OPEN CALL: 2025 Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture

We are pleased to announce the Open Call for Skowhegan’s upcoming 2025 program (June 7–August 9, 2025). For nearly eight decades, Skowhegan has offered artists the opportunity to engage within an experimental framework based on the idea of sharing knowledge and skills within and among artists. During our nine-week program, 65 participants working across all disciplines have the opportunity to live as a community of peers on our 350-acre campus in rural Maine. Participants devote time to their studio practices while participating in a collective learning process through a variety of skill-sharing and theoretical workshops, group and individual studio visits, performances, lectures, and reading groups.

Based on a transversal open structure, Skowhegan creates a space in which the participants design the program’s contents in full collaboration and alongside an international and distinguished group of residents and visiting artists who serve as faculty.

School and residency
Skowhegan is a School in the sense that it provides an open pedagogical structure in which knowledge and skills are conveyed in a critical, learning-centered manner. However, there are no formal courses or expectations regarding outcomes and deliverables. Rather, over the course of the nine-week program, faculty and staff share their artistic practices and interests, proposing a blend of theory and practice, discourse and production.

Skowhegan is also a Residency that welcomes 60-65 participants each year who live and work side-by-side on our rural campus. We emphasize how mutual care can be extended as another artistic practice, which requires daily rehearsals to accomplish the possibilities, but also challenges, inherent to communal living.

2025 faculty
Every year five renowned Artists in Residence, five Visiting Artists, and a Paul Mellon Distinguished Fellow serve as faculty creating a space for an intergenerational dialogue. The 2025 faculty will be announced. Skowhegan was founded by a group of artists in 1946 (Willard “Bill” Cummings, Sidney Simon, Henry Varnum Poor, and Charles Cutler) Skowhegan and has hosted as alumni and faculty, artists such as John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Alex Katz, Howardena Pindell, Pope L., Carrie Mae Weems, Melvin Edwards, Ralph Lemon, among many others.

Expectations
At Skowhegan we live as a community while supporting the individual needs of participants, faculty and staff. Participants are provided lodging, daily meals, as well as studios and workspaces on Skowhegan’s 350-acre campus. The facilities comprise more than 80 buildings with a library, different shops for fabrication (including metal, wood, ceramics), fresco shop, media lab, performance space, dining hall, community space for leisure activities, and dorms.

Application process
Our application system is simple and is based exclusively on work developed to date in order to provide opportunities to artists from various fields and backgrounds.  We do not require applicants to apply with a specific project in mind.

Eligibility
All artists are welcome to apply. Skowhegan is particularly interested in emerging artists with a professional studio practice. Experimentation, intellectual curiosity, and the ability to collaborate and interact with peers are the main requirements.

We welcome artists working in all disciplines. While we still keep the historical name “Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture”, we understand art in a multidisciplinary way.

Tuition
Skowhegan’s application process is need blind; socioeconomic status is not considered. We will work with all accepted participants to ensure they are able to attend. Participants from outside the United States will need to obtain their visas, and Skowhegan provides a letter of acceptance upon request.

Process of selection and notification
Our selection process is based on the ethics of consensus among a broad range of artists. All applications are reviewed by a large group of practitioners. Elected finalists will be interviewed.

Applications will be accepted between September 30 and November 15, 2024 11:59pm EST (UTC -5:00). Prospective participants will be notified at the beginning of February if they have been selected for an interview. Final notifications will be around mid-February.

Please refer to Skowhegan’s website for more information and details on how to apply. If you have further inquiries, email: help@skowheganart.org.