Back home in Philadelphia, Beth Feldman Brandt reserves her Fridays for writing poetry. At least, in theory she does. Distractions tend to get in the way for the busy foundation director.
So, for the second time in two years, Brandt has traveled to Ragdale, a retreat-style campus in Lake Forest, to recharge her batteries as an artist. Within a week of arriving, she had already made significant strides on one of her next projects, a series of poems based on arcane maps she viewed at Chicago’s Newberry Library.
“Two weeks here is like nine months at home,” she says during a break. “You’re not trying to go to work and make dinner and drive people around. You get to stay in the writing space 24 hours a day, which I don’t get to do at home. You can work at 6 in the morning or you can work at midnight. Or you can work anywhere in between.”
Giving artists a temporary respite from everyday life has been Ragdale’s formal mission for the last 35 years, though the historic property’s ties to art goes back much further. It’s about the closest thing Illinois has to the notion of an “artist colony,” the type of secluded, creative utopia that first sprang up in the United States in the early-20th century.
The Ragdale Foundation hosts as many as a dozen artists at a time — from writers to painters to musicians and everything in between — to live and work on-site during residency periods that average two weeks. Cost is a nominal $25 per day for each artist, which includes a chef-prepared evening meal.
The rotations continue year-round. So does the constantly churning application and selection process.
“The reality is, even best-selling authors and successful artists have day jobs,” says Ragdale executive director Susan Page Tillett. “What Ragdale gives them is time and space away from their day jobs and their families so that they can really devote all of their time to creating new work. It’s that ability to focus and get away from all of the stuff that gets in the way.”
A similar residency program operates on a lower profile in downstate Peoria, within the city’s redeveloping warehouse district. Industrialists Joe and Michele Richey created the largely self-financed Prairie Center of the Arts in 2003 as a way to broaden the use of the vintage factory building that houses their custom-order machine shop, Tri-City Machine Products.
More than 80 visiting artists have had access to studio space there while living rent-free in a Germantown Hills home nearby. Participants are expected to stay a minimum of two months with the hope they’ll become “imbued into the community,” says Michele Richey, board president for the not-for-profit.
Among the alumni is composer John Orfe, who spent seven months in the program through early 2008 before taking an assistant professorship at Bradley University. He says his fruitful time with Prairie Center was the equivalent of a “pre-sabbatical” that allowed him to finish his Yale doctorate while completing three commissions.
“I was writing a solid six hours a day and practicing at least three hours a day, and it was very good for me to get a sense of my working methods,” Orfe says. “It’s often the case that if you’re an artist, in whatever creative field, you have a day job. To have a chance to devote such an extended period to art-making was a phenomenal opportunity.”
There are some 500 artist-residency programs throughout the United States, but they vary in the way they operate and in the type of physical environment they provide.
For creative souls seeking the remote and rural, Art Farm in south-central Nebraska hosts an average of three artists at a time who help develop the property while crafting their own work. In Steuben, Wis., Artists' Cooperative Residency & Exhibitions, or ACRE, folds several artists into a communal setting each summer.
In contrast, the broader-based arts organizationthreewalls near downtown Chicago places a visiting artist in an apartment/studio. Gallery space is also available to participants, who cycle through one at a time.
“We’re in the middle of the West Loop,” threewalls executive and creative director Shannon Stratton says. “It’s not like we have a studio with a view of the forest. It’s more for artists who are coming specifically to an urban environment for projects that require this setting.”
The summer artist residency offered by the Galesburg Civic Art Center in west central Illinois is perhaps somewhere in between. Director Heather Norman says the program, which dates back to the mid-1980s, accommodated as many as eight participants at one time before it was downsized to feature a single hand-picked artist for the past couple of seasons.
In 2012, the plan is to have three or four visual artists live and work in town, but the program will introduce “community-driven” elements under which participating artists hold workshops for residents or leave behind a piece of public art, even if it’s on a temporary basis.
“We have been a seal-yourself-up-and-do-your-own-thing kind of program,” Norman says. “We needed to find something that works for us.”
The residency program is estimated to cost $3,000. Norman hoped to get studio space from Knox College, as well as cash donations from local businesses, to make it happen.
If there’s a central factor that binds many of the host organizations, it’s the daunting task of raising funds during the continuing economic slump. Not surprisingly, competition is fierce for private dollars.
“It got that much harder after 2008, but I have to say our donors have been loyal, and there are always new ones,” Tillett says of Ragdale’s North Shore region, which helps support the foundation’s $700,000 annual budget. “What we find is that not that donors will give to one or the other of us, but good donors who really care about the arts will give to us and the Art Institute or us and the local theater.”
The solitary nature of an artist’s retreat, which is often closed from public view, can make it a tough sell when approaching potential donors, says Caitlin Strokosch, executive director of the Alliance of Artists Communities. She says the main purpose of a residency opportunity is to foster creative “research and development,” rather than present a showcase of completed work.
“There’s never been the kind of funding to this field that there has been to things that are more tangible — museums or theater companies or the symphony,” she says. “It’s very hard to connect with funders.”
As a result, organizations have found it challenging to sustain their core mission, even as applications for residencies have surged because of widespread unemployment among artists. Some organizations are putting off capital investments, Strokosch says.
“There’s a lot of infrastructure that requires a lot of maintenance and upkeep, and I think a lot of that has been on hiatus,” she says. “People are having to make really difficult decisions. But what I’m mostly hearing from the field is, ‘What can we cut other than our support to artists?’”
The infrastructure needs at Ragdale couldn’t be ignored, regardless of the economy. The centerpiece of the bucolic property is an 1897 summer home built by noted architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, which became a haven for artists of his era. The arts and crafts-style mansion is undergoing a $3 million restoration and modernization that is expected to be completed in the spring.
The Ragdale Foundation has raised $2 million of the total and was able to move ahead with the help of a five-year loan from the city of Lake Forest, which owns the property and leases it back to the not-for-profit. The fund-raising continues.
“We’re two-thirds of the way there,” Tillett says.
Organizations that support residency programs face uncertain levels of support from public sources such as the Illinois Arts Council, which has consistently awarded grants to Ragdale and its peer organizations. The state agency’s budget has decreased by more than half since fiscal 2007, from about $20 million to $9 million currently. IAC officials say they have responded by suspending some grant categories and emphasizing awards that give arts organizations greater flexibility in how they spend the money.
Meanwhile, IAC recipients have felt the effects of the state’s chronic cash-flow problems. Grant money to arts organizations have been delayed by months, prompting IAC Chairwoman Shirley Madigan to issue an apologetic letter to them.
“For some of them, it’s a very difficult time in terms of how they stretch their funds,” says IAC Executive Director Terry Scrogum. “For example, a theater might, in looking at their upcoming season, not be able to do as many productions. It could be the same for performances by musical groups.”
The next state budget is expected to be tight for his agency, Scrogum says. But he says he’ll continue making the case that art helps local economies.
“The people who have had a lot of exposure to the arts would agree that it provides a lot in their lives and in the lives of their families and their communities,” Scrogum says.
The argument isn’t lost on Brandt, the Philadelphia foundation director who spent two weeks at Ragdale. She was able to begin two new poetry projects before jumping back into the fray of daily life.
“As always, I pack up my papers just amazed at how much work I got done,” she said in an email after returning home. “I realize that I can’t hope to replicate that time and focus and output. Instead, I guess I just do my best to maintain the commitment I felt there.”
Mike Ramsey is a Chicago-based freelance writer.
Illinois Issues, December 2011
