Midwestern Voices and Visions is a collaboration between the Alliance of Artists Communities and seven artists' residency programs in the Midwest. Each site offers its own way of serving its artists-in-residence, though all share a common vision that supporting living artists with time and space to create new work is essential to human progress.
Click on the names below to read more about each program:
Anderson Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
Red Wing, Minnesota
Art Farm
Marquette, Nebraska
Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts
Omaha, Nebraska
John Michael Kohler Arts Center
Sheboygan, Wisconsin
Ox-Bow
Saugatuck, Michigan
Prairie Center of the Arts
Peoria, Illinois
Ragdale Foundation
Lake Forest, Illinois
Art Farm
Art Farm’s mission is to support new artistic vision – vision which is often obscure, impractical, and independent of commercial recognition. To offer visual artists, writers, performers – anyone considering themselves creative – studios, time, and resources, for pursuing their range of expression, for experimenting, and for developing projects, where failing is no less welcomed than succeeding. 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 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 and ears will fill with the sounds and shapes of an incredible number of birds and bugs. And, like it or not, the weather will always be your collaborator in whatever you do.
Currently, the residency season spans the months of May to November. Every artist-in-residence makes some contribution of labor to improve the general conditions at Art Farm. This labor – ranging from digging sewer trenches to soldering electronics to pouring cement, and all accomplished at the dizzying, blistering speed of continental drift – has sustained Art Farm over its fifteen years of existence. In many ways, Art Farm is a work-in-progress being formed from the efforts of these artists, coming from all across the globe to a small patch of land filled with grass, trees, and old buildings in