Exploratory Research Residency at CADVC

2026 Program: Eric Gottesman

Eric Gottesman (b. 1976 Nashua, New Hampshire) teaches, organizes, writes, and makes artworks with other people. His work addresses nationalism, migration, structural violence, history and intimate relations. His projects question accepted notions of power and, by engaging communities in critical self-reflection and creative expression, propose models for repair. Gottesman’s work is always collaborative; he has never made an artwork alone. 

Gottesman has presented his collaborative art projects at health conferences, universities, in government buildings, on the televised opening of the NFL season, on indigenous reserves, in post-war rubble, and at museums like MoMA PS1, MFA Boston, the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Addis Ababa City Hall, the Children’s Museum of Art in New York, the Cornell Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Center of Photography, the Addison Gallery of American Art and others. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaboration with young people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, toured that country in a series of street installations, and was published as a collective monograph. 

Gottesman is a John Simon Guggenheim Fellow (2020), a recipient of an ICP Infinity Award (2017), a Creative Capital Artist (2015), a Fulbright Fellow (2012), a Lightwork resident artist (2011), an Artadia awardee (2009) and a co-founder of For Freedoms. Sudden Flowers, his decade-long collaboration with young people in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, toured that country in a series of street installations, and was published as a collective monograph. An excerpt of his co-translation of Ethiopian writer Baalu Girma’s banned novel Oromaye was published in Hayden’s Ferry Review, only the second published English language translation of Amharic literature. 

Teaching is integral to his practice, and Gottesman is a mentor in the Arab Documentary Photography Program in Beirut, Lebanon and was the 2024-2025 W.W. Corcoran Visiting Professor in Community Engagement at George Washington University, where he is in residence through 2027 in conjunction with the National Gallery of Art.

2025 Program: Tomashi Jackson and Nia K. Evans

Tomashi Jackson is an expanded field painter whose multimedia work investigates the links between history, materiality, and current events. Her residency with CADVC, ongoing since 2022, has been the site of a developing a body of research focused on the history of and advocacy for alternative art spaces.

In 2025, in collaboration with policy analyst and economic advocate Nia Evans, Tomashi Jackson’s “Pedagogy Study Hall” project hosted a series of intermedia series of public discussions about investment and disinvestment in the arts and humanities, looking to Baltimore as a critical case study in grassroots organizing in a system of gross structural inequity.

Baltimore offers a critical forum for exploring a range of formal and informal organizational approaches to arts education and community development through the arts. It also provides an important model for exploring informal cultural economies that support local art education and production in the interstitials between, and in the absence of, major financial investment. This residency program resulted in the exhibition Pedagogy Study Hall and a number of public programs including the webinar Pedagogy Study Hall Roundtable: Education History and Policy.