What if you have an idea for an artwork inspired by Wedgwood ceramics, but you want to make it with paper pulp? Or if you know how to sculpt in clay, but want to make a fishbowl in glass? What if you dream of crafting pillows in porcelain? Artist residencies often attract medium-specific makers who want to spend time doing exactly what they do best, perhaps teaching workshops or giving demonstrations. But what about artists who want to explore something they’re not an expert in? Where the smorgasbord of formal, multidisciplinary art education ends, specialized residency programs begin, offering artists a chance to learn new disciplines and expand their skill sets.

The 1970s was the golden age of artist residencies. Three monumental programs in craft mediums, each detailed in this article, were founded within a few years of one another: the Arts/Industry Program at John Michael Kohler Arts Center, established in 1974 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin; the Pilchuck Glass School, set up in 1971 in Stanwood, Washington; and Dieu Donné, incorporated in 1976 in New York City.

At first glance, the programs seem to have few similarities: Kohler’s factory setting is massive and industrial, while Pilchuck is rural, and Dieu Donné is perched in the heart of the Brooklyn Navy Yard. But all three programs offer artists at different stages of their careers the time, space, and support to take valuable risks by working in a material or technique they haven’t yet mastered, or that may be totally new to them.
 

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Kohler

Ceramic Expertise on a Grand Scale
 

“Kohler Co.” is a name many recognize from kitchens and bathrooms across the country. But the company, established in 1873, made cast iron products – equipment for farms and local furniture factories, even decorative urns and crosses for cemeteries – before establishing itself as a manufacturer of ceramic fixtures.

In 1966, the Kohler Foundation donated the family’s historic home to the Sheboygan Arts Foundation. Over the years, it has expanded into a robust art museum, with dance, music, and theater programming, called the John Michael Kohler Arts Center. It’s also the administrative headquarters of the Arts/Industry residency program, which began in 1974 when Ruth DeYoung Kohler, longtime director of the arts center and granddaughter of the founder, invited potters to make work within the factory. Her brother Herbert, the company’s CEO at the time, gave the endeavor his blessing. “Herb calls me his crazy sister,” she shared with American Craft in 2014, “always coming up with new ideas.”

And it was a good idea: Since that first year, when Jack Earl and Tom LaDousa delighted factory staff by making sculptures out of Kohler urinals and toilets, the Arts/Industry program has welcomed more than 500 makers to its unique facility to work in metal, ceramics, or enamel, with the aid of Kohler factory experts and engineers in the Pottery and Foundry facilities.

Competition is fierce for the 12 three-month residencies offered each year. Program director Faythe Levine says it attracts an intriguing pool of candidates – “from traditional craftspeople to performance artists” – since they don’t need experience in ceramics or metal to apply.

Artist Giselle Hicks says that the industrial knowledge she learned from Arts/Industry during her two residencies there had a big impact on the projects she produced. Hicks, who has an MFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, is already an expert in clay. But she didn’t have much mold-making experience, and working at Kohler as a resident in 2005 and 2012 helped deepen her understanding of what she could – and couldn’t – achieve technically.

The company’s heritage as a manufacturer of domestic fixtures made it the perfect place for her first residency project. Intrigued by the social rituals and connections formed in bedrooms and dining rooms, she set her sights on creating a piece that abstracted the planar forms of both a mattress and a dining table. But she didn’t want to make a monumental version of those things. “I wanted to achieve scale in my work through the multiple,” she says. “I wanted to make something that the viewer understood with their body – objects that were familiar enough to draw the viewer to them, strange enough to hold their attention at a distance.” Working with Monty Stauffer and other Arts/Industry technicians and associates, Hicks built molds and perfected her casting and glazing techniques, resulting in several abstract works, built of multiples, that evoke the bed and the table at once.

When Hicks returned to Arts/Industry for a second residency in 2012, she aimed to create a table with a floral surface pattern that appears to bloom into three-dimensional ceramic bouquets. This project proved too challenging to complete during her residency, but she was able to take the knowledge gleaned from her experiments there and try again. The results were two tables and a series of wall tiles that were inspired by a tapestry. “You don’t really know if something works or not until you finish the thing,” Hicks, now 40, says, grateful that at Arts/Industry she had the time, materials, and access to expertise she needed to explore her ideas.

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Pilchuck

A Magnet for the “Glass-Curious”
 

Like Arts/Industry, the Pilchuck Glass School in northeast Washington attracts artists who are eager to dive metaphorically into a specific material. But where Kohler allows makers to use and learn about industrial processes, Pilchuck is deeply rooted in studio craft. Established in 1971 by artist Dale Chihuly and philanthropists John H. Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg, the program was initially designed as a summer workshop. Nearly 50 years later, it’s established as a major center for glass art instruction and a magnet for glass and glass-curious artists alike.

Pilchuck offers two residencies that artists can apply for. The John H. Hauberg Fellowship, a 12-day program held each spring, is designed for groups of up to six artists to work together on a themed project. (The artists tend to work in visual media, but the fellowship is open to writers, performers, curators, and critics, too.) Emerging Artist in Residence (EAiR), the second program, is designed for glass artists in earlier stages in their careers, and Pilchuck welcomes a small juried group of them each fall.

Artistic director Benjamin Wright notes that although Pilchuck’s superb facility is a big draw for artists from all over the world, so are its setting and the people who work there. “Residents can expect a talented, motivated, and curious cohort with which to explore the material,” he says. “Coming to Pilchuck, situated on a magical plot of land surrounded by beautiful forests, is a much-deserved break from the rigors of life. It allows artists to recharge their energy and focus entirely on their studio practices.”

For Doug Jeck, who teaches ceramics at the University of Washington in Seattle, Pilchuck was relatively close geographically – about 50 miles as the crow flies – but being an artist in residence there last summer gave him access to a whole other world.

Jeck, who works primarily in figurative ceramics but experiments in mixed-media works incorporating video, arrived at Pilchuck with an idea for what he describes as “site-specific, photographic works with basic glass elements,” but notes that he wanted to work “spontaneously.” With the aid and instruction of skilled technicians, he was able to make pieces that he later arranged into surrealistic scenes and photographed, such as a fishbowl (for his own Dr. Seuss-inspired stuffed fish), several versions of Man Ray’s Gift (the famous 1921 sculpture of a flatiron with tacks glued to it), and a football helmet.

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Dieu Donné

Playing with Paper
 

Dieu Donné was founded in 1974 by printmaker and book artist Susan Gosin while she was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. When she moved to New York City in 1976, she incorporated it as Dieu Donné Press and Paper with fellow artist Bruce Wineberg, and they began producing limited-edition letterpress books and collaborating with artists wanting to work with paper. Today, Dieu Donné is a nonprofit education studio (the Press was incorporated separately in 1988 to focus on producing fine books) offering two residency programs that include the opportunity to work with a “master collaborator.”

“Our residents generally have little or no experience making paper,” says Tatiana Ginsberg, co-director of artistic projects and one of Dieu Donné’s master collaborators. The Lab Grant residency is invitation-only and tends to be awarded to well-known artists in other mediums, including former residents Ann Hamilton, Do-Ho Suh, Nari Ward, and Nicole Eisenman. It provides “a chance to experiment and discover freely” outside of one’s established practice, says Ginsberg. The juried Workspace residency, however, is designed for emerging artists based in New York state. Like Lab Grant participants, Workspace artists are typically not paper-makers, and are invited to Dieu Donné in part to experiment.

Artist Susan Hamburger came to her 2018 Workspace residency at Dieu Donné with a vague notion of what she wanted to make. In her painting, papier-mâché, and collage practice, she often references 18th- and 19th-century prints and ceramics as well as Neoclassical architecture and ornamentation. In particular, she has been drawn to Josiah Wedgwood’s Jasperware, a line of fashionable ceramics, decorated with applied ornaments, that debuted in the 1770s.

“My goal was to go beyond simply translating my work into handmade paper,” she says, “and to create something that, without this opportunity, I would have otherwise been unable to make.” Working with master collaborator Amy Jacobs, she was able to complete a Jasperware-inspired triptych with pressed paper borders and relief elements of casting cotton that she either hand sculpted or built with molds.

Hamburger credits the success of her residency to having room to work out her ideas as well as the ability to collaborate with an expert. It’s a sentiment that reflects how residencies provide valuable time and space for artists of all levels to experiment, fail, and grow. “The first day was all about ruling things out by trial and error, with a number of comical snafus, including a mold that didn’t survive the press,” Hamburger says of her time at Dieu Donné. “But from that process of elimination and mishaps came the idea for the final piece.”