diaries


Is the Artist Residency Worth It?

March 2026
9 min read


Arts Editor: Victoria Comstock-Kershaw


Contributors:

Sabīne Šnē
Franziska Von Guten
Natalia Revoniuk
Jamie Seymour
Eva Dixon
Julia Gutman
André Hemer



The artist residency is one of the few things in the art world that artists will defend with genuine warmth. It can change your practice, your network, your sense of what you're even making work for. It can also cost you a month of lost income, a donated work and a $25 application fee for something that turns out to be a big fat scam. Underregulated, uneven and increasingly crowded with programmes that range from life-changing to exploitative, we set out to work out whether the artist residency is actually worth it.

The Allegory of Painting, Vermeer, c. 1666-8.

Last summer, an Instagram ad began circulating. The digital publication Abstract Mag was offering a two-week residency in a château in the South of France — flights, accommodation, meals, materials, all covered. Fifty partner galleries would be considering your work, an exhibition of the final products would be hosted, and a magazine review would be published. It sounded, frankly, incredible. Too incredible, perhaps. Application deadlines were extended again and again — April, then May, then June. When artists looked closer, not a single partner gallery was named anywhere. Emails bounced. A $25 application fee was requested after an initial sign-up form. Reddit threads, Substack articles and more cropped up, lamenting not only the loss of the initial fee but the state of an art world that created enough desperation for these sorts of alleged scams to take root.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Dutch Proverbs, 1559.

To the internet’s collective dismay, it didn't turn out to be a scam, or at least not one in the Fyre Island sense. Photos of real artists at a real château have since appeared on their Instagram — though with comments turned off, and admittedly it looks like there hasn’t been the promised exhibition or accompanying publication. One French participant, whose sister lived nearby and who went despite her reservations, described the two weeks as "clearly amazing." She was generous about the organisational chaos: poor communication, mystery around how artists were selected, no clarity on what would happen next. "I think as it was the first edition and the team is small and young, the organization could have been better," she notes, "but I am not gonna complain as I had two great weeks."

Leonora Carrington, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur, 1953.

The residency resides in an awkward category: not always a complete racket, but not exactly always a guaranteed return either, something floating in the large and underregulated middle ground of “experience” that most artists will have to navigate the worth of. The residency can be a turning point or a tax write-off. It can be the month that rewires your practice, opens a new body of work, or puts you in a room with people who will end up mattering the most to your career. It can also be an expensive, logistically exhausting commitment that leaves you with a half-finished project, a dent in your savings and a vague sense that you should have just stayed in your studio. The difference between those two experiences is rarely obvious from the outside. So: is the artist residency worth it?

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Giorgio de Chirico, Piazza d'Italia, 1970.

For artist Natalia Revoniuk, the answer is unambiguous, although the circumstances were extraordinary. In 2022, a few months after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine began, she took part in Villa Austria, a residency in Feldkirch that brought together six Ukrainian women artists working across painting, video, textile and installation. "Everything was provided: accommodation, food and materials," she says. "It gave us a rare freedom to focus entirely on creating." The timing made everything more intense: artists processing the same reality through entirely different languages, conversations that never really stopped. During the residency, Revoniuk moved well beyond her usual practice, creating an installation inside an empty twelve-metre swimming pool covered entirely in black film, transforming the space into a surface for drawing that visitors could physically enter. She also made a series of canvases — one of which she cut and partially burned before repainting — built around the idea that war accelerates personal evolution. The residency, she says, "expanded my artistic language and strengthened my trust in experimentation and intuition." Three years later, many of the participants are still in contact.

Ukeles, Washing/Tracks/Maintenance Outside, 1973.

This is the kind of testimony that makes the residency sound not only worthwhile but essential. And, for many artists it genuinely is — not necessarily because every residency produces work of that weight, but because the conditions it creates are difficult to manufacture elsewhere. Artist Sabīne Šnē, who tries to do at least one residency a year, describes the appeal in terms of productive disruption: "[Residencies] push one outside familiar surroundings and comfort zones. They disrupt routine in a productive way, like pressing a reset button you did not realise you needed. You return home slightly altered, carrying new ideas, new relationships and a collection of questions that will probably turn into artworks later." Her preference is for research-led programmes that include studio visits, field trips, talks, some form of mentoring. "They function as a temporary laboratory for shaping new ideas and testing them, but also as a kind of pause, a mini vacation. You are still working, but differently. You observe more, listen more, walk more, and thinking counts as productivity."

There is also something less tangible but equally valued: the community. Šnē describes residencies as one of the few situations in adult life where you are placed inside a small temporary community of strangers with a common purpose — cooking together, exchanging reading recommendations, borrowing tools, complaining about your projects. Residency friendships, she notes, often outlast the residency itself. Revoniuk says the same. It is a reminder, as Šnē puts it, "that artistic practice does not exist in isolation" — which sounds like a platitude until you have spent enough years in a studio alone to understand exactly what she means.

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Joos van Cleve, Saint Jerome in His Study, 1528.

The geography of where you go, it turns out, shapes the experience as much as the programme itself. Franziska Von Guten, who co-founded an artistic collective and has done residencies both online and in person, found the contrast between northern and southern Europe striking. A residency in Naples was her most memorable: "I believe the context profoundly influenced the work we produced, and that, to me, is the essence of a residency: when the inspiration draws directly from the city or the surrounding territory." The northern European experience, by contrast, felt closer to salaried work — more structured, more obligatory. The trade-off was real though: more freedom in the south, but fewer concrete opportunities at the end. More structure in the north, but a better-organised network and genuine follow-up. Neither is simply better. It depends, as with most things in an artist's career, on what you actually need at that moment. Artist Jamie Seymour, for example, cites as his most memorable residency The Field in Derbyshire — now defunct — housed in what he describes as a "crazy surreal former Steiner school in the middle of the countryside." That The Field no longer exists says something about which residencies survive and which don't. The ones with the glossiest websites and the biggest Instagram followings tend to outlast the ones that are, well, simply good. It is not always a reliable indicator of quality in either direction.

Sophie Calle, Hotel Room, 1981.

What the programme prioritises matters just as much as where it is located. Australian artist Julia Gutman is candid about the ways residencies can go wrong even when they are legitimate: "It definitely depends who runs them — how comfortable you feel, and how much pressure there is to perform for collectors etc. and how rigid or school-like it feels." Over-programming is a particular pitfall. "Sometimes they are obsessed with shepherding you around the city, too many studio visits, and it doesn't usually lead to anything." What makes something special, in her experience, is almost the opposite: "Less programming and scheduling, legitimate studio space and thoughtful pairings of artists. Less focus on professionalisation and more on international community building." It is a useful corrective to the assumption that a packed itinerary signals a serious programme. Often it signals the opposite — a residency more interested in appearing valuable than in creating the conditions for actual work.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomorrow is the Question at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019.

But the conversation cannot stay aspirational for long. Artist Eva Dixon's response to the question of whether residencies change your practice is a sharp yes and no: "They always help with growth but the cost of having to get to the place and afford to stay there without funding — which is most residences — can be taxing, especially when they are only a month long and require a work to be donated." This is the version of the residency that rarely makes it into the brochure: the one that costs you travel, accommodation, a month of lost income, and a work, in exchange for an experience that may or may not lead anywhere. The maths does not always add up. Šnē is equally direct on this point: "I only apply to funded residencies. Personally, I do not see why artists should have to pay to work." She also flags something that tends to be underacknowledged in discussions about access: "Mobility in the arts is not equally distributed. Holding an EU passport makes travel and visas significantly easier, which is a privilege that I have and I should acknowledge."

Gregor Schneider⁠, Haus u r, 1985-2001.

So how do you spot a bad one before you commit? The rise of what artists have started calling "AirBnB residencies" — essentially holiday lets with a creative veneer and a programme PDF — has made due diligence more important than ever. One France-based programme is frequently cited as an example: an artist described it plainly as "an AirBnB marketed to artists, not an artist residency," noting that acceptance was guaranteed, costs ran between €60 and €100 a night, studio space was shared between up to six painters in a room of roughly ten by twenty feet, and the organisers had no meaningful connection to art institutions. "I would recommend it for a weekend getaway," they wrote, "but it is NOT an art residency." At the more serious end of the spectrum, a Berlin-based programme that took six Black American artists abroad for a six-week residency was described by a participant as "a complete disorganised disaster," involving lost and unaccounted-for artworks, artists being made to share rooms with the programme founder, and months of "lies, gaslighting and ridiculous emails" when residents attempted to retrieve their work. One contributor offered a rule of thumb that cuts through most of the noise: "The residencies that promote themselves as artist promoters are always BS — because that is NOT the purpose of a residency. A residency is a place to give space and support for the undisturbed creation of work." If the marketing leads with exposure and gallery connections and buries the studio provision, treat it with suspicion. If you will definitely be accepted, you are making a booking, not being selected. And if the accommodation is the most prominent feature of the website, ask yourself honestly whether you are looking at an artist residency or a boutique hotel trying to appeal to a desperate demographic.

David Hockney, Portrait of the Artist, 1972.

It is useful, then, to hear from someone running one of the good ones. André Hemer, artist and co-founder of Painting Diary — a long-form publication and residency — is candid about what actually makes the thing work: "The basic managerial stuff is the hardest. We have a coordinator that deals with a lot of the practical stuff and in a way that's as important as anything conceptual." The needs of residents, he notes, vary enormously and require constant adaptation. But the principle he keeps returning to is simple: "The most important thing in my opinion is that the residency lets the artist decide what outcome they want, and doesn't overload with expectations. The more freedom in time spent, the better for the work." He is equally clear-eyed about the collector residency model, which pushes artists toward production above all else: "You can miss the benefits of actually being in a new place with new people and context." A residency that tells you what to make is, in its own way, as much of a problem as one that takes your money and gives you a shared studio the size of a bathroom.

Rirkrit Tiravanija, Tomorrow is the Question at Remai Modern, Saskatoon, 2019.

So, is the artist residency worth it? The checklist, distilled from everyone here, is fairly simple. Is it funded, or are you paying to attend? Is acceptance selective, or will everyone who applies get in? Does the marketing lead with the studio and the programme, or the views and the networking opportunities? Are previous participants named and reachable? Is the studio space legitimate and genuinely yours to use? Are you being given time to work, or a schedule that works around you? And critically — do you know what you want from it? A new body of work, a change of context, time to research, the right people in the room? The residency that answers a specific question your practice is already asking will almost always outperform the one that simply sounds impressive. None of this guarantees a transformative experience. But get it right and you may, like Revoniuk, return home with work you could not have made anywhere else — and people you will still be talking to three years later.

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