Cassilhaus: SABBATICAL WEEK EIGHTEEN

Find a comfy chair and put on your seat belt. This was a crazy jam packed week. A reminder that you can click any photo to enlarge it. I'm pretty fired up that I have found more residentially based and/or founder run programs in the West. I had really hoped to find more programs that had some similarities to Cassilhaus and found exactly one-The Fountainhead Residency which I visited back in Week Thirteen-in the entire eastern half of the US. Some interesting variants this week. On my way from Port Townsend to Seattle I stopped on Bainbridge Island to see the program at the Bloedel Reserve. This stunning 150 acre public garden was the private residence and garden of Prentice and Virginia Blodel from 1951-1986.

Photo courtesy of Bloedel Reserve

Paul Hayden Kirk designed Japanese Guest House blends the features of a Japanese tea house and a Northwest Native American longhouse

After Virginia died, Prentice asked well know architect Jim Cuttler to design a small residence/education center on the property to honor his wife and to live out his final days. It is in this house that Bloedel houses their residency program today.

Photo by Art Grice

Their program has some striking similarities to ours (Well OK so minus the 150 acre pristine garden and the staff of 35 but we have Duke Forest and awesome interns!) and is open to both established and emerging artists, composers, writers, botanists, landscape architects, researchers and others exploring the themes of nature and the human connection with nature. All projects and work in the residencies must connect in some way to nature. I have to say that my interview with special programs manager Laura Counsel set a new high pleasantness bar with the entire conversation taking place while walking through the gardens including frequent sprinkler dodging (I went on a day when the garden was not open to the public). Thank you Laura!

I was off to Seattle next for a visit to MadArt which I had learned about only days before from the director of the Seattle Art Museum (see below) which was hosting one of their recent installations. I met with founder Alison Milliman and brand new director Emily Kelly (sorry forgot to make a photo!). I also met their current artist in residence Jennifer Angus, aka Insect Girl, who was working on this ambitious installation called Super Natural (yes those are real formerly living bugs) in their public storefront studio space on a busy commercial street. (Jennifer's dog Pippy is the one at the top of this post with the wings.)

Learn more about the innovative and audacious ways MadArt is "bringing art into our lives in unexpected ways" on their site.

I had long been wanting to visit my friends Kim Rorschach and John Hart who live in Seattle. We met when Kim was the founding director of the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University in Durham, NC where we live. She know directs the Seattle Art Museum (SAM), one of the 20 largest art musuems in the US, including three campuses-the main downtown location, the Seattle Asian Art Museum, and the Olympic Sculpture Park. John teaches law at UW. We had a delightful dinner and got back up to speed on all things Durham and Seattle.

SAM has a spectacular collection. I only had about 45 minutes before closing so I zeroed in on the contemporary exhibits.

Katharina Fritsch, El Anatsui, Nick Cave top to bottom

Oh Rockland Residency you had me at these photos.

Based in Seattle and founded in 2015 by the "unmarried husband and wife team" of Jodi Rockwell and Shawn Landis. Imagine an art-loving couple who combine their two last names to form the name of their residency and offer artists free time and space in a residency program based in a contemporary home part of the year and rent the space the rest of the year on airbnb to fund the residency????? That's getting pretty close to home!

Jodi and Shawn with recent AIR Argentinian Muralist Carla Bertone in front of the mural she created on the garage of the residency house. Photo by Alex Garland. Jodi is a ceramicist/teacher and Shawn is an artist/contractor and they have big plans to give back even more to the arts community. They are completely fearless and in the process of fixing up a sort of arts campus of buildings with many live/work possibilities. Stay tuned. I am really grateful to these two for a really fun interview and sharing of ideas.

My next stop was a solid 4 1/2 hours away in Southwestern Washington in the thriving and beautiful metropolis of Oysterville, WA (population 9). I learned about the Willapa Bay Residency from artist Simen Johan who was in residence at Hambidge all the way back in Week 2. He had done quite a few residencies and was very gracious to write me a detailed list of programs that I might want to visit and Willapa Bay was at the top of the list.

Founder, "recovering lawyer", and independant bookseller Cyndy Hayward opened her program in 2014 after more than a decade of careful planning. She was very quick to make clear to me that it was not a "residentially based" program even though she lived on site during construction of the residency buildings and that it was not about "engaging the local community" but all about the artists and their experience there. It is a fully subsidized program including meals and each cohort (30 day residencies) of 6 artists includes 2 visual artists, 2 writers, a poet, and a composer. The only "requirement" of the residency for the artists is that they share the evening meal together. This interaction is very important to Cyndy and the core of her program. I was fortunate to arrive early in the month as the artists were just getting to know one another and they invited me to share dinner with them and it was wonderful. Nice having a personal chef................

The program is laid out over 16 stunning acres and includes individual artist cabins, a visual arts studio building, and other specialized studios for the writers, poets, and composers. There is the common building with the dinning facility and lots of wonderful space.

Here Cyndy shows me around one of the artist cabins.

After dinner I joined a few of the artists for a stroll on the beach.

Willapa is an incredibly well organized program and clearly Cyndy has thought everything through to the nth degree. Artists have clearly taken notice as it has become a very competitive program. I am definitely ready to sign on. I better get working on my portfolio and stop writing these blog posts.

I was sad I had to get on the road. I spent the night in Astoria, OR and got to cross the amazing Astoria-Megler bridge which is over 4 miles long. If you got this post via email you will not be able to see the videos. You will need to go to the blog here.

image courtesty of zerography.com

I headed to Portland, one of my favorite West coast cities, where I managed to actually find a program smaller than Cassilhaus! I was welcomed for dinner at the IN-HOUSE residency program based in the home of Jea Alford and Isaac Weiss, two recent MFA grads who are getting a very early jump on giving back to the arts community. They are the youngest folks I have visited on this trip and it was very inspiring. Their housemates pitch in to help the program as well. They host a single resident at a time in their spare room and have a shop/studio in the back yard that is for the artist when they are visiting. They make connections for their visitors in the community and arrange for an exhibition of their work in Portland at the end of their stay. The dinner was for their current artist from Austria, Hanna Schwartz, a textile artist from Salzburg. It was a wonderful evening and my hosts were very welcoming. I took photos but they have vanished for some reason.

The next day I spent some time at the Portland Art Museum and saw some wonderful photography. I saw a great image by my friend Cheryle St. Onge from her Natural Findings series shot with a large format 8x10 view camera.

and I discovered an artist I was not familiar with named Gloria Baker Feinstein. Her series of Twins and Quads is wonderful.

That night I flew to San Francisco and stayed with my wonderful friends Heather and Oren and their two kids Mari and Zeke. I had my own apartment on the ground floor of their place in Bernal Heights and it was pretty sweet. I have known Heather for almost 20 years when I made my first cold call to her at a photography gallery when I just started collecting. She is now the executive director of SF Camerawork, a venerable SF institution. I cannot overemphasize how critically important these longer stays with friends have been to making this sabbatical trip possible, both from a mental health and a budget standpoint. Having a comfortable base in any city just makes everything a whole lot easier. And you can learn a bit about the game of Life.

My first morning I headed out to another fun residential program called The Growlery run by a force of nature named Jean Chadbourne. Jean's bio from her site is worth repeating in full:

While studying informational graph theory in Budapest in her early 20s, Jean Chadbourne, future founder of The Growlery, took off for Transylvania with nothing more than a small backpack with a change of clothes and a large knife. One night, while stranded in a small village, an old woman who spoke no English welcomed Jean into her home, insisting on killing a chicken to feed her foreign guest. Jean was so touched by the woman’s hospitality that she decided that very evening to establish a living space for fellow dreamers.

Known to many as “the Beige Ghost”, Jean earned her degree in mathematics from Reed College, where intense academic pursuits are augmented by adventurous self-expression. She’s a video game enthusiast, sci-fi and fantasy fanatic, and retro-futurist; in other words, she puts the tron in patron. Some say she embodies the intellectual rigor of Archimedes with the refined taste of Peggy Guggenheim and the horrific singing voice of Florence Foster Jenkins. A Bay Area native, she never brags about her sharp parallel parking skills. She enjoys candlelight dinners, long walks on the beach, souped-up electric vehicles, and real hip-hop.

Jean has basically taken a 6 bedroom Victorian in Haight-Ashbury and made it available to artists to live and work in at no cost and to transform the space into a malleable canvas for perfomance, installation, and every form of work in between and then inviting the community in to share it. There was an installation going in when I was there and my guess is that it is a pretty dynamic environment all the time.

That afternoon I headed over the Golden Gate (always fun to cross that bridge!) to visit a legend in residency circles, The Headlands Center for the Arts in the Marin Headlands.

I can't begin to cover the scope and range of their work in this already jam packed blog post so check out the short video below and spend some time on their site and be amazed. The impact this institution has had on artists in all disciplines from around the world is incalculable. For over 30 years the Headlands, in its residency program alone, has served more than 1200 artists. Their home is the historic Fort Barry military base and the very act of commissioning artists to adapt these spaces from military use to fabulous artist spaces is an act of grace in and of itself.

I met with Holly Blake, their residency manager, who with 22 years on the job gets the experience award of all of the people I have met with and I discovered quickly that there was no experience she had not had with a visiting artist! She was a wealth of information and we had a very lively discussion. I thought I had a few too many full time jobs but the scope of Holly's job in humbling.

While I was north of the city close to Sausalito, I had to visit my friend David Maisel, an artist whose work I have followed and admired for a long time. This was my first time visiting his studio and seeing his new project called Proving Grounds about the sites where chemical and biological weapons for the military are produced and tested was intense. I have no idea how he gets access to these sites but he was been working on access for a decade and the work is stunning. They will be produced in large scale as prints on aluminum in grids of 9. He will also produce a series of them as Albumen prints.

It was an action packed day but I was on an art high.

While in SF I wanted to get a visit in with former Cassilhaus AIR Chris McCaw and his girlfriend Rachel Phillips and since Heather and Oren know them as well, Heather suggested we get together for lunch on Sunday in the city (Chris and Rachel live south in Pacifica). Heather and I had just put together a new table for their outside area and she was hot to try it out!

And finally somewhere in the blur of my 5 days in the city I managed to squeeze a visit into Pier 24, a showcase for one of the top private photography collections in the country, and it did not disappoint with an exhibition called Grain of the Present. Many of my favorite artists and a few new discoveries.