This week at Penland is entirely out of the ordinary. We are hosting a five day retreat for 100 Penland instructors. All fifteen of our studios are available for the participants. Along with our excellent studio coordinators, each studio has a studio assistant to help folks find things and figure things out. Many people are working in studios they are unfamiliar with.

Everyone was polled ahead of time to find out what sorts of demonstrations they might like to see and/or offer and then our program staff worked with everyone to create a schedule. All of this is optional of course; some folks may decide to stay in one studio and work on a project, others may move around a lot; we expect a lot of people to be teaching each other.

We hope that participants will share their teaching ideas and philosophies, strengthen connections with each other, try new materials, explore new ideas, learn from each other, get back in touch with what it means to be a student, and, of course, have fun.

Artist/educators Christina Shmigel and Jeff Goodman worked with program director Dana Moore to plan three evening events (also optional) that are aimed at stimulating ideas and discussions.

These pictures are from Sunday, the first full day of the retreat. We’ll be posting on the blog regularly during the week, so stay tuned.