Last week, The Chinati Foundation/La FundaciĆ³n Chinati announced its 2026 Artists in Residence: David Batchelor, Will Boone, Deondre Davis, SoiL Thornton, Gillian Walsh, and Sarah Zapata.
The 2026 cohort includes artists from the United States and Scotland working across a variety of media including performance, sculpture, textiles, printmaking, and painting. Each artist will spend up to two months living and working among the art, architecture, and land at Chinati.
The Artist in Residence (AiR) Program was initiated by Donald Judd in 1989 and remains fundamental to the artist-centered mission that Judd established at Chinati. Since its inception, more than 200 artists from over 25 countries have participated in the residency program, which does not require that artists produce new work but offers time and space for the development of ideas. Many artists conclude their time in Marfa with public open studios, talks, or performances.
Past AiRs include Farah Al Qasimi (2024), Eric N. Mack (2023), Dionne Lee (2022), Sarah Crowner (2022), Jessi Reaves (2021), Rosy Keyser (2017), Matt Connors (2015), Hernan Bas (2013), Ester PartegĆ s (2012), Steve Roden (2010), Charline von Heyl (2008), Christopher Wool (2006), Maureen Gallace (2005), Matthew Day Jackson (2004), and Katharina Grosse (1999), among others. IngĆ³lfur Arnarsson (1992) and John Wesley (1989), both of whom have work permanently installed at Chinati, were artists in residence. A full list is available at chinati.org/programs/artists-in-residence.
The Artist in Residence Program is generously supported by the Milton and Sally Avery Arts Foundation and an anonymous donor.
About the 2026 Artists in Residence:
David Batchelor (b. 1955, Dundee, Scotland) is an artist and writer based in London. He studied fine art at Trent Polytechnic, Nottingham, and cultural theory at Birmingham University. For over 30 years, Batchelor has been concerned with the experience of color within a modern urban environment and with historical conceptions of color within Western culture. His work comprises sculpture, installation, drawing, painting, photography, printmaking, animation, and textiles. Batchelor has exhibited worldwide, and his work is in the collections of a number of museums, including the Tate, London; the British Council Collection; Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York; Vorlinden Museum, Wassenaar, Netherlands; SĆ£o Paulo Museum of Modern Art, Brasil; and Museo de Arte Moderno, Santiago, Chile. Batchelor has also written books and essays on color theory, including Chromophobia (2000); the anthology Colour (2008, editor); and The October Colouring-In Book (2015). He is currently preparing a new book, Chromocopia, to be published in 2026.
Will Boone (b. 1982, Houston, Texas) makes works whose graphic power is matched by their palpable physicality, generating content from an unlikely array of sourcesāincluding music subcultures and the visual vernaculars of cattle ranches and barrooms. His technical processes are informed in equal measure by the DIY ethos of punk and the precision of industrial manufacturing, and give rise to paintings, sculptures, and immersive installations. Boone pays particular attention to forms that emerge from social contexts with no clear association to art historical narratives. Taken as a whole, his work serves as a repository for archetypal, if fragmentary, expressions of contemporary life. Boone has been the subject of solo exhibitions at David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles (2023); Karma, New York (2022); Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (2019); and Rubell Family Collection, Miami (2014). His work is held in the collections of institutions such as the FundaciĆ³n Baruch Spinoza, Barcelona; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; and the Rubell Family Collection, Miami. Boone lives and works in Houston.
Deondre Davis (b. 1991, Chicago, Illinois) is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work explores material redirection, object-making, and painting through a conceptual lens. Davis’ practice examines identity, consumption, and refuse. Recent and forthcoming solo exhibitions include Castle, Los Angeles (2025), and Gordon Robichaux, New York (2024, 2026).
SoiL Thornton (b. 1990, lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) graduated from Cooper Union in 2012. Recent solo institutional exhibitions include Choosing Suitor, Secession, Vienna (2023); Decomposition Evaluation, Kunstverein Bielefeld (2022); and Sir Veil, Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (2016). Thorntonās work is in the permanent collections of the Buffalo AKG Art Museum; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others.
Gillian Walsh (b. New York) is an artist and choreographer from New York. Recent works include Fame Notions, Performance Space New York (2019); May, Gropius Bau, Berlin (2022); Wilderness, Danspace Project/New York City Players, New York (2023), and Friday Night Lights, Dia Chelsea, New York (2024).
Sarah Zapata (b. 1988, Corpus Christi; lives and works in Brooklyn, New York) employs weaving, tufting, and traditional craft techniques to create loud, architecturally responsive installations that traverse themes of gender, colonialism, and fantasy. Zapataās site-specific works reflect her intersecting identities as a queer woman of Peruvian heritage raised in Evangelical Texas and now based in New York. She has held solo exhibitions at the ASU Art Museum, Tempe; Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City; and Museo MATE, Lima; and her work is in the permanent collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museo de Arte de Lima, Lima; the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; among others. She has been the recipient of grants from the Dallas Museum of Art, the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture, the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, and the Harpo Foundation.