Points of View: 20 Years of Artists-in-Residence at the Gardner celebrated the Museum’s residency program, which commemorated its twentieth anniversary in 2012. To date, seventy-four artists from twenty-four countries and an equally diverse range of disciplines had come to live and work at the Gardner. These residencies perpetuate the legacy of the Museum as a public resource for scholarship and creativity in the tradition of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s salon on the Fenway. Artists use their time to research and reflect, but they also nourish the museum, turning their unique perspectives to the collection, the archives, the building, and the world beyond the museum in exhibitions, performances, working with the Gardner’s school partnerships, and conversations with the community.

This exhibition offered a brief survey of the program through select works by past participants, including Ackroyd and Harvey, Luisa Lambri, Todd McKie, Abelardo Morell, Luigi Ontani, Elaine Reichek, Dayanita Singh, Su-Mei Tse, Nari Ward, and Danijel Zezelj as well as works and correspondence of artists who had personal ties to the museum, such as John Singer Sargent, whom Isabella Gardner invited to paint in the museum in the winter of 1903. It was enriched in July and August 2012 by another exhibition, Magic Moments: The Screen and the Eye, a selection of film and video works by past residents Cliff Evans, Luisa Rabbia, Taro Shinoda, Su-Mei Tse, and David Wilson shown in the main special exhibitions gallery.

Points of View: Twenty Years of Artists-in-Residence was made possible in part by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Gardner Museum receives operating support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council.