Shannon Brooks

Shannon Brooks has been invited to a week-long artist residency at a private residence/artist studio in Prattsville, NY from June 23-29, 2024. This rural space is located in an old general store-home with access to a barn that has been newly converted to a dance/performance studio. The residency will provide Shannon open-ended time to convene with nature, experiment in the studio, and dig deeper into her current project CLAY PRACTICE. At the conclusion of the residency, Shannon will have the opportunity to connect with the Prattsville community through a small, intimate showing at the studio-barn, or through facilitating a public workshop at Prattsville Arts Center. 

The WOO Grant will help cover travel expenses, including transportation and food.

Shannon Brooks (ACG ‘21) is the 2023 Leeway x Fleisher Visual Artist-in-Residence. As a low vision/blind person, Shannon is interested in de-centering sight as the predominant form of creating and experiencing artwork and exploring more physical ways of communicating. During the residency, Shannon will develop Topographical Memory Maps, hand-built wearable ceramic costumes that use touch as the primary method to create and experience the works. These sculptural garments with expressive structures are inspired by systems of touch-reading like Braille and experiment with different textures and glaze to expand on the emotion and thought behind each piece. Living objects meant to be touched, worn, and even broken through the creation and exhibition process, these ceramic garments are a sensory score reflecting the constant transformation of personal and collective memory.

As a trauma-informed teaching artist with experience facilitating collectively-led creative projects and performances, Shannon will facilitate a series of workshops that encourage participants to explore their bodies, histories, and emotional capacities in clay with a sense of comfort and curiosity. Throughout this residency, Shannon will showcase disability as a generative creative force and is committed to growing trauma-informed accessible creative practices, specifically supportive to people with cognitive, sensory, and developmental disabilities.

Shannon Brooks will create an accessible online community archive of art and documents from Disabled artists in Philadelphia, support the artists to develop multimedia responses to the archive, and present the responses at two public virtual events. Shannon's project includes collaborating with artist-archivists and a website housing the archive and events, where Disabled people can celebrate disability and confront oppression.