Collectivity, Communities, Connectedness: Decolonizing Art Colonies

What to do with the problematic category of the art colony? On the face of it, this question might seem anachronistic for a special issue of ARTMargins. The term art colony conjures up an image of artists retreating from urban centers in the 19th and early 20th centuries to find respite, inspiration, and the support and company of peers in areas of natural beauty. Underpinned by a zurück zur Natur (“back to nature”) philosophy and a desire to paint fisherfolk and farm laborers, rather than professional models posing as such in city ateliers, artist colonies mushroomed in coastal and rural villages of Britain, France, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Scandinavia, Russia, and the United States between the 1870s and 1914. These are well documented in landmark surveys by Michael Jacobs, Nina Lübbren, and Brian Dudley Barrett, among others, who situate their histories as alternatives to modernist narratives centered on Euromerican art academies and metropolitan art markets.1Yet the notion of artists coming together in a specific place— temporarily, seasonally, or permanently—for the purpose of making art, as well as learning from one another and deriving creative and intellectual stimulation, is far from confined to Western art ecologies and is of course a commonplace of contemporary practice globally. From the Cholamandal Artists’ Village in India’s southern state of Chennai, where Madras modernism flourished from the 1960s to the 1980s alongside traditional arts and crafts, to the suburbs of Beijing, where artists congregated in the 1990s in abandoned semi-industrial spaces until developers and rising real estate prices pushed them out; from the rise since the 1980s of community arts centers in black townships in South Africa to the simultaneous growth of Aboriginal art centers in Australia’s remotest regions; from today’s city-based residencies in Buenos Aires and Dar es Salaam to retreats in the Namib Desert and the Takayna forest in northwest Lutruwita/Tasmania, artists connect and collaborate for myriad motives under vastly differing socioeconomic and political circumstances.2 Clearly, the term art colony cannot account for such variety, though, for the same reasons, nor can the terms artist residency, art center, artist community, and artist village. The diversity of the field defies any simplistic taxonomic impulse.Nevertheless, the labels art colony, artist colony, and artists’ colony (with the possessive apostrophe) continue to circulate, designating a particular type of historic artistic collective community who usually travel to a particular location and reside together for a period. Specifically, as Rex Butler and A. D. S. Donaldson suggest in the review article for this issue, the category is often invoked as the antecedent for the present-day artist residency.3 While the profane word colony is rarely applied to contemporary residencies—the Nida Art Colony on Lithuania’s Baltic coast being a notable exception—most historical accounts of artist residencies cite their origins in 1663, with the establishment of the French Academy in Rome, where winners of the Prix de Rome were sent to study classical art and architecture for three years. This early impetus to travel and study then burgeoned in the 19 th and early 20th centuries with the rise of rural art colonies across Europe and North America. These dual origins point to two factors underlying the contemporary residency: education and travel. Yet these two factors are also found in other long histories of travel and cultural exchange in, for instance, North African Arab countries, across Central Asia, and among Pacific archipelagos—histories that might more plausibly be seen as forerunners to the artist residency.4 Such histories could feasibly enable a shift from the obdurate Eurocentrism of current discourse on art colonies, which remains grounded in a colonial mindset: one of profiteering from the extraction of resources and the exploitation of Indigenous people.Here we reach the nub of the problem: both etymologically and epistemically, the art colony is tied to the extractive and exploitative processes of colonialism. This is dolefully apparent in the former penal colony of Australia, where an exhibition of 18th-century convict artists’ representations of indigenous flora and fauna, which the British colonial administration commissioned in order to fully possess and control their territory, could unironically be called Artist Colony: Drawing Sydney’s Nature.5 Writing from Wurundjeri country in Naarm/Melbourne, amid urgent calls for truth-telling and treaty with Aboriginal people, it is impossible to ignore the colonialist underpinnings of the art colony designation.Some art colonies forcibly displaced earlier communities in a process that replicated that of imperial expansion. At Carmel, on California’s Monterey Peninsula, in the first decade of the 20th century, Chinese immigrants were evicted through arson and armed possession to make way, as Geneva Gano puts it, for “white leisure, pleasure and cultural enrichment.”6 In most cases, however, colonization was less overt, if no less invidious. Late-19th-century artists who traveled to Barbizon, Étaples, or Grez-sur-Loing painted the local people and landscapes for a largely bourgeois market based in the metropolises of Europe, Britain, and North America. Their landscapes converted nature into a saleable product, while portraits and genre paintings—of Barbizon peasants, fisherfolk at Étaples, or Pueblo Indians at Taos— contributed to an othering that positioned the regional towns’ residents as either the antithesis of cosmopolitan city sophisticates or the last of a dying race. As Margaret Werth reminds us, “Both Monet and the foreign artists who came to Giverny in the 1880s and after were also ‘colonizers,’ settling in the village, hoping to extract value from it and convert its land and people into cultural capital they could export elsewhere.”7 While Werth hastens to differentiate this form of occupation and appropriation of a French regional town from the occupation and control of non-European peoples by European colonizers, or from what we might label as imperialist land grabs and the dispossession and attempted genocide of Indigenous people, she nevertheless also extends the metaphor to consider the tourism and commodification that subsequently eroded Giverny’s attraction to artists as yet another form of colonization.8Indeed, as that possessive apostrophe in artists’ colonies suggests, artists often literally took possession of these picturesque villages. Some purchased properties there, but even those who merely boarded at the local hotel or rented affordable cottages at least partly displaced local inhabitants, commandeering not only accommodation but also stools at the bars and easel space in narrow streets and along quays. While their arrival was sometimes welcomed by residents of towns with sluggish economies, the unequal economic and social status of the permanent residents compared to the incoming artists and tourists—who flocked to the regional villages and towns as an inevitable result of the artistic myth-making that occurred there—created at times an exploitative dynamic.9This dynamic is at odds with the highly structured and curated host-guest relationship of contemporary artist residencies. Most artist residencies of course depend on the invitation of a host (sometimes a private patron, but more often a foundation or institution) being extended to a guest artist or artists who visit a certain place—be it remote, rural, suburban, urban, or virtual—and who at least notionally benefit from a period of sustained focus on their work, as well as from interactions with fellow artists, with the hosts, and with the place itself. These collaborative exchanges and the highly competitive application processes that result in the awarding of stipends and of free or low-cost residencies clearly differ from the art colony model. Many of the artworks made during residencies are site-responsive, remaining at the site of the artist residency, and while some work may be taken away—to circulate in markets, museums, and galleries far from the residency’s location—the underlying structures of invitation and reciprocal exchange clearly distinguish the artist residency from the art colony’s processes described above, of touristic encroachment and extraction.Between these two models—the art colony and the artist residency—lies a range of alternatives that constitute the focus of this special issue of ARTMargins. The articles and artists’ project presented here originated in the three-day conference “Artists’ Colonies in the World/The World in Artists’ Colonies,” held at the University of Melbourne in November 2022.10 The conference organizers—Rex Butler, Ian McLean, Sheridan Palmer, Victoria Perin, and I—envisaged this in quasi-utopic terms as “a conference for imagining the artists’ colony as an alternate model for writing art history.” By beginning to map the complex network of art colonies around the globe, we hoped from our austral perspective to facilitate new postnational art histories that transgressed the strictures of geopolitical boundaries. More specifically, we also wished to build a comparative context for our joint research project on the Abbey Art Centre—an art colony on the outskirts of London that attracted dozens of Australians following World War II.11 As art historians, sociologists, and curators from Australia, France, Germany, India, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States presented papers on art colonies ranging in scale from an inner-city share house to an entire city (Tangier), the sheer variety of case studies testified to the unfixed nature of the art colony as a category and suggested its malleability as a theoretical model for writing modern and contemporary art history. Predictably, the use of the term artists’ colony was heavily debated during the closing roundtable. Other, less politically loaded terms were suggested, including art center, artist community, artist collective, artists’ village, and artists’ mura (to use the Japanese term). While appealingly neutral, these terms essentially only skirt the problems inherent in the art colony label and ignore the historic use of the term and the self-identification of many groups of artists as such.While the label art colony has proved to be resistant to change, the concept itself is conspicuously open to decolonization. So what exactly is a “decolonized art colony”? At its most literal—and following the increasingly urgent calls around the world in recent years to decolonize education syllabi—the decolonized art colony is one that attends closely to First Nation voices and may indeed describe groups of Indigenous artists living and working alongside one another in ways that resist colonial impositions. More broadly, however, a decolonized art colony can be conceived of as one that resists dominant discourses, hierarchies, and taxonomies as well as the unequal power dynamics connected to issues of gender, social class, race, and nationality.12 The organizers of a session at the 2020 Universities Art Association of Canada conference, titled “Decolonized Art Colonies and Uncooperative Art Cooperatives: Expanding our Understanding of the Modern and Contemporary Art Collective,” conceived of the decolonized art colony as one that brings together “Indigenous, ethnic, immigrant, religious, regional, or international groups of artists” into intercultural dialogue; that may engage in “practices that recover and decolonize the land”; that preferences collaborative art, particularly of an activist bent; and that may be highly mobile or even unproductive.13 At its core, the decolonized art colony consciously or unconsciously counters the extractive logic of the colony. This may occur in countries overthrowing colonial rule, postindependence, as in many parts of Africa and Asia in the mid- to late 20th century, as well as in countries such as Australia, where continued discrimination against Aboriginal people, an absence of formally negotiated treaties over land rights, and the presence of a foreign monarch as the head of state are marks of ongoing colonization. As such, the term decolonized art colony proves more flexible than the postcolonial art colony, encompassing both art colonies operating under conditions of postindependence as well as ongoing colonialism.14The articles presented here examine four case studies of post-1945 decolonized art colonies. They range from a neo-avant-garde utopian community in North America to a nonresidential community arts center for black artists in apartheid-era South Africa. Despite the geographic and temporal disparities between these case studies, they share a sense of egalitarian communality and artistic experimentation.To begin with the post-World War II neo-avant-garde, Gloria Sutton examines the Gate Hill Coop, an experimental art colony and intentional community founded in 1954 in Stony Point, New York, by former Black Mountain College (BMC) students and faculty, who brought with them transplanted Bauhaus ideals of integrating modernist art and design with everyday life. Focusing on the transitory nature of utopic experimental spaces such as Gate Hill, BMC, and the Bauhaus before them, Sutton argues that transitoriness represents not failure or collapse but, rather, a generative form of community building. Building on Paul and Percival Goodman’s contention in Communitas (1947) that the dissolution of intentional communities “irradiate[s] society with people who have been profoundly touched by the excitement of community life, who do not forget the advantages but try to realize them in new ways,” Sutton argues that the enduring impact of experimental institutions and intentional communities lies not in their founding ideals or longevity but in the transitory, adaptive labor that sustained their communitarian values after their dissolution.15 This labor—often invisible and gendered—is best epitomized, she argues, in the work of Gate Hill potter, poet, translator, and BMC faculty member M. C. Richards, whose translation of interdisciplinary pedagogy into lived experience merits much wider acknowledgment in histories of postwar avant-gardes.Iñaki Estella considers Fluxus founder George Maciunas’s ideal of collective living, as expressed in his attempts to establish “Fluxus colonies.” While the Fluxhouse Cooperative artists’ studios in Soho remain Maciunas’s most influential project (1966-75), realizing his ideal of a collective “Fluxcity,” Estella focuses instead on the lesser-known Ginger Island project (1968), which entailed negotiations to purchase an uninhabited island in the Caribbean, drafting subdivision plans, inviting artist friends and wealthy allies to move there and build homes, and—in true technocratic style—preparing detailed studies of soil types and cultivars to enable the colony to achieve self-sufficiency. Estella argues that this and a second unrealized collective colony, involving plans to purchase an island off the north coast of Menorca (then, in 1972, under General Franco’s dictatorship), were inspired as much by earlier European art colonies as by Soviet collectivization. Both also connected to Maciunas’s “migration projects”: ambitious travel itineraries prepared for groups of artist friends to visit remote islands around the world, living off the land and sea, combining tourism with models of utopian communal living. As Estella reveals, travel, tourism, and colonization were at the heart of each of these neo-avant-garde projects.Pfunzo Sidogi castigates the term art colony as “weaponized,” given its ties to colonial “exploitation, dispossession, racism, and trauma,” before it to his the term black artists’ colonies to describe community art centers in black townships in South Africa under conditions of Sidogi the ways in which black artists by coming together in such of collective as in in on the outskirts of to from one another while making and While centers such as were not and their being Sidogi argues that they the as a in in to the of the and its community art centers such as a that artists from the of while and Indians to work alongside of black social and political that black people at the of the In black artists’ colonies the logic of the from case study is The Village in in of While is in art histories as an early of collaborative and art as an experimental practice that to the of Singapore, it in the context of this issue as a artists’ colony on the of urban at the of artist who students from College of the and Academy of to of studios on his farm at argues, from practice of open studios where artists, and in discourse that any artistic or that this highly and form of and exchange of that was essentially “a in Asia, in the and and Art for in two years before the of collective alternatives to art of While the term been applied to a type of where art students lived and alongside a by were no in as and point a type of that is in of collective them to including the politically and the for the purpose of that some two or more by the of the also calls the groups to a or to achieve a certain art or which can art, the and open a wider or best by of institutions of who can art and other artists the education and this notion of the against of the form of collective learning and artistic of the this to the collective and their artistic and of and that “a of collective pedagogy in and local and to a specific are also at the heart of Rex Butler and A. D. S. review in which they through the relationship between the art colony and the artist Their for is a review of two recent The of Art and a of by as Butler and Donaldson is a of artists’ in in Australia’s which has long been as the of the contemporary Aboriginal art the from the of contemporary Aboriginal art at the of a to instead focus on the and and experience were factors in through the of Butler and Donaldson that at least in its early more closely to the model of an art colony than an art as and as artists from traveled to new art and many it across the country with the model of the artist residency as we it and artist project for this issue, the 18th-century artists on as a mobile art colony. From the perspective of a the artists the of exchange on the of the They the from among and who artists and and a of on the that was them in the In a community of artists, and as a mobile art colony, and project the dynamics of art colonies with their for and one at the of colonial and as a of British imperial In this their project the colony that it brings into

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