Artists in Residence, Sleeping Bear’s creative ambassadors

Pictured: Ellie Harold, a recent Artist in Residence at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore

By Sarah Bearup-Neal
Sun contributor

Here are two assertions about creativity: 1.) It needs time and space; 2.) Time and space are necessary because great works of art don’t leap out of Zeus’s head fully formed; they incubate. And maybe that’s why Zeus invented artist-in-residence (AIR) programs. In Leelanau County there are two.

What’s an artist’s residency? The Alliance for Artists Communities defines it this way: A place “where artists of all disciplines can go to work on their art … They are research-and-development labs for the arts, providing artists with time, space, and support for the creation of new work and the exploration of new ideas.” AIR programs are offered by the Glen Arbor Art Association and the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore.

Glen Arbor Art Association

The Glen Arbor Art Association (GAAA) AIR program began in the 1990s at the behest of the late Suzanne Wilson, one of the GAAA’s founders. Wilson handpicked visual artists for the program and found friends in the area to house them. The program has evolved since then.

Today, a committee of seven volunteers administers the program. Painters comprise the lion’s share of applicants. The program, however, is open to artists working in other visual media, performance, prose, poetry and music. A prospectus and application are available for download on the GAAA website, GlenArborArt.org. The AIR Committee meets in March, after the application deadline, and selects the coming year’s residents. Residencies are two weeks in duration. There are an average of seven residencies each year. They begin in mid-May and continue into October. The GAAA provides housing and a studio space at Thoreson Farm. There is a $20 application fee.

“Suzanne felt (an AIR program) was very important, and a way to support artists in their development,” said Peg McCarty, GAAA director. “If you look at many of our past artist-residents, this was a jumping off point for new growth and new development.”

That was certainly true for Margo Burian. She was a GAAA AIR in 2006.

“At the time I had been freelancing as a commercial illustrator for 17 years, and showing work through galleries only as time permitted. I was becoming increasingly dissatisfied with the grind and instability of work-for-hire,” Burian, a Grand Rapids resident, wrote in a recent email. “In an effort to rediscover the life-long love I had for making art, I decided to apply for a residency.”

What Burian’s residency revealed to her, she wrote, is that “I was no longer interested in the deadlines, the specificity and pressures of commercial art.” It took almost three years to make the transition, but in 2009 Burian declared herself a full-time painter. She maintains a vigorous studio practice, exhibits at galleries throughout Michigan and continues to apply for artist-residencies.

“Being here, away from their normal circumstances, AIRs have time to regroup and find new inspiration,” McCarty said. “When you get away from your normal circumstances you can be a new person.”

Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore Artist-in-Residence Program

There are 40 U.S. National Parks offering 50 artist residencies. The Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (SBDNL) program was instituted in 1993 and draws applicants from throughout the United States, said Susan Sanders, SBDNL media specialist. “We average about 30 applications a year.”

Two three-week residencies are offered in September and October. Residents are housed rent-free in small houses used by seasonal help, at the restored Tweedle Farm, or at one of the developed campgrounds. The SBDNL AIR prospectus and application are online at NPS.gov/slbe/parkmgmt/artistinresidence.htm. It, too, is a juried process. The deadline for submission is April 15.

Artists in the National Parks date back to the 1870s. Ellie Harold’s art-in-the-Park’ing took place in 2009.

“The three weeks of the SBDNL residency showed me what it meant to devote my life to making art,” Harold wrote. “I loved the full-time immersion.”

Harold first visited Michigan and SBDNL in 2007. She and her husband moved here permanently in 2009. They packed up a house in Atlanta and resituated themselves in Frankfort. News that she’d been selected to be an artist-resident in the Park came shortly after they’d moved to Michigan. A death in her family preceded Harold’s move north, and that life event almost derailed her residency.

“When I learned I’d been awarded the residency, I was feeling so bereft I almost passed on it,” Harold recalls. “I’m so glad I didn’t. It was a life-changing experience.

“I learned much about how art can be in service to the world as well as to my own artistic fulfillment. I also loved realizing that we citizens actually own our National Parks and it’s a privilege to serve as volunteers in any way we can.”

Artists have long played a special role in the National Parks, Sanders said. In Harold’s case, she now helps jury residency proposals submitted to the SBDNL AIR program. But there is a deep connecting tissue that ties artists to the natural world—and, in turn, helps communicate the National Park’s mission of preservation.

“They go out and see the world and the beauty around them. They visualize it for us, filter it down,” Sanders said. “And sometimes it helps us see the Park, the dunes, the water in another way. We gain more of an understanding, an awareness, an appreciation of the resources, the buildings, the history when we see it through other eyes.”

According to the National Park Service (NPS) document, Drawing New Audiences, Expanding Interpretive Possibilities, “Artist have been part of the National Parks since the 1870s when famed Hudson River painters played a vital role in documenting the majestic landscapes of the West.” Owosso artist Linda Beeman is all over that idea.

Beeman practices moku hanga, a Japanese form of woodblock printing dating back to the eighth century. It’s an art form infused with tradition and ritual, which Beeman—who has enjoyed multiple artist’s residencies—uses to communicate her feelings about the natural world.

“The natural world is everything in my work. It’s where I find my inspiration. It’s where I find my inner peace,” said Beeman, who was a GAAA AIR in May. She was an AIR at the Porcupine Mountains National Park in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula in 2011. “I’m a quiet environmentalist. I try to bring attention the endangered places through my work. I want to make people want to see what I’ve seen, and to protect it.”

An exhibition of Beeman’s work that resulted from her GAAA residency is now on display at Center Gallery in Glen Arbor through Sept. 18.

Ellie Harold’s NPS residency, too, provided an opportunity to preserve a fleeting view of the world inside the Sleeping Bear Dunes—leaving one with the notion that Zeus, at least where artist-residents are concerned, moves in mysterious ways.

“Each morning before going off to paint, I’d take my coffee out into the yard (of Tweedle Farm) where I’d bask in the early morning sun alongside an ancient tree,” she said in an August email. “I knew I wanted to paint that tree …

“Finally, one morning, I set aside my coffee cup and did the deed; the result is one of my favorite paintings from that period, ‘Morning Companion.’ A couple years ago I noticed the tree had been damaged in a storm and taken down. Now, my painting may be one of the only records of its existence.”