Program for visiting artists and cultural managers

The Studios of Key West has been rapidly developing our campus and programming over the past three years, and we recently launched a residency program at several charming cottages scattered around the Old Town neighborhood. Using a curatorial process, and network of advisors, we’ve begun inviting interesting, established creative people to spend time in Key West as artists, producers, and cultural managers-in-residence.

A residency at TSKW is a respite, providing a week or a month of new influences, interesting people, and tropical environment. A stay can include a project, presentation, screening, or outreach idea—or it can simply be a retreat-like hermitage.

Our campus—and surrounding neighborhood—has set out to actively host remarkable creative people from all over the world—extraordinary emerging talent, those working in the margins, and confirmed producers of culture. We also seek practitioners not usually eligible for other residency programs—culinary figures, comedians, television directors, music producers, curators, talk show hosts, circus artists, and people with refined and often obscure specialties. We host them for the unique impact they have on our culture, and because Key West is a different sort of place. We engage them because their work represents a profound part of the American creative spectrum.

In January 2008 we hosted our first ever artist-in-residence, Helsinki-based American photographer, Curt

Richter, who helped us baptize our artist cottage, the Mango Tree House. Since then, we’ve added a half-dozen other accommodations—and hosted New Zealand musician Lorenzo Buhne, Chicago artist Mike Lash, Canadian Helen Verbanz, and Miami new media artist Charles Recher. More recent residencies have included musicians, Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips, Brooklyn painter Steve Keene, and crafts artist Thomas Mann.

In July 2008, we broke new ground and introduced the Cultural Manager Residency—a shorter stay for professional arts administrators from across the country wanting a retreat to MIle Marker 0. That program has since matured with residencies for cultural leaders from the Art Institute of Chicago, Djerassi Resident Artist Program in California, Maine College of Art, West Kortright Center in the Adirondacks, and the City of Madison, Wisconsin. You will recognize some of their voices in this catalog, and meet many of these arts administrators when they return to the island with new cultural produce for our community.

Each TSKW residency is carefully planned with the incoming artist or cultural manager. And each becomes a unique experience. Families and partners are welcome, and the development of new ideas and projects is encouraged—although never required. Much like life here on the island, creative things happen in a casual, passive way. Inspiration strikes at the most unexpected times, under the shade of a mango tree, as the geckos bark through the evening, while communing with the parrotfish along our coral reef. After a few days on the island, removed from mainland culture, it does strike.

Long a home to artists and creative people, the ghosts of Hemingway, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, Mario Sanchez, and Shel Silverstein still haunt our Old Town neighborhood. On any given day, it’s not unusual to run into modern-day creative people, such as Judy Blume, Billy Collins, Jimmy Buffett, Meg Cabot, Terrence McNally, John Martini, Seward Johnson, Robert Stone, and Annie Dillard.

The island is small, 2 x 4 miles, and all TSKW residents are equipped with a bicycle, furnished cottage, work space, and guidance from our staff and community of artists. There are Cuban groceries, cafe con leche, and the Spanish language on almost every corner. It can be 80 degrees in the winter, with a beach never far away.

Flowers bloom year-round, and fruit trees proliferate. For a small community, Key West is rich in cultural events, creative projects, and celebrations of every kind. The population is diverse and compassionate, and takes to heart the island’s famous motto: One Human Family.

Our creative community is proud of this special sense of place. We embrace an independence from the mainland, celebrate our tropical and Caribbean influences, and seek out artists and cultural leaders wanting to do the same­—and gain the benefit of exile in the Conch Republic.