Buddha in a birdcage, Buddha on a plate,
Buddha stuffed with rags in a reliquary state,
Buddha under glass in a red metallic shroud,
Buddha wrapped in paper, twelve times on twelve shelves,
Buddha in the sketchbook, Buddha in the words,
Buddha as the first name of the ex-husband of a hairdresser from Burnsville named Priscilla,
Buddha as a friend of friends who study on his ways,
Buddha as my uncle, noodling in my dream
on an ever-dwindling chopstick held between his knees,
Buddha on 109th street, leaning out the window on a red pillow in a red brassiere,
Buddha as a child’s shoe, washed up on the beach,
Buddha as the chicken I ate last night,
Buddha as a line drawn, followed, and erased,
Buddha as the case I make for nothing, a space,
Buddha sitting shiva, Buddha kicking ass,
Buddha watching TV, Buddha cutting grass.

– Buddha in a Birdcage, by Betty Oliver

The goal of this project is to publish the poetry of Betty Oliver, a New York artist and poet who passed away in October, 2000, after an extended battle with breast cancer.  When Betty died, she left all of her creative work in the care of Burnsville, NC glass artists and Penland instructors Billy and Katherine Bernstein. An accomplished mixed-media sculptor, Betty began to write and perform poetry around 1990, and created a powerful body of written work. Though she performed her poetry quite actively at New York venues such as Dixon Place and the Knitting Factory, her work has never appeared in printed form.

As a poet, Betty was an engaging and compelling performer, often beginning readings by fighting her way out of a giant paper bag. As a teacher, she was very effective and sought after, and led many classes and workshops, primarily here at Penland and at Haystack Mountain School of Craft on the Maine coast. The book will be edited by Haystack director and poet Stuart Kestenbaum, designed by Robin Dreyer and Leslie Noell of Penland’s communications office, and marketed jointly by the two schools. Any profits from the sales of Betty’s book will be given to the scholarship funds of Haystack and Penland.

As with all USA Projects, the Betty Oliver Poetry Project must reach its monetary goal by a self-chosen deadline (June 6) in order to receive any funding. If you’d like to read the project proposal, watch the video, and consider supporting the project, you can click here to visit the project page at United States Artists.

January print resident Dustin Farnsworth is having a pretty good year. He earned his BFA in woodworking and functional art, with a minor in printmaking, from Kendall College of Art and Design in May, and won a Windgate Fellowship, which he’s using to move to Asheville and work for three or more established makers in wood and steel over the course of a year – the grant money pays his way while he gives his labor to the artists. So far, the established makers he’s assisted have been Stoney Lamar, for whom he fabricated steel components in preparation for a lifetime achievement award show at SOFA, and Brent Skidmore, for whom he built 13 mirrors. In the spring, he’ll be working on large-scale furniture pieces with Sylvie Rosenthal.

To feed the print-centered side of his artistic life alongside all of this three-dimensional work, he’s also made time this year for a short printmaking residency at Kendall (in Grand Rapids, Michigan), where he assisted a class, and for Penland’s two-week January letterpress residency. “I’m pretty balanced between woodworking and printmaking,” he says. “I have a hard time distinguishing between the two. Mark-making is the thread that runs between both.”

The Penland residency was Dustin’s first opportunity to work in letterpress. He’s always been fascinated by the letterpress as an object – the machine, the wood type, the history of the medium – so he was excited to get to use one. “It’s all so beautiful,” he enthuses. “There are lots of kinetics in my sculpture; it’s very gearhead influenced. Letterpress is a good combination of that and printing.”

Dustin also enjoyed the chance to work more on just one thing at a time than ever before. He arrived with a very specific plan for his work, which he then veered away from unexpectedly as the two-week residency progressed. “It’s phenomenal to to be stuck in the mountains in the middle of nowhere and still be able  to work 16 hours a day,” he reflects. He’d like to come back next winter and rent the studio for a longer period. Between now and then, it’s back to Asheville to carry on with the next phase of the Windgate project. He’s also applied for a residency at Arrowmont, and will be teaching two classes this summer at Princeton Secondary School in New Jersey. He’ll have work in a group show at Blue Spiral 1 over the summer and will show there again in a split exhibition next January. “I have a lot of work to do before then,” he says.

You can learn more about Dustin and see pictures of his work by clicking here to visit his website.

Jennifer Bueno, a mixed-media sculptor and former Penland resident artist, is fundraising on USA Projects for an upcoming installation at The Annex in Raleigh, NC. Her project, Remotely Sensing, is based on the out-of-body feeling generated by observing the earth via satellite images:

…Recently, I’ve found myself engrossed in satellite images. Though these images are created by data gathered directly from our planet, they seem otherworldly.  Their false colors are created by gathering specific frequencies from the spectrum that give an alien glow, and when you think about it are really only “false” to our species who see a limited number of frequencies.  And yet they are accessible. In the terrain I can identify a river, a mountain, a city; viewing the earth at a certain distance creates an odd sense of knowing place.

I would like to create a body of work that ruminates on how these now ubiquitous images affect our perception of place.  I see this body of work as a focus of my exploration of awareness within the context of experience. Some of these satellite images invoke an out of body feeling similar to a kind of ”spirit projection”.  For me looking at these images creates a distance in time between myself and the place that I see. They create a magical change that I am extremely excited about. It is our home becoming something else….

If you’d like to read Jennifer’s proposal and perhaps consider supporting her project, click here to visit her USA Projects page.

You can also click here to visit Jennifer Bueno’s website, to learn more about her other artwork.