The Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture is an artists residency located in Madison, Maine, just outside of Skowhegan.[1] Every year, the program accepts online applications from emerging artists from November through January, and selects 65 to participate in the nine-week intensive summer program. Admissions decisions are announced in April. The school provides participants with housing, food, and studio space, and the campus offers a library, media lab, and sculpture shop, among other amenities.[2] The tuition for the program is $6,000, however, aid is available.
While on campus, the participants interact with five or six resident faculty artists for the duration of the program, as well as five to seven visiting faculty artists, both of whom are selected by Skowhegan’s Board of Governors. Participants are not allowed to bring family or friends with them to Skowhegan, nor are visitors allowed on campus. Lectures by faculty artists, which are generally held on Fridays, are open to the public.
History
During World War II, New England portrait painter Willard Warren Cummings was stationed in Alaska in the War Art Unit. There, he shared his idea for an educational model “where young artists could study with leading artists of the time” with Sidney Simon, a sculptor also in the Unit.[3] Upon returning from the war in 1946, with the help of Simon, Henry Varnum Poor, already an established presence in American Art, and Charles Cutler, a New England stone sculptor, Cummings turned his family farm into a functional alternative school run by artists for artists.[4]
As the name indicates, Skowhegan was originally focused on the traditional art forms of painting and sculpture, but gradually, the program began accepting artists of all practices, even being the alleged site of the first contemporary Land Art piece in 1968 by Douglas Leichter and Richard Saba.[5]
Similarly, while the school originally offered classes such as life drawing or plein air painting, it eventually forwent traditional forms of instruction save for weekly faculty lectures, and all classes on campus are now self-directed by participants. Fresco instruction, however, has always been a part of the program. Today, Skowhegan is one of the few institutions in the United States that teaches this technique. N. Sean Glover was the fresco instructor from 2010 to 2019, when Oscar Rene Cornejo took over.
Since 1952, Skowhegan has recorded the lectures given on campus by resident and visiting faculty artists. They now comprise an archive of over 700 lectures and are accessible to artists and researchers in select repositories including The Colby College Museum of Art, The Archives of American Art, The Art Institute of Chicago, The Getty Research Institute, and The Museum of Modern Art[6]
