In an art world that has learned to measure a residency by what comes out of it—the open studio, the commissioned piece, the exhibition that justifies the invitation—Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian have made one that measures nothing at all.
Portrait of Rashid Johnson, Photo by Joshua Woods, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth.
The Residency at Casa Gràcia, the artist couple’s new program in Mahón, the capital of Menorca, hands its recipients a studio, a study, a walled garden, and a single, almost contrarian premise: there is no deliverable. Residencies are self-directed, with no obligation to produce an outcome or a public presentation. Developed with the support of Hauser & Wirth Menorca, it arrives less as a launchpad than as a refuge—a wager that what most artists lack is not opportunity but time without conditions.
Time as the Luxury Good
The Residency at Casa Gracia, Photo by Daniel Schäfer,
Courtesy of Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian.
What Johnson and Hovsepian are offering is, in practice, the scarcest commodity in any working artist’s life: unstructured attention. The program frames itself as an incubator for ideas and cross-disciplinary dialogue, but its real radicalism is subtractive—it removes the obligation to perform.
That impulse is personal for its founders. “Menorca has offered me something rare: a sense of slowness, clarity, and openness that allows thought and creativity to expand,” Johnson said in a statement. “Creating this residency is an opportunity to share that experience with other artists—offering time and space for reflection, experimentation, conversation, and renewal.” The line lands differently coming from an artist who spent much of 2025 inside the Guggenheim‘s rotunda, where his retrospective “A Poem for Deep Thinkers” gathered nearly ninety works across three decades. A residency built on stillness reads, from that vantage, like a deliberate counterweight.
Inside Casa Gràcia
The Residency at Casa Gracia, Photo by Daniel Schäfer,
Courtesy of Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian.
The building itself has a second act worthy of its tenants. Built in 1860 and once home to the entrance of a nightclub with the owners’ apartment above, the property has been reconceived as a live/work environment defined, in the program’s words, by simplicity, clarity, and ease. The renovation is overseen by Laplace—the Paris-based studio that turned an 18th-century naval hospital into Hauser & Wirth’s Illa del Rei galleries—working alongside the Menorcan architects Maimó&Brosa.
“Menorca has offered me something rare: a sense of slowness, clarity, and openness that allows thought and creativity to expand,”
Rashid Johnson
Three spaces anchor the residency: a 300-square-metre studio, a study, and what is billed as the largest private walled garden in central Mahón, shared between the artist and writer in residence. The interiors hold the same line—traditional Menorcan furniture, sourced locally, set against a few contemporary pieces—so that the island’s heritage and modern living read as one continuous gesture rather than a contrast.
Why Menorca
Aerial view of Mahon Harbour,
Photo by Davide Bonaldo.
Menorca has spent the past few years quietly becoming the Mediterranean’s most deliberate cultural destination—a slow island by design rather than neglect. The whole of it is a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and in 2023 its prehistoric stone landscape was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List as Talayotic Menorca, recognizing one of the densest concentrations of archaeological sites on earth.
That ancient register is precisely what Hovsepian invokes. “There is something profoundly moving about Menorca and its mystical atmosphere,” she said in a statement. “Scattered throughout the island are prehistoric talayotic structures, ancient stone monuments that quietly hold the memory of another time and civilization… For me, Menorca has always been a place that expands inner space where ideas surface more freely and where creativity feels connected to something both personal and ancient.” For an island marketed elsewhere as sun and sea, the residency stakes a different claim: depth over leisure, geology over the beach.
The Hauser & Wirth Orbit
The Residency at Casa Gracia, Photo by Daniel Schäfer,
Courtesy of Rashid Johnson and Sheree Hovsepian.
The residency does not stand alone; it plugs into an ecosystem the gallery has been building on the island since 2021, when Hauser & Wirth Menorca opened on Illa del Rei with eight galleries, an outdoor sculpture trail, a Piet Oudolf garden, and the Cantina restaurant. While in residence, artists and writers draw on the support of the local Hauser & Wirth team—an unusually well-resourced safety net for a program that otherwise asks so little of its participants.
“There is something profoundly moving about Menorca and its mystical atmosphere,”
Sheree Hovsepian
The governing advisory board signals the same blend of art-world weight and literary seriousness: alongside Johnson and Hovsepian sit curator Katherine Brinson, writers Patrick Radden Keefe and Colson Whitehead, artist Hank Willis Thomas, and Iwan and Manuela Wirth, among others. Before the full program opens in 2027, an inaugural season this fall will host the recipient of an artist grant from the Institut Menorquí d’Estudis (IME), supported by Es Baluard Museum and Hauser & Wirth Menorca.
How to Apply
Five places are awarded each year—three visual artists for residencies of up to three months, and two writers for stays of up to six. Applications for the 2027 calendar year close 31 July 2026, with artists and writers from the Balearic Islands, mainland Spain, and around the world all eligible. Full criteria and the application portal are at casagracia.org/apply.
