Communities: Artists’ in the Northeast
By Mary Bucci McCoy, Art New England | February/March 2007

The fifty-five-room Yaddo Mansion provides living and working space for Yaddo’s guest artists, 2003. Photo: Rick Gargiulo.
The summer of 1978 was a pivotal season for Tabitha Vevers, a painter from Massachusetts. Freshly graduated from Yale, she got a scholarship to spend the summer at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, in Skowhegan, Maine. Since then, she has participated in other artists’ residencies. “It’s amazing how much time you have to work when you don’t have to go grocery shopping, or answer the phone, or go to a job, or all those everyday life things,” she says. “All of a sudden time just opens up and your mind opens up.” Providing time, space, and freedom from distractions, residencies at some of the best-known artists’ communities in the Northeast play a pivotal role in the development of artists’ creative work.

Today Lisa Yuskavage is an art star. But twenty years ago when she did her first residency at the Fine Arts Work Center (FAWC) in Provincetown, Massachusetts, “I was just graduating and wanted to prolong what lay in wait for me in New York.” Yuskavage summarizes her time at FAWC as a true transition. “At FAWC I was a newt just out of school, and actually made paintings about the life of Christ. They were not ironic. But pretty bad, too. It was good to work without thought of jobs on the one hand, and without teachers on the other.” The FAWC, founded in 1968, focuses primarily on those in the early stages of their careers. Each year, they offer seven-month fellowships which include a stipend and live/work space to ten artists and ten writers. Residents work, live, and eat independently; they can gather in a common room.

For Vevers, who divides her time between Cambridge and Wellfleet, it was that first summer at Skowhegan that started it all. “At that point, it was this great transition because you weren’t quite being kicked out into the real world. It’s a summer of being with other artists. There were people there of all ages, but it’s geared towards that transitional period, so there were other artists around my age. You have all your meals together, it’s almost like camp. It’s more on the college model, you’re more independent than college, but less independent than you would be out on your own.” Skowhegan’s renowned nine-week educationally focused summer program is extremely competitive; recently there were 1,643 applicants for sixtyfive slots. Students pay a fee to attend, but many scholarships are available. Linda Earl, executive director of Skowhegan, says, “It is a chance for the artists to step off track; they don’t come with a specific project in mind. It is a chance for them to be spontaneous and open, to explore. For those coming out of graduate school, it is an antidote or alternative to the often linear trajectory of their work there and the pressure on them. For others, it’s an opportunity to focus on their studio practice in a way they might not otherwise do.”

Boston painter Ken Beck was one of the “others.” He says, “I don’t know what my life as an artist would have been without Skowhegan.” Beck describes his experience at Skowhegan a year after Vevers was there. “I had not been to art school, I was thirty-six years old when I went to Skowhegan, so I may have been the oldest student there that summer. I had painted and drawn all my life, but had no formal art education other than some classes I had taken. This was really deep immersion into the culture of contemporary art in terms of big critics and superstar artists who were visiting artists that summer. It was a trial by fire, a rite of passage, it completely committed me to my life as an artist.

The experience revealed to me how much more it asked to have a life as an artist, and how serious it all was and how much was on the line, emotionally and personally, and in terms of the march of history.” He describes the school, which is on the grounds of a former farm: “All the studios are up the hill from the living spaces, which are on the edge of a very nice lake, which is also where the dining room is.

The walk back from the studios to the bungalows down by the water, it’s a quarter or half-mile walk, and there are no lights on the road, and to do that is an experience in itself, on a dark night with no starlight.” Skowhegan offers a stellar roster of visiting artists and critics-in-residence for its students. “Some of the people who were there were Susan Shatter, Lois Dodd, Linda Benglis, and Frances Barth,” said Beck. “Having the opportunity to rub shoulders with art stars, it is a very New York-oriented school, it operates in Maine but it really is run in New York City.”

Nadya Volicer, a 2001 Massachusetts College of Art graduate, did a month-long fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center (VSC) in Johnson, Vermont, in 2006. Her work ranges in scale from objects to room-sized installations, such as Home Spun, which was included in the DeCordova Museum’s 2005 annual exhibition. “I had four studio visits with the visiting artist faculty who each brought a unique perspective and sent my ideas in many different and exciting new directions,” said Volicer. “But the true value of the residency was allowing me to strike the divine balance for myself as an artist, of intense, focused, rigorous studio time offset by camaraderie, communing over mealtimes with others, in this case artists and writers.” With fifty artists and writers in residence at any given time for a total of 600 residents annually, their program is the largest in the country. The thirty-building campus was put together by restoring existing buildings, so it is not necessarily noticeable to someone passing through town. In this Volicer found another kind of balance. “It’s nice how the VSC is nestled in the town of Johnson in a way that allowed me to feel out in nature and in civilization simultaneously.” Jon Gregg, founder and president of VSC, offers that “We allow people to slow down and really just be in stillness . . . we are relating at a core level to creative practice.”

Like many young artists, Volicer has participated in several artists’ communities, including the Jentel Artist Residency Program in Wyoming, Millay Colony for the Arts in New York state, the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation in Maine, and the Artist’s Enclave at I-Park in Connecticut. As Tabitha Vevers notes, “There ends up being a whole group of people that you bump into at various colonies. People to some extent make the rounds. It’s not just trying to capitalize on it, I think people genuinely feel they work better there.” The nature of residencies has changed over the years, according to New York sculptor Heide Fasnacht. “There was a time when you went to Yaddo or MacDowell and nobody could contact you all day long, and now of course they can call your cell phone or they can e-mail you. So I think that really changes the experience quite a bit.” She was twenty-nine when she did her first residency at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York. “It was the first time I took the risk of letting go of a day job and just went away to work, and what that provided me was this feeling that I was a legitimate artist, that it was okay to work all day long, and that what I did actually was work.” Yaddo has been offering residencies since 1926 at the former estate of the Trask family, choosing approximately 200 fellows annually from a pool that typically numbers around 900 applicants in a broad range of disciplines including visual artists, choreographers, composers, writers, and filmmakers. Program Director Candace Wait says, “It’s a whole different reference for creative work. The art being made here is very contemporary, but the program is traditional.”

“It was trial by fire, a rite of passage, it completely committed me to my life as an artist.”

Fasnacht says, “What has prompted me to seek residencies has been different over the years. At a certain point, I thought perhaps that I wouldn’t do it anymore because it’s working in a protected environment, and I like reality and I don’t need a protected environment. However, I call it an eyewash, you go to a new place and you see different things and it washes your eyes of what you’ve been doing, and it’s very refreshing to the work itself.” In August 2005, Fasnacht went to MacDowell. “I really needed a break, I needed to get away, and I needed to do something fresh. I was in the process of making a change in my work, and to stay on the beat it really helped to have this protected rhythm with absolutely no distractions.” The work resulting from that residency was exhibited at the Bernard Toale Gallery in Boston in the fall of 2005. Fasnacht compares MacDowell with Yaddo: “I personally have a real love of going hiking and going cycling. I’m very athletic, and MacDowell offers that because you’re really very close to Mount Monadnock and there’s a lot of great cycling roads. I don’t like the suburbs or small towns as much, so I like the rural quality of MacDowell. At the same time, Saratoga Springs is a charming town. Yaddo is quite an extraordinary couple of buildings. They have this marvelous allée of trees that they imported from Germany, these enormous pine trees that are almost like the size of Conestoga pines of the west. They’re quite remarkable, you don’t see them anyplace else in the Northeast.”

The grounds of MacDowell, which are a national bird and game sanctuary, were critical to sculptor Fritz Buehner’s 2005 residency. Since 1978 he has commuted from Brooklyn to Boston to teach at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts; although he lives and works in urban areas, his work addresses issues of suburban development and the environment. MacDowell gave him the space to do some of his outdoor “site carvings,” which he photographs over time.