Will be breathing that mountain air in August thanks to an artist residency offered by the Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences.
This creative sanctuary of 600 acres in the mountains of north Georgia began in the mid-1930s thanks to one enterprising and relentless woman, Mary Crovatt Hambidge, who lived the bohemian life of NYC in the 1920s and ten years later was ready to settle down to the life of a mountain weaver. She ended up being recognized internationally for the excellence of her weaving, and with the help of nearby women, started a cottage industry (The Weavers of Rabun) that sold its high-quality weaving at Rabun Studios in Manhattan.
If you want to know more about her story, check out my short film (Mary Crovatt Hambidge: Whistler, Wanderer, Weaver, Utopian; 2016).
During this artist residency I’ll be working on two new projects. One looks at Georgia artist Michael Murrell, who I first met while researching the Hambidge film. Murrell has created a fantastic body of work over the last 30 years that is hard to describe because it crosses so many boundaries and materials. You have to see it to believe it. (See a short video here I did a few years ago featuring his homage to the chestnut tree.)
The other project involves Common Good Atlanta, a boundary-crossing program in itself that brings together Georgia professors with incarcerated students to do a deep dive in the liberal arts. The program was started 12 years by Sarah Higinbotham, who was working on her PhD at Georgia State Univ. at the time (she’s now at Emory’s Oxford College) and was soon joined by Bill Taft, who was in the GSU creative writing program (he’s also a well-known Atlanta musician). Since then, they’ve created a nationally recognized program that has a waiting list of faculty wanting to teach in prison classrooms as well as a new program for released inmates. You see the true power of the liberal arts in liberating minds, both students and instructors, in this program.
So… lots of video editing ahead… along with that mountain air and gravel roads.
Thanks, Hambidge Center.