Description

Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, an institution among long-standing artists’ residential training programs, will observe its 75 th anniversary with the production and publication of “The Skowhegan Book.” This unique volume will not only document the history and practices of Skowhegan, but is providing the opportunity for productive convenings on which the texts and various contributions will be based. This project follows a number of recent projects and celebrations of famous U.S. residential art schools, including the Luce-funded exhibition “Look Before You Leap,” an exploration of Black Mountain College, and the Portland Museum of Art’s recent exhibition “The Vanguard: Haystack Mountain School of Crafts, 1950-1969”.
Unlike the short-lived Black Mountain and Haystack programs, Skowhegan has a long history that has spanned generations of artists and a democratic approach to modes of artistic practice. Two commissioned authors, Faye Hirsch and Ingrid Shaffner, will respectively produce a narrative history of the school and a series of thematic “albums” that focus on an intergenerational multiplicity of artistic voices. The publication will be the product of two years of deep archival research, including the combing of audio recordings of hundreds Skowhegan lectures. (A 2001 AAP grant supported the conversion of 500 of these lectures from audio tapes to digital files.)
The text will also feature the dialogues that will have emerged over the course of five moderated, roundtable alumni/faculty convenings on topics as wide-ranging as participatory pedagogy, structure and governance, place and setting, work and working, and diversity and democracy. This aspect of the project work is distinguished by the number of convening participants and the expertise levels of moderators, who include: Carin Kuoni, Director of the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School; Darby English, University of Chicago; and Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Director of the Lucas Museum.
The Skowhegan Book is intended as a celebratory document of the history and legacy of Skowhegan as it passes the 75-year mark, but its critical approach, and its inclusion many and distinctly diverse voices promises that it will also serve as an expansive document on the evolution of artistic practice over the course of the mid-and-late twentieth century to today. Its heavy reliance on little-studied but exceedingly rich archives underpins that promise. The 300-350 page book will be produced in an initial print run of 6,000.
The proposed grant is a fitting one to follow the AAP’s 2001 $150,000 grant, to preserve and disseminate the Skowhegan lecture archive.