NPS - National Park Service

04/30/2024 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 04/30/2024 08:21

Weir Farm National Historical Park Welcomes May 2024 Artist-in-Residence: Yael Ort-Dinoor

News Release Date:
April 30, 2024

Yael Ort-Dinoor is a learner and educator. She creates work centered around the embodiment of ritual practices and their relationship to place, time, and community. Yael is interested in the translation of metaphorical and physical surroundings, across mediums. Her work explores existing or fictional narratives of people, objects, and sites within non-linear storytelling, gestures, and transient spaces.

"As an immigrant artist without multigenerational lineage in one place, I am curious about how legacy impacts imaginations of the future," says Yael. "Working at Weir Farm is an opportunity to engage with all that was cultivated in a historic space - education, artistic practices, natural phenomena and familial traditions - and develop new works that join in dialogue with creative ventures that string together generations of makers. Inspired by these artists' legacies, I hope to create work within this residency that cartographically responds the space's landscape and unique histories."

Artist-in-Residence Open Studio Program Saturday May 25, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
Stop by the Artist-in-Residence Studio between 11:00 and 12:30 to meet May Artist Yael Ort-Dinoor, view her work, and learn more about the Park's Artist-in-Residence program. Light refreshments will be provided by the Friends of Weir Farm. No registration required.

More about May's Artist-in-Residence
As a former design faculty member at Boston University's School of Visual Arts (2007-2023), Yael Ort-Dinoor taught interdisciplinary courses in Performative Text and Design, Visual Systems, and Design Theory alongside graduate and undergraduate design studios. Yael holds a BLArch in Landscape Architecture and an MFA in Graphic Design. Beyond the studio, she is a dedicated yoga and movement practitioner and works as a field crew on a local community farm. Her work weaves material, abstract forms, and at times movement as a vocabulary responding to the environment around us. Using mark-making and repetition inspired by walking, farming, or creating serial work, she explores mundane and ephemeral nuances that turn into cartographic interpretations of the immediate environment.

During her residency, Yael plans to combine and develop two existing projects: Walking Maps and Shifting Landscapes. Borrowing signs and symbols from existing architectural buildings and objects within the Weir House, she will create work based in walks and land morphology. The goal is to create abstract maps that serve as cartographic representations of time spent at Weir Farm, including any of species observed by the Weir Farm phenology program. Yael's maps will involve visual interpretations of light and shadow, scent, texture or tactility, seeds, soundscape, etc., and are inspired by how Indigenous counter mapping relates to different ways of knowing or depicting land and nature.

About the Weir Farm Artist-in-Residence (AIR) Program
Weir Farm's AIR Program fosters contemporary artistic expression on site and prioritizes experimental and thought-provoking approaches to examining and interpreting our world through the medium of contemporary visual art practice. The AIR Program keeps Weir's experimental tendencies alive allowing the Park to share new ideas broadly with ever more diverse artists, communities, and visitors. This program is supported by the generosity of Park partners, including Friends of Weir Farm.