Within the umbrella term of artist residencies exists several variances of models and permutations of program types. There are residencies wherein a tangible outcome is expected culminating in a project and, conversely, residencies where contemplation and creative inquiry is emphasized without the burden of producing a quantifiable end result. Richardson and Walker describe this type of residency as initiatives that examine closely the process and method of artmaking itself as the end result that yields dividends to the stakeholders. An example of this type of residency would be the ACTivate Residency of Boston Center for the Arts which is designed to support artists in the risk-taking exploration of an idea or concept without the requirement or strictures of delivering a finished product. Other variants of artist residencies profiles and models include short-term, long-term, embedded, and nomadic and a variety of other modified forms that are interchangeable with diverse host settings such as museums, libraries, research institutions, and universities. Short term residencies can be as brief as one week while long-term and embedded can be extended to an entire year with access to site-specific resources such as the Los Angeles Public Library residency program that occurs annually. A distinguishing characteristic of a nomadic residency is the opportunity for the artist to work across a diversity of locations and communities which allows for engaging with a wider range of stakeholders.  

An example of an artist residency hosted by a library is the Los Angeles Public Library Creators in Residence initiative. The program consists of engaging multidisciplinary artists to create new work informed by the library’s collections and services that strives to amplify the library as a creative space. A recent iteration of this initiative had an artist invoke the library’s history and connection with local indigenous sites by creating large mixed-media collage paintings utilizing traditional methods to promote a public discourse on the library’s changing role in contemporary society. 

The pattern in the literature seeks to identify the specific values and goals within artist residencies. Caro does a succinct job of highlighting the shared values that were prioritized within artist residencies and were a factor in developing criteria and methods for evaluating the field of artist residencies. Those shared values include artist development, empowerment and collaboration, and community engagement. 

An overarching theme of artist residencies is the diversity and flux in which they can exist and reinvent themselves within. Consequently artist residencies is a term that is both interchangeable and all encompassing and sometimes elusive to wrestle down definitively as inherently artist residencies are a phenomenological concept that is ever evolving. Further to the phenomenological aspect, artist residencies emphasize the experiences of both the artist and the collaborating participants and meaning is derived from the unique positionality of each stakeholder. Gardner confirms the unique diversity of residencies and the variances that exists in program design and the challenge of categorising residencies into a single model and emphasizes how expectations and requirements vary greatly. 

Bianco also broaches the fluidity of artist residencies and submits that embedded artist residencies do not adhere to any one standard format and variances exist in terms of length and approach and what is prioritized is a synergistic collaboration between the artist and organization. A synergistic collaboration emphasizes diverse perspectives and strengths working together toward innovation and improved outcomes. Nishimura casts artist residencies similarly as a system that supports the dynamic process of artistic creation by equipping the embedded artist with space and resources for a set period of time. Similarly to the earlier example of a library iteration, the structure of artist residencies for Los Angeles County Library funds artists over three years and envisions artist placements as opportunities to collaborate with host departments toward artist-driven solutions to civic challenges via community participation and community assets. The unifying pattern that unites Bianco’s, Nishimura’s and Los Angeles County’s residency definitions is the aspiration toward co-design and co-creation through positive disruption and what Lithgow and Wall defines as productive friction which is classified as heretofore unprecedented yet desirable outcomes that deliberately confound given values, knowledges, priorities, and practices. Lithgow and Wall, also in the context of artist residencies, probe non-quantifiable social impacts as legitimate forms of outcomes that evoke social cohesion and incubate community cultural ecologies. Lithgow and Wall refer to societal cohesion as shared values and a sense of belonging as crucial to feeling united and connected with one another within a community. Thriving cultural ecologies are dependent upon how a community interacts with the social and physical space in a cultural context. Lithgow and Wall go on to maintain that the cultural activities and creative practices inherent in artist residencies can be understood as ecologies that do not necessarily produce an immediate and tangible economic return in perceived traditional cultural settings. 

I was convinced that we were veering toward the core of my line of questioning with productive frictions. Productive frictions serve as a defining characteristic of artist residencies. From the artist perspective, productive friction is instigated in many forms. To reiterate Lithgow and Wall’s position, productive frictions are the artistic activities and practices that run in opposition to the conventional organizational goals of efficiency. The forms of productive frictions can be listed as: 

• The discovery of new resources.. 
• Raising visibility for previously obscured experiences. 
• Legitimization of unanticipated uses of resources. 

Examples of this in a library setting can be an artist selected to highlight and engage with a special collection and amplifying through a creative lens for consumption by a wider audience and potential stakeholders. A residency that meets this description was staged by the Los Angeles Public Library where artist Ashley Walker took inspiration from the library’s historical archives of documents, manuscripts, and photographs to create work and public programming that culminated in an exhibition hosted by the library. Also within the Los Angeles Public Library system, artist Tien Nguyen drew heavily from the library’s special collection of historical restaurant menus to explore the lost histories of the residents and communities that produced them. Another example of an artist residency in a library was Los Angeles County Library’s Kamishibai Project wherein they collaborated with artist Alan Nakagawa to work with library staff on a traditional form of Japanese street theater and storytelling at various library branches to highlight artist-driven inquiries about complex civic issues such as homelessness and sustainable local conservation. 

The literature asserts that productive frictions are found in the opportunity for experimentation, cultivating new artistic practices, and experience with working within rigid institutional bureaucracies. For instance, the research of Arrendondo interrogates productive frictions from the stance of the artists through qualitative narrative inquiry methodologies to characterize the creative process within a community context and advances the notion that the artist benefits primarily from the opportunity to indulge in experimentation and develop their own exploratory artistic practice. Another study that employed case studies as a methodology to examine this phenomenon, Clark also investigates residencies from an artist perspective and concludes that the opportunity to co-create affords a chance for artists to develop a socially engaged practice and have their artwork be participatory and community-informed. A participatory and community-informed practice refers to a form of participatory action research that researcher Lenette describes as a method that yields results that challenge established and dominant research paradigms that emphasize objective measurement and generalization such as positivism in favour of practices that are demonstrably more collaborative, creative, and respectful of co-researchers’ ideological underpinnings. A socially engaged practice is described as art that is collaborative and participatory and involves people throughout the process of creation akin to participatory action research. Olsen examines how socially engaged art that is a feature of artist residencies employs contradictions and conflict to broach critical questions about social conditions in which an artist is embedded. Sandberg also approaches a definition of residencies from the aspect of artists and employs a thematic inductive analysis through semi-structured interviews to determine that artists can develop their own practice and adapt as artists by resisting institutional conformity and structure and maintain artistic identity and autonomy.

Creative experimentation and innovation are the impetus that consistently appear in the defining of artist residencies. Scholars assert that artist residencies and productive frictions hinge upon welcoming process-oriented unintended results and being receptive to inviting new community narratives. Rasmussen employs a case study methodology to conclude that art can be effectively wielded to address systemic social problems and challenge prevailing norms and that the process of co-creation and collaboration is more important than the end result in municipal artist placements. Rasmussen asserts that the disruption of everyday operations in an art context is part and parcel with the intervention. Zeplin employs a grounded theory methodology to analyze case studies of artist residencies and host institution bureaucracies. Zeplin concludes that while corporate structures struggle to accommodate the will and creative processes of artists, these challenges result in experimentation, risk, and failure and consequently becomes a valid result and of value to the institution. Another shared characteristic of productive frictions from an experimental perspective is the difficulty in discerning results and evaluating value. Using a case study methodology, Streatfield and Markless investigate systematic approaches to impact evaluations in library settings and confirm that the language of evaluation is inconsistent and problematic and lack the necessary impact indicators and benchmarks that are conventional for setting objectives and accountability. 

In this establishment of an artist residency definition, it’s critical to also investigate the aspirations of intended outcomes. Articulating a clear distinction between outcome and impact will also serve the investigation of artist residencies. Drawing divergence from the two concepts will demarcate how one result differs and delineates from the other. Lang scrutinizes placemaking in the context of impact through a case study methodology under a theoretical lens of place intensification. She examines which stakeholders yield social dividends and benefits that are tangible and intangible. Lang delineates impact as a result achieved through a number of interactions and factors while defining outcome as a result that can be directly correlated to a specific intervention. Consequently it can be surmised that placemaking is a pivotal defining characteristic in defining artist residencies and how it functions in the form of opportunities to co-create and collaborate with professional artists and gain new perceptions of public library spaces. Lang defines placemaking initiatives as a combination of community participation, culture, and place attachment that strengthens a community by producing an emotional bond to a location. Crane adopts a case study methodology to determine that placemaking achieves a dual objective for the community as effective library outreach and establishing a shared community identity. In relation to social returns on investment, Clark  cites that artist residencies have the ability to promote the mental wellbeing of library users by reducing isolation and co-creating a new artistic vision for library spaces. This spurring of rediscovering library spaces incites civic participation and increases confidence in terms of library users utilizing heretofore unfamiliar library resources and spaces. The line between artist and community stakeholder can be blurry and Damon-Moore researches the impact of placemaking on artists and frames the changing perceptions of library space and art from an artist perspective as a productive friction. 

To further aid in defining artist residencies, it is beneficial to examine how productive frictions is characterized by the host institution. Host institutions cast artist residencies as an opportunity to re-evaluate operational processes, organizational identity, and increase administrative tolerance for ambiguity and uncertainty. Bianco investigates how institutions can benefit from artist residencies and cites the opportunity to embrace uncertainty, open-ended outcomes, and ambiguity can strengthen an organization. Berthoin Antal employs a dynamic identity model and narrative methodology to conclude that, within the framework of artist residencies, employees have the ability to construct new narratives via collaboration and rethink an organization’s receptiveness to change. The research of Lithgow and Wall further builds on that proposition of imposing new narratives and emphasizes the benefit of accentuating and introducing intentional inefficiencies within an institution to reimagine conventions and introduce new forms of engagement between institution and community. Rooney-Browne and McMenemy performed a textual analysis and concluded that it would behoove libraries to re-examine their own perception and reconcile the tension between social responsibility and the conventional rigid quantifiable output of a civic institution. Taylor also performs a textual analysis of existing gray literature to examine the cross-sector collaboration opportunities within artist residencies and maintains that the institutional benefit of enacting internal cultural shift and the process of destabilizing operational norms and co-creation itself as more significant than the finished art product. The LA County Arts & Culture Evaluation Report arrived at a similar conclusion that artist placements had expanded the view of respective host departments and convinced them that art-as-process could be a useful tool in achieving organizational missions. Art as process is explained by researchers Richardson and Walker as the artmaking practice itself being emphasized as the artwork and methods concurrently make themselves apparent as the work is being realized.  

Taking these disparate approaches to defining artist residencies and synthesizing commonalities and differences of these scholars’ descriptions convinces me that a new overarching definition emerges. The unifying characteristics compel me to surmise that artist residencies are collaborations that center an emphasis on the unknown and highlighting the uncertainty in collaboration in a manner that attempts to be beneficial to stakeholders involved. 

After wading through the literature and surfacing with a newfangled understanding of artist residencies, I’m convinced there’s a wealth of further research and studies to further conduct to better aid in residency design and consequently help each respective stakeholder from the artist and institution and community members alike. We’re at the cusp of a better understanding of this unique civic and artistic endeavour. Akin to artist residencies themselves, we just have to seize the initiative and dash face-first into the heretofore unknown together.