Posted On
Share
Emmanuel is hosting four working artists this summer through the Emmanuel College Artist-in-Residence (ECAR) program.
Now in its 14th year, the program boosts the creative environment at the Emmanuel Art Department and connects students with larger ecosystems of creativity off campus.
“It’s really about building bridges and bringing people in,” said Associate Professor of Art Stephan Jacobs, who runs the ECAR program. “It gives students a chance to interact with people who are working in art and maybe start to build their own networks a bit.”
The six-week residency provides time and space for artists to develop new work at the Emmanuel studios. In return, the residents bring their creativity to campus and provide unique learning opportunities for students in a collaborative environment. Those connections often continue paying off after summer is over, added Jacobs.
“Beyond the energy they bring to our studios, ECAR artists often return during the academic year to share their work through lectures and hands-on workshops,” said Jacobs. “These relationships often grow into something larger—sparking exchanges that have sent students around the world, from the Galapagos to Bauhaus University Weimar. It’s a testament to what a summer residency can become.”
The annual residency program concludes with an exhibit in the Gallery 5 space, on the fifth floor of Eisner Administration Building. The public is invited to meet the artists and view their work at the 2026 exhibit opening on Thursday, July 16th from 4-7 p.m.
The residencies are awarded across four disciplines: Ceramics, Photography, Printmaking, and Social Practice. This year's artists are:
Luke Johnson — Printmaking
Luke Johnson works in print media, drawing, and durational engagements within collections. Within his work, Johnson draws from the stories and unintended afterlives of archival materials, responding to the ways objects embody, or fail to embody, their history and intent.
The resulting works pose a series of visually transmitted questions: what does it mean to leave a mark? Does it matter if such marks are traceable to their sources? And what does it mean to consider those marks, passed down through time by those who came before us, which may no longer be legible?
Jihyun Kim — Ceramics
Jihyun Kim is a ceramic designer from South Korea, who is based in London. Her practice blends sculptural and functional ceramics, drawing on Korean fairy tales, folk beliefs, and personal memories shaped by her grandmother.
Using gloop glaze as a structural material, she embraces its unpredictable flow to create forms that feel both intentional and mystical.
Through her work, she shares Korean stories and invites a sense of magic into everyday life.
William Mark Sommer — Photography
Sommer is a multidisciplinary traveling visual artist who engages with the American landscape through creating projects, books, and installations that utilize photography to illuminate narratives of nature, preservation, and empathy.
Through these ongoing creations, Sommer seeks to foster connections to the land, examine how human actions shape environments, and highlight the unique narratives expressed through place, identity, and connection.
Louise Siddons — Social Practice
Siddons is a transatlantic choreographer, printmaker, curator, and historian who uses social practice to mobilize embodied knowledge in communal history-making and queer epistemologies.
Across media, she creates work in the context of the ordinary, the vernacular, and the iterative rather than the spectacular. Hand-crafted, digitally informed, historically rooted, and movement-based, her work celebrates the queerness of the familiar through individual and collective forms of expression.
Visit the ECAR website for more information about the 2026 Artists in Residence.