A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.
This summer Harold Arts offers three sessions, as well as a few weekend opportunities for those of you with tighter summer schedules. Residencies at Harold Arts offer participants shared and individual studio facilities, comfortable accommodations, and chef-prepared meals. For musicians and others interested in working with sound we have our Poolhouse recording studio; a huge room, a wide array of gear, and engineers ready and willing to plan and execute your audio endeavors. Other facilities available for residents include modest wood-working facilities and and a wood-fired kiln for ceramic works. And of course, the rolling hills and majestic white pine forests of Haven Tree Farm are yours to explore.
Harold Arts is also excited about a few recent developments this year that will make your stay better than before. This spring we are putting finishing touches on the Sewing Barn, our new 2024 sq. ft. 2-story, electrified studio building while laying new bamboo floors in Hotel California. Each year we work to make new improvements to make everyone’s experience better and are excited to cut-the-ribbon on the Sewing Barn in time for your arrival.
Through thoughtful invitations and light programming, Harold Arts aims to provide a platform which is flexible to the needs of its participants while grounded in a few basic rules of engagement. Most of our 2012 programs are thematic, in an effort to focus collective energies around a governing topic. These sessions have been programed in collaboration with Kelly Kaczynski (Do Do II) and Shannon Stratton/threewalls (Survival III), and are designed to encourage projects which live beyond the residency itself.
This year, residencies at Harold Arts are awarded by invitation only. However, if you would like to invite yourself, we encourage you to submit a letter of inquiry to info@haroldarts.org
Do Do II: June 23rd - July 6th
Excrement itself is a product that is both pragmatic and necessary to our basic existence. By its nature, poop is entropic, breaking down and filtering into a network system (the earth) to produce growth (sustenance), a process of sustainability. Inasmuch as it is pragmatic, it is deeply symbolic, making meaning as it comes. The act of excretion presupposes the idea of ingestion and digestion, suggesting a site of production and dissemination. Excrement is the product that moves into the world and is absorbed by what we might consider to be the social domain, or public. To expel, to excrete, is to make the world again and again. Do do is chaos and creation, male and female, waste and seed, base and sublime, refusal and gift, reticence and ecstasy, desire and power, doubt and knowledge, negation and production, old and young, praxis and practice.
As a subject, excrement or feces seeps into ideas of production manifest in artistic practice. In that spirit, this two-week session will focus on excrement as production, doing a do do. We seek proposals that are mining the possibilities of what excrement offers both metaphorically and realistically.
Harold Classic: July 9th - 26
Freedom is classic. In the beginning Harold offered exclusively self-directing residencies, environments where resident artist co-create the form of the residency with aid from the program’s facilitators. Harold Classic is a truly open forum for artists who wish to be met with no obstacles in their pursuit of rural artistic production, but would like to utilize the resources and community offered at Harold Arts.
Survival III: August 10th - 24th
Survival is a three-year collaborative residency project between Harold Arts and threewalls. Held each summer at Harold Arts in Morgan County, Ohio near the town of Chesterhill, Survival is an ongoing discussion about the continuation of existence, in spite of obstacles or advantages in the landscape, economy or community, in public or private that hinder or facilitate endurance.
The project combines long-term relationships with commissioned projects and returning visiting artists, writers and curators with short-term residents and temporary visitors to create a collaborative program facilitated by its participants. Over the last two seasons residents have produced films, embarked on research projects and conducted workshops on themes relating to survival - whether physical, psychological or social. Past residents Sara Black and Conrad Freiberg are both working on new commissions for the Hub & Tack program, part of The Placemaker Foundation, our sister organization which seeks to invigorate Morgan County through arts and culture with a focus on site-specific works in architecture, earthworks, performance, sculpture and sound.
We invite your proposals to cap off the third year of Survival with a special invitation to those who would like to conduct workshops or make presentations in conjunction with the theme. Of course, we still invite individual research and private exploration.
This session is open to musicians and artists working in performance, film/video, architecture and three-dimensions.