RESIDENCY HIGHLIGHT - PENLAND SCHOOL OF CRAFTS
by Barbara Courtney

(published in Artist Trust's Journal, 2002)

Last month, I attended a conference in Charlotte, North Carolina that offered several site visits to arts centers in the vicinity. With a strong interest in artist residency programs and a hunger for some autumn colors, I decided to visit Penland School of Crafts. 

Heading west from Charlotte, towards the Blue Ridge Mountains, we arrived at Penland in a couple of hours. Our tour began with a brief history. In 1923, Lucy Morgan, a teacher at a local Episcopal mission school, organized a group of local women to create and market hand-woven goods. Sharing looms, material and marketing, the group actively developed product lines that later expanded to include other media. In 1929, when Lucy invited noted Chicago weaver Edward Worst to teach her local weavers, people from throughout the United States asked if they could participate as well, and the Penland School of Crafts was born. Over the next several years, instruction was offered in other crafts native to the region. More facilities were built, and more students began to enroll. Today's Penland School of Crafts hosts over 1,200 students per year working in ten craft media (books and paper, clay, drawing/painting, glass, iron, metals, photography, printmaking, textiles, and wood.)

Pausing to glance through the Summer catalog of classes at Penland, we perused a mind-boggling selection of one and two-week sessions, while the Spring and Fall catalog describes several eight-week concentration classes. 

As we wove through the various studios, I was pleased and proud to stumble upon two of Washington's finest artists at work:  David Chatt, busy with his amazing small-scale bead sculptures; and Jean Hicks, who was felting hats. (Along with David and Jean, more than 50 Washington State artists have served as Penland instructors, and 148 Washington artists have attended as students.) 

We made our way down a beautiful country road to The Barns, the studios and residence of the “Penland Resident Artists” who live and work at Penland for up to three years. The residents pay a minimal monthly fee for their lodging, studio, utilities for their facilities and their other living expenses. The current Resident Artists come from Japan, Puerto Rico and around the U.S., and are all encouraged to participate in the rich community life at Penland.

In addition to the Resident Artists program, artists may apply to become ”core students" working for the school to receive room, board and tuition in addition to taking on a leadership role among work-study students. 

Penland courses almost always fill to capacity. Registration applications are due by February 8 for summer courses (or on a first-come first serve basis thereafter), July 15 for Fall courses, and October 15 for Spring courses.  While tuition, room and board at Penland may seem cost-prohibitive for many artists, Penland offers a generous amount of financial assistance to students who would otherwise not be able to attend. 

My Penland visit satisfied my appetite for autumn colors, but I also came away with a valuable reminder of how much place influences our thinking and working. I came away wanting to encourage more Washington State artists to take advantage of this magical, inspiring place in which to grow their art.

For more information about Penland visit www.penland.org.

A VISITING ARTIST'S PERSPECTIVE
By Jean Hicks

My residency at Penland allowed me to again hear questions from my earliest days in the arts - questions such as “Why not?” and “How could you put together...?”

While there, I initiated a project I have been thinking about for some time. Using ideas from the Bill of Rights as an intellectual framework, I made, found or borrowed ten red hats, one for each amendment documenting the work through a public photo shoot. The red was chosen for its historic references to liberty and sacrifice. Using other artists and artisans as models, along with a master photographer with long ties to the Penland community, the focus on inquiry shifted from the Bill of Rights to a more amorphous concern for community. Penland’s community exists within an idyllic environment, and ultimately the photo shoot became a study of artists in nature (the shoot backdrop was a very large red oak which had fallen on the deck of my cabin, a result of a nasty windstorm that also killed 33 people in nearby Tennessee). We looked like a flock of pilated woodpeckers (those big red headed ones), surprised in the act of demolishing a tree. Some of this work will be exhibited in a show at the Craft Alliance in St. Louis in January 2003.

Teaching has always been a fundamental inspiration for my work, and at Penland I had the opportunity to engage a large portion of the community in my activities. I gave a number of small felt-making demos/classes to other studio areas with specific applications to their media. I also taught hat-making workshops to staff members and to a visiting group of grantmakers.

A VISITING ARTIST'S PERSPECTIVE
By David Chatt

As I write, I have completed seven weeks of an eight-week residency at Penland School of Crafts in Western North Carolina. While I start to collect packing boxes and make arrangements for my return trip, I have been considering the expectations that I brought with me and have been comparing them to the realities that I will take home. As I boarded the plane in Seattle, I looked forward to leaving all of the distractions that a city holds. I anticipated being in a lovely rural setting and enjoying hour upon hour of uninterrupted work time. I also wanted to experiment in other mediums.

Penland is in an idyllic setting, nestled in the Appalachian Mountains. The air is clean and fresh. The nights are star laden and filled with the sounds of crickets and cicadas. Car alarms and police sirens are as rare as slugs in a salt mine. People still leave their purses in unlocked cars. Had I been home for the last two months, I would likely have been able to tell you all about sniper attacks, the election, the United Nations resolution on Iraq and the ugly metal fence that my neighbor is building. Instead, I can tell you that watching the foliage change day by day in the mountains of North Carolina is an amazing process. If you get involved in making something and forget to look up for a couple of hours, when you do, you will notice that the colors have changed. It happens so fast and the colors are so dramatic that when you turn away, you wonder if it really was as magnificent as that, or if your imagination has embellished your memory of it. My hopes for a respite from city life were met and exceeded.

Uninterrupted work time has been the least real of my expectations. I don’t know how I thought that living in a community with 150 other artists was going to provide me with solitude, but I did, and it did not. Instead, I have experienced an opportunity to live among smart, creative people who are as dedicated to the process of “making” as I am. I have spent a lot of time in my studio and I have made some work, but the most interested thing about being here has not been the amount of work I have done, but the quality of thoughts I have had while I am working. I work in solitude at home. Here, I have a ready audience of people who are my peers. I have had some interesting conversations while I have been here but as I write, it is the unsaid that rings loudest in my ears. Just being among like-minded folks, whose primary focus is to learn and grow and create, has been a rejuvenating experience that has caused me to see and think differently. My plans for the future have changed and my commitment to my craft has been energized.

The community setting has also provided me with an opportunity to show people what I do. I make sculpture out of tiny glass beads. If you are not familiar with my work, you are probably finding it hard to imagine what I am talking about. I am used to this reaction. It was gratifying to be in a place where I could show people what I do and talk about why it is that I do it. These two things in tandem have never before occurred in a public setting.

Working in other media and being in a place where there is opportunity to experiment has been great. I have taken advantage of this but it did not occupy as much of my time as I thought it might. I came here after a summer that conspired to keep me away from my studio. When my residency began, I was anxious to work but unfamiliar materials felt like more distraction so I gravitated to the familiar. I came here wanting to do some glass casting; I have been working in a glass studio this past week, and while my pieces are not yet out of the kiln, I have learned some new techniques that I will continue to work with.

As my residency comes to an end, the comforts and familiarities of home are starting to draw my attentions away. I think this is as it should be. I have had a great time, and a productive time. Now I am ready to be home and will take with me a rewarding enthusiasm for my work.

My thanks go to Penland, the NEA and the Warhol Foundation for making this experience possible.

David Chatt was a 1999 Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship recipient. To learn more about the artist and his work visit his website at www.davidchatt.com.