Announcing Artist in Residence (AiR) Applications for 2024!
2022 Artist - Sarah Bird (Co-AiR with Nick Neely)Sarah Bird grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She attended Brown University before spending four years at the Grand Central Atelier in New York City to study contemporary realism. Though she set out to become a landscape painter, while in New York she departed from the school’s figure-centric curriculum to devote herself to the more intimate, self-determined landscapes of still life, the poetic genre that remains her fascination. Her current work often takes two forms: traditional, altaresque arrangements of natural objects on cloth; and “foliage paintings,” wilder compositions of plants, leaves, and branches on a dark background, which she sees as cross-genre between landscape and still life. She now lives with her husband, the writer Nick Neely, in the La Grande, Oregon. The recipient of a 2017 Idaho Arts Grant, her paintings have been shown in New York, Los Angeles and Block Island, Rhode Island.
2022 Artist - Nick Neely (Co-AiR with Sarah Bird)Nick Neely's first book, Coast Range, a collection of essays, was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal for natural history writing. His second book, Alta California, an LA Times bestseller, details his twelve-week trek from San Diego to San Francisco to retrace the first overland Spanish expedition through California. A former resident of Hailey, Idaho, he now lives with his wife, the painter Sarah Bird, in La Grande, Oregon, where he is an Assistant Professor of English/Writing at Eastern Oregon University and teaches in EOU’s low-residency MFA program with a concentration in Wilderness, Ecology, and Community. He is currently working on a book about the Cassia crossbill endemic to the Albion Mountains and South Hills and is excited to poke around the rocks and make some forays upslope into the Albions. Learn more about him at www.nickneely.com2021 Artist - Jess ScheiderJess Scheider is a visual artist living and working in Boise, Idaho. Provoked by the mysterious, the unseen and the ineffable, her artworks grapple with both a changing world, and our fraught relationship with nature. The earthly textures that inhabit the surfaces of Jess’s paintings seek to evoke a presence from the viewer, drawing them close to the surface to seek out connections which may have been previously hidden. Jess’s work is guided by a deep desire honor the land and its many teachings, foraging a connection to those who came before, and those who are yet to arrive. Within these explorations, issues of existence, perception, adaptation, reclamation and the infinite rise to the surface. 2018 Artist - Poo Wright-Pulliam
|
Last updated: November 7, 2023