Art Farm, artist and writer residency in rural Nebraska, artist residencies
Residency Application Deadline
March 1
Internship Application Deadline
March 15
2024
Residency Application Now Open
(for a residency between June 1 to November 1)

This can include painters, sculptors, ceramicists, architects, performers, designers, filmmakers, digitalists, engineers, drone artists, puppeteers, writers, musicians, playwrights, philosophers, psychiatrists, storm chasers, script writers, and others we can't think of, etc.

CLICK HERE TO APPLY
Deadline
11:59pm February 1, 2024

2023 Writers (and others)
Residency Application
Form
Deadline March 1, 2023
Art Farm's mission is to support artistic vision, which may be impractical, obscure, and independent of commercial recognition—where failing is no less welcome than succeeding. To offer artists, writers, performers, and others: studios, time, and resources for pursuing their range of expression, for experimenting, for developing projects in a vibrant environment of cooperation rather than competitiveness, 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.

artists residencies
writers residencies
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

Call for 2023 residency applications is open
go to the forms by clicking on a brown disc below closest to your interest for any time between June 1 to November 1

The call for 2024 residency applications is now closed

The call for 2025 applications will open on November 1, 2024 with a deadline of 11:59PM, February 1, 2025

Some say we are assigned the life we live: fundamentally deterministic; others say our lives are prevented from unraveling because we have the will to choose, linked to cause: guided by reason during periods of difficult reflection and uncertain direction. But when apodictic results elude us, our values become the arbiter of validity we feel is reliable scaffolding, as we build with the invisible bricks of emotions, for moral decisions and priorities in relationships between individuals, groups, cultures—the world, and it is the driver of what we feel is obligatory behavior: kindness, proof of trust, and the gain of respect and loyalty are positive examples. Equally, values animate less constructive features of profoundly impaired and constricted elements of brittle and unrepentant retribution thought as necessary to cleanse life of social or cultural contaminants.

Thus, equipped with a faith in the functionality of improvisational illusions, we are being confronted by a global climatic system in the process of change we struggle to fully understand, articulate our response to, and control with pragmatic effectiveness in order to avert apocalyptic suffering worldwide, but the realities of folly and tragedy plot misconceptions into every scientific fact and technological advance, leaving unresolved how the asymmetrical balance of political power, the clash of irreconcilable expectations, entrenched entitlements to resources, and the contagious consensus of dogma, whether it derives from religious, social, economic, or intellectual impulses, might be reduced or resolved. That this is true or that is false, it’s our beliefs that motivate us.

The tintinnabulated warnings of climate research try to serve as foreplay to action, but remain too abstract to wake and arouse our desire for change. An alternative outside the rational model, somewhere between atoms and galaxies, as an application of intelligence with a chance to restructure the direction of humanity and bequeath us insight and perspective are the arts: like a lit match, though its light seems dim and distant, the arts can set ablaze every shadowed corner of our culture’s living tissue as reliable reconnaissance to expose unpredictable consequences from the actions of our sentiments. Truth is not a single calculation derived from accumulated data points, but comes in a thousand forms of representation and cannot be grasped easily without fictional mediation in making our efforts come to match with observable sustainable regularity our reasons for doing: fables, parables, myths, allegories, and eccentric fantasies—life epically dramatized in vernacular idioms. It’s the truth embedded in these narratives that we crave and understand, aiding us in feeling and thinking deeper for longer periods about caring and meaning in our collective lives.

If climate change becomes The Big Unstoppable spreading its brimming flush over us with mesmerizing vastness, then we can do no more than fall silent in awe of it as we are of the starry night sky above: too immense—too enigmatic for us to comprehend, but looking up into that dark dome, as we try to thrive amid the neoPermian dilemma and ruins of our own doing, it is worth remembering that the arc of life is filled with marvelous and wondrously imaginative vitality to continue on in slight, slow, steady strides with no assurance we will be among the resurrected.
more waiting>>>

If asked, what vital elements are necessary in making a person's life good, a reply might advocate that there be freedom from inequity, freedom from fear, freedom from domination. Of these, in histories of all known human societies, never has there been freedom from fear. Is fear necessary for survival and contingent on what surrounds us? Do burecratic institutions bring us a world stilled in restful order with assumptions of stability and continuity, offering complacent frameworks of certainty? Against this background, does a settled point in space exist: or is life little more than surprise and luck—our summum bonum.

We find our fears in the sum of our values, whereby we will strive to correct incidents of irregular personal relationships and societal shortcomings. Values inspire something feeling right, better, justified; fragrant as sunshine; stirring the soul and marveling the mind—our moral re-armament policy against injustice (two mice and a cat vote on what's for dinner), in mutual obligation to others and our own inner wilderness against the conditions of a fragmented society.

However, whatever our veridicality of a new order might be of social dignity, moral character, or spiritual purpose, there are bugs in the code from which mutually assured misalignment arises if identifying truth with messianic delusions, delivering in Wagnerian register, spoken in secure spreadsheet, or promoted as if by a pack of doped-up chimps. Values are not culturally clean rooms of rationality: usually predictable to polarize, often indifferent to implications, and created from beliefs traditionally available. Although splendid in conception and comprehensive in detail, the ideal is at the mercy of the real as different levels of reason and experience reflect the constitutions of opposing principles: lofty supremacy of this new system may be desired, but the result can ultimately be wrong, misguided, and an ideological moral mugging. Nuance is not always in high demand among those with unswerving convictions.

Can the contours of values, balanced by caring, rather than hardened by the need for control, find shape to treat the fate of effects with greater sophistication when introducing ideals intrinsic to democratic motives? Can the arts avoid prescriptive or restrictive options, as they are not a domain beyond social conditioning and political standards, which create tension between artistic integrity and reins of reality in providing alternatives? All arts have the articulate capacity to close the divide between parting-the-clouds legalities and the quiet resolve of personal empathy with a mandate of generating emphasis on the mysterious complexity of the transiently and contradictory constructed nature of ourselves that might explain existence, helping us to learn how we coexist beyond the centrality of rights with humility amid the diverse and fundamentally destabilizing sways of doubt and uncertainty.
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writers, performers, musicians, etc.

It is to the disquiet of today's emerging artists, confronted by art's variety of denominational terrains, in searching for their strategic call to contemplation and expression: do they choose abstract cognition versus subjective experience; form a relationship to process or objects produced, or simply apply their principles to the business of art. Where might artists look or listen to assuage their anxieties, laying them into the everlasting calm. Should they elect to grope their way through the business of art world, it may require some major aesthetic gym time to train for competing in this 3-part sequential endurance career event, as in the order below.

Academia is the institutional structure, through which aesthetic styles tend to pass, with its mission of mentoring visionaries within mainstream orthodoxy and inculcating in them skills of spontaneous self-invention under scholarship's shroud of accumulated, athletically linguistic narrative, with curriculum corrections inserted as needed to assure students that they backed the best horse in the gallop to the galleries.

Commercial galleries are the perfected aesthetic arm of the capitalist state, their existence bankrolled by patrons to benefit the higher levels of investment interests, while they provide the hierarchical value of art in gold plated perspectives through the electrolytic bath of publicity polished with a propagandist's optimism, phrased to burnish brands.

Critics complete the triad of commercial grasp, with their glittering credentials of collected wisdom and aesthetic authenticity, authoring firewalls of exalted standards to preserve a sparse firmament of stars, as well as being the Disembodied Hand scribbling the necessary documents for posterity's investment concentration.

What is the herd bewildered to do, those who ran the race, but fail to be embraced by this trinity at the finish line? Perhaps it's the idiomaticalness of their aesthetic witness perceived as containing overabundant zesty zeal or crimped and stunted in their provincialism: their membership bestrewn with flinty eccentrics and their existence seemingly too bereft of aesthetic bequest to be ribboned winners. As their night draws nigh and shadows lengthen, they wonder if ever they'll be seen—consider that it depends on who holds the light and upon whom its narrow beam is aimed, not the race.

In a world that fetishistically venerates the allure of money, for those artists in Icarian fall from the cutting-edge of this economic contingency it often means landing in the zone of artistic extinction, but there does exist a wider universe of creative flourishing and the intrinsic glow it gives life: in it you find that the exhilaration of discovery, the empowerment of independent thinking, the immersion into concentrated effort, and the denial of self are characteristics which stir into our souls greater humanity each time we encounter and recognize these in others and ourselves: it's possible this might be when you're the sharpest you'll ever be...only a few more>>

[[M]...[1]...[2]...[3]...[4]... [5]...[6]... [7]... [8]...[9]
If your flame of concentration is snuffed out by the dense screed of syntactic complexity above, you may wish to click on the individual numbers overhead or move higher to the menu items where verbal de-escalation and other thrills of aesthetic sensation abound.

It's said that 83% of the universe is elusive and can only be inferred as existing. This proposition might be compelling speculation in understanding the invisible mass of an artist's creative process: their intuitive instinctual self, the abiding voice of their variegated inner nature and the vulnerable distance of their forbear concealed by the standard exposure on gallery walls—the nexus novelty of private direction against public disclosure: the sacred and intimate traded in the spectrum of negotiated exchange for the irregular voyeurism of public mass trespass and the economy of trophy assets.

The porosity of process forming into art is also the formation of intimacy with the artist: the incoherent spasms of their mind in motion, their indistinct self in perpetual internal drama, their rambling choices dancing like tumblers on cracked glass over a chasm, unconscious of the cracks while searching for matches to light the fire that illuminates the inner sky as the way to find faraway. It's a feral aspect of the philosophical reduced to the visceral where the axes of identity kiss with head-on collision in free-ranging experience hoping to form a bond with ecstasy's idioms. Sometimes it hits gold, but mostly it's lead and as some claim, in the quiet afterward, this was their beginning, others claim they still live with mysteries.

Contemporary life has cleared the table of the need for edictal intervention decreed from Perfection Above in charting an autonomous course, but this moment of freedom is an unsustainable grace, as the intrinsic elements of life's crumbs remain, indisputably on the verge of chaos from daily fissures of contingent and reversible relationships with the world and others. Capitalism's placebos of constant consuming offer tinctures of fame and tithes of fortune, but its insistent compulsions compresses the emotions of experience to the awareness level of a performing dog, leaving a feeling close to the impossibility of going on.

The process of the creative urge is not a placeholder for existing and is as inexplicable as love, forever a surprise reforming anew—the endless sparkle of going forth...still more>>


2023 Internships
Intern Application
Form
Deadline March 1, 2023

Call for 2023 Intern applications is open until March 15