June Goodness at the Colony

From top: Dustin London, Liz Ainslie, flowers with bee, flowers with barn, Lydia Paar and friend

June residents are feasting on the surrounds here, as are the bees, birds, and our little four-legged mascot Chelsea. You can see her keeping writer Lydia Paar company. What haven in the hills for art is complete without an under-the-table muse?

Renowned Artist Nina Katchadourian to Lead Workshop at the Colony

Family: Artmaking with Nina Katchadourian
June 30 to July 2 2011

This subject is something that is often (un)comfortably close at hand, rich with potential, and complicated to work with. The workshop aims to take an objective view of the topic on one hand, by looking at the work of artists (Janine Antoni, Patty Chang, Richard Billingham, Sally Mann, Gillian Wearing and Neil Goldberg among others) who have taken it up from a variety of proximities, but also to delve into the deeply subjective. This presents challenges: how do you allow an unknown viewer access to a story you are so close to? How do you prevent the personal from becoming solipsistic and self-indulgent? Working with this subject can obviously be personal, but it can also be a way to explore broader subjects concerning genealogy, history and origin, and the question of what it means to "be related" to someone in the first place.

The workshop is not restricted to any one medium and a cross-disciplinary approach is welcomed. Although not required, participants are encouraged to bring family documents that hold particular allure from them as possible starting points to work from.

Nina Katchadourian works in a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video and sound. Several times, she has worked with her family directly in collaboration (such as in "Accent Elimination," where she and her parents worked with a professional voice coach to acquire each other's accents) or other times by examining a family document in depth ("The Nightgown Pictures," based on a photo-document made by her grandmother about Katchadourian's mother). Other projects, such as "The Genealogy of the Supermarket," looks at the way family is portrayed through the images of people that appear on common grocery store products. Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. She is based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, MASS MoCA, Artists Space and SculptureCenter in New York, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. Katchadourian is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco. More information on Katchadourian's work can be found at http://www.ninakatchadourian.com/.

Save the Date!

Our annual party on the gorgeous grounds of the Colony!

Last year, despite intense weather, we had our best party yet. The coolest art by Chris Kardambikis and Jasdeep Khaira hung from our buildings and tent, as well as adorned tabletops. Laura Silver hula hooped. We had wine and conversation, music and auctions. Open studios. Food. Poets. Writers. Artists of all stripes and those who love them.

This year we will have all the goods - plus ambient dancers in the mix! We think Edna sure knew what she was doing carving out this corner of the world for all sorts of reveling...

Color at the Colony

Kate Vida was in residence here last month and used the grounds to amazing advantage. The sets were eye-popping, as you can see, as well as ear! Working in the office we could hear the occasional over-inflation of the props. We're really excited to see the video clips from this shoot and hope to share snippets soon. Meantime, gawk these pics!






Photos by Adam Baran

Kate Vida is an interdisciplinary artist based in Connecticut and New York City. Her wearable forms exaggerate and amplify relationships between what the body can do and what the forms enable (or deny) the body to attempt. She received her MFA from Yale University in Painting and her BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She has performed at The Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven and Mass MoCA, North Adams. Vida recently apprenticed at The Budapest Puppet Theater in Budapest, Hungary where she learned traditional mask construction techniques.

Barn Swallow: Millay Newsletter Online

Millay Colony for the Arts is at last fully digital! Well, our newsletter is. Lots of zeros and ones somehow magically provide the color, poems, details, and photos from doings at the Colony for your viewing pleasure. We're using a new online interface that simulates pages turning with the touch of the cursor. You can zoom in and all around then back out. It might take some getting used to, but it's easy once you get the hang of it!

Inside you'll find a personal essay from July resident Robert Glück, a write-up on our pilot program with Teachers & Writers (see photo below), application tips from two-time poetry juror Rachel Levitsky, and much more.


Teaching-Poet Adam Wiedewitsch in Germantown High School

Barn Swallow Issue 10 Winter/Spring 2011 is chock full. Check it out and let us know what you think. www.millaycolony.org/newsletter

2011 Residency Season Underway!

The long winter seemingly has not left the hills here. No, not snow. But chill and fog and huddling over hot drinks are still with us. The signs of spring do show themselves. The robins poking the field for worms - there must be 30 of them at any one time - the mudded road, and oh, the residents! Artists and writers and music at the Colony. Creatures all foraging the lay of the campus for words, color, lines, and notes. (And coffee, of course.)

Tisa Bryant Workshop Retreat

Try Anything: A Lab for New Writing
May 29 to June 2, 2011

According to the Oxford Dictionary, an experiment is defined as "an action of trying anything." To try to reproduce the mind's questions, the eye's scrutiny of place, relation, space, the meaning of being in the world, alive and feeling, may demand that we break rules, trespass borders, re-imagine the embodied voice, its language of signs and symbols. What does one do when such attempts at translating ourselves are not easily contained within a single genre, form or register? This class is lab for such questioning, regeneration and discovery. We will create new writing borne from the Millay environment, the bodies of your own poems, essays, fictions or plays, all inspired by various source texts, trunks of special junk and myriad cellular memories. We will make new writing that functions on a number of levels (or not at all!), by design, or by the nature of the beast. Throughout, we'll share our own attempts, findings, failures and intentions, and encourage deeper forays into creative possibility. Requirements: Bring some old, new, or in progress works, and try to give yourself over to fascination, obsession and different ways of doing.

Tisa Bryant is the author of Unexplained Presence (Leon Works, 2007), a collection of hybrid essays on black presences in film, literature and visual art. She is co-editor of the cross-referenced journal of narrative and storytelling possibility, The Encyclopedia Project, which produced Encyclopedia Vol. 2 F-K, in 2010. She is also co-editor of War Diaries, an anthology on black gay men’s desire and survival, published in 2010 by AIDS Project Los Angeles. Her work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in the journals 1913, Animal Shelter, Mandorla, Mixed Blood, in the ‘zine, Universal Remote: Meditations on the Absence of Michael Jackson, and the solo exhibits of visual artists Jaime Cortez, Wura-Natasha Ogunji, and filmmaker/installation artist Cauleen Smith. She teaches prose, hybrid forms and innovative ethnic literature at the California Institute of the Arts.

The Millay Colony for the Arts offers four-day retreat workshops on Colony's sylvan setting. Each class includes twelve hours of workshop time, all meals, and ample time to work, ruminate and explore our lush natural surroundings. Private bedrooms and spacious private studios are available for all participants.

These workshops offer artists a chance to delve into their work, explore new ideas, meet extraordinary teaching artists and collaborate with others while spending intense work-time on our gorgeous campus. Fragrant with blueberries, thyme, and wildflowers, the quiet loveliness of our campus provides uninterrupted calm and inspiration—the perfect retreat for creativity and relaxation.

For more information and to apply: http://www.millaycolony.org/workshops