Artists-in-residence program expands
By Rob Levin
After three years of bringing working artists to campus, the College of the Atlantic Kippy Stroud Artists-in-residence program has been permanently endowed and is set to expand. Thanks to a $1.14 million grant from the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation (MBSF), the program will be funded in perpetuity and grow from an established early fall residency into the academic year.
“Connecting with art can show us that culture is continuously produced and is not locked into narrow timeframes that freeze moments and peoples—rather it reforms, rebuilds, and rejuvenates worlds and world views,” says COA Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts Catherine Clinger, who has led development of the program. “The artists who visit COA and Mount Desert Island as part of this program can help us enter into conversation with culture and nature in ways that can nourish our spirits as a broadened learning community.”
As part of the endowment agreement, the established month-long fall residency program will continue as it has in 2019, 2021, and 2022, while two new programs, the Kippy Stroud Emerging Visiting Maine Artist(s) and the The Kippy Stroud Memorial COA Lecture will further add to the offerings. The two-week visitor program will allow a Maine artist, chosen by COA arts faculty, to contribute directly to the studio classroom as a collaborative shared space, incorporating the program into a COA arts course in the late winter or early spring term in context with COA’s core human-ecological field of study. The public lecture, set for late May each year, honor’s Stroud’s original Acadia Summer Arts Program in Bar Harbor, which included several lectures per week. Lecturers will be selected from three nominations from COA and three candidates identified by the MBSF board.
“The much-amplified COA Kippy Stroud Artists-in-Residence Program will perpetuate the vision and spirit of Kippy’s commitment to generous hospitality, creativity, artistic achievement, and bringing artists together with time to relax, foment new ideas, and be inspired by the natural splendor of MDI,” says Stroud foundation board member Patterson Sims. “This program powerfully builds upon the legacy of Kippy’s legendary Acadia Summer Arts Program, familiarly known as Kamp Kippy, and her role as the founder, director, and funder of the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, along with her family’s deep, multi-generational attachment to Mount Desert Island.”
The creation, expansion, and endowment of the program would not have been possible without Clinger’s work, said COA Dean of Institutional Advancement Shawn Keeley ’00.
“I want to thank Catherine for her vision for the program, management of the first several years, and excellent stewardship of the relationship with the foundation, which has led us to this point. BRAVA CATHERINE!!” he wrote in a recent email to the COA community. “This program will not only bring wonderful opportunities to our students, faculty, and staff in the years to come, but it will also further establish COA as a center of gravity for the arts here on MDI and in Maine.”
Stroud was a talented artist, teacher, generous philanthropist, and impassioned promoter of contemporary art and artists. Starting in 1977, she founded, funded, and directed The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, an experimental program for artists working in textiles and many other media. On MDI, where she spent summers, she oversaw and funded the Acadia Summer Arts Program (ASAP), or as it was affectionately known, “Kamp Kippy.” For almost three decades ASAP hosted hundreds of artists with their guests and families.
Kamp Kippy, in the words of the scholar and curator Debra Bricker Balkan, “represented a high-octane salon, an exhilarating retreat where ideas were exchanged over dinner, before lectures, and on boat trips, walks, and off nights with fellow guests… ASAP was the outgrowth of her phenomenal largess, of her desire to bring extraordinary people together.” Kippy passed away in 2015 and her foundation is committed to carrying her passion for art forward.
Images: Work by COA Kippy Stroud Artists-in-residence, 2019-2022. Heather Lyon (‘99), Semaphore Love Letters, Isle au Haut; photo credit Luke Myers; Work by Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley; Okwui Okpokwasili, left, and Katrina Reid in a performance of Poor People’s TV Room at NYLive Arts in 2017, photo credit MG.
