Art Farm, artist and writer residency in rural Nebraska, artist residencies

Residency Application Deadline
March 1
Internship Application Deadline
March 15

2012 Visual Arts(and others)
Residency Application Form

2012 Writers (and others)
Residency Application Form

red barn gallery

victoria

Art Farm’s mission is to support artistic vision, which may be impractical, obscure, and independent of commercial recognition—where failing is no less welcomed than succeeding. To offer artists, writers, performers, and others: studios, time, and resources for pursuing their range of expression, for experimenting, for developing projects, but most of all, for distilling the promise and potential of their creative enterprise, while working and living in a rural environment.

Art Farm's physical presence is in its buildings and land. More elusive to describe is the ambiance—the subtle influence of the environment's impact on time and space. The sun and stars measure your time, not clock and calendar. Space is shaped by proximity to sound and silence. The sky: your eyes: your ears will fill with the sound and shapes of an incredible number of birds and bugs. And, like it or not, the weather will be your collaborator in all undertakings.

Ed Dadey, Director

artist residency application forms

artists residencies
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1306 West 21 Road, Marquette, NE 68854-2112, USA
Art Farm is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization registered with the State of Nebraska
All rights reserved © 2012

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art harvest 2011art harvest 2011art harvest 2011art harvest 2011
Saturday, October 29,
12:00 - 7:00 PM
Sunday, October 30,
12:00 - 7:00 PM

Are you someone who thrives in the few pockets of quiet places left in this world, then take a minute, and stroll through some of the other web pages to see if an Art Farm artist residency or writer residency matches your standards. Not every day is peacefully idyllic as frogs make a mighty chorus after rains, migrating geese, ducks and cranes honk and squawk across the sky while the cicadas crank up their shrill at sunset and the basso hymns of the owls keep you company through the night. If this is your first visit here, you missed the deadline for 2009, but if Art Farm seems worth a try, come back in November when applications open again and click on one of the artist or writer residency images, which will be below this text, and jump right to the application form. Not enough yet: well, we will take the whole summer to convince you, so keep checking back to see what is happening or keep jumping ahead to see what you missed...some more>>

As a member of the Alliance of Artists Communities, we encourage viewers to fill out a brief survey. Click here or there (on the left image) to go to this survey. The survey is completely anonymous and is for statistical analysis only.

What you, I or others do on earth in the daily course of our lives, artists do on roof ridges above tree tops. This is not phenomena vulnerable to objective description and we have no admission of verifiable or replicable answers for why they are so inclined. Sometimes clues exist in their choice of expression, but often that expression is subversively uncertain and not a copy of the world made beautiful, as they register their raw footage of unedited experience and exceed our articulation. It doesn’t lend well to executive summary, but it can take you, I or others to a new destination: not a place but a way of seeing. We give you a chance to appraise this speculation with sporadic events throughout the season ending with Art Harvest on a weekend in late October... a bit more>>

If you don’t have much interest in fauna and flora; then does something more in mid-air, above the bugs and blossoms, fit your style better? There is ample number of buildings, in various stages of function and completion, from freshly finished to the brink of ruin: yours to use for installations, performances—whatever your theatrical conviction and whatever you can conceive of doing in them, doing on them, doing over them or doing under them: short of destroying them . ...still more>>

Do you have an inner pioneer yearning to get in touch with the source experience of subprime primary existence? It could be your ideal of disheveled dignity—a mud brick conceptualization center, free of all techno-distractions and high-concept fabrication, fully appointed with outdoor furniture. These are just a few of the items from the cafeteria of options you’ll find at Art Farm, with more arriving every day.... <start over

Miruna Dragan surveys the countryside atop one of Art Farm’s barns as she plans her installation.

Cheryl Ratliff takes a break from basic living to soak up some sunshine.

This is not the chaotic representation of civilization’s collapse in which Meredith stands amid, but one of Art Farm’s more elastically organized areas of source materials that she has chosen to surmount and claim for the letterpresses.

Each year Art Farm races head on into projects of higher purpose, although, for some projects, stakes must be set to show forward progress. For years, too long ago to remain in memory’s capture, Art Farm has collected and stored throughout its various buildings, letterpresses and auxiliary equipment found in print shops (state of the art, 1910). Like so many things in life, this equipment, waiting with the stoicism of animals, wondering if anything is ever to be more than life's unfulfilled potential. But, sometimes, suddenly the clouds of despair do part and the sunshine of promise warms the day. Among the resident artists of 2009 is Meredith, greatest among the mighty and the brave, coming with skills necessary to release these machines from their entombment. She gave the beginning physical shape to, of what has only lingered in the fog of fantasy: a letterpress/bookmaking residency, by clearing and organizing a studio and the equipment to become a functioning paradise for letterpress printers...allmost done>>

1.When a building on Art Farm retires under the influence of age, neglect or weather’s assaults and the projected victory of its restoration fades from view, it still lives on, renewed from its rubble, offering components as material for a new structure; a new purpose: a new vision. This is the vision of Charles Tucker: to introduce others to a location, through a structure, like an aperture, to behold the subtleties of a landscape of which they were previously blind.

2. Under a crepuscular sky, two assistants take a paradisal diversion from their labor at day’s end to enjoy, with enthralling infatuation, vaporously ethereal stratospheric splendor. You might imagine their taciturn prudence imposed by concentrated labor giving way to stock phrases of exultant and exclamatory delight and prolonged joy at the sight—perhaps you would echo their sentiments.

Our notion of nature, like life and love, is something we pretend we know the true ways of, but we live satisfied with the piles of lies we build around it, offered as shape and structure for metaphors we expound. Ignoring the western tradition that presumes nature as separate and open to all projects, a precept intimately handled with onanistic exuberance by real estate speculators and developers, perhaps there is a possibility for integrating the referent, ‘self’ and the environment. Nature has not always approved of our meddling nor have we always been equal to or qualified through fragile judgment to meet the tasks envisioned, but there is no need for forever foreclosing any effort due to past examples of blank incompetence. An alternative to approaching nature in a no-knock police raid manner, or treating it like a backseat queen, might be to mingle with it by measured invitation, subsidized by other minds previously there living in accord with it. Think of nature as an aesthetic lay-a-way program, waiting for us to collect the ecstasy of an exhilarating moment surrounding us in a special domain. We could go on pretending, remaining indifferent to this caucus—shouldn’t be difficult......keep moving>>

A new residency season is taking form; another unmapped aesthetical pilgrimage of wobbly evolution towards an obscure conclusion, but remaining alert for reality to be shattered by fresh inspiration of creative intervention that avoids the chasm of commodity that art seems to have plunged into, becoming a better product to stock the shelves for capricious over-shoppers and losing its ceremonial station as the fulcrum of our existence. Soon to fill Art Farm are strangers by geography and culture, but sharing an insistence to live life, with its teetering instability of contingent reasons no logic can unravel, and attempt to form new articulated styles of living, balanced through their aesthetic expression, well knowing the equilibrium they strive for might be riveted into distorted position by concrete circumstances of their lives, inaccessible to direct introspection, but their expression of experience, doomed or exalted, implies the possibility of new experience—some defiant against the power of commerce.

Neither the logician’s sport of objective criticism nor intonations from the Hidden Dispatcher are helpful guides here, for with any difficult and exhausting decisions embracing contradiction and ambiguity, making any choice may be the only reward available when facing life uninterested in an alliance between reason and will, but each resident will come, setting their expressive tendencies on maximum, bright as the constellations above; their complexions altered along the way by climate and insect bite, and against formidable odds, attempt to define alternate conceptual categories out of life’s fluidity. Not everyone will see their life glam up at Art Farm in the glittering way they might imagine, but it’s possible a wayward ray of illumination from their pen or brush will burn and gnaw on the rest of us in perplexing and unexpected ways......more>>

Art Farm continues to develop its limitless promise of meeting impossible expectations, as winter drives relentless towards summer, vigorously asserting its new identity via a new logo (see lower right). The current logo (see upper right), continues its role as forever distracting to design professionals, their encomiums, as a preferred appraisal choice, remaining obscure as ever, no less distant from dimensions of moral outrage and aesthetic panic than before, still leaving Art Farm recognizing that a casual, superficial glance at its current logo may never produce an association with it as the primary urge for why you masturbate nor be the pinup logo for millions, therefore, in confronting this open wound of eviscerating revelation of serious decline in its communicative influence, the resistive power of inertia, habit and bygone radiance collapses before the demands of conscience, social expectation and obligation to the integrity of artistic impulse allowing room for a new logo to begin its tentative immersion into the Art Farm domain.

Although the original logo may seem as if formed by a committee of kidnappers suffering cigarette withdrawal brought on by inadequate supply, due to ineffective financial solicitation strategies, the conception and intent was to create an image emblematic of and a catalyst for creativity through the highest design standards expressed by humble masterpiece—a triumph of design and aesthetic appeal. However, hindsight and feedback indicate that its imagery has failed to convey, perhaps lost in the compositional translation from abstraction to icon of lofty ambition and monumental vision, the infectious and raffish magnetism of innovative branding, its message remaining unavailable to the normally aware, the aesthetically anesthetized and the astute professional.

Art Farm requests you not cancel your patience during this period of inevitable evolution and win-directed identity management, with its transformation unstoppable at the unprecedented blinding speed of continental drift—hoping that you will linger loyal, balletically optimistic and borne aloft by possibilities, yet unforeseen that the new logo will reveal.....more yet>>