Art Farm, artist and writer residency in rural Nebraska, artist residencies

Residency Application Deadline
March 1
Internship Application Deadline
March 15

2024
Residency Application Now Open
(for a residency between June 1 to November 1)

This can include painters, sculptors, ceramicists, architects, performers, designers, filmmakers, digitalists, engineers, drone artists, puppeteers, writers, musicians, playwrights, philosophers, psychiatrists, storm chasers, script writers, and others we can't think of, etc.
CLICK HERE TO APPLY
Deadline
11:59pm February 1, 2024

2023 Writers (and others)
Residency Application Form
Deadline March 1, 2023

Art Farm's mission is to support artistic vision, which may be impractical, obscure, and independent of commercial recognition—where failing is no less welcome than succeeding. To offer artists, writers, performers, and others: studios, time, and resources for pursuing their range of expression, for experimenting, for developing projects in a vibrant environment of cooperation rather than competitiveness, but most of all, for distilling the promise and potential of their creative enterprise, while working and living in a rural environment.

Art Farm's physical presence is in its buildings and land. More elusive to describe is the ambiance—the subtle influence of the environment's impact on time and space. The sun and stars measure your time, not clock and calendar. Space is shaped by proximity to sound and silence. The sky: your eyes: your ears will fill with the sound and shapes of an incredible number of birds and bugs. And, like it or not, the weather will be your collaborator in all undertakings.

artist residency application forms

artists residencies
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1306 West 21 Road, Marquette, NE 68854-2112, USA
Art Farm is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt non-profit organization registered with the State of Nebraska

Call for 2023 residency applications is open
go to the forms by clicking on a brown disc below closest to your interest for any time between June 1 to November 1

It's the Annual Art Harvest this weekend
october 19 and october 20
1pm to 7pm
click on events in the menu bar for more info

art harvest 2017
(see events)
Saturday, October 21,
1:00 - 6:00 PM
Sunday, October 22,
1:00 - 6:00 PM

Are you someone who thrives in the few pockets of quiet places left in this world, then take a minute, and stroll through some of the other web pages to see if an Art Farm artist residency or writer residency matches your standards. Not every day is peacefully idyllic as frogs make a mighty chorus after rains, migrating geese, ducks and cranes honk and squawk across the sky while the cicadas crank up their shrill at sunset and the basso hymns of the owls keep you company through the night. If this is your first visit here, you missed the deadline for 2009, but if Art Farm seems worth a try, come back in November when applications open again and click on one of the artist or writer residency images, which will be below this text, and jump right to the application form. Not enough yet: well, we will take the whole summer to convince you, so keep checking back to see what is happening or keep jumping ahead to see what you missed...some more>>

Click on one of the round images below, appropriate to your creative area and it will open the link to the application form.

What you, I, and others do on earth in the daily course of our lives, artists do on roof ridges above treetops and beneath roots in existential vaults of cloistral voids. The choice they make is the essential imperative of creative impulse: a phenomenon not regulated by objective description and lacking verifiable or replicable answers for why they are so inclined to examine aesthetic assumptions from the shape of their private experience. Call theirs the defiant simplicity of individual effort to understand the positive applicability of difference. Although some will discover their vatic vision, others will do little better than struggle to roll their pebbles uphill: passionate without obvious reward or regard. Sometimes clues exist in their selection of expression and often these expressions are subversively uncertain and aesthetically noncompliant; seldom a copy of the world made beautiful nor be a compatible fit with executive summary, but taking you, I, and others to new destinations: places of ambiguous allure….a bit more>>

If you don’t have much interest in fauna and flora; then does something more in mid-air, above the bugs and blossoms, fit your style better? There is ample number of buildings, in various stages of function and completion, from freshly finished to the brink of ruin: yours to use for installations, performances—whatever your theatrical conviction and whatever you can conceive of doing in them, doing on them, doing over them or doing under them: short of destroying them . ...still more>>

Play: a behavior described as essential for living an autonomous life in a state of positive being: where functional survival (action, explanation) and novelty (imagination, understanding) combine, similar to the spontaneity found among puppies and children. It is recognized by its kaleidoscopic and decontaminating spasms of whimsy, by its gossamer moments, which may be no longer than the half life of a wink and by an amnesia that leaves us indifferent to the agenda of daily pressures: where seriousness is placed in escrow, where brilliant insight overrides systematic thought and the subjectively imagined inner world is a closer reality than the measured objective world surrounding us.

This is acknowledged as common practice in the arts; how playfulness can refine imaginative skills relative to aesthetic expression with infinite possibilities and paradoxical juxtapositions. Nevertheless, the world of play is also a piranha paradise offering a variety of decoys and its sociopathology is a far remove from improvisation and impulsiveness in its allure to attract others for unfair or relative gain by playing with their emotions, their minds, their resources or identity.

The ambivalence we have towards play can be found in the linguistically pliant phrase of ‘playing by yourself’: so engaging in many ways for personal growth, with such acceptable activities as juggling or composing yodeling tunes, but which can easily morph and flicker into an episode of ‘playing with yourself’ where you are dithering indulgently between positions of creep and clergy, in the form of bodily self-attention when your hand is your only friend on weekend nights.

The quantum universe and the genetic drift of evolution plays dice with every copy of our cells and has made us the players that we are, but in response to this, perhaps as security or insurance against randomness of the next roll, some report that God, as Master Minter, never clowns around with us on earth nor, presuming later, in Heaven, but whatever route chance and divinity follow, they have endowed play with a permanent panoramic polarity of being everywhere present, nowhere visible in its presence and magnitude between outcomes of pleasure and pain, trust and suspicion, insight and manipulation: it’s perfume and sarin in the same bottle, and our phantom limb of consciousness in a baggy bundle of permutations with limitless potential for innocent and transgressive deviation.

Anyone can play: everyone does, but you don’t always have to play along...
more to read>>

Our notion of nature, like life and love, is something we pretend we know the true ways of, but we live satisfied with the piles of lies we build around it, offered as shape and structure for metaphors we expound. If we ignore the western tradition that presumes nature as separate and open to all projects, a precept intimately handled with onanistic exuberance by real estate speculators and developers, then perhaps there is a possibility for integrating the referent, ‘self’ and the environment. Nature has not always approved of our meddling nor have we always been equal to or qualified through fragile judgment to meet the tasks envisioned, but there is no need for forever foreclosing any effort due to past examples of blank incompetence. An alternative to approaching nature in a no-knock police raid manner, or treating it like a backseat queen, might be to mingle with it by measured invitation, subsidized by other minds previously there living in accord with it. Think of nature as an aesthetic lay-a-way program, waiting for us to collect the ecstasy of an exhilarating moment surrounding us in a special domain. We could go on pretending, remaining indifferent to this caucus—shouldn’t be difficult....keep moving>>

Now accepting applications for 2015

Originality: that dramatic soliloquy we feel as boiling elastic within us and theatrically out of us: we associate it with unbounded creativity in the arts; great discoveries in science; vast projects in architecture and engineering, in daily occurrences of unprecedented insight, nonobvious restructuring of old patterns, and at its fundamental level, we call it ‘purpose’—its function as a path we stumble down searching for meaning in all the complexity of our humanness.

Quantum theory established that the inanimate subatomic universe absorbs and releases matter and energy discretely until a passive state ensues. Biology suggests life is little more than chaotic piles of protoplasm: catalogs of chemicals randomly mixed for billions of years without intent, shaped and influenced by brute circumstance: both explanations illuminate the known universe through statistical knowledge and empirical observation, but might an additional principle exist here—quantum biology: a chemically kinetic state as balance against entropy?

Consciousness as a quantum consequence may manifest in humans as a purpose and desire to imagine other situations—call it originality in its emergence from us: not depending on genetic copies of survivors: not a choice between ‘do’ or ‘don’t,’ as it makes us a process participant in stabilizing the elusive equilibrium between static and dynamic systems.

All creatures through their single imagination are aware of other creatures, seemingly gained by the helpful hand of natural selection, but what explains consciousness, as it may not be an evolved state: imagine consciousness closer to a chemical continuity across the spectrum of all plants and animals, simply arising as a property out of increasingly complex chemical interactions, and like our bodies’ specialized cells racing amok from the never-ending chemical addendum we blend into nature’s stew, consciousness continues expanding, unsympathetic to our aims on this mortal coil, as we are to the aims of worms and cockroaches while we grapple with life’s incoherence.

Give your sails a moment to billow in this breezy rhetoric while you’re steering your shipwreck of self without the Omnipotent Compass ready to guide: it’s a charming apercu to envision we’re part of whatever is postponing life’s unarrestable decline, ignoring that it may be little more than introspective incest between our awareness and imagination, but we’re extending life, in original ways, without any idea why and no guarantee we won’t be losers at the last call.....more>>

Art Farm continues to develop its limitless promise of meeting impossible expectations, relentless in its management of recalibrated aspirations vigorously asserted as an representation of refreshing uniqueness of enlightened sublimity via a new logo (see lower right). The formerly uncelebrated logo (see upper right), continues its role as forever distracting to design professionals, their appraisals sounding similar to a self-checkout message of, “Unexpected item in the bagging area;” remaining no less distant from dimensions of moral outrage and aesthetic panic than before and reminding Art Farm that a casual, superficial glance at its retired logo may never produce an association with it as the primary urge for why you masturbate nor be the pinup logo for millions, therefore, in confronting this open wound of eviscerating revelation of serious decline in its communicative influence, the resistive power of inertia, habit and bygone radiance collapses before the demands of conscience, social expectation and obligation to the integrity of artistic impulse allowing room for a new logo to continue its tentative immersion into the Art Farm domain.

Although the original logo may seem as if formed by a committee of kidnappers suffering cigarette withdrawal brought on by inadequate supply, due to ineffective financial solicitation strategies, the conception and intent was to create an image emblematic of and a catalyst for creativity through the highest design standards expressed by humble masterpiece—a triumph of design and aesthetic appeal. However, hindsight and feedback indicate that its imagery has failed to convey, perhaps lost in the compositional translation from abstraction to icon of lofty ambition and monumental vision, the infectious and raffish magnetism of innovative branding, its message remaining unavailable to those normally aware, aesthetically anesthetized and professionally astute.

Art Farm requests you not cancel your patience during this period of inevitable evolution and win-directed identity management, with its transformation unstoppable at the unprecedented blinding speed of continental drift—hoping that you will linger loyal, balletically optimistic and borne aloft by possibilities, yet unforeseen that the new logo will reveal. <<start over

Some say we are assigned the life we live: fundamentally deterministic; others say our lives are prevented from unraveling because we have the will to choose, linked to cause: guided by reason during periods of difficult reflection and uncertain direction. But when apodictic results elude us, our values become the arbiter of validity we feel is reliable scaffolding, as we build with the invisible bricks of emotions, for moral decisions and priorities in relationships between individuals, groups, cultures—the world, and it is the driver of what we feel is obligatory behavior: kindness, proof of trust, and the gain of respect and loyalty are positive examples. Equally, values animate less constructive features of profoundly impaired and constricted elements of brittle and unrepentant retribution thought as necessary to cleanse life of social or cultural contaminants.

Thus, equipped with a faith in the functionality of improvisational illusions, we are being confronted by a global climatic system in the process of change we struggle to fully understand, articulate our response to, and control with pragmatic effectiveness in order to avert apocalyptic suffering worldwide, but the realities of folly and tragedy plot misconceptions into every scientific fact and technological advance, leaving unresolved how the asymmetrical balance of political power, the clash of irreconcilable expectations, entrenched entitlements to resources, and the contagious consensus of dogma, whether it derives from religious, social, economic, or intellectual impulses, might be reduced or resolved. That this is true or that is false, it’s our beliefs that motivate us.

The tintinnabulated warnings of climate research try to serve as foreplay to action, but remain too abstract to wake and arouse our desire for change. An alternative outside the rational model, somewhere between atoms and galaxies, as an application of intelligence with a chance to restructure the direction of humanity and bequeath us insight and perspective are the arts: like a lit match, though its light seems dim and distant, the arts can set ablaze every shadowed corner of our culture’s living tissue as reliable reconnaissance to expose unpredictable consequences from the actions of our sentiments. Truth is not a single calculation derived from accumulated data points, but comes in a thousand forms of representation and cannot be grasped easily without fictional mediation in making our efforts come to match with observable sustainable regularity our reasons for doing: fables, parables, myths, allegories, and eccentric fantasies—life epically dramatized in vernacular idioms. It’s the truth embedded in these narratives that we crave and understand, aiding us in feeling and thinking deeper for longer periods about caring and meaning in our collective lives.

If climate change becomes The Big Unstoppable spreading its brimming flush over us with mesmerizing vastness, then we can do no more than fall silent in awe of it as we are of the starry night sky above: too immense—too enigmatic for us to comprehend, but looking up into that dark dome, as we try to thrive amid the neoPermian dilemma and ruins of our own doing, it is worth remembering that the arc of life is filled with marvelous and wondrously imaginative vitality to continue on in slight, slow, steady strides with no assurance we will be among the resurrected.
more waiting>>>

If asked, what vital elements are necessary in making a person's life good, a reply might advocate that there be freedom from inequity, freedom from fear, freedom from domination. Of these, in histories of all known human societies, never has there been freedom from fear. Is fear necessary for survival and contingent on what surrounds us? Do burecratic institutions bring us a world stilled in restful order with assumptions of stability and continuity, offering complacent frameworks of certainty? Against this background, does a settled point in space exist: or is life little more than surprise and luck—our summum bonum.

We find our fears in the sum of our values, whereby we will strive to correct incidents of irregular personal relationships and societal shortcomings. Values inspire something feeling right, better, justified; fragrant as sunshine; stirring the soul and marveling the mind—our moral re-armament policy against injustice (two mice and a cat vote on what's for dinner), in mutual obligation to others and our own inner wilderness against the conditions of a fragmented society.

However, whatever our veridicality of a new order might be of social dignity, moral character, or spiritual purpose, there are bugs in the code from which mutually assured misalignment arises if identifying truth with messianic delusions, delivering in Wagnerian register, spoken in secure spreadsheet, or promoted as if by a pack of doped-up chimps. Values are not culturally clean rooms of rationality: usually predictable to polarize, often indifferent to implications, and created from beliefs traditionally available. Although splendid in conception and comprehensive in detail, the ideal is at the mercy of the real as different levels of reason and experience reflect the constitutions of opposing principles: lofty supremacy of this new system may be desired, but the result can ultimately be wrong, misguided, and an ideological moral mugging. Nuance is not always in high demand among those with unswerving convictions.

Can the contours of values, balanced by caring, rather than hardened by the need for control, find shape to treat the fate of effects with greater sophistication when introducing ideals intrinsic to democratic motives? Can the arts avoid prescriptive or restrictive options, as they are not a domain beyond social conditioning and political standards, which create tension between artistic integrity and reins of reality in providing alternatives? All arts have the articulate capacity to close the divide between parting-the-clouds legalities and the quiet resolve of personal empathy with a mandate of generating emphasis on the mysterious complexity of the transiently and contradictory constructed nature of ourselves that might explain existence, helping us to learn how we coexist beyond the centrality of rights with humility amid the diverse and fundamentally destabilizing sways of doubt and uncertainty.
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It is to the disquiet of today's emerging artists, confronted by art's variety of denominational terrains, in searching for their strategic call to contemplation and expression: do they choose abstract cognition versus subjective experience; form a relationship to process or objects produced, or simply apply their principles to the business of art. Where might artists look or listen to assuage their anxieties, laying them into the everlasting calm. Should they elect to grope their way through the business of art world, it may require some major aesthetic gym time to train for competing in this 3-part sequential endurance career event, as in the order below.

Academia is the institutional structure, through which aesthetic styles tend to pass, with its mission of mentoring visionaries within mainstream orthodoxy and inculcating in them skills of spontaneous self-invention under scholarship's shroud of accumulated, athletically linguistic narrative, with curriculum corrections inserted as needed to assure students that they backed the best horse in the gallop to the galleries.

Commercial galleries are the perfected aesthetic arm of the capitalist state, their existence bankrolled by patrons to benefit the higher levels of investment interests, while they provide the hierarchical value of art in gold plated perspectives through the electrolytic bath of publicity polished with a propagandist's optimism, phrased to burnish brands.

Critics complete the triad of commercial grasp, with their glittering credentials of collected wisdom and aesthetic authenticity, authoring firewalls of exalted standards to preserve a sparse firmament of stars, as well as being the Disembodied Hand scribbling the necessary documents for posterity's investment concentration.

What is the herd bewildered to do, those who ran the race, but fail to be embraced by this trinity at the finish line? Perhaps it's the idiomaticalness of their aesthetic witness perceived as containing overabundant zesty zeal or crimped and stunted in their provincialism: their membership bestrewn with flinty eccentrics and their existence seemingly too bereft of aesthetic bequest to be ribboned winners. As their night draws nigh and shadows lengthen, they wonder if ever they'll be seen—consider that it depends on who holds the light and upon whom its narrow beam is aimed, not the race.

In a world that fetishistically venerates the allure of money, for those artists in Icarian fall from the cutting-edge of this economic contingency it often means landing in the zone of artistic extinction, but there does exist a wider universe of creative flourishing and the intrinsic glow it gives life: in it you find that the exhilaration of discovery, the empowerment of independent thinking, the immersion into concentrated effort, and the denial of self are characteristics which stir into our souls greater humanity each time we encounter and recognize these in others and ourselves: it's possible this might be when you're the sharpest you'll ever be...only a few more>>