2024-2025 Residency Call
During 2024 and the first half of 2025, we’ll open a call to 36 creative people. We’ll host five two-week residency periods as well as two special one-week residency sessions (one specifically for visual artists, one for four residents plus eight alumni artists). Applications for 2024-2025 open up April 15, 2024 and close May 31, 2024. You can apply via the Submittable link here.
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September 14-September 22, 2024 (Visual artists)
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September 28-October 6, 2024 (All genres; four folks at the school and eight alumni in-town)
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October 13-October 27, 2024 (All genres)
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November 3-November 17, 2024 (All genres)
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December 8-December 22, 2024 (All genres)
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March 2-March 16, 2025 (All genres)
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March 30-April 13, 2025 (All genres)
We are also hosting a 2025 invitational residency for four participants nominated by Seattle Arts & Lectures/Writers in the Schools (WITS), to honor teaching artists for their service with youth. WITS will choose attendees for this session, held during Seattle Public Schools’ winter break.
We provide accepted applicants with space and time to create new work without the interruptions of normal life and with the bonus of healthy meals prepared by culinary professionals, with menus designed to accommodate residents’ food challenges and including as much local and organic food as we can reasonably source. Past chefs have included organic farmers, graduate nutrition students from Bastyr University and Colorado-based dietetics programs, as well as professional personal chefs and artistic nomads with chef skills from Seattle and Portland. We proudly invest in local, organic produce and eggs from Frey Family Farm.
During each residency, we host visiting artist presentations. Typically open to the public as a dessert potluck, the pandemic has also introduced the option to relocate these events to a Zoom room online. Additionally, during each residency period we hold a resident reading/art sharing evening — this is not mandatory, but it’s a fun way to share new work with the community and gather feedback from fresh eyes and ears; we have the option to move these events to Zoom.
Each resident lives in an 800-square foot former classroom that offers peekaboo views of Mineral Lake and Mt. Rainier, and that will double as a writing studio, with desk and chair, lighting, bookcase, etc. Visual artist residents may improvise a studio anywhere on the grounds (including the room they sleep in — which has worked well for graphic novelists and pen-and-ink artists), work plein air in the area, or use the gym or covered patio as studio space. The main school building has bathrooms with showers. Residents are served all meals. The town of Mineral features a swimmable fishing lake, a tavern, a historic bed & breakfast, a general store, two churches, many free-range deer, and a post office. It’s a 25-minute drive to the Ashford/Nisqually entrance to Mt. Rainier National Park.
Accessibility
Depending on an artist’s mobility, we are not universally accessible. The main school building is on a single story and has a ramp entry as well as disabled parking. The 9-foot wide halls and smooth floors are fine for those with walkers and wheelchairs. Most doors (to each studio/bedroom, the dining room, the deck) are 36 inches wide, but doors into the bathrooms are narrower and not accessible-width for all wheelchairs (travel wheelchairs have worked, and these should be fine for a walker). To shower, a person will need to be able to step into or otherwise get over the shower pan’s raised rim; it is possible to shower with a medical chair, but there are not handle bars in the showers at this time. We have a gym building, as well, and it is accessible via a ramp entry. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you have concerns about accessibility; we have hosted residents who have maneuvered easily in travel wheelchairs and with walkers, as well as residents who have brought caregivers.
