application hours or days in advance.

2023 AGO x RBC Artist-in-Residence Upcoming Events

The Goldberg Variations by Clayton Lee
Friday, October 13, 7 PM – 8:30 PM
Walker Court, Art Gallery of Ontario
Free with General Admission
The Goldberg Variations by Clayton Lee | Art Gallery of Ontario (ago.ca)

Responding to the theme of humour, performance artist and AGO X RBC Artist in Residence Clayton Lee stages a large-scale intervention in Walker Court and the Gallery at large. The latest in an ongoing series, the artist explores his own personal history through the lens of queer diasporic sexuality and aesthetics, classical music, and professional wrestler Bill Goldberg.

Clayton Lee (he/him) is a Toronto-based performance artist and curator. Performances include (◕‿◕✿) at The Performance Arcade in Wellington, New Zealand and Chapter’s EXPERIMENTICA in Cardiff, Wales; Ways of Being, co-created with Michael Rubenfeld (FOLDA, The Kick and Push Festival); Duets for Beginners (SummerWorks); and Informal Beginnings (Katzman Contemporary’s Duration & Dialogue II). He is the outgoing Rhubarb Festival Director at Buddies in Bad Times Theatre and is the Director (Artistic) of Fierce Festival.

Online Premiere: Mechanism (2023) by Eva Grant
AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence: Eva Grant | Art Gallery of Ontario

Developed over the course of her summer term as AGO X RBC Artist-in-Residence, join us for the debut of Eva Grant’s experimental film Mechanism. Featuring a single character transforming into four comedic archetypes, the film explores the ways in which laughter can be divorced from humour, by showcasing it as both escape symptom of hysteria, malaise, and malevolence.

Eva Grant is a bilingual filmmaker operating at the intersection of queer and BIPOC storytelling. She is an enrolled member of the St’át’imc Nation and is also of South and West Asian and European descent. She studied literature and philosophy at Stanford University, and her multimedia projects have been supported by the CBC, ReelWorld Screen Institute, BIPOC TV and Film, TELUS STORYHIVE, ImagineNATIVE, the Indigenous Screen Office and the Canadian Media Fund.

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