In the 10 years we have been running our Artist in Residence program here we have hosted 43 spectacular artists of all stripes from around the world.  It has been the richest experience in our lives. Back in 2014 we celebrated the 5 year anniversary with a 4 day bacchanalia of activities that was one of the most fun weekends ever!  For the 10th we raised the bar even higher! 20 artists returned for the September 12-16, 2019 celebration and it was an astounding homecoming. Because our artists are here one at a time most of the artists did not know one another and some great friendships and collaborations blossomed during the long weekend. We even had SWAG!

Joining us were Hannah Frieser, Charles Guice, Sean Kernan,, Michael Prince, Ann Ehringhaus, Aldwyth, Tamas Dezso, Eszter Szablyar, Dave Anderson, Doug Beube, Rachel Perry, Madeline Sales, Berto Sales, David Pace, Olivia Parker, Mark Sloan, Marie Navarre, Walter Angehrn, Eva Weber, and Naama Tsabar.  We spent months planning a very rich schedule of activities and with spreadsheets in hand Ellen and I were cruise directors and van drivers. Our dear friend and amazing artist Lori Vrba helped out all week as chief cat herder. 

We located enthusiastic host families (THANK YOU!) for everyone who didn't have local accommodations and invited this extended community to a few of our weekend events. The Thursday night arrival event was just for artists though and appropriately at Cassilhaus.  Our then current AIR Naama Tsabar gave a talk about her work and upcoming performance of Composition 21 at the Nasher Museum of Art.

Our dear friend Giorgios Bakatsias and his team at Parizade  prepared an outdoor feast fit for royalty and the evening had a magical coda with a performance by Madeline and Berto Sales AIR '15, aka Beleza.

Friday morning we headed off to 21c Museum Hotel, a 24/7 contemporary art museum/hotel and a Durham treasure.

After a yummy lunch enroute we had a private tour of Spoonflower, the world famous print on demand company, by its CEO Allison Polish.

Just after that our good friend Alice Whiteside who directs the UNC Sloane Art Library gave us a real treat by pulling literally hundreds of rare limited edition art and photo books from the reserve stacks and letting us do some serious geeking all afternoon. UNC has one of the top rare photobook collections in the country. It was one of the highlights of the weekend and we all made some amazing discoveries.

We gave everyone a little rest and time to reconnect with their host families before dinner at Grub, a Durham restaurant that Ellen and her team at Ellen Cassilly Architect designed. Ann Ehringhaus AIR '11 led the whole group (including host families) in a wonderful centering exercise before dinner.

In December of 2018 Ellen and I travelled on a 4 day racial equity bus tour to Montgomery Alabama and one of the leaders of the tour was playwright/actor/teacher Mike Wiley.  Mile performed segments of his one-man plays ON THE BUS during our long drive and knocked us out.  Mike agreed to do a  performance of his Blood Done Sign My Name for just our group at the Full Frame Theater at Duke and it was a transformative evening. 

Saturday morning we were off to Brunch at local favorite True Flavors Diner and then we split up into two groups for tours of the legendary Durham Scrap Exchange (sorry no pix) and the singular Tuba Museum

We had a wonderful outdoor lunch at another Ellen Cassilly designed project in Duke Gardens and then had an adventure in Pittsboro, NC at the stunning studio of NC potter Mark Hewitt. Mark is a legend in pottery circles and gave a wonderful talk about his work. Quite a few small pots made their way into new collections.

We had a wonderful sharing evening back at Cassilhaus with a pot luck dinner and informal Pecha Kucha with all of the artists and their host families. So wonderful to learn about everyone's current and upcoming projects.  We had a special surprise visit from the Poetry Fox (Chris Vitiello) who dazzled everyone with custom poems on demand.

Sunday morning kicked off with Meditation, Movement, and Mojo with Ann Ehringhaus AIR '11, Sean Kernan AIR '17, and Marie Navarre AIR '10. It was a total gift and a wonderful calm in a pretty hectic schedule!

We were very lucky to time the reunion while curator Mark Sloan's (AIR '14) amazing Southbound exhibition was in town on its grand tour of the South.  We visited the show at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design in Raleigh and Mark gave us a wonderful personal tour.

We headed east to Wilson NC (making the required stop at legendary Parkers BBQ) to visit the studio of photographer Burk Uzzle and tour the epic Vollis Simpson Whirligig Park.

PHEW!  I'm tired just typing about it all.  Monday morning we had a joyous sendoff brunch at Foster's Market and everyone said their goodbyes and the planning started for the 15th in 2024!  

Fitting that Walter Angehrn AIR '09 gets the last word.  Walter is one of our dearest friends and the very first Cassilhaus Artist in Residence. Hugs all around.

I first became aware of Jesse Andrews in June 2015 at the Nantucket Film Festival.  Ellen and I were visiting our niece and nephew on the island and we had heard some great buzz about the film Me and Earl and Dying Girl. We adored the film at the Festival screening and afterwards there was a Q & A with the New York Times bestselling author and film's screenwriter Jesse Andrews. Love at first sight (or first hear!)  Ellen and I almost immediately birthed the idea of having a screenwriter come to the residency at Cassilhaus. Our initial overtures were spurned by a flippant, if adorable, auto-email reply about being in a remote Chilean fishing village that suggested contacting his publisher if we really had something interesting to talk about. We had moved on when about 15 months later out of the blue an excited and slightly contrite Jesse contacted us about coming to the remote writing village of Chapel Hill at the beginning of 2017 to complete his latest novel--he was over the moon about his first draft and his publisher had a large gun to his head and the stars were ripe for alignment.

The initial timing was not going to work as I was just about to embark on my sabbatical journey but I moved things around a bit and we had our first-ever artist in January. Jesse is both a novelist and screenwriter and writes primarily YA (Young Adult) Fiction--a category I didn't even know existed until his arrival. He comes with a lot of YA energy!  He was super focused and disciplined while he was here and a marvel to watch.  I had never had the pleasure to watch a novelist work up close in real time and I was just flabbergasted to see Jesse bound over to our side of the house literally jumping up and down exclaiming something on the order of "you won't believe what just happened at the end of the chapter. You just won't believe it!  I never could have imagined he would do that" Like some third party observer he was watching the characters HE created shock and surprise him. It was raw joy.

Jesse was so generous with the community while he was here. When we invite an artist in a new medium to Cassilhaus we are always astonished at the new constituencies that we discover and engage.  We had no idea of how robust the screenwriting community was in the Triangle and Jesse was open to working with a number of the local screenwriting classes. We made the acquaintance of well know screen writer Gary Hawkins who was right under our nose teaching at The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke and he agreed to moderate a discussing around adapting a novel for the screen following a screening of Me and Earl and the Dying Girl at the Full Frame Theater.

I don't think I've even know someone who was almost unable to speak without their hands.  Talking is a full body sport for Jesse.

The novel Jesse came to finish is called MUNMUN and it was published last April. MUNMUN takes place in an alternate reality a lot like our own, except everyone is proportional in size to how much money they have. Warner and his sister Prayer have none, and so they're about the size of rats, which is not just demeaning, but dangerous: day and night they face mortal dangers that bigger richer people don’t ever have to think about. Warner and Prayer know their only hope is to scale up, but how can two littlepoors survive in a world built against them? Read the first few pages here!

Just before he left Jesse asked if he could do a reading from his book for a small group of friends and it was a wonderful intimate evening.  It was the first time he had read from the new book in public.

Many of our visiting artists bond with our cats Jaco and Joni but Jesse had a particularly tight connection with Jaco. This is one of my favorite photos from his time with us having an existential conversation with Cassilkitty #1.

Thank you Jesse for opening up your world to us.  It was a really fun ride.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

—Elmore Leonard

I am more than a year behind on these posts so I am going to cheat a little bit and draw from my wife Ellen's text from the gallery guide for the first exhibition she solo curated at Cassilhaus Gallery called Exquisite Corpse.

Regular readers of this blog know that each year as part of our training for interns at Cassilhaus we frame photographs to donate to local non-profits. Check out a bit about the program here. This year our intern, Phyllis Dooney, identified the Straight Talk Support Group and their new transition house in Durham as our recipient. They work with men recently released from prison and their families to support a healthy transition to life on the outside and combat recidivism. We delivered six Michael Kenna photographs today and installed them just as they are about to accept their first residents.  We were very impressed with their executive director Bessie Elmore and excited that residents will be able to enjoy beautiful art on their walls.

Please consider supporting this very worthwhile organization here.

Interstitial was an exhibition of the work of Boston based photographer David Hilliard. The INTERSTITIAL Gallery Guide is available for download and an edited version of my statement from that guide is below.

I was immediately drawn to the work of David Hilliard from my first encounter at the Pulse Art Fair in Miami in 2005, where I added a diptych called Green to our collection.

Probably more so than any other piece in the show, Green offers a break in the panorama between the panels. You don’t realize it at first, but when you spend some time you realize the two views have very different focal distances and perspectives. I find myself thinking about the world between the panels—what I call the interstitial space.

When I first proposed the title Interstitial to David he was, shall we say, less than enthusiastic – “I have heard the word before (never brave enough to use it) but was trying to relate it in a solid way to the work…” I started questioning my own understanding of the word and when looking through definitions from various disciplines I found my usage was actually a hybrid I had created in my own head. I work in the audio/video industry, specifically the medical A/V world, and interstitial spaces in this context are the non-public spaces between the floors of hospitals and other medical buildings that house the mechanical, communication, and other back-of-house equipment. These “inter-floors” allow servicing of procedure rooms that need to be sterile and online 24/7 without disruption. Our work is done in the negative area and goes unnoticed, but it supports the critical work done in the public space.

Interstitial struck me as a good descriptor of what I find so compelling about Hilliard’s work. David has a remarkable ability to create a narrative in just 2,3, or 4 discrete panels, but moreover, he creates opportunities to fill in the narrative around and in between the panels.

This exhibition was the most logistically complicated ever undertaken at Cassilhaus. It contains work from our own collection and six other private collections and involved coordination with three of David’s galleries and an art transport company. Seven of the works came from a museum exhibition in Provincetown that closed 5 days before they needed to be hung at Cassilhaus. Two pieces were produced specifically for this exhibition, including Shortest Day, which was exhibited here for the first time.

Interstitial would not have been possible without the generous loan of work from Don Ball, Larry Wheeler and Don Doskey, Allen Thomas Jr., Jack Gorman, Glen Medders and Paul Coggin, Kyle Worsham and David Witsell. I am also grateful to Joseph Carroll, Mike Carroll, Yancey Richardson, Maggie Waterhouse, Fred Hutchinson, Jessina Leonard, Ellen Cassilly, Marc Elliot, and Liz McLean. Finally I cannot say enough about the amazing support and encouragement of David Hilliard throughout this entire process. He is a great artist but an even greater friend.

Enjoy the space between.

—Frank Konhaus, October 2016

Like many exhibitions the work begins by looking at an enormous number of images. We have three of David's pieces in our own collection and I was looking for at least 15 more. I scoured his website and the websites of all of his galleries and asked him if there were new images he was working on. I put out an all-call to my collector friends in the area to see what Hilliard images they had in their collections. I made a dream list of images I wanted to have for the show and I got to work tracking them down. David offered to connect me with some of his major collectors to try and find pieces that were not available from his gallerists. I was over the moon when one of his very well known and prolific collectors (who will go unnamed) had EVERYTHING I was looking for and agreed to lend and then completely crushed when at the last minute they changed their mind and would not lend anything. It took me a few days to shake that off and reconfigure the show and seek new lenders.  We're not the National Gallery here and it sometimes is a stretch for people to wrap their brains around lending to the gallery in Frank and Ellen's house!

After jumping through quite a few hoops I had a line up that I was very happy with and just had to get the work here. As I mentioned above, some of the work was in a museum exhibition in Provincetown and came down less than a week before we opened.  Much of the rest of the work was coming from New York and Boston and my schedule didn't allow for me to pick up the work myself. Enter the amazing art transporter Liz Mclean with Continental Courier. Liz does fine art deliveries up and down the East Coast and the stars aligned for her to pick up all of the work at 4 different locations and bring it all to Chapel Hill on her way to Florida in time for us to hang. She saved my butt and although I blew my non-existent budget, she gave me a really great deal and was incredibly professional. It was a first for Cassilhaus to use a real art courier.

Everything arrived in perfect shape and Jessina and I did a marathon installation session.  I had final locations for everything as I had exhaustively moved 8 1/2 x 11 images of each of the pieces around the gallery.

I timed David's show to be up during our annual Click! Photography Festival and it was a really exciting time.  French artist Georges Rousse and his wife Anne Marie were in town for a public art installation and Zanele Muholi was in residence at Cassilhaus.

David spent a few days here around the opening and was very generous with his time mentoring former Cassilhaus intern Michaela O'brien's photobook students.

He gave an artist talk at his opening that was very enthusiastically received.

David's parents are separated and figure prominently in his work although almost as two entirely separate bodies of work. He is extremely close with his father and has been photographing him for decades. He spoke to him almost every day while he was here.  He had recently moved into an assisted living community and David continued to work with him there.  As I was finalizing the exhibition I concentrated images of his father in the back project gallery and I felt like something was missing.  I asked if he was willing to share/loan some of his father's treasured possessions and he very generously shared one of his father's journals, some personal notes, a model of a ship, and some of his books--all of which were featured in images in the show. I felt like it made the exhibition and made it deeply personal.

“I like that a photograph alludes to something and doesn’t really fully tell the story."  -David Hilliard

Photo of Zanele Muholi inside Georges Rousse's Installation at Durham Fruit by Diane Davis

Wow it has been 7 months since I last posted at the end of my sabbatical trip and a year since I did my last regular entry about goings on at Cassilhaus.  I guess I just need to get back on the horse. All of our exhibitions and visiting artists are documented via this blog so its time to get caught up! This post takes us back to October of 2016 to the spectacular residency of South African artist and LGBTQI activist Zanele Muholi and her collaborators Lerato Dumse, Lindeka Qampi, and Thembela Dick.

I first learned of Zanele's work from a donation of one of her photos to the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University collection:

Katlego Mashiloane and Nosipho Lavuta, Ext. 2, Lakeside, Johannesburg  Lambda Print  Courtesy of Nasher Museum

Then I heard her speak at the Look3 Festival in Charlottesville, VA in 2015 and I was blown away.  I invited her to the residency on the spot. I spoke to a few other residency programs who had hosted her and I was advised to be ready for ANYTHING.  She did not disappoint! The first surprise of many wonderful surprises was that she arrived at RDU with 3 and not 1 collaborator as expected and they were all coming to Cassilhaus!

Thembela, Lindeka, Zanele, Lerato and Moi

Within hours of arrival we were exploring the most important cultural sites of Durham-the Scrap Exchange and the Parlour. They had never seen anything like the Scrap and they went crazy filling up two whole shopping carts with materials for Zanele's self portrait series Somnyama Ngonyama. This exuberance was all the more amazing given that in the previous 100 hours they had flown to North Carolina from South Africa via Paris (to accept an award), Amsterdam (to open an exhibition), and New York (meetings for upcoming events).

Their energy was both inspiring and daunting.  Even during their "retreat" at Cassilhaus they flew to Cincinnati, Boston, and New York for various events and were constantly making work here.  Zanele and team were in great demand in the community. We try to protect our visiting artists from too many requests for their time so they can have a productive and private residency but Zanele was incredibly generous with her time and worked with so many students at local schools and universities, gave a keynote address at the Click! Photography Festival, and met with several LGBTQI organizations in the Triangle.

They also did an interview on The State of Things with Frank Stasio

Despite the incredibly heavy and emotionally charged work that she does, Zanele brought so much joy everywhere she went.

She produced amazing work while she was here-much of it at the house. There has been extensive press on this work including in the New Yorker, Vogue, and The Village Voice. The work was even on a giant display in Times Square during her appearance at Performa 17.

We are honored to have added the piece above, Basizeni XI, Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016, to our collection. Zanele made the piece in our front yard from tire inner-tubes from the Scrap Exchange. While stunningly beautiful, it references the horrific hate crime of necklacing in her home country.

Phaphama at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016.

Xiniwe at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016.

Hlonipha at Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016.

Gcina I, Cassilhaus, Chapel Hill, North Carolina, 2016

Namhla I, Cassilhaus, North Carolina, 2016


Zanele and her team were so charged by the work that they had done in North Carolina that they decided to mount a major pop-up exhibition of all of their work just 5 days before their departure!  Thanks to the incredible generosity of Tim Walter at The Fruit and a SWAT team of volunteers we pulled it off and it was a smash!

The power of this work and these artist/activists continues to ripple through our lives. Barely a day goes by that we don't hear something about Zanele's work from some corner of the world. She was recently Knighted by the French Government for her pioneering civil rights work. Just this morning I learned of her incredible upcoming partnership with the Philadelphia Photo Arts Center. She has dedicated her life to improving the lives and protection of LGBTQI people everywhere and it was one of the great honors of our lives to host her, Lerato, Lindeke, and Thembela at Cassilhaus.

A week to reflect in remote Montana.  Thank you Danielle for an amazing gift.

Frank’s Sabbatical by the Numbers

Number of Days:                                             144

Number of Nights in an Airbnb:                        36

Number of Free Nights with Generous Hosts:   108

Road Miles Driven:                                          12,145

Air Miles Flown:                                               6,864

Total Travel Miles:                                          19,009

Number of States Visited:                                20

Number of Stops:                                             52

Number of Interviews:                                      51

Number of Prior Cassilhaus AIRs Visited:            9

Number of Photographs Taken:                         6018

Highest Elevation Outside of a Plane                 10,984’

Number of New Tires on my Car                        4

Number of Artist Studio Visits                           15

Number of Different Whole Foods Visited          22

Number of Public Swimming Pools I Swam in     24

Number of Lives Changed Forever                     1

Thanks to everyone that made this journey possible. Over the coming months I hope to sort through my notes, interview recordings, photos, memories, and insights and bring my new found knowledge to bear on growing an even richer Cassilhaus community.

For an idea that does not at first seem insane, there is no hope.

--Albert Einstein

I SWEAR I DIDN'T PUT THEM THERE!

Whoa who knew I would make it twenty weeks into this incredible journey! Thanks for coming along for the ride.  Lordy I hope there are tapes! (I wonder how long it will be before people don't get the reference?) Actually there are--about 60 hours of recorded interviews and I am woefully behind on taking notes on them. More on that later.

My last two Western US stops were in Wyoming. It was my first time there and it is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been.  It's pretty amazing that both of these programs are very well known and respected programs and one is in a town of 25 and the other a town of 142 and they are only 10 minutes from each other and they have no connection.  What are the chances?

I started out at the Ucross Foundation in Ucross, WY. Started more than 30 years ago and situated on 20,000 acres of working ranch land (12,000 of which is protected by the Nature Conservancy), this amazing program welcomes more than 80 artists a year and has some household names amongst its alums. Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Annie Proulx and Doug Wright are past residents as are MacArthur Fellows Charles Wuorinen, Sarah Ruhl, and Colson Whitehead. National Book Award winners Ann Patchett, Jean Valentine and Ha Jin have also been through the residency program. I was particularly drawn to this program for a number of reasons-1st was that they had been mentioned multiple times in my travel by artists as one of their favorite residencies. 2nd they are one of the few residencies I visited that has an exhibition program and I really wanted to compare notes with someone about our exhibition program at Cassilhaus. Theirs has a focus on work of alumni and they try to integrate work from local artists into their exhibitions. Finally they have a number of very interesting partnerships, including with the Sundance Institute, the PEN/Hemingway award, and the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts. In my mind strategic partnerships are the way of the future for us if we want to increase our impact without stressing our already bandwidth limited space and resources.

I spoke with Tracey Kikut, their program director (pictured), and Sharon Dynak, their President, and they gave me a tour of the grounds and facilities. It was a very enlightening interview.  In addition to the individual artist studios, the large space shown above on top of their gallery space is available for dancers or artists who are collaborating and need a larger space than their studio.

All of the books on these three shelves as well as two more out of frame were ALL written by Ucross residents!

I was staying in an airbnb in Buffalo, WY as there was really no place to stay in either of the two places I was meeting.  This is what happens when you have a bad mattress at your airbnb and streetlights outside your windows.

2:41 am F4.5 for 30 sec.

3:03 am f7.1 for 10 sec.

3:21am f6.3 for 30 sec

The next day I was off to a spot just down the road in Clearmont-Jentel Arts. I found an immediate chemistry with Mary Jane Edwards, their ED, and Lynn Reeves their Residency Director.  They had both been there since the beginning of the program-more than 15 years-and it was so clear that they worked together like a well oiled machine and really loved doing it.

They gave me the grand tour and I was there for more than 4 hours! Below is the main house where all six artists live and share meals.

This is one of the visual arts studios.  Studios are discipline dependent. Notice there is a day bed in each studio so artists don't even have to go back to their apartment if they are in an intense working phase.

I got the extra special treat of seeing Mary Jane's private home  and studio on site designed by the same architect that did the main house.  Her tales of her travel and the art treasures she found around the world were spectacular.  I could have spent days there.

This is one of Mary Jane's own pieces in her studio.

Other than two appointments I have set up at the end of July in VA, this was my last stop on my sabbatical and it was a bit of an emotional experience. It has been quite a journey over 5 months, 20 states, 19,000 miles, and more than 50 visits! I have learned so much and made an amazing new network of friends and colleagues which will bear fruit for years to come. I am so grateful to Mary Jane and Lynn for making my last stop such a memorable one and reminding me once again why I am doing all of this in the first place. When I commented that Jentel was in the middle of nowhere they corrected me and made it clear that Jentel is "at the center of someplace special." How right they are.

My work has only just begun.  I still have over 60 hours of interviews that I have not taken notes on and over 6000 photos to sort through. This will be a long process to try and make some sense of all of this material I have collected.  My sage wife Ellen suggested that rather than spend my last 7 days driving another 3000 miles across the country that I hole up in rural Montana at our friend Danielle's house and spend some time catching up, processing, and preparing for reentry so that is what I am doing!  I am in a magical place near Roscoe, MT and completely off to myself with no interviews or meetings. I am shipping my car home. :)

There are years that ask questions and years that answer.

--Zore Neale Hurston

Fishtail General Store, the community hub of Fishtail, MT, the closest community to Tippet Rise Art Center.

The latest in snowboarding accessories


A vista at Tippet Rise Art Center

You know it's beautiful in Wyoming when you can make this image through the driver's window on an iPhone while driving 80 mph and not looking at what you are photographing.

From San Francisco I headed back to LA. I had an unexpected 4 hour visit to the Apple store after both my laptop and iPhone failed on the same day but I emerged (as usual) fully functional and in awe of how great Apple's service is-both were out of warranty and both were fixed anyway.

I had a great visit with Jan Williamson, the ED of the 18th Street Arts Center in LA. With more than 20 years at 18th Street Jan is an industry veteran and has presided over the purchase of their campus and their expansion to the largest residency program in Southern California.

Approaching their 30th year in operation, 18SAC has broad progamming and a full campus of brightly colored buildings for programs, artist studios, residency housing, and exhibition space.  Their 3 pronged residency program was unique among all the programs I'd visited.  They have a long term program for arts ORGANIZATIONS where the full organization is housed on their site indefinitely and works intimately with their other programs, a medium term 3 year residency program for California based artists, and a more conventional short term program of 1-3 month residencies for national and international artists.

Photos courtesy of 18th Street Art Center

Seems like I barely had my feet on the ground and I was back on a plane for Billings MT to see Tippet Rise, one of my most anticipated stops on the trip. I settled in to a very cool and retro airbnb in Red Lodge, MT.

Olive green shag!

Partying Bear Paintings

Way back in 2011 I was contacted by Rockefeller Philanthropy Adivsors in NYC about one of the their clients who was developing an art, music, and sculpture center in rural Montana. They were interested in commissioning artist Patrick Dougherty to do a piece on their land. Patrick had recently done a piece at Cassilhaus when he was one of our visiting artists and I was also producing a film about his work called Bending Sticks (website undergoing work) and they wanted me to connect them to Patrick. The client turned out to be Cathy and Peter Halstead, the founders and benefactors for Tippet and I have been following their progress and anticipating the opening for years.

Spectacular is the only way to describe this 11,500 acre dream site and the product of decades of dreaming and planning. Music is the first love of the Halsteads and the indoor and outdoor music venues host world class classical music artists from around the globe for an ambitious summer program which as I write this starts in 3 days.

Visiting artists are housed on site in dreamy quarters each with a Steinway grand piano.

Sustainability drives everything with conservation easements over 1/3rd of the property, LEED Gold buildings, and a fleet of electric vehicles charged by on-site solar "garages"

The 9 major sculptural pieces have been situated so each can be enjoyed and viewed from near and far without seeing the other works on the property. Lindsey Hinmon, Director of Outreach and Logistics, and Beth Huhtala, their new Educational Program Manager were gracious enough to spend nearly 5 hours with me, including a 3 hour personal tour of all the campus buildings and artworks just days before their season opening for the public. We also had a very lively discussion about the amazing possibilities for a more formalized residency program for musicians, poets (Peter Halstead is a poet), and other artists that they are working on.  THANK YOU Lindsey and Beth!

Lindsay and I in front of a painting by artist Mark Di Suvero

Super Guide Beth

Inverted Portal by Ensamble Studios

The legendary Big Sky

Mark di Suvero's Proverb

DOMO by Ensamble Studio

Patrick Dougherty's Daydreams

Alexander Calder's Two Discs

Mark di Suvero's Beethoven's Quartet

Frank "playing" Quartet with the artist's blessing. That was way fun.  At it's previous home at Storm King visitors were not allowed to play it.  It seems happier now. Photo by Beth.

After my visit in Montana I was headed for a visit to two programs in Wyoming.  Everyone I spoke to said I HAD TO cross into Wyoming via the Beartooth Highway.  They were right! In the span of just a few hours I went from an altitude of about 4,000 ft to almost 11,000 at the peak and then back down again.  I got a wicked altitude headache but it was worth it. My usual reminder that if you are getting this post via email the videos will not play and you need to go directly to the blog here.

“Sticks are something we all have in common. Everybody knows sticks - the twigs and branches picked up on grandfather's farm; the branches woven in grandmother's basket. Somewhere threaded in all the public mass is a common thread, and that thread is the human spirit.”  --Patrick Dougherty

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.

Diane Arbus

Alec Soth

Garry Winogrand

Nicholas Nixon     A complete set of all 42 annual photos of the Brown Sisters.

OK I'm officially exhausted now. Next week things cool down a bit.

 Nature can do without man but man cannot do without nature.   --Prentice Bloedel

I've been buried in trip planning for days. When I embark on a major new leg of the sabbatical I have a list of places I might want to visit and do additional research on. I begin to write letters of introduction in advance without knowing exactly when I will be in their area.  It's a house of cards and at some point you just need to decide where you will be and hope for the best. Once things start to firm up I put on my travel agent hat and make flights, car rentals, airbnb selections etc.  Driving such great distances is getting a little old and so as I was driving to LA from Phoenix I decide to use a sort of hub and spoke strategy for my visits to the West.  My wonderful friends Kevin and Betsy Dill offered me their guest house in West Hollywood for as long as I want so I am making camp there and I am going to be flying to various destinations as needed. First I wanted to spend a few days with their family and check out a few things in LA. I had heard a lot of buzz about the Maholy-Nagy retrospective show at LACMA and I went with Betsy. I knew his photo work but had no idea of the range of other work he did.

I think this photograph was my favorite piece in the show.  What an amazing composition. Sorry for the crappy iPhone reproduction. Below Betsy through the exhibition entry door.

I always love to visit my favorite Chris Burdens when I am at LACMA. A reminder that if you are getting this post via email you will likely not be able to view the videos.  Go directly to the blog here. Bellow is a short film about Burden's Metropolis II.

I had a little fun with his signature piece Urban Light 2008 at the entrance to the museum.

A new discovery for me this visit was the work of Saudi Arabian artist Abdulnasser Gharem, a self-taught artist who spent 23 years in the Saudi military. This politically charged piece is called Camouflage 2017 and is made of rubber stamps.  The detail below shows the reversed text which appears throughout the work.

I couldn't resist the obligatory "levitating" shot of Michael Heizer's Levitated Mass (photo by Betsy). If you haven't seen Doug Pray's documentary about the project of getting this 340 ton boulder to LACMA it is worth a view.

Betsy and I also squeezed in a visit to the Getty to see Chris Killip's show.

This was my favorite from the Killip show-Youth on Wall, Jarrow, Tyneside 1976

I decided that my next segment would be Washington, Oregon, and San Francisco.  I flew to Portland and drove all the way north to Port Townsend, WA.  I was originally supposed to see a residency program there but the appointment fell through and I ended up doing two great studio visits with Seth Rolland and Andrea Love. Seth is an amazing furniture designer and builder that I met when we purchased one of his tables for Cassilhaus.  This is my second studio visit with him and he showed me some of his latest creations.

My friend Andrea is an incredible animator that I met through her parents who are dear friends from Durham.  She does not do computer 2D animation but very labor intensive 3D frame by frame animation from sets and characters that she makes herself.  Here is her demo real to give you a flavor of her work. This old school low tech methodology gives the work an unusually fresh and unique look. She gave me a studio tour to get a glimpse of how the "sausage is made." Click on any image in this post to enlarge.

Andrea with husband Alex

We all went back to Seth's shop afterwards and then had a nice dinner on the water.  Of course everybody knows everybody already in Port Townsend.

I found a crazy and wonderful airbnb in PT with a spectacular cat.  A hand-built straw bale house that was sort of Middle Earth meets the Moors. The hosts make müsli commercially and sell it at local farmers' markets and online.

I was driving down some random road in PT and out of the corner of my eye I saw this intense splash of color flapping in the wind on a clothesline and I almost drove off the road trying to get my camera out. I was praying the home owner would not come out to find out what the crazy man was doing photographing her sheets.

One of my favorite discoveries in town was Chetzemoka Park. I went back three times in one day.

The illiterate of the future will be the person ignorant of the use of the camera as well as the pen.

László Moholy-Nagy

So what do one of the world's largest radio telescopes and homemade pie have in common??? They were both on Highway 60 in New Mexico on the way to visit my latest bucket list item-Walter de Maria's seminal land art piece The Lightning Field

photo courtesy of the Dia Foundation and John Cliett

The Karl Jansky Very Large Array or VLA Radio Telescope is an astonishing instrument.  Click the link if you really want to learn about it (really you do!) but basically a radio telescope, as opposed to a normal optical telescope, receives radio waves rather than visible light and can mathematically combine signals from multiple dishes to get the equivalent resolution and sensitivity of one huge dish that would be miles wide but physically impossible to build. The VLA has twenty seven 82 foot diameter dishes that weigh 230 tons each.  They move on a Y shaped grid of railway tracks and can be deployed in different configurations as wide as 22 miles apart. It was built in the late 70s and the location was chosen because there is zero light and electromagnetic pollution on this vast rural plain.

I photographed the VLA extensively in 2000 (beautiful images if I do say so myself) but unfortunately all of those images are on analog 35mm slide film in my basement and I am not home to scan them!  Ellen was along for the ride this time and I really wanted her to see it.

You can see some of the railroad tracks below.

This is the maintenance hanger where they service the antennae. You can get an idea of scale from the pick-up truck.

This is the beast that moves the telescope around for configuration or service.

The VLA is a fascinating place to visit if you ever get the chance and Pie Town, NM, population 186, down the road a bit further is a great place to eat pie! Folks are trying to bring the town back from extinction and the home made pie competition is fierce.

But back to the main event.  I have wanted to see Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field for a long time.  It is in an undisclosed location in rural NM and the only way to see it is by appointment through the Dia Foundation.  Reservations go on sale on Feb 1st for the year and basically they sell out that day. We secured 5 spots and Ellen and I invited our NC friends and art groupies MJ, BethAnn, and Elizabeth (same crew that invited us for hot air ballooning last week) to join us so we had the place to ourselves. De Maria has strickly proscribed how he wants people to experience the piece: you are driven by van from Quemado NM and you stay on site for 24 hours in the original homestead cabin. They give you no real information about the piece before you arrive so you can form your own impressions during your time there.  Only 6 people max can see it at a time and no photographs are allowed.  This was really hard for me but I honored his wishes and it allowed me to experience the work rather than document it. From Dia:

The Lightning Field (1977), by the American sculptor Walter De Maria, is a work of Land Art situated in a remote area of the high desert of western New Mexico. It is comprised of 400 polished stainless steel poles installed in a grid array measuring one mile by one kilometer. The poles -- two inches in diameter and averaging 20 feet and 7½ inches in height -- are spaced 220 feet apart and have solid pointed tips that define a horizontal plane. A sculpture to be walked in as well as viewed, The Lightning Field is intended to be experienced over an extended period of time. A full experience of The Lightning Field does not depend upon the occurrence of lightning, and visitors are encouraged to spend as much time as possible in the field, especially during sunset and sunrise. In order to provide this opportunity, Dia offers overnight visits during the months of May through October.

Commissioned and maintained by Dia Art Foundation, The Lightning Field is recognized internationally as one of the late-twentieth century's most significant works of art and exemplifies Dia's commitment to the support of art projects whose nature and scale exceed the limits normally available within the traditional museum or gallery.

When we arrived around 3pm I was a little underwhelmed. At that time of day the sun was such that you can only see a couple of the poles from the porch of the house and you wonder what all of the fuss is about. I read all of De Maria's technical notes about the installation in the cabin and was completely fascinated by the incredible detail and technical accuracy of the installation.  Tolerances were 1/16" between the poles and an elaborate underground grounding network was in place when and if the field attracted lightning.  Then I started walking through and around the field.  I decided to do it solo and my compatriots did the same.  We stopped for dinner (provided by Dia in the frig) and then I started to walk around the field at sunset.  It was magical.  The stainless poles reflected the blue sky and as you looked up one of the poles (about 22' high) the top of the pole completely disappeared and melded with the sky.  I tried walking all kinds of patterns-diagonals, perimeters, etc. If you hold onto the poles there is an amazing vibration from the wind as the poles are anchored many feet below the ground in concrete.  The ground is just scrub vegetation around the poles and there was lots of evidence that animals, including some very large animals, liked the field as well. I couldn't identify the footprints but we thought it might be elk. The next morning early there were similar revelations.  You could see all 400 poles distinctly from the porch in the full 1 mile by 1 km grid. I've never really had this much time to experience a single work of art and it was a transformative experience for me. We didn't experience lightning during our stay (lightning season is more July and August) but it seemed completely unnecessary for our already extraordinary experience. I didn't want the van to come get me the next day. It was a day off the grid and very much in the present. Here is a shot of our crew back in Quemado.

We parted ways with our NC friends and Ellen and I headed off to Phoenix for a fun reunion with three of our former Cassilhaus artists-in residence, Marie Navarre and Mayme Kratz from the Phoenix/Tempe area and Alan Bur Johnson from Jerome. We stayed with our dear friend Lisa Sette and her husband Peter Shikany and they hosted a dinner.

Ellen, me, Marie, Lisa, Mayme, and Alan

Lisa owns Lisa Sette Gallery and is the gallerist for all three of these amazing artists. It was the first time we had seen her dazzling new midtown location. We stayed in Lisa and Peter's fabulous guest house which was actually on the cover of the premier issue of Dwell magazine.

I was sad to have to take Ellen to the airport after only a day in Phoenix but somebody has to work! I stayed on for a week to start my planning for the West Coast leg of my trip. Temperatures in Phoenix were brutal so I was forced to use their swimming pool every day to swim laps.

I also managed to get in a wonderful studio visit with Mayme. Her work involves casting natural materials in resin. It is a fascinating process to watch and I was amazed at the range of materials she is using in her work.

It was so great to get to catch up with all of these old friends and Lisa and Peter's place was such a wonderful oasis.  I totally bonded with my dog-sitting charge, Jaxon, too.  Now it is off to LA!  Stay tuned for Week Seventeen.

“Cut my pie into four pieces, I don’t think I could eat eight.”  -Yogi Berra

One of the earliest booked locations I had on this trip was a visit to the Tamarind Institute, a world famous Fine Art press in Albuquerque, NM. My friend Diana Gaston, whom I met when she was the chief curator for the Fidelity Investments Collection and got to know through Curator Camp at Cassilhaus, is now the Executive Director there and she invited Ellen and me out to give a talk about our programs at Cassilhaus. Ellen and I were finishing up our time in Marfa on our #thirteenyearsthirteendays anniversary tour and had three days to make our way to Albuquerque. First stop was Las Cruces, NM and a visit to the amazing White Sands National Monument. It is a photographers' paradise and I had photographed there extensively on my sabbatical in 2000 but Ellen hadn't seen it. We got there at 6:45 am just before they opened to avoid any footprints in the sand and the ranger let us in early. Nothing like a 275 square mile sandbox to bring out your inner child. It did not disappoint. Click any image to enlarge.

Next we headed off to Truth or Consequences, NM to take a soak or two in their famous hot springs.This one at Riverbend Hot Springs is right on the Rio Grande river.  Multiple baths with different temps. Dreamy.

Our airbnb in ToC was an off-the-grid dome house and surprisingly luxurious. If you want to know where all the hippies have moved to......

We have an old friend from Durham, Max Rada Dada, in town and it was fun to catch up. Here I am with Ellen and Diana Gaston sporting my latest Rada Dada fashion in front of the latest Tamarind edition by Cassilhaus and Tamarind AIR Rachel Perry.

Tamarind put us up for 4 days in their exquisite artist apartment on the top floor of their headquarters on the UNM campus and we got a fabulous demonstration of their lithography operation and a peak at a selection of their stunning editions produced throughout their history.

Here Ash (left) and their master printer Valpuri Remling work on a 5 color lithograph. It is an incredibly fascinating process.

Prior to giving our talk on Saturday, we decided to sneak away to Sante Fe for the day Friday to take in a couple of studio visits and to find out what all the incredible buzz was about with Meow Wolf. The buzz was warranted. This incredible artist-collective- designed interactive experience/permanent installation is sort of St. Louis City Museum meets acid trip. Incredible and tons of fun.

We fell down this rabbit hole for many hours.  Speaking of rabbit holes.......

Our talk at Tamarind on Saturday for a nice sized group of Tamarind supporters went really well. Ellen and I spoke for almost an hour and there were a lot of good questions.  Ellen and I spent much of the morning finalizing and updating our presentation.

One of Tamarind's board members held a wonderful reception for us which I stupidly neglected to photograph but it was a delightful evening all around with a tremendous group of people. Thank you Debi and Clint.

Sometimes the greatest way to check off an item from your bucket list is to find out about doing it just hours before it happens. We got a call late Saturday from our friends MJ, BethAnn, and Elizabeth who were in town to join us for another bucket list item I will cover in the next post, and they asked us if we would join them for a hot air balloon trip at dawn the next morning.  We impulsively said yes and on a cold Sunday morning we were off to the skies.  Albuquerque has a huge balloon culture and is the site of the world's largest annual balloon festival.

What a spectacular ride and when the burners aren't firing it is incredibly quiet up there.

We were done by 9:30am and had time for another trip to Santa Fe to do a little gallery hopping and to visit our photo gallery friends David Scheinbaum, Janet Russek and Andra Russek of Sheinbaum and Russek LTD. They have been photo mentors to me for a long time and one of the first contacts and friends I made in the photo community. They have a stunning home, studio, and home gallery in Santa Fe and it was wonderful to share a meal and an afternoon with them.

When moral superiority combines with billowing ignorance, they fill up a hot-air balloon that's awfully hard not to poke.

--Barbara Kingsolver

Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and Residency, Captiva Island, Florida

CLICK ANY IMAGE IN THIS POST TO ENLARGE

For the most part, getting access to the programs I am interested in visiting has involved simply writing a letter of introduction, usually to the Executive Director of an organization, explaining the intent of my sabbatical trip and talking a bit about our program at Cassilhaus. Doors have been generously opened around the county. Early in my research I discovered the unparallelled arts philanthropy work of the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation in NYC and their residency program on Captiva Island Florida. They have no less than 5 separate grant programs to support artists and arts organizations.  I spent hours on their website and I found a video about a conference that took place on Captiva in 2015 for their SEED grantees that I thought would be the all time motherlode for my research-a week-long convening of more than 30 innovative and mostly emerging arts organization from all over the US that the Foundation had identified as up and coming and worthy of support. ALL OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS' TOP PEOPLE WERE THERE TOGETHER IN ONE PLACE. I found out that the summit was every two years but there was zero information about it on the web. I couldn't even find a date for 2017 and I desperately wanted to find a way to be invited. I contacted Christopher Rauschenberg, Bob's son, who is President of the Foundation Board and a major force in the photo world. I had met him at various photo conferences. He advised me that the summit was just for grantees but offered that Ann Brady, who directs the residency on Captiva, would be happy to talk with me about their amazing (but unrelated to the SEED summit) residency program. I contacted Ann and gently pleaded my case.  She kindly agreed to show me around and talk with me about their program but not during the summit and said that only the director of philanthropy in NY, Risë Wilson, could authorize an outside observer coming to the SEED summit. Undaunted, I put on my charm shoes and contacted Risë and we hit it off. After a brief conversation she invited me to come as an observer for the first two days of the conference.  I WAS IN! AND it was in Florida where I was already headed AND the dates were perfect for my schedule AND for 2017 they had added all (more than 20) of their Artist as Activist grantees, some of the top social practice leaders in all media and fields, to the summit cohort. Kid in a candy store!!!

The experience was incredible. On Monday Ann Brady spent over two hours with me on the deck of Rauschenberg's Fish House (third photo above) giving me the benefit of her 20 years of experience in the residency world and making me feel very much at home there.  That evening we had dinner and orientation with the entire group and some fun ice breaker exercises.

Ann and Risë

On Tuesday I was able to sit in on several of the excellent content sessions on non-profit management etc. and Tuesday night was the "artist showcase" where several artists from among our ranks performed for the group.  I was blown away. It was also a great opportunity to get to know a bit about the participants and their organizations and I have already set up meetings with two groups later in my trip.

I had to drag myself away from Captiva but I was due in Dallas. I serve on the collections committee at the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University with Nancy Nasher, whose father Ray endowed the museum. At an April meeting I told her I would be in Dallas in May and she insisted I attend "the most unusual and amazing musical event I would ever experience"-a fund raiser called Cancer Blows featuring 20 of the world's top trumpeters.  Unusual indeed! It was quite an affair and I got the VIP treatment as Nancy and her husband David were the lead sponsors.

Arturo Sandoval was amazing!  I was shocked to learn that Doc Severinsen was still alive!  Quite a dresser.

I had a wonderful chance to reconnect with my cousin Carol and her husband John who hosted me in Dallas.  We were pretty close growing up but I hadn't seen her in a long time.

Ellen and I decided to celebrate our 13th wedding anniversary by spending 13 days together on the road so she flew into San Antonio and I drove down from Dallas to connect with her and stay with her nephew and his family there.  We launched the hash tag #thirteenyearsthirteendays to track our trip on Instagram.  I have been using the hashtag #frankssabbatical on my whole trip.

Ellen joined me the next day for an interview with Veronique Le Melle, the Executive director of Artpace, in San Antonio. They have a distinguished history and an amazing list of artist alumni including Mark Bradford, William Cordova, Dario Robleto, Christian Marclay, Glenn Ligon, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and Tracey Moffat. They have an unusual model where for each artist-in-residence session they appoint a curator who selects one international artist, one US artist, and one artist from Texas to form a collaborating cohort.

After our interview we headed off to one of our lifetime bucket list items-a visit to one of the art world Meccas, the small West Texas town of Marfa. You need to be dedicated.  Marfa is basically three hours from ANYTHING. First off who knew that the legal speed limit was actually 80mph anywhere???

Ellen wanted to take the slow Southern backroads route. The drive was stunningly beautiful. We were in West Texas reverie. So much so that we forgot to fill up the car and ended up having a white knuckle adventure with dreams of spending the night on the side of the road.  At 10 o'clock at night without any cell or internet service we realized we were 70 miles from the next gas station, were on E, and to add insult to injury were driving a diesel car and didn't even know if the distant gas station was open or if it had diesel. The VW Jetta's 46mpg paid off.  We got to a gas station with 12 miles left on our range indicator but the station was closed.  There was a trucker there at the 24 hour diesel pump and he put a code in for us to use the pump and we filled up!  I have never been so happy to see a gas station in my life. We pulled off to celebrate the stars.

Marfa did not disappoint. Incredible vibe and people and we had a fabulous airbnb. Lavish brunch our first morning on the back deck.

Marfa is home to the Chinati Foundation which houses the estate collection of a vast trove of work by Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Carl André, John Chamberlin, Robert Irwin, Roni Horn, and others.  We took the 5 hour!!! complete collection tour and it felt like we only got a short look.  Particularly breathtaking were the 100 untitled works in milled aluminum by Donald Judd from 1982-86 and the single untitled fluorescent light installation across SIX ENTIRE BUILDINGS! by Dan Flavin.

photos from the Chinati website

More Judd work in concrete outside of the exhibition buildings.

Another amazing treat at Chinati was a newly completed installation occupying an entire building by Robert Irwin.

We spent a lot of time just walking around town.

A few years ago when we were in Austin we bought a print called Women's Studies at Flatbed Press by an artist named Julie Speed. The piece is actually up in a show called Exquisite Corpse at Cassilhaus as we speak. Download Exquisite Corpse Gallery Guide

Just by chance I found out she lived in Marfa and I contacted her and she graciously invited us over for cocktails and a studio tour.  Amazing work and a great human to boot! We also got to meet her wonderful and very accomplished musician partner Fran Christina.

At the suggestion of our Chinati tour guide, we took a drive out route 2810 almost to the Mexican border, what she said was Donald Judd's favorite drive, to have a picnic and watch the stars.

My trusty steed logged its 8000th mile.

I used a 30 second exposure and a flashlight to "paint" a portrait of Ellen gazing at the stars.

Another night we checked off another bucket list item by going to Prada Marfa, a permanent public art installation in the form of a fake Prada boutique right on the highway near Valentine TX.  Again we used the 30 second exposure and flashlight technique to take a night shot and illuminate the sign and logo for the photograph.

To go in the dark with a light is to know the light. To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight, and find the dark, too blooms and sings, and is traveled by dark feet and dark wings.

            --Wendell Berry

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Off to Miami! When I have gone to Art Basel Miami in the past, I have stayed with our wonderful friends Arnoldo and Mirta in South Miami. Ellen went to college with Arnoldo and they have a fabulous place with a guest house and they put me up for the week. I was living large.

One of my issues so far is that I haven't found a whole lot of residency or exhibition programs based in private homes and I was looking for more models close to Cassilhaus.  I hit paydirt with the Fountainhead Residency. A wonderful couple, Dan and Kathryn Mikesell, collected contemporary art, started inviting artists to their home, fell in love with living and working with artists of all stripes, established a residency program in a house beside theirs, and they have established life-long bonds with their artists and it is the richest experience they have ever had. Sound familiar???

I interviewed Kathryn for several hours and just couldn't believe how much our stories overlapped.  They have many more artists than we do (3 at a time and 30-40/year) and I was astonished to find that they have no staff and do everything themselves!  I thought I was overextended. So many wonderful stories and so many great ideas gleaned. This is by far the closest analog I've found to what we are doing at Cassilhaus and I now have an amazing sounding board for ideas and issues going forward. The most significant thing that will come out of this sabbatical research is a singular network of residency and community arts program professionals that I can tap in the future.

I only got a glimpse of their wonderful collection.

Their newest artist, Kari Cholnoky, had just moved into the garage studio and was already amazingly far along on her project.

Not as similar to Cassilhaus but no less interesting was my visit to the de la Cruz Collection, the private museum of Rosa and Carlos de la Cruz that houses their collection-one of the largest collections of Cuban art in the world-in a stunning space in downtown Miami.

I was fortunate to connect with Ibett Yanez (at left), the director of the de la Cruz museum, during my visit and she introduced me to Carlos and Rosa (center) and we had a wonderful meeting and I learned about their extraordinary educational and travel outreach programs which they support and fund entirely themselves. Ibett was very generous in connecting me with other interesting programs for my research as well.

It always helps to have friends with connections!  I had visited the spectacular Margulies Collection in Miami years ago and was blown away by their singular collection, particulary in photography. It turns out that my friend Arnoldo is good friends with the husband of legendary curator of the collection Katherine Hinds and he was able to organize a private tour and interview on a day that the museum was closed.  Katherine has been the curator of the collection since 1982 and is working on a comprehensive book about the collection.  She was delightful and gave me full access to the collection. 

For the past five years the collection has been acquiring an extensive collection of work by Anselm Keifer

I loved this piece by George Segal too.

Katherine also introduced me to "one of her favorite artists in Miami", Antonia Wright, a performance, video, and installation artist and Antonia was kind enough to meet me and give me a studio tour on very short notice. I have rarely had the opportunity to talk with a performance based artist and It was enlightening to learn of the years of study in meditation and tai chi she did to perform this piece with bees. (Click on the icon to go full screen)

Miami was a spectacular stop. Thanks to everyone for their kindness, generosity, and hospitality.

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,

One clover, and a bee, And revery.

The revery alone will do, If bees are few.

--Emily Dickinson

I NEVER miss the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham. This was the 20th year and I have been to 17. I decided to take a mid-sabbatical break and spend three weeks at home and it was great to be with Ellen, Jaco, and Joni and be back in the hood with my friends. Some of my favorites this year at the festival were Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, Last Men in Aleppo, Strong Island, and Purple Dreams. I did some sabbatical prep while home but I won't bore you with the details. Just at the end of week twelve Ellen and I went to Orlando to celebrate her elevation to the prestigious College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects.  She received her medal at an investiture ceremony at the national conference and was one of only 4 Fellows from NC this year.  I am so incredibly proud of her and this important professional achievement.

Another famous woman gave the keynote.

With the next post I will pick up the sabbatical adventure again and Week Thirteen brings some amazing stops! Thanks for reading.

It had been a long time since I had driven in NYC and it was pretty harrowing getting out of the city and on my way south but I lived to tell this tale.   My first stop was Glenstone in Potomac MD.

Photos by Scott Frances and courtesy of Glenstone website

Glenstone is a stunning private museum set on 200 acres and housing the private post World War II collection of Mitchell and Emily Rales. The 25,000 sf museum was designed by noted late architect Charles Gwathmey of Gwathmey Siegel Kaufman and is surrounded by world class sculpture by Ellsworth Kelly, Richard Serra, Jeff Koons, Andy Goldsworthy, and others. Landscape design is by Peter Walker and Partners. They show only work from their own collection and collect extremely deeply for the one artist shows that they mount. Emily is the Executive Director and Chief Curator. The collection is open to the public but with very limited group size to control the viewing experience. When I was there, there was an exhibition of the work of Roni Horn. Well into construction is another museum more than 5 times the size of the first to house their growing collection. The new project is being designed by Thomas Phifer and Partners.  There is a nice article in the New York Times about the couple.

Mitchell and Emily Rales in front of Richard Serra’s “Sylvester.”   Christopher Gregory/The New York Times

This was the absolute first place I found in my research and the first letter I wrote asking for a visit related to my sabbatical trip.  I initially rejected the idea of stopping here as I was initially looking for "places like Cassilhaus" and we don't have a whole lot in common with extremely wealthy collectors with private museums and no residency program. What got me was their singular education program.  We have been trying to beef up our own education and outreach and I thought I might learn a few things from them. Stockton Toler, Glenstone's Visitor Experience Director graciously agreed to show me around on a day the museum was closed and I was really inspired by the work he is doing.  He now has 43!! public middle and high schools in Montgomery County, MD visiting Glenstone on a regular basis.  Glenstone pays and arranges for all bus transportation and even pays reimbursement for substitute teachers. He works directly with the curriculum director for the entire county school system who facilitates connection with art teachers and makes sure their tours cover state learning requirements. While we were talking, Stockton walked me through the amazing Roni Horn show.  Hard to believe that all of this work from one artist is in a single collection!

Even more amazing on the education front is their new and first-of-its-kind  Emerging Professionals Program-a two year on the job program for recent BFA and MFA grads that offers full salary and benefits and concentrated exposure to a museum studies curriculum one full day a week while working as docents/guides the other 4 days. They had just admitted their first class of 9 students when I arrived and will be at full capacity next year when the new museum opens. After two years they will have exceptional experience to compete for highly competitive museum jobs.

Just before I left Stockton asked me if I wanted to see Andy Goldsworthy's amazing three stone and clay cabins entitled Boulder, Room, and Holes. They look identical from the outside but inside is a different story. The craftsmanship is astounding.

I was pretty fired up and as soon as I got home the following week I set up a meeting with Jessica Ruhle, the Director of Education and Public Programs at the Nasher Museum, to see how we could beef up our collaboration and better engage their existing network of school groups. Stay tuned!

I'd been wanting to visit my friend and amazing photographer Eliot Dudik for some time and I decided to add Charles City, VA to my flight path on the way home. This is Eliot in his studio which was a church in a previous lifetime.  His crazy house is an assemblage of a bunch of structures that have been moved to the site and connected into one. Eliot graciously put me up and I spent some time photographing his space.

Eliot calls photography book collecting a disease. :)

Eliot was recently hired to conceive, set up, and run the College of William and Mary's new photography program in the art department. I didn't know until my arrival in Williamsburg that W&M is the second oldest college in the country. They had no photo program prior to Eliot's arrival and he is hell bent on blazing some new trails. His is the only photo program in the country that starts first year students with 4x5" large format analog film cameras and traditional darkroom process. He wants his students to get out of the snapshot mentality of cellphone cameras and learn how to see and compose thoughtfully and carefully and learn the basics that the large format camera demands to make successful images.  He has almost single handedly built a state of the art darkroom and he is a popular professor with overflowing classes. He showed me some of his students' work and it was impressive.

During our Actual Size exhibition at Cassilhaus, Eliot brought a group of his students down to see the show and they took the back roads on the way and shot with their 4x5s.

Another project he worked on with his students to learn the basics of cameras and light was the building of a Camera Obscura on campus and then working with them to make prints of goings on on the quad inside the three-lens chamber.

Eliot has also started a book arts program and teaches his students about all aspects of making and binding of unique books as art objects. "Book" has a pretty broad interpretation in his class.  He posts a ton of his students' work on his Instagram feed @eliotdudik.  In collaboration with the W&M library each of his students will have their final book accessioned into the permanent collection of the library. Quite a coup for an undergraduate student.

Student work on display in the W&M library

I got back home just in time for my favorite event of the year in Durham-The Full Frame Documentary Film Festival. It was the 20th year and I have been to about 18 of them. We always have family come to town for it and my sister Barb came for her 11th year and our niece Theresa and her husband Peter came from Nantucket and we had a great time.  Trailers for my favorites: Purple Dreams, Last Men in Aleppo, Abacus: Small Enough to Jail, Heaven is a Traffic Jam on the 405, Quest, and Strong Island.

 In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

—Alfred Hitchcock

Susan Worsham   Marine, Hotel Near Airport, Richmond VA, 2009  Archival Pigment Print

Week eight found me NYC bound and another chance to spend some time with Ellen. We stayed in Jersey City for the first time at our dear friends Melinda and Richard's place.  What a stunning view from the rooftop garden across the Hudson to Manhattan.

We go to the AIPAD photography fair together each year and catch up with our friends in NY and in the photo world and see all of the new amazing photo work.  This was the first year the fair was held at Pier 94 and it was a much bigger show than normal.  I have been going almost every year since 1999. We made some terrific finds this year including the amazing Susan Worsham image at the top of this post that will be featured in the groundbreaking Southbound photography exhibition curated by Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art Director and Cassilhaus AIR alum Mark Sloan and College of Charleston Professor and soon-to-be Cassilhaus AIR Mark Long. We added this piece and the one below by Louis Stettner to our collection. I've been following Susan Paulsen's work for a while and her images stick with me for a long time. The Zanele Muholi image below just knocked me out. This is part of the self portrait series she was working on when she was at Cassilhaus.

Louis Stettner  Thanksgiving Day Parade, NYC, 1974  Gelatin Silver Print

Susan Paulsen  Armonk, 2008  Archival Pigment Print

Zanele Muholi Zamile, KwaThema, 2016  Gelatin Silver Print

That bastard Trump is even messing up my photo fairs.  As a show of solidarity with artists and gallerists from countries suffering under his xenophobic travel ban, AIPAD left Tehran based Ag Galerie's booth empty but with this sign on the show floor.

We did get to meet and discover the work of a fantastic Iranian artist named Niloufar Banisadr and purchased the piece in her Polish Chair series below. The chair serves as a stand-in self portrait when she is unable to show her true self.

Her Paris Gallery was showing provocative self portraits in the niqab she shot in her twenties and is not able to show in her homeland or her website to this day.

I have a wonderful filmmaker friend in Chapel Hill named Olympia Stone. I saw her first film, The Collector, many years ago.  It is a documentary about her father, Allan Stone, a famous New York gallerist who passed away in 2006 and his obsessive art collecting/hording exploits. Check out Olympia's other films about artists on her site, several of who were represented by her father. Sorry I don't know the name of the photographer of this wonderful portrait below.

I was having an unrelated email conversation with Olympia and told her I was headed from Woodstock to NYC and she exclaimed "you must go visit my Mom-she is right on the way!" I was a little bit taken aback and hadn't yet connected the dots that the house she lived in was the very same one featured in the film and still jam packed with art. Boy am I glad I took her up on the invitation!  It was one of my greatest art experiences in my life. It is impossible for me to describe the depth and quality of art in their home and in deference to their privacy I don't want to include detailed photographs. Her mother Clare Stone, an equal partner in Allan's art obsession, could not have been more welcoming, delightful, and animated and knew the stories behind every piece.  I was there for hours but barely scratched the surface.  Talk about a kid in a candy store.

I think my favorite piece in the whole house is Thiebaud's portrait of Clare, Girl with the Blue Shoes, 1968.  Having Clare stand in front of her portrait and tell me stories of sitting for the portrait almost 50 years ago was a once in a lifetime experience. What a stunner!

New York is, of course, the art capital of the universe and it did not disappoint on this trip. Although trying to stay focused on sabbatical related visits, I got to see the Whitney Biennial and the equally stunning Human Interest: Portraits from the Whitney's Collection, a fantastic photo show at the Met called The Poetics of Place, Perpetual Revolution at ICP,  Vija Celmins at Matthew Marks, Olafur Eliasson at Tanya Bonakdar, and Vik Muniz at Sikkema Jenkins (possibly my favorite.)

photo by Ellen Cassilly

The above 4 are from the Whitney.  Pardon me again for being a lousy note taker on artist's names.  There was an amazing but sobering piece about artist student loan debt (image directly above) with quotes from artists including our own Lisa McCarty and a graph showing the combined student debt of all of the artists in the biennial.

 I hadn't been to the Guggenheim in a while and I fell under the spell of Frank Lloyd Wright's architecture like never before. I had fun for a few hours photographing the space (I peeked at the art too).

Back on the sabbatical trail I was incredibly lucky, thanks to my friend Tim Walter in Durham, to get a meeting with Bruce Payne who taught at Duke for decades and is now on the faculty at Baruch College where he leads the graduate program in arts administration.  Bruce has taught and mentored thousands of students and has former students in amazing arts leadership roles throughout the world. He took me to a fabulous lunch at the members lounge at the Met. Of the many pearls of wisdom I gleaned from our meeting, one anecdote about the power of leveraging small amounts of funding to have larger impacts, stands out as a profound insight that I have already passed on to dozens of people and put into practice myself. 

The story takes place in the late 70s before their was a Women's Studies department at Duke University. There was an informal women's caucus of female faculty. The Provost at the time went to the head of the caucus and said that Duke had received a windfall gift of $75,000 and he requested a proposal from them to use the grant to help women's studies and programming. They came back the next day and asked if they could spread the gift out over 3 years and the Provost was flabbergasted assuming they would jump at the chance to use it immediately to get a prominent visiting female faculty person or some other great immediate need. He asked how they could have an impact with only $25,000/year. The leaders of the women's caucus proposed a three year University-wide contest with $10,000 a year going to administer and promote the contest and $15000 toward five $3000 annual awards to any faculty person or department chair in any discipline that could re-imagine their syllabus "as if women mattered!". It was genius not only because of the 15 departments that had one or more of their syllabi refocused on the contributions of women but that ALL departments had to rethink their curriculum if they wanted to apply. Bruce contends that this was one major driving force behind Duke becoming a much more progressive and women-friendly institution than its peers. As wonderful as it would have been to have a top notch visiting scholar for a year, these small grants had a much larger and lifelong impact. This is my favorite story of the sabbatical so far.

The blessing and curse of traveling with your own car for months on end is that you don't have to worry about traveling light and can have such luxuries as two suitcases, a large computer monitor, your favorite water pillow, lots of camera gear and a tripod, gifts for the folks I am visiting, a cooler for fresh food, a humidifier etc.  This is final load-out in one load!  Headed home to NC for a few weeks!

INDEED!

I'm liking these LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONGER stays where I get to settle in a bit. I spent all of week seven in Woodstock NY with the lion's share of it at the Center for Photography at Woodstock, one of the medium's most venerable institutions that is about to celebrate its 40th anniversary. I stayed with former Cassilhaus Artists in Residence Charles Guice and Hannah Frieser.

On my drive there from PA I stopped at a intriguing residency program in East Jerusalem, PA called Holes in the Wall Collective and got to spend a short time with two of their founders Dhira and Julia. They curate residencies/happenings on the Art in the Fields property that I visited.

In the AIR residential space

Performance and Studio Space

Julia turned me on to an amazing new artist residency resource called RES which is currently under development. The RES co-founders—Katrina Neumann, Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria, and Kira Simon-Kennedy—have considerable experience in the field. In 2013, Neumann founded Rate My Artist Residency, a Yelp-like platform for artist residencies that she runs alongside her own artist practice and a full-time job as a gallery director. In 2009, Sanz de Santamaria co-founded Residency Unlimited, a New York-based residency program and creative hub, which also hosts a robust page for residency open calls. And in 2013, Simon-Kennedy co-founded China Residencies, a nonprofit offering advice and information about residencies in China and Hong Kong. They hope to have the combined platform up and running this year but in the meantime all three of these sites are incredible resources already.  I have mostly been using The Alliance of Artist Communities and Res Artis for my research on this trip so far and i look forward to this combined and more highly integrated and up to date site.

So back to Hannah and Charles at Woodstock. Charles continues to mentor a hand-picked group of artists around the world and advancing their careers in amazing ways. Hannah is the new Executive Director of CPW. Just before I arrived Hannah let me in on the excited news that they had just gotten the opportunity to purchase a house they used to rent for their residency program and it would really allow them to expand their program and save precious resources being spent on expensive rentals in the booming Woodstock real estate market. After a lightning fast fund raising campaign they closed just a few days before I got there and what a beautiful old house.

I interviewed Hannah for a couple of hours and was just blown away by her dedication to the artists she serves.  CPW is the only photo based residency in the world that serves 100% artists and curators of color and has from its inception in 1999. She sees the residency not as a one time opportunity but a career spanning engagement with an artist.  Before they arrive and long after they are gone Hannah is working with them to advance their career, get their work in exhibitions, and get connected with other opportunities in the field. She has an encyclopedic memory and remembers individual images from portfolio reviews she did with artists a decade prior.

Hannah also curates the exhibitions at CPW.  When I was there there was a three person show called Visceral Notions featuring the work of Bennie Flores Ansell, Elsa Mora, and Gabriel García Román.

Gabriel and Bennie's works were new to me and I only had some familiarity with Elsa's.  We have one of Elsa's pieces from 2003 in our collection.

Elsa Mora, Circurlo Vicioso, 2003  Imbue print on handmade watercolor paper

Elsa Mora, Natalie 3, 2016  Archival Digital Print on canvas, collage and paper insect.

I have discovered so many wonderful artists while hanging out with Hannah and Charles. I was lucky enough to catch an artist talk while I was there. Elsa unfortunately could not be there but I got to meet Gabriel and Bennie and learn more about their work.

Gabriel García Román, Jairo, 2014 Photogravure, chine-collé and silk screen

Gabriel García Román, Carlos & Fernando, 2016 Photogravure, chine-collé and silk screen

Gabriel talked about his stunning Queer Icons series. Bennie showed some fascinating installation pieces.

Bennie Flores Ansell, dpi Northward Migration, Without a Center to the American Landscape, 2017, 2000 one-inch slide film dots and butterfly collection pins

Bennie Flores Ansell, Analog Pixel Projection, 2017, Variable contrast filters, mirror and glass

Bennie Flores Ansell, Film Sprockets Compression Time LIne, 2016, 30 feet of Beadalon, magnetic clasp and hand-cut slide film sprocket holes

This piece was just crazy cool.  Artists are no strangers to obsessive practices but hand cutting thousands and thousands of sprocket holes from the side of slide film and stringing them together in a 30 foot string is truly over the top. The piece is stunningly beautiful and fun to watch in motion.

Just before I left I found out that Elsa was now the artistic director of an amazing new artist community called ArtYard in Frenchtown, NJ and it was because of an opening there that she couldn't be at the artist talk.  Looks very cool! It's not that far of a drive.......

A reminder to those reading this via email to go directly to the blog here for proper formatting.Click any photo to enlarge.

My trusty VW in 32" of snow in Leonardsville, NY

They predicted snow....

but not a 50 year record blizzard! I grew up in Pennsylvania but it has been 40 years since I got to play in snow like this and it was spectacular.

On my trip I have been using an app called Pinbox. During the months of research prior to embarking on this journey I started putting pins in each location that I might want to visit and the app allows you to associate information like website/contact info/notes etc. As I am about to go to an area of the country I start digging in deeper to the sites I have pinned and do additional research to see if there are additional sites I missed.  I then typically call or write letters to those places and try to set up a visit.  Sometimes its months in advance and sometimes just a few days.  Scheduling a multi-month journey can be a bit of a house of cards as you want to be far enough out to be assured of a convenient visit time but not too far out that I schedule myself into a bind if my plans or timing change.

As I started week six I was leaving Buffalo and I decided to head to Central NY and specifically a place intriguingly named The Horned Dorset Colony located in the tiny village of Leonardsville. The 40 year dream of a writer, painter, and musician who have assembled an amazing cohort of lovingly restored structures anchored by the famed Horned Dorset Inn and Restaurant to create a singular environment to encourage artistic cross pollination. The inn and restaurant preceded the colony and indeed their world class French Cuisine by chef Aaron Wratten attracts clientele from 100 miles away. With little more than 24 hours notice and without knowing me from Adam, Roberta, Kingsley, and Harold welcomed me like family and installed me in "the library cabin" complete with a 10,000+ volume library and a beautifully restored and incredibly luxurious suite of my own.

My planned day long visit turned into four when we were completely snowed in with the storm of the century.  I got to know my hosts and their dogs, the history of the colony, helped shovel their driveway, and did I mention that the aforementioned chef is their son and he and Harold took turns cooking the most amazing meals ever for us? I was praying for the snowplow not to come. 

Kinglsey was really taken with this photo I made of one of their trays in the dining room with just the right light.

All of the "cabins" are meticulously restored with antique salvage from the area and the 3 directors do almost all of the work themselves.  It is almost unbelievable.  They tell me they have trouble prying writers out of the "Falls House" which they use for writers and poets.

After four days my hosts helped me dig my car out and I was very sad to say goodbye.  I definitely will be back.

I headed next to a residency program near Ithaca call the Constance Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts and it really struck a cord with me about legacy.  Connie was a photographer who died of cancer way too young at 49 and decided just before her death that she wanted to endow a residency program for New York artists on her 200 acres of land in the Finger Lakes area of NY. Each session of the summer juried residency has one photographer, one writer, one poet, and two other visual artists. There are 5 discipline specific studios and lodgings on the campus.  In an unusual model these facilities are available the rest of the year on a first come first served basis for only 25$ a day to allow any NY artist to have uninterrupted time to do their work.

I immediately connected with the wonderful Executive Director Lesley Williamson and we had a lengthy and very helpful conversation about their program.

She also generously allowed me to stay the night in Connie's room in the house she built on the site.  I love this self portrait that hangs in the entry.

After six weeks solo on the road I was pining for some family time so we organized a little reunion with my two sisters Barb and Ann and their husbands and my wife Ellen in Carlisle, PA where Barb lives. Just before I left I got an email out of the blue from a high school friend I hadn't spoken to in 40 years telling me he had just bought our childhood home and so we organized a wonderful walk down memory lane and visited together as a family.  We also went to the land in Perry County PA where my parents lived for decades and we shared so many memories.

I found this on the tack board in Connie Saltonstall's bedroom.  Connie yours already has.