Jasmine Brown, an interdisciplinary artist from Virginia now based in St. Louis and pursuing an MFA at Washington University, was named the university’s 2026 Media Artist in Residence — a program run by the school’s Time Based + Media Art area that gives one selected graduate student full access to its Media Studio for seven to ten days during spring break, followed by a public installation of whatever they made. Brown’s resulting piece, a moving-image and sound work titled Oh, for my foolishness, [rain] strike me down, now!, opened to the public on April 17.
A residency shaped like a sprint
Unlike the multi-month production timelines most artist residencies run on, WashU’s MAR program compresses everything — concept, production, and public presentation — into roughly a week and a half of concentrated studio access. That structure changes what kind of work tends to come out of it: less a polished, long-gestating project and more a document of what a specific artist can produce under real time pressure with full technical resources on hand. The residency also includes a performance component option and a scheduled public installation weekend, so the sprint has a hard, public deadline built in rather than an open-ended showing.
What the work is actually doing
Brown’s practice, as described around this residency, plays with systems of failure expressed through yearnings for belonging, worked out through digitally distorted film and — notably for a program built around a media studio’s technical infrastructure — whimsical, woolly physical installation elements alongside the moving image. That combination of glitch-adjacent digital distortion with soft, handmade material is a specific and legible aesthetic choice: the failure the work explores isn’t purely technical or purely emotional, it’s staged at the point where the two collide.
Why residencies like this matter for emerging artists
Programs structured around a compressed, fully-resourced sprint — rather than a slow-burn fellowship — are a distinct and useful model for student and emerging artists specifically, because they front-load access to expensive studio infrastructure (in this case, WashU’s full Media Studio) without requiring the artist to already have an extended, self-directed production plan. It’s a smaller, faster on-ramp into the kind of institutional support pipeline that eventually leads to solo shows and larger commissions — worth watching for anyone tracking how university media-art programs are cultivating the next wave of practitioners.