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Anonymous Artistanonymous
Attended 2014 · October 9, 2014
Funky, weird, and fun, Art Farm provides a rural backdrop for your
Funky, weird, and fun, Art Farm provides a rural backdrop for your creative endeavors. For over 20 years, Artist Ed Dadey has kept these acres of misfit buildings and piles of surplus as a safe haven for the artist who seeks to enter a community and roll up their sleeves to keep it going. Participating artists (up to 12 at a time) agree to work for 12 hours a week to improve the place in return for your own room, studio, and access to a myriad supply of tools and materials. If you can find them. The place is piles upon piles of stuff, some old and rusting in the field, some newly acquired from auction. You see something that sparks your imagination, and ask Ed if you can do something with it, maybe leave an outdoor sculpture in the field, or make a crazy new door for a studio, or . . . Ed is open minded, patient, and passionate about this project. He can teach you to weld or use a router, fire up the kiln, drive a tractor, and who knows what else. Nebraska in the fall gets cold and if you want to warm up, you’ll have to fire up the woodstove. Summer is hot and muggy. There’s no air conditioning here. A public swimming lake is a 5 minute drive away. Insects, spiders, and mice are abundant. Rabbits dash across your path and a raccoon might be living in the attic above your studio. You buy and cook your own food, and there’s no cleaning service here, so depending on the artists before you, it might be a mess. Much of the place is falling apart, or never finished. Your work may not be so efficient, in part because of how chaotic things are, but in return, you’ll feel a kind of anarchic freedom to range wild, run through the nearby cornfields, make something new, and meet great new people. I’ve never met a residency I didn’t like, but don’t come if you need to be in a cozy pampered place. This one is raw. Bring your banjo, any tools you absolutely need to work, and any spare and useful materials, tools, furniture, or kitchen gadget you might have lying around to donate. There’s a use for it here somewhere.
— Anonymous, 2014. Imported from the original ratemyartistresidency.com archive.
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Anonymous Artistanonymous
Attended 2019 · October 19, 2019
Not for the faint of heart but for the free of spirit, Art Farm is
Not for the faint of heart but for the free of spirit, Art Farm is one of the last places of it's kind on earth. If you want permission to be your wildest, to experiment, to fail, to hands on learn a new trade, to fold quiet in your hands, to wander restored prairie, to discover the remnants of decades of artists, if you believe in the old, if you fix your shoes instead of buying new ones, if you long for a version of you driven by spirit and not by productivity, Art Farm may be for you. In deep communion with the earth, Art Farm is a haven for critters that have been displaced by hundreds of miles of mega-mono-farming. Art Farm is full of material, possibility, genuine and talented artists, a playful air that is deeply missing from much of the world. Paint a mural on a century old house, erect a massive sculpture on the edge of the corn, fire in a kiln in the second oldest school house in Nebraska-- the farm is also a haven for the displaced buildings of an era of farming long past. Ed says yes to the dreams of 50-70 artists a year and will teach you any of his hundreds of trades. The accommodations are constantly under renovation; this residency is for those up for roughin' it, but rarely have I seen people thrive the way they thrive at Art Farm and no where else have I and my work thrived like here.
— Anonymous, 2019. Imported from the original ratemyartistresidency.com archive.
