Town Hall Artists Residencies: Something for Everyone

The Town Hall residency is a little known and incredible opportunity for creative people in Seattle. The Residency, like Town Hall’s more well known programming, encourages many ideas; it supports projects that connect to the community as well as stimulating interactions among different types of artists. There have been 35 residencies since it began in 2012, in theater, performance, poetry, music, visual art and multimedia. James Kuehn, who runs the program, explained to me that they have had two artists or scholars a year. From the applications they receive, a panel looks for questions the artists are asking and what stories they tell. Some residents go on to become local celebrities. Others are creating amazing projects that are still ongoing.

One example is Jahnvi Madan, a cello musician who discovered that women were performing jazz in the 1940s. She found transcriptions of their music in archives, and as a performer she performed some of them solo, as well as expanding them for a jazz band. Another is Ellie Barber who writes music, plays the tenor guitar and the cello, and explores a “symphonic–indy” sound with her 12-piece group Ollella.

Maie Brown is another former Artist Resident. She is a multi-talented visual artist and musician who created a program that focused on Israel and Palestine.

The current Artist Resident until December is Jocelyn R.C. She calls herself a “lens-based artist” and watching her work it is easy to see why. She has multiple devices, cameras, special projection techniques, and handheld scanners. Jocelyn is a highly original photographer and multimedia artist. Her Town Hall project “Here-Then” comprises a baby picture offered by the volunteer, overlaid with a current photograph that Jocelyn takes. She then digitally manipulates and overlaps the childhood image and the current image. Joselyn sees “Here-Then” as a way of creating a “shared humanity.” I participated in the project and felt a connection between my childhood, the artist, and the resulting project.

Experimentation is her usual approach to photography, so each completed work is quite different. “Solid Water Situations” shown at the International Climate Festival in England in 2025, had a simple theme of “Unmelting.” In each layout, an ice cube goes from melted to a square cube, rising up, so that it seems to be coming back from extinction. Jocelyn made 50 time lapse photographs of the ice. The most amusing is the ice cube with the topping of an everything bagel rising up and taking the topping along to be a topping of a cube of ice.

In 2024, she created huge photographs/projections titled “Seen in the Sound,” that were shown in the Fulton Center in New York City. Fulton Center connects the glitzy Westfield World Trade Center shopping mall (“the largest in New York City”) to trains to New Jersey and subways to Brooklyn. As people rush to make connections, they passed these huge murals of nature with manipulated layers. For five minutes every hour they were animated.

Town Hall’s residencies encourage exploring new ideas, or new ways of working. Coming up in December is a collaboration with Washington Ensemble Theater called “Wetworks.” Four residents supported by grants from 4 Culture will revise plays and hold a live reading. This public exposure will hopefully lead to a production of the play.

That is the spirit of Town Hall and its residencies. They sit at the intersection of many artistic groups in Seattle, encouraging connections and creativity.

~Susan Platt