Almost a year ago I bought a house. It felt like the biggest miracle ever as a self employed artist, queer, non binary, unpartnered person with no generational wealth or access to a cosigner or beneficiary. It took many years and many steps to be ready and able to make this happen, both logistically and spiritually. I hadn’t filed my taxes in years, my credit score was shit, and I had no savings for a down payment. Through mentorship, dedication, privilege, hard work, god, and an FHA loan, I was able to acquire my house surrounded by five acres of woods and a small meadow.
For the last year I have been working to make it a colorful and vibrant space for artists and friends to visit, and today I am excited to present to you a new project and name for this work, as well as an open call for the first experimental residency season.
Window Place is a domestic artist residency and rural land project for looking in and looking out
If you’ve never done an artist residency before or this is your hundredth one, Window Place is a space for you to explore your research and tend to what has been hidden. On the Leelanau Peninsula of Michigan just fifteen minutes to the beach, it’s a place for artists to rest in nature, spread out their research, stretch a canvas, sew a quilt, or look within for what is waiting to come out.
These kinds of windows which create “places” next to them are not simply luxuries; they are necessary. A room which does not have a place like this seldom allows you to feel fully comfortable or perfectly at ease. Indeed, a room without a window place may keep you in a state of perpetual unresolved conflict and tension - slight, perhaps, but definite.
In principle, any window with a reasonably pleasant view can be a window place, provided that it is taken seriously as a space, a volume, not merely treated as a hole in the wall.
- A Pattern Language
The residency season runs November 1 - March 27 and applications are due October 15. There may be anywhere from 3-10 residents chosen for the season. Some residencies are hosted by me and there is also a few spaces to have the house to yourself. This a fee based residency with one scholarship slot and one funded residency with a $400 stipend. You will hear back by November 1 with either a proposal for your residency or a note that there won’t be a spot for you.
It is for all artists, writers, visionaries, creatives, practitioners, herbalists, weirdos, freaks, painters, workers, care givers, light seekers, quilters, weavers, tattoo artists, anyone looking for space to become more themselves.
Everything is on the website! There are so many people to thank for the support and visioning of making this project possible. Thank you to Mary Welcome for the decade long residency support and visioning and turbo time work on Window Place. Mary helped me vision and organize Have Company which held residents from 2014-2016 in the Heartside neighborhood in Grand Rapids, MI. You can listen to those artists and see the archive here.
Hosting has been an important part of my practice for over thirteen years. Hosting in all ages music venues, houses, shops, galleries, residencies, campers, and more. It brings me deeper into my own art practice and helps me to get to know a place and the people in it by introducing it to visiting artists.
Like all of my offerings I use artist loosely, broadly, spaciously. Be whatever it is you want to be and propose the project you want to see in the world. Take a page out of Beth Pickens’ book and risk getting rejected.
So many miracles have already emerged out of leaving Instagram, my big ideas coming back to me to be of great service to the people. Window Place is one of those ideas and it is a beautiful feeling to share it today. Inventing new projects, naming them, and finding language is a part of how I understand my own experience of being on Earth.
You are encouraged to text the link to Window Place to a friend, share it with your own email list, and certainly : apply! A note on the first ever season of the artist residency at Window Place : by applying you understand you are agreeing to attending something brand new and we will be excited to build practices and systems with your feedback. This is the beginning stages of an experiment.
If you have questions you can email windowplaceresidency@gmail.com
Quilt Class is happening on Tuesdays starting October 10 and I would love to have you! A Quilt is Something Human is a place I feel happy being myself and watching other people become brighter in the process of their unlearning and new skill building. We are going to creatively unblock through the lens of blanket making. Bust through perfectionism. We can be scared to fuck up at quilt class but do it anyways. See you there.
Quilt Class and Joanna Brouk are really all that is on my mind today. I hope you apply to be a resident at Window Place and come into my little world and create your own there. My books are open for mid October into November for Creative Advising if the trek to Window Place is too far and you want support on your projects.
If you missed it : Friday Threads was about Social Media Addiction and includes dozens of insights from all sides of every coin. I highly recommend it!
All I want in this whole world is to see more art and feel more art and teach more art and to know more art. I want artists to have space for them to peel back the layers of the ordinary again and again and I want to use my resources to ensure that this keeps happening. Thank you for being a reader I love you!
P.S. An important review of How to Not Always Be Working to remind you that BEING REJECTED by one person, a group, an organization, a grant, a residency - doesn’t mean you get to quit. We must keep going!
