It isn't often that one has the opportunity to reflect on a century of progress, but that's just what Ox-Bow asked me to do to kick off their centennial celebration at a lecture on July 9 at the Grand Rapids Art Museum. Several other residency programs have celebrated milestone anniversaries in recent years, and while we are always looking ahead to how we can continue to evolve as a field to meet the needs of artists, it's worth taking a moment to reflect on how we got here... The complete speech is below. Thank you, Ox-Bow, for the opportunity to share the story of the field and congratulations on turning 100!

Ox-Bow + the Importance of Artists Communities
Caitlin Strokosch, Executive Director, Alliance of Artists Communities
July 9, 2010 - Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids MI

In 1910, the Metropolitan Opera performed its first opera by a US composer (The Pipe of Desire by Frederick Shepherd Converse). In 1910, Pablo Picasso's first one-man show opened at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery in New York City. The world bid farewell to Mark Twain and Winslow Homer, and welcomed in Django Reinhardt, Artie Shaw, and Bonny and Clyde. J.D. Rockefeller, Jr. at the age of 36 retired from business to become a full-time philanthropist, and Alaska's Mt. McKinley was scaled for the first time. It was a time of transition and discovery, of a nation still finding itself.

In 1910 Chicago, the United Garment Workers' strike dragged on for 5 months. The Vice Commission determined to stamp out prostitution. Industry raged and congestion choked the city streets. It's easy to think of Ox-Bow as a retreat from the city, by artists looking for an escape. But artists' residencies are as much about advancing as retreating, about being drawn to something even more than what the artists are drawn from.

A century ago, a handful of visionaries around the country had a similar dream - to create a place where artists could gather together to devote themselves wholly to their art. These dreams of Utopia took a similar shape - at Ox-Bow, Yaddo, Byrdcliffe, and The MacDowell Colony - a bucolic natural landscape, removed but accessible from a major city; the fierce determinism of a few individuals set on creating such a place; and artists shaping this dream from the beginning. Steeped in European notions of the atelier, salted with New World individualism, and flavored with local characters, these early artists' residencies were decidedly American.

Ox-Bow's founders placed their faith in the creative process, and carved out a sacred space where that process could unfurl, turn in on itself, unfurl again, and take a new and unexpected shape. But there's the rub - unexpectedness. As much as we may crave to see the world through artists' eyes, supporting artists is risky business. They have been known, on occasion, to be unpredictable. And how well an artist residency has done its job in supporting them is not easily measured by tickets sold or tourism generated, by test scores or tax returns. There is no economic impact index for the return on investment when you trust an artist to explore new ground. And yet that is what artists' residencies have done for a century, before the IRS offered tax incentives, before the National Endowment for the Arts, before Richard Florida. Artists residencies trust the artist to make their own way from process to product. The tangible results of a residency - the films and paintings, plays and dances, books and music, and all the rest - often emerge months or years after the first creative spark, while many results are never tangible at all. Artists' residencies fan the flames of creativity by offering inspiration and support to artists at a critical time - in the private moments of creative daring when first the pen is put to paper, or brush to canvas, or fingers to keyboard, when outcomes are especially uncertain, when ideas are often most fragile.

So how do you evaluate success when you don't dictate the outcome? The question is more than academic. Grant applications hinge on plans for assessment. Community partners look for assurances that their investment will have measurable results. It is all too tempting to saddle the artists with our anxieties and expectations - that they please, please make something we can proudly show to our supporters without embarrassing us, or that they donate their time to schools and community programs so that we can justify our property tax exemptions.

And so we point to the alumni who are famous, or even infamous. We tally the awards they've won and bask in the legitimacy it brings. To say Aaron Copland wrote Appalachian Spring, and Truman Capote penned In Cold Blood, and Quentin Tarantino created Reservoir Dogs while in-residence - we are right to use their success as examples of a residency's impact. But truth be told, if no alumni ever went on to fame or supplied us with an impressive scorecard, residencies would keep doing what they do. Because trust lies in believing that artists transform their experience into something that will leave the world better for it, whether or not we read about it in the New York Times.

Ox-Bow and hundreds of artists' residency programs around the country hold steadfast to a belief in the messy, unpredictable creative process. The artist Bruce Mau said: "When the outcome drives the process, we only ever go to where we've already been. If process drives the outcome, we may not know where we're going, but we will know we want to be there." And who doesn't want to be there - at Ox-Bow on a summer night when an artist has a breakthrough, or when a chance conversation at dinner can launch a lifelong collaboration?

One challenge to overcoming this push for outcome is in the mystery of the creative process itself. We romanticize the muse, the instant flash of inspiration, the moment when Jackson Pollock accidently dribbled paint on his canvas and started a new movement in the art world. Who wants to hear about rough drafts, edits and revisions, pages crumpled up and thrown away more often than not? Hours upon hours sitting at a desk trying and trying again? That sounds an awful lot like work, like something I do, and I don't really want to think of artists' work as work - where's the magic in that? It doesn't help that much of an artists' work often happens not within the walls of a studio but within the walls of the mind. That kind of work doesn't often look like work at all. Sometimes it looks like napping in the meadow or sharing a drink with another artist-in-residence late into the night. Who knows what ideas are churning, where the conversations will lead, and why should we expect them to happen in an office from 9-5 or even in a studio at all? The creative process usually requires some of both periods of rest and determined activity. In the natural world, we know that growth and rest depend on each other, that a bulb dormant in winter is still stirring inside with new life. We recognize in academia the need for sabbatical - for a change of scenery and a period of renewal that is often centered around new work. And we value this freedom-from-outcomes in science and technology, offering our most creative and innovative thinkers with time and space to experiment, to tinker, to fail. Artists' residencies are like that - research and development labs for the arts.

There are over 500 artists' residencies in the US today and more than 1,000 worldwide, and the organizations are as different from each other as you can imagine. In the last century, the field has made room for other visions of Utopia, as each artist residency seeks the right balance of community and creative exploration, of solidarity and solitude. When Mary Hambidge created The Hambidge Center, an artist residency in rural Georgia, in 1934 during the height of the Great Depression, she sought a communion with man and nature alike, by turning inward through periods of reflection and respite. She wrote, "In development there is a caesura, a pause, a moment held in perfect balance to renew breath for progress in higher development.... In the grand spiral movement, we are now going through the process on involving, moving from the outside in."

Stewardship of the land is a common thread that runs through many artist residencies as well - the desire to preserve and protect a Utopia in the wilderness and to invite artists to immerse themselves in the land, to be moved by the beautiful and harsh turns of nature. ArtFarm, in rural Nebraska, for example, claims "The physical presence is its buildings and land, but more elusive to describe is the ambiance: the subtle influence of the environment's impact on time and space. Time is measured by sun and night sky, not by clock or calendar. Space finds its borders by proximity to sound and silence. The sky and your ears are full of sounds and shapes of birds and bugs. And, like it or not, the weather will be your collaborator in all undertakings."

Some Utopias are born out of sorrow. When Pamela Djerassi - a poet and painter - took her own life in 1978, her father, Dr. Carl Djerassi, created a program in her honor where other artists could be nurtured by the land that Pamela loved - a 600-acre cattle ranch in California's Santa Cruz Mountains. Dr. Djerassi was inspired by a trip to Florence as he considered the Medici family and the patronage they had given to artists of their time. And he wondered how he might, in some small way, be able to extend his support to contemporary women artists. The Djerassi Resident Artists Program has welcomed nearly 2,000 artists in the last 30 years to the ranch named Sic manebimus in pace (Thus we'll remain in peace).

But Utopian visions are not only of meadows and mountains. Many artists have found sanctuary in cities. A new wave of artist residencies emerged in the 1980s, like Bemis Center for Contemporary Arts in downtown Omaha. Housed in a vacant, turn-of-the-century, 170,000-square-foot warehouse, the Bemis Center brought together city officials, the Department of Housing & Urban Development, private and corporate foundations, and business leaders to realize a dream of neighborhood revitalization and a community that would support cutting-edge contemporary art. Thirty years ago, Bemis' neighborhood was abandoned - today, Bemis attracts 15,000 visitors a year and the neighborhood buzzes with coffee shops, record stores, and restaurants.

Others have envisioned not a separate place for artists but instead an enfolding of artists into uncommon settings. Dr. Frank Oppenheimer viewed art and science as complementary ways of exploring the world, and created Exploratorium - a museum of science and human perception - to incorporate the arts and sciences together. Exploratorium's artists-in-residence collaborate with scientists and educators to undertake deeper investigations into the social dimensions of art, science, and culture. Their art forms are diverse, ranging from multimedia performances and theatrical productions to animated filmmaking, dance, music, poetry, painting, and performances that explore cultural connections. This Utopian playground has stirred artists to explore new directions, like Ned Kahn who came to the Exploratorium as a volunteer, became enamored with natural phenomena, and has since made environmental art and sculpture his life's work.

There are artist residencies for visual artists, dance-makers, writers, musicians, architects, scholars, and others - some 16,000 artists are granted residencies in the US every year. There are residencies in urban warehouses, in rustic castles, old army barracks, and on palm-tree studded beaches. In vacant storefronts, modern factories, and ancient monasteries. From solitary sites to arts centers teeming with activity. Some serve only one or 2 residents at a time, while others bring together dozens of artists. Some provide state-of-the-art facilities, materials, and technical support, while others are spartan - a bed, a chair, a room of one's own. Some focus their support on artists already in their community, and others welcome artists from around the world. There are those that keep the public at arm's length and those that throw open the gates. And there are more being created every year. Urban arts centers like The Steel Yard, reclaiming an industrial site, supporting local artists through communal workspace, and working with neighbors and public agencies for thoughtful community revitalization. Or Baer Art Center, on a remote tip of land on the coast of Iceland, offering artists respite and an opportunity to collaborate with each other in the beautiful, untamed landscape. Or the Institute for Sustainable Living, Art & Natural Design in Bellaire, Michigan, dedicated to ecological living and community self-reliance through the arts.

This abundance of models offers artists of every stripe a place to call home. Emerging artists who are discovering the joys and challenges of being self-directed for the first time. Those returning to their art-making after years or decades of other jobs, of raising families, of serving others, who decide, at last, to apply, to try, to see if they still have what it takes. Long-established artists longing for fresh ideas.

They turn to residencies in search of the practical - equipment they don't have access to at home, a public in which to develop community art, a break from cooking and cleaning and running errands, an opportunity to exhibit their work. And they turn to residencies for the ephemeral, too - solitude or camaraderie, validation, mentorship, self-discovery. Whatever the initial motivation, there is something transformative that happens during a residency, when an artist enters the studio on that first day and knows that the time is their own, that they have been given a gift. Artists try new things, they get stuck and unstuck and stuck and unstuck again because really there are so many hours in the day when you don't fill them with phone calls and Facebook and finding parking and sorting the mail and taking out the trash and unclogging the drain and watering the lawn - so many hours in the day that you can stumble a dozen times and still right yourself again before dinner. When there are no strings attached, artists find they do more work, produce more, push harder, and move farther than they ever imagined. Residencies stir artists up - not just their work but their spirits, too. One artist in her late 50s was attending a residency for the first time a few years ago. "After you arrive at the residency," she said, "you might create something that would never have otherwise existed. You could discover one or two new lifetime friends. You might land in your body, and find that those dark places are yours and that growth can hurt but is always worth it. You may learn that what is precious is what you left back home. Your peripheral vision could double. You may discover that your breathing has changed, and you are forever one degree hotter. You will certainly feel grateful."

She found her Utopia, not so much in the structures and programs but in the values that artist residencies share: trust in artists, belief in the process, and communion with people or places that challenge and inspire. Holding to these values while still allowing for change is one of Ox-Bow's greatest strengths. Ox-Bow is a place that, while physically removed, is deeply connected to contemporary concerns, to the ideas shaping our world. Ox-Bow has maintained a responsiveness and adaptability, rejecting the ivory tower and allowing itself to be shaped by the artists who have stayed there and the local community as well. I look back on Ox-Bow's first century and I am humbled, awed. But I am particularly excited looking forward to Ox-Bow's next century. You see, Ox-Bow's perseverance and vitality lie in being itself a part of a creative process. Like an artist hones his craft studying the foundations, Ox-Bow's foundation is a century's steadfast belief in artists and the possibility they offer us. And like an artist who learns to relish the uncertainty of works-in-progress, Ox-Bow allows itself to be shaped and transformed by the creative process, to not force an outcome from each new season but to yield instead to exploration, to chance encounters, new directions, curiosity, imagination, and the knowledge that the best Utopias are always a work in progress.... Here's to Ox-Bow's second century!