A CURIOUS YEAR | New work from Penland Resident Artists and Core Fellows
July 7 – September 11, 2021
John & Robyn Horn Exhibition Gallery
A Curious Year Collection
August 18 – September 5
Special online only collection of work by these artists available ~ HERE
PENLAND RESIDENT ARTISTS
Adam Atkinson
Nate Cotterman
Julia Harrison
Jason Hartsoe
Everett Hoffman
Kit Paulson
Ellie Richards
Adam Whitney
PENLAND RESIDENT ARTIST PROGRAM
Penland’s resident artists are full-time artists who spend three years living and working in Penland’s school community. The program is designed for artists who are at some pivotal moment in their career—the residency is an opportunity for them to test ideas and make choices that will have a lasting effect on their work and their lives. Resident artists may use the time to develop their studio practice, to work out the practicalities of making a living, to push technical and conceptual boundaries, or to explore entirely new directions in their work.
The primary expectation of resident artists is that they engage intently with their work. They are also expected to have an open door policy, welcoming students, instructors, and the public to their studios, both informally and formally through the resident open house that is part of each Penland session. They are welcome to visit workshops, attend slide lectures, and to participate in all aspects of life at the school.
Resident artists work independently and set their own goals for their residencies. They do this, however, in an atmosphere of support, encouragement, and creative energy. Their studios and living spaces are clustered so that interaction with other resident artists is inevitable. Living at Penland also gives them access to the many working craftspeople who live nearby as well as the national and international Penland community.
Education at Penland is built around intense, total-immersion workshops. The resident artist program enriches the workshop program in a variety of ways: students are inspired by the work and the work spaces of the resident artists, who serve as models for the kind of commitment required for sustained artistic production. And, with seven or eight participants at any given time, the program provides diverse examples of ways to make a life in craft.
Resident artists are selected through a competitive process that draws applications from all over the country. Selection is based on the quality of the work and on clearly articulated goals. At the end of their three years, some Penland resident artists move onto other residencies or decide to pursue teaching careers, but the great majority of them set up independent studios and continue to pursue the work they started at Penland.
PENLAND CORE FELLOWS
Sarina Angell
Molly Bernstein
Mia Kaplan
Maria Fernanda Nuñez
SaraBeth Post
Tony Santoyo
Erica Schuetz
Hannah Mitsu Shimabukuro
Scott Vander Veen
PENLAND CORE FELLOWSHIP PROGRAM
The Penland Core Fellowship Program is a two-year work-study fellowship that offers emerging artists the opportunity to explore artistic interests and career possibilities in a supportive artistic community.
Penland core fellows are energetic, bright lights who soak up everything and bring something truly special to the Penland community. These artists fully engage with Penland by taking classes, working in their own studios, and performing integral jobs for the school.
Core fellows are selected through a competitive process that attracts applicants from every part of the country. Applications are assessed for the quality of the art work and the interest of each applicant in being part of a close-knit community of artists. When selecting new core fellows, Penland is looking for talented individuals who have reached a moment in their lives when the program will be a pivotal experience.
Penland’s ever-changing learning environment, which includes world-class artists and teachers in a dozen media, allows core fellows to tailor their experience to meet their individual goals. The program can serve as preparation for careers in studio art, education, or design.
The work that core fellows do for the school—jobs such as dining hall manager, weekend cook, and entertainment coordinator—places them at the heart of Penland’s operation and gives them an opportunity to develop leadership skills. They are a bridge between the staff and the studios and serve a unique role in helping others have “the Penland experience.”
Core fellows live and work together and often learn as much from each other as they do from their classes. In the process, they form close friendships and become part of each other’s lifelong professional networks. The core house is an incubator for great ideas and deep conversations.
Remix #1 attempts to stimulate through color in a playful and inviting manner to people of all ages and backgrounds. Each letter is cast glass, and formed from children’s play foam letters. The letters are familiar objects and point to the crucial place in time where humans develop so much of themselves, childhood. The utilization of a popular LL Cool J lyric, specific to Hip Hop culture and more specific to black culture, aims to open the accessibility of the gallery space. My additional lyric “But I’m Gonna LiFT you UP” is light-hearted, perhaps sweet, a twist on the aggressive original lyric. The underlying question to myself with this work, “As an artist, as a writer, as a mixed race female with potential to influence others, what do you have to share that is going to motivate or inspire those who will see the work?”
– SaraBeth Post
I wish for this series of vessels to communicate the tedium and banality of our shared isolation of the previous year of quarantining. Each vessel is irritably individual in a narrow and claustrophobic shaft of its own space yet shares an experience of anchored isolation with the group. This is an unspoken isolation latent in the most normal of years but provoked by our grief and exasperation of 2020. The forms themselves suggest the curious formal similitude of monuments of the funeral and also the victorious, the sepulchral and the triumphant, the trophy and the tomb. They are an expression of grief and also the steadfastness of our will to persevere.
– Jason Hartsoe
A good night, a night light, a crack in the door—each ritual created a veil of refuge as I slept through the night as a kid. These night lights made 25 years later from bronze and encrusted vintage rhinestones emote their own feelings, and offer their light for protection. They adorn the walls with their fear, joy, and ambivalence existing as a sentinel and friend telling us it’s ok to be afraid of the dark.
– Everett Hoffman
This piece is concerned with the question of discernment, primarily in our inability differentiate the real and the fake, as well as our willingness to accept processes of concealment and transformation that leave no remnant of an origin. Formally, this series is an articulation of my interest on how minimal forms become evocative and enhance our attention to material and surface details that would be missed in more complex forms.
– Maria Fernanda Nuñez
INQUIRIES | For more information or to purchase works in the exhibition please contact Kathryn Gremley at gallerydirector@penland.org or 828.765.6211
Images at top: Scott Vander Veen, Any Given Waking Moment, paint and mixed media collage on stretched canvas forms, 72 x 84 x 2 inches | SaraBeth Post, Remix #1, cast glass on steel hardware, 38H x 66W x 2D inches
PENLAND GALLERY
Penland School of Crafts
3135 Conley Ridge Road
Penland, NC 28765
828.765.6211
Currently open Wednesday through Saturday 11AM-5PM
gallery@penland.org