Each year — once in March (for residencies August-October) and once in October (for residencies March-July) — we gather professionals from each discipline, including alumni, to review applications received by poets, writers, composers and visual artists for our Core Residency program. We review submissions “blindly’” requesting applicants to remove all identifying information (name, gender/identity, ethnicity, geography, age.).so that work is judged primarily by merit. That said, as each juror (and sets of jurors) have their preferences: we select jurors from a wide variety of styles and experiences to help ensure diversity, equity and inclusion.
Because we know how difficult being an artist is (despite the thrilling bits), please know that we would love to invite all applicants to Steepletop. However, both the size of our facilities (we only have space for up to 7 residents) and the number of applications means that the selection is highly competitive. SO: if you are not accepted the first time, please consider trying again in order to ensure a jury comprised of wholly new sets of eyes (and ears)!
In addition, we have created other residencies, the nonjuried Wintertide Rustic Retreat and the staff-juried Steepletop Residency, to help meet the demand for time and space at Millay Arts.
Jurors receive a $100 honorarium and are invited for one-week stays at Steepletop, as available, during our Wintertide Rustic Retreat Residency season. .
Should you wish to be considered as a Juror, or wish to nominate someone, email us! .
2022 JURY MEMBERS
Poem for a Bird, 2020, Oil on Canvas, 36” x 36”
LAWRE STONE, Visual Arts Juror 2022
Lawre Stone was raised in New Jersey and remembers painting the iridescent colors of a polluted sky over the oil slicked Passaic River from her childhood bedroom. Images of nature compromised by human endeavor continue to inform her work.
Engaged in a conversation between interior worlds and physical experience, her paintings become a forum for charting tumultuous feelings, and the chaos, nuance and tones of everyday occurrences. The emergency of our time and an existential future, compel Stone to empathize with aspects of the natural world through color, image, shape and gesture. Each painting begins with the suggestion of a landscape-like space. Washes, spills and slabs of oil paint construct a space made from color. Backlit and shallow - she’s painting the illuminated middle ground, a space that languishes in limbo between the certainty of a vanishing point and the tangible clarity of sharp focus.
The images are a personal lexicon derived from remembered feelings related to observations of natural phenomenon. The petals of a dying flower, a vital organ in distress, a broken chunk of an iceberg, or the sounds of conversations between songbirds can inspire an image. For Stone, painting explores the unseen forces that propel and impede the structure of growth and destruction. A painting might suggest the tiny world under a microscope, a vast landscape, or the unseen space of the interior self. A paint heavy brush or the scrape of a knife can abruptly freeze gesture in space, preserving feeling and emotion.
When systems break down, something hidden is revealed. Swipes of paint obliterate a form once revered. Stone is interested in finding what must be discarded and what must be carried forward. The un-seen contains both the beauty and the horror of what we have done. Painting is a portal to this unseen world.
Lawre Stone’s work has been exhibited in the United States and Europe and has been reviewed in publications including,The New Art Examiner, The New York Times, and Art in America. She received an MFA from The Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College, Bard MFA, and a BFA from Rhode Island School of Design. She is currently the Associate Director of Bard MFA and joined the Board of Millay Arts in 2022.
Lawre Stone lives and paints in Columbia County, New York.
2021 JURY MEMBERS
PLAY & SCREEN WRITING
Jennifer Farmer
Jesus Valles
Matthew Dalton Jackett
POETRY
Kristina Marie Darling
Jhani Randhawa
Jubi Arriola-Headley
VISUAL ARTS
Rina Dweck
Larry Krone
Katrina Bello
Monika Burczyk
COMPOSING
Emi Makabe
Tom Nazziola
FICTION
Anna Cabe
Andrew Milward
Nicky Gonzalez
Barbara Winograd
Ryan Matthews
Caroline Beimford
NONFICTION
Joseph Lee
Sabrina Fuchs Abrams
Tricia Romano
Rachel Zimmerman
Poetry Juror 2020
YANYI
Decrescence, 2018
The Queen sits on a throne
of gem-trimmed robes.
Between her robes
the jutted moth, it follows
dust. She can’t rest before
the funeral, her self-
unmaking, some maid
whose hair is browned
by blood; a matching
queen. Nights’ dim candles,
grackles’ glib decrescence.
Now dance, now weep.
No rest for feet still
warm from summer’s
phrasing — odors / ankle
/ thorn. Keeping time
while dying, the Queen grows
bored, her hand’s throat
out, amiss. (Yet I sob,
I paw. Yet) I kiss.