Video by documentarian & alum Trey Burns, underwritten by the Corsicana Visitors’ Bureau.
ARTISTS
MARÍA VALENZUELA - Santiago, Chile – textile, embroidery
María Valenzuela’s practice consists of a study of drawing and tracing in space that dialogues with the languages of dance, performance, experimental video, photography, and embroidery. With a BA (sculpture focus) from the University of Chile, she studied photography at the Pontifical Catholic University and the ICP New York. She also studied Visual Anthropology at the University of Barcelona and received her Masters in Documentary Creation at the University Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona. Throughout her career, she has participated in video art exhibitions, performances, and projects that combine the audiovisual world with intangible oral heritage in Chile and Spain. After seven years in Spain, María proposed a new technique of hand embroidery on different supports in Chile, participating in national and international competitions and exhibitions. In Corsicana, María created a series of delicate colored-pencil drawings as well as embroideries on paper. A fluid investigation of line, a study of the possibilities of the grid, and a responsiveness to her environment inform María’s work, whose organic, linear movements and pattern and variation harken to a background in dance and a sustained interest in the dialogue between color and form. instagram.com/majevalenz
WALKER WALLS TARVER - Montclair, New Jersey – painting
Painter Walker Walls Tarver traces her lineage through a matrilinear heritage. She is inspired by her paternal grandmother, an artist and lifelong Texan whose legacy has long guided Walker’s studio practice. In Corsicana, Walker utilized the space to make drawings, small paintings on watercolor paper, and ultimately large-scale paintings informed by her engagement with her surroundings as well as with her grandmother’s stories and the Jungian imagery therein. She is amassing a library of imagery that offers a continuation with her previous work while adding new symbolic layers to her universe of shapes that evoke the performance of womanhood and the architecture of self and family. walkerwallstarver.com
WRITERS
JENNIFER HAIGH - Boston, Massachusetts – novel
Jennifer Haigh’s first novel, Mrs. Kimble, won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Her successive books—four novels and the short story collection News From Heaven—have won numerous awards and been published in eighteen languages. Her most recent novel, Mercy Street, is the winner of the 2023 Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, and was named a Best Book of 2022 by the New Yorker, the Washington Post and the Boston Globe. Her work has been recognized by the Guggenheim Foundation, the James Michener Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop, she teaches in the graduate program in creative writing at Boston University. In Corsicana, Jennifer worked on the first draft of a new novel. Having completed research, she used the intense time of the residency to open herself up to the initial process (larded with surprises) of putting words on the page. jennifer-haigh.com
JOSEPHINE BIRDSELL - Columbus, Ohio – Writing Studio
Josephine Birdsall is a queer, nonbinary artist and essayist in recovery. Their mixed media artwork and personal essays deal with issues of queer and feminine liberation, life and sobriety in subculture, and rest and recovery in the face of trauma. They aim to dismantle recovery stigma, de-glorify addiction, and speak truth to power. In Corsicana, Josephine continued work on a collection of personal essays that examines punk subculture and substance-use recovery, using a lyrical blend of research and personal narrative. The essay collection will ultimately culminate in currently untitled novel-length memoir.
ALUMNI
CÉLINE LEROY - Paris, France - translation
Céline is an alumna of 100W, who has translated scores of literary works—by the likes of Maggie Nelson, Deborah Levy, and Ross Gay—from English into French. During her 2022 residency, she worked on transposing novelist Barbara Kingsolver’s first collection of poetry into French. Back in Corsicana, she translated Peter Heller’s The Orchard, a novel set in a cabin in Vermont’s Green Mountains that follows a translator of Chinese poetry who seeks solace in the rigors of nature. instagram.com/celine2405
MATHILDE LAVENNE - Lille, France – multimedia
Multivalent 100W alumna Mathilde Lavenne, a graduate of France’s prestigious Le Fresnoy, National Studio of Contemporary Arts, is an audiovisual and new media artist and director whose work combines an exquisite sensibility to narrative with a rich and palimpsestic visual vocabulary and an engagement with emerging technologies.
Lavenne's ongoing Corsicana Residency since last spring 2023 is supported proudly in partnership with Villa Albertine, for her commitment to work here through summer 2025. The Land I Live On, an immersive documentary, explores the local legacies of petroleum and cotton as seen through the prism of women’s narratives, many of them African American and connected to a history of enslavement and capitalism. Local figures Ruby Williams and the late spiritual medium Annie Buchanan, among others, will figure in a metaverse. Having gleaned unique archival material and oral narratives, Lavenne is currently working on the storyboarding, mood boards, and graphic library that will allow her to create a prototype for the immersive documentary. Layering animated 3-D material, particle animation, mapped video sequences, and volumetric video capture, the result will create bridges and sound the hidden narratives of the invisible. Back in Corsicana inside Anteroom, Lavenne screened her existing, award-winning film Solar Echoes, which centers on a thermo-nuclear power plant in Andalusia, Spain—a haunting, ethereal juxtaposition with visions of the recent solar eclipse. mathildelavenne.com
