The Artist Is In

With the support of artist-led communities and programs, artists are finishing novels and finding inspiration for their next body of work in getaways designed for the creatively disciplined. Whether close to nature or a new cityscape, the right residency program can be paramount to an artists’ success. Our favorites across the country span from rural Maine to the Golden Gate Bridge.

Range Life

ANDERSON RANCH IN SNOWMASS VILLAGE, COLORADO

By RYAN STEADMAN
If you’re a city-dwelling artist, one most likely confined to a 500-square-foot apartment-slash-studio, you probably dream of escaping your cement prison and getting back to nature the way so many artists before you have done, from Georgia O’Keeffe to Andrea Zittel.

Artist residencies are that life preserver, a practical way for talented artists to get out of their self-imposed pressure cookers and work in the quietude of a natural setting. There are some excellent ones sprinkled across the United States,such as Skowhegan in Maine and Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, but the crown jewel of artist residencies has to be the Anderson Ranch, which is nestled within the beatific climes of Snowmass Village, Colorado.

The ranch occupies five acres inside Snowmass Village, a resort town that today is best known for winter sports. The idea for a local art school was entrusted to the raku ceramicist Paul Soldner, who was invited in 1966 to teach workshops at the ranch and thus established its roots as an artist’s residency. Soldner’s
goal for Anderson Ranch was always to produce something outside the norm of traditional art schools. Through the efforts of artists and supporters like Soldner, the Anderson Ranch Arts Center was established as a nonprofit organization in 1973.

“What I can tell you is that we transform lives,” says Anderson Ranch executive director Nancy Wilhelms. “It’s possible to start here as a young artist and build a career and a lifetime relationship with Anderson Ranch. I can point to artists who started in the children’s program and have come back as faculty.”

Anderson Ranch has year-round programming and facilities for all levels of artists—not just professionals—providing talks, access to curators and teachers, and the ability to work in a wide variety of state-of-the-art studios, from a traditional ceramics studio to a high-tech digital fabrication lab.

“It is difficult to be welcoming to all comers and still create an atmosphere of excellence,” writes art collector Dennis Scholl, in an upcoming publication celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the ranch. “Yet since its founding, Anderson Ranch has fulfilled that goal, whether for a hobbyist learning to throw a pot or a professional fine-art photographer coming to check out the latest cutting-edge technology.”

For any artist, no matter his or her level of training, the time spent at Anderson Ranch is nothing short of transformative. That’s what New York painter Sarah Kurz, who received a highly sought-after ten-week residency at Anderson Ranch in 2013, says about the work she produced in the lush, nature-filled backdrop of Snowmass Village. “The otherworldliness of my surroundings helped refine the sense of atmosphere in my work,” says Kurz, who has become known for her gauzy, light-filled paintings. “The mountain air is so physically and visually different from city air—I understood more clearly how to suggest place.”

Wilhelms, who attended college at the University of Colorado, Boulder, the Rhode Island School of Design, and the Center of the Eye school of photography in Aspen (which was eventually absorbed by Anderson Ranch), agrees: “Our setting seeps into the pores and the psyche [of the residents]. We see it constantly in the artists’ work and in their ideas.”

It’s a testament to the quality of the program that the secret is out about Anderson Ranch, which has managed to capture the attention of collectors, press, and benefactors worldwide from its relatively tiny outpost tucked in the majestic Rocky Mountains. It’s exactly that natural beauty that seems to call great artists back to Anderson, time and time again.
andersonranch.org