What Is an Artist Residency?

View from the porch

Source: Annita Sawyer

I’m sitting on the porch, under the overhang of the barn, where I can type on my laptop. I watch Juliet and Ivy approach the pool in front of me—Ivy so she can jump into the freezing cold water, and Juliet, who can document it with her iPhone camera. Ivy has set for herself a daily discipline of jumping into this pool or the quarry excavation pool just beyond the hill leading into the woods. We are three of six artists at a residency in Vermont.

My adventure began with a March 1 email. Dear Annita, We have had an opening in our residency program and are inviting you to attend. Please let me know by early next week if not before.

I’d submitted the application last May, in 2024—almost a year before. Notifications arrived by email in September. Mine wasn’t a yes, but it wasn’t an outright no. I was on the waiting list, they told me. Cold comfort, I thought, and moved on.

I’m an experienced residency applicant. This means I’ve had to learn to take rejections in stride. I haven’t an exact count, but my acceptance-to-rejection ratio is probably less than 1:6. I’ve spent more weekends than I can count applying to residencies. If I were accepted 20 or so times in the past 15 years, that’s more than 120 applications!

This year, I’d almost resigned myself to never being accepted for a residency again. I figured I was too old and/or that I’d failed to deliver on the promise of my writing projects. I found no lack of ways to explain how I fell short. After all, I was a psychologist. I wasn’t a professional artist, writer, musician, or dancer. Yes, I’d written a book, but it was a memoir. The story was already there; it practically wrote itself.

It’s not for me to say why some residencies respond with yes and others with no. Or what there was about my application this time that might lead to selecting me and not someone else from the waiting list. I recognize that it’s arbitrary to a certain extent. There are so many creative people that some residencies have hundreds, if not thousands, of good choices available for their limited number of places. They have to narrow them down drastically to choose each one. There are several residencies where I believe that I’d thrive and would love to attend. I’ve sent applications to some of them three, four, even seven times and seen every one turned down. At a few, I’ve been accepted two or three times—sometimes from the waiting list—yet they rejected my application at other times. And once, after two initial rejections, an impressive residency accepted my application on the third try.

In my studio

Source: Annita Sawyer

I’m a reasonable applicant on paper: I wrote a prize-winning book, and two essays won prizes; I received a Yale outstanding faculty award. In fact, there are zillions of awards for all sorts of things, so a prize isn’t always hard to come by. But perhaps I shouldn’t dismiss myself so readily. Even the best artists can be rejected if there’s not enough room.

Almost before thought, I assume that others are better, smarter, more accomplished in their field than I am. Yet here, among all six of us talking together, I discovered that even the most objectively successful/accomplished artists live with similar personal doubts. After I confessed, I’m from the waiting list; I wasn't their first choice, I discovered that two of these impressive women I so admire, to whom I attributed first-in-line status, were called from the waiting list, too.

View from my studio

Source: Annita Sawyer

Residency magic comes from living among creative souls. We’re visual, musical, literary, and performance artists—including combinations and broad interpretations of each field. We bring with us diverse histories and cultures, a vast array of creative styles and practices, and unique manifestations of our art along with its philosophical and emotional underpinnings. A community develops from our living together—mingling at meals, conversing in passing or on walks together, sharing our work, sharing peace in the natural world around us. This nourishes and inspires me. It expands my world.

Today the air is soft; the sky intense blue. Even the wind, which yesterday still carried a winter chill, feels gentle. The forsythia bush I see from where I sit in my studio has turned from a slim stand of pale sticks into a giant burst of yellow. Spring is taking hold!

As days pass, more clumps of bright daffodils—yellows, whites, a few orangey-pinks—appear around the yard. Soon will come irises and tulips, lilies of the valley and peonies, and more after that.

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Forsythia and Daffodils grace our Dinner Table

Source: Annita Sawyer

Perennial plants spend months preparing before they show—time deep in dirt, under snow, nurturing young shoots leading up toward the surface, in time breaking through to reach for the sun.

With residencies, too, there’s a process. Each cultivates its own particular garden, unique in its details, forming and reforming as seasons and cohorts change.

Artists in residencies: bouquets of fresh flowers—Creating. Growing. Changing. Affirming.

Happy Spring!