2010: Workshop Retreats

 

The Millay Colony for the Arts offers four-day retreat workshops on Colony's sylvan setting. Each class includes twelve hours of workshop time, all meals, and ample time to work, ruminate and explore our lush natural surroundings. Private bedrooms and spacious private studios are available for all participants.

These workshops offer artists a chance to delve into their work, explore new ideas, meet extraordinary teaching artists and collaborate with others while spending intense work-time on our gorgeous campus. Fragrant with blueberries, thyme, and wildflowers, the quiet loveliness of our campus provides uninterrupted calm and inspiration—the perfect retreat for creativity and relaxation.

June 30th to July 3rd
Family: Artmaking with Nina Katchadourian

This subject is something that is often (un)comfortably close at hand, rich with potential, and complicated to work with. The workshop aims to take an objective view of the topic on one hand, by looking at the work of artists (Janine Antoni, Patty Chang, Richard Billingham, Sally Mann, Gillian Wearing and Neil Goldberg among others) who have taken it up from a variety of proximities, but also to delve into the deeply subjective. This presents challenges: how do you allow an unknown viewer access to a story you are so close to? How do you prevent the personal from becoming solipsistic and self-indulgent? Working with this subject can obviously be personal, but it can also be a way to explore broader subjects concerning genealogy, history and origin, and the question of what it means to "be related" to someone in the first place.

The workshop is not restricted to any one medium and a cross-disciplinary approach is welcomed. Although not required, participants are encouraged to bring family documents that hold particular allure from them as possible starting points to work from.

Nina Katchadourian works in a wide variety of media including sculpture, photography, video and sound. Several times, she has worked with her family directly in collaboration (such as in "Accent Elimination," where she and her parents worked with a professional voice coach to acquire each other's accents) or other times by examining a family document in depth ("The Nightgown Pictures," based on a photo-document made by her grandmother about Katchadourian's mother). Other projects, such as "The Genealogy of the Supermarket," looks at the way family is portrayed through the images of people that appear on common grocery store products. Katchadourian was born in Stanford, California and grew up spending every summer on a small island in the Finnish archipelago, where she still spends part of each year. She is based in Brooklyn, NY. Her work has been exhibited domestically and internationally at places such as PS1/MoMA, MASS MoCA, Artists Space and SculptureCenter in New York, the Serpentine Gallery, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego. In 2006 the Tang Museum in Saratoga Springs, New York exhibited a 10-year survey of her work and published an accompanying monograph entitled All Forms of Attraction. Katchadourian is represented by Sara Meltzer gallery in New York and Catharine Clark gallery in San Francisco. More information on Katchadourian's work can be found at www.ninakatchadourian.com.

July 30th to August 2nd
Archives and Ephemera: A Poetry Workshop with Ronaldo Wilson

What materials might we bring into the realm of the poem? With what sources can we open the life of the mind into language that captures and reveals our imaginations, intentions, and explorations? An archive is defined as "a place or collection containing records, documents," "a long term storage area," and "a repository for stored memories or information," while ephemera is marked as a "short lived thing," and "printed matter of passing interest."

This workshop asks you to bring in and work from your archives and ephemera, ideally anything that can fit in a standard sized brief case or grocery bag, depending on your records, habits, findings, and tastes. Perhaps you have a small archive of photographs, news clippings, or journals you've been collecting? Or, maybe you have a series of loose notes, sketches, objects, or partial but striking drafts that you've left untouched and wish to revisit?

Throughout the week, you will focus on your own archives and ephemera as a means of generating a cycle of new poems. Students will work on in-class exercises, as well as discuss freshly drafted works. To further inspire our writing and conversation, we will look to poets who work with various modes of the archival and the ephemeral to include Cornelius Eady's Brutal Imagination, C.A. Conrad's Advanced Elvis Course, Harryette Mullen's Sleeping With the Dictionary, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge's I Love Artists, Wayne Koestenbaum's Rhapsody of A Repeat Offender, and Meena Alexander's Quickly Changing River.

Ronaldo V. Wilson is the author of Narrative of the Life of the Brown Boy and the White Man, winner of the 2007 Cave Canem Poetry Prize (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2008), and Poems of the Black Object (Futurepoem Books, 2009). He is a graduate of the PhD program in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, and NYU's Graduate Creative Writing Program. Wilson has won numerous fellowships to include the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center, Cave Canem, Kundiman, Djerassi, and Yaddo. A co-founder of the Black Took Collective, he teaches creative writing and African American poetics at Mount Holyoke College.

September 30th to October 3rd
Weather as Muse: Video with Bernadine Mellis

In this workshop, the weather—increasingly the object of attention, interpretation, and worry—will be our muse. Participants will work with three possible collaborators: 1) the daily weather itself, 2) intriguing and beloved texts or images about the weather, and 3) fellow workshop participants. Each participating artist should bring three source objects (image, sound, or short text) that deal with weather. We will work with these sources, and with the daily weather, together and alone, to create 3-5 minute videos. Some instruction in shooting and editing digital video will be offered as necessary, depending on participants’ levels of experience and skill. Please bring your own equipment.

Bernadine Mellis' short films include Born, The Golden Pheasant, and Farm-In-The-City, a collaboration with EE Miller. Bernadine's father's role as lead attorney in Earth First! activist Judi Bari's civil case against the FBI prompted her to make The Forest For The Trees, her first documentary. Bernadine also directed The Odyssey, a collaborative adaptation of Homer's 24-chapter epic, made up of 24 shorts by 24 different mostly queer/trans/lady filmmakers. She is currently in production on a documentary about children of the New Left tentatively called Struggle Baby. Bernadine teaches film and video in the Five Colleges. Her films can be found on www.redbirdfilms.com.

October 30th to November 2nd
Ecopoetics after Copenhagen: Language, Form, Site with Jonathan Skinner

A field-based workshop, offering an introduction to environmental writing in relation to current poetic practice, in the post-Copenhagen moment. Setting our compass by key works of postmodern ecopoetics (Charles Olson, Gary Snyder, Lorine Niedecker, Larry Eigner, Ronald Johnson, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Ed Roberson, Cecilia Vicuña), let's hit the trail, charged with bringing our writing practice to the task of response. In what ways do land art (Robert Smithson), research poetry (Juliana Spahr), conceptual writing (Kenneth Goldsmith) or mestizo poetics (Cecilia Vicuña) change our relation to place? When the very air we breathe is bought and sold, can poets reclaim the commons? How do we meaningfully respond, as poets, to disrupted urban environments, collapsing bee colonies, displaced communities, or the Pacific garbage patch? This workshop sets out some of the tools for redefining language practice in the face of climate change and related global catastrophes, with a special emphasis on site-specific writing.

Jonathan Skinner's poetry collections include With Naked Foot (Little Scratch Pad Press, 2009) and Political Cactus Poems (Palm Press, 2005). He founded and edits the journal ecopoetics (www.ecopoetics.org), which features creative-critical intersections between writing and ecology. Skinner also writes ecocriticism on contemporary poetry and poetics: his essays on the poets Ronald Johnson and Lorine Niedecker appeared recently in volumes published by the National Poetry Foundation and by University of Iowa Press. His essay "Thoughts on Things: Poetics of the Third Landscape" appeared recently in the Ecolanguage Reader (ed. Brenda Iijima). Skinner teaches in the Environmental Studies Program at Bates College, in Central Maine, where he makes his home.

 

Workshop Details

Workshop Schedule: Each day begins with a fresh breakfast followed by a three- hour workshop at 10:00 AM. Total workshop time for the retreat will be twelve hours. The afternoon can be spent working in the studio, visiting local sites, swimming in a nearby lake or walking the mountain trails. Dinner is served overlooking our gorgeous meadows. Evening hours are devoted to worktime.

Fees: $600 includes tuition, private room, private studio and all meals. $375 includes tuition and meals only.

Participants may purchase a thirty-minute Private Consultation with their instructor for $150. Manuscripts (15 pages maximum) must be sent in advance; portfolios can be but this is not required.
Limited Scholarships, based on need, are available.
Millay Colony Alumni receive a 15% discount.

To Apply: Send a letter of introduction indicating your choice of workshop and including a brief biography with a $100 deposit. Also include a work sample (10 pages of writing, 10 images on CD or a brief video clip). Applicants will be accepted on a first-come first-serve basis. Please indicate if you require lodging and studio space and if you would like to have a Private Consultation with the instructor.

Apply to: The Millay Colony for the Arts, 454 East Hill Road, Austerlitz, NY. Attention: Summer Retreats. Make Checks payable to The Millay Colony for the Arts.

For more information please get in touch with Caroline Crumpacker at 518-392-4144 or .