Pine Meadow Ranch Center for Art and Agriculture (PMRCAA) is excited to announce its 2023 residency participants. Through a juried application process, 24 artists, culture bearers, scientists, scholars and researchers from around the US have been selected for either one-month or two-week stays at PMRCAA in Sisters, OR from March through November. PMRCAA offers dedicated individuals a supportive environment in which to further their creative development. This year will be PMRCAA’s fifth year supporting the arts and agriculture through its residency program.
Through an open-call process applicants were invited to focus on the theme of Food & Agriculture. The topic connects the residency program with much of the work of parent organization, The Roundhouse Foundation, particularly in the agricultural sector.
“Agricultural practices are adapting and/or adopting new techniques to deal with the current environmental and social challenges,” said PMRCAA’s Arts Projects Coordinator, Ana Varas. “By inviting participants who focus on the different components of the food system, we aim to foster critical thinking, dialogue and exchange of ideas and knowledge, which can lead to potential solutions to some of the environmental and social problems we are facing today,” Varas stated.
All participants selected will develop work around this year’s theme and will work closely with the broader local region that is already participating in a lot of community-supported agri(cultural) initiatives. It is through community engagement and annual themes that PMRCAA positions itself as a unique and dynamic program amongst other Artist Residencies across the country.
PMRCAA also hosts a variety of community events around the scheduled residencies throughout the year, including lectures, workshops, open studios and roundtable talks.
The 2023 residency participants are:
Visual Arts
Alexandria Nazar (Philadelphia, PA) is a painter living in Philadelphia. She received a Master’s in Painting and Drawing from the Tyler School of Art and Architecture in Philadelphia and a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts and History from the University of California, Davis. She has attended residencies at The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works in Troy, N.Y., MASS MOCA in North Adams, Mass., and the Chautauqua School of Art in Chautauqua, NY.
Ben Buswell (Portland, OR) is an artist based in Portland. Buswell’s sculptural work spans diverse media: glass, ceramics, metals, resins, incised photographs and more. He subjects these materials to physical processes (such as scratching, piercing, melting and tearing) wherein the accumulation of small, repetitive gestures build into a complex whole.
Catie Michel (Denver, CO) is an artist and researcher focused on visual storytelling that explores our relationship with the natural world. With a background in biology field research, her creative work employs both artistic and scientific principles and is always founded in keen observation, hands-on investigation and unending curiosity.
Collin Bell (Syracuse, NY) uses documentary and portrait photography to craft images that explore vulnerable and complex themes. Inspired by Latoya Ruby Frazier, Matt Eich and Vanessa Winship, Bell is interested in mixing art and documentary photography to capture themes regarding changing landscapes, non-traditional families and unexpected communities.
Derek Yost (Portland, OR) works as a painter and tattoo artist in Portland. He grew up around the West Coast and began drawing when he was a kid. His work draws from a range of sources, including folk art, pre-Columbian art, wildlife and botany. He creates rich, vibrant images filled with patterns and bold lines on paper and concrete.
Flora Carlile-Kovacs (Seattle, WA) is a textile artist who uses an ancient textile technique of combining wool and silk fibers and fabrics with water, soap and vigorously kneads it to create dense, durable, unwoven material: felt. She believes that felting is underestimated and underrepresented in the art world. Her mission is to break the boundary between fine craft and art and find its audience.
Laura Nolan (Bend, OR) has spent her life immersed in the creative process. Conversation and relationship are her primary studies, using a range of formats including sculpture, performance, community engagement and functional art. The current mode of Nolan’s work involves flora and metal and the connection and comparison of material and form.
Michael Pribich (New York City, NY) is a visual artist living in New York City with artist Esperanza Cortés. Born and raised in Northern California, he is interested in the artist’s role in advancing ideas that lead to continual growth and change. His core belief is that in recognizing labor as cultural production, there becomes an expanded social space.
Sally Widgery Finch (Beaverton, OR) is a visual artist who works with weather and other information to see patterns over time. Her work manipulates information to see it in new ways.
Tammy Jo Wilson (Oregon City, OR) is a black artist and curator. She received her bachelor’s from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in Portland and her master’s from San Jose State University. She is Art in Oregon’s co-founder and president, Bush House Museum director of exhibits and programming, and Lewis & Clark College’s visual arts and technology program manager.
Performing Arts
Evan Kassof (Philadelphia, PA) is a composer based in Philadelphia whose work is at the intersection of opera, science and community building. He is the music director of ENAensemble, a contemporary opera company which develops and premieres new works. Both his past, as a physicist, and present, as a union organizer, directly influence the art and music he makes.
M. D. Schaffer (New York City, NY) is a queer, non-binary, African-American writer, librettist and lyricist from Houston who lives in New York City. Their works examine the relationship between Americana, historical romanticism and contemporary American reality.
Literary Arts
Diane Wilson (Shafer, MN) is a Dakota author with a deep commitment to learning and writing about the relationship between humans and plants, water and land, and how that relationship has evolved over time. She’s working on an essay collection that explores those relationships, along with Indigenous ways of mapping, including marker trees, stars and pictographs.
Jackleen De la Harpe (Portland, OR) is a writer who has worked primarily in journalism and nonfiction — essays, news and explanatory reporting. She is working on a memoir and also is focusing on fiction as a member of a rigorous writing group, The Guttery, in Portland. She cares deeply about food, poverty and our relationships to each other — community.
Joe Wilkins (McMinnville, OR) is the author of a novel, Fall Back Down When I Die; a memoir, The Mountain and the Fathers, and four collections of poetry, including When We Were Birds and Thieve. He lives with his family in Oregon, where he directs the creative writing program at Linfield University.
Nancy Matsumoto (New York City, NY) is a writer who covers food, agriculture and the environment. She co-authored Exploring the World of Japanese Craft Sake and edited a forthcoming book of Japanese poetry from UCLA’s Asian American Studies Press. She is working on a book about women at the forefront of food systems change.
Multidisciplinary
Julian Saporiti and Emilia Halvorsen (Portland, OR) perform as the musical duo No-No Boy. Saporiti transformed his doctoral research on Asian American history into concerts, albums and films with No-No Boy. His album “1975” on Smithsonian Folkways Recordings has been hailed by NPR as “one of the most insurgent pieces of music you’ll ever hear,” which “re-examines Americana with devastating effect.”
Emilia Halvorsen is originally from Baltimore, and as a musician and artist with No-No Boy, has performed and taught workshops everywhere from Shishmaref, Alaska to Tijuana, Mexico. Working with these communities inspired her to attend Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, where she pursues criminal defense and immigration law. Halvorsen’s visual mediums include hand-embroidery, nature journaling and digital illustration. Through No-No Boy, she combines her interests in storytelling, music and advocacy.
Kaci Rae Christopher (Sisters, OR) is a Sisters-based writer and garden educator focusing on fostering transformative experiences for youth through a connection to land. Her passion is guiding children to discover a healthy land ethic and personal empowerment to prepare children for the challenges of the climate crisis and an ever-changing world.
Kai Takada Misner (Detroit, MI) is the Leader of Controlled Environment Agriculture Technology at Planted Detroit, a vertical hydroponic farm on the east side of that city. Misner looks forward to combining his interests in local, sustainable food production with collaborator Madelaine Corbin’s eco-centric art practice while in residence at Pine Meadow Ranch.
Madelaine Corbin (Detroit, MI) is a multidisciplinary artist living in Detroit. She received a master’s from Cranbrook Academy of Art in Fiber in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., and bachelor’s from Oregon State University. Her research-based practice moves fluidly between drawing, writing, sculpture, textiles and natural dyeing. In residence, she looks forward to collaborating with Kai Misner.
Milo Vella (Ithaca, NY) recently graduated from Cornell University’s College Scholar Program in Ithaca, N.Y., and from Deep Springs College in Deep Springs, California. He works to research, support, and safeguard Indigenous and heritage-based agroecological systems. He hopes to learn from camas prairie restoration efforts to support parallel work led by Nüümü (Paiute) collaborators in Payahuunadü (Owens Valley, California).
Sarah Red-Laird (Ashland, OR) is a conservationist, researcher, beekeeper, educator and artist. She is always contemplating methods to creatively bring people to understand and appreciate the value of bees and healthy flower-filled landscape. Red-Laird combines her love of cyanotype prints with her landscape observations.
Slinko (Mapplewood, NJ) is a multidisciplinary artist from Ukraine living in the U.S. Her practice is informed by scholarship on labor, agency and power and is inspired by interactions with ordinary people, localized contexts and material culture. She earned her master’s from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts in Richmond, Va., and has been awarded multiple residencies.
