Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency by Collar Works
The Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency (EMAR) program by Collar Works is designed to provide a diverse group of emerging and established artists an immersive, supportive, productive, and communal atmosphere for art-making and dialogue on a bucolic 77-acre farm in Washington County. The summer residency is offered for 5 weeks, with 2 and 4-week residencies for individual artists and 1-week residencies for families.
The residency program aims to create opportunities for artists to take risks and develop new contemporary works across many art forms, primarily visual and literary arts, while engaging in meaningful dialogue with fellow residents and arts professionals. Our goal is to create a residency program that responds to the critical needs of emerging artists and artists as parents, while striving to build a program that reflects the rich cultural environment of today through an active commitment to diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion.
Since its inception, creating an environment that stands out as a safe space for creative risk taking, personal growth and respite, especially for parent artists, has been a core goal of the Elizabeth Murray Artist Residency.
Elizabeth Murray believed that each person deserves an opportunity to make their art and for their art to be visible on equal platforms. With that in mind our goal is to provide space and access for all, regardless of differences of race, age, color, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, religion, national origin, migratory status, disability/abilities, political affiliation, veteran status and/or socioeconomic background.
For more than two decades, Elizabeth Murray and her husband Bob Holman, together with their children, split their time between NYC and a classic farmhouse in Washington County, New York. Murray, who passed away in 2007, was a groundbreaking artist. Her many honors include a Skowhegan Medal in Painting in 1986, a MacArthur “genius” grant in 1999 and a career retrospective at MoMA in 2005. Holman, a poet and arts activist, founded the Bowery Poetry Club in 2002 and produced the PBS series The United States of Poetry (1996) and Language Matters (2019). In 2017, the Murray-Holman family partnered with Collar Works to design a summer residency program for visual artists.
With its 77 acres of bucolic farmland, multiple bedrooms, common areas and barn-loft artist studios, the farm is an ideal residency location. For many years, the farm served as both a summer home for the Murray-Holmans and a creative retreat for Elizabeth Murray, whose studio was located in the large, cathedral-like dairy barn. Given the history, location and amenities, the family felt that the creative use of the property and its natural surroundings would carry on Elizabeth Murray’s legacy.
Dedicated to supporting the legacy of Elizabeth Murray, the Collar Works team believes there is a kindred connection between its mission and what Murray’s story symbolizes to artists on the periphery of the zeitgeist, to those who are artists as well as parents and to individuals who overcome adversity to achieve their vision.
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