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Yaddo

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Formation
  
1926

Phone
  
+1 518-584-0746

Founded
  
1926

Type of business
  
Artist colony

Website
  
yaddo.org

Founder
  
Region served
  
United States of America

Yaddo

Purpose
  
To nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment

Address
  
312 Union Ave, Saratoga Springs, NY 12866, USA

Hours
  
Open today · 8AM–7:30PMSunday8AM–7:30PMMonday8AM–7:30PMTuesday8AM–7:30PMWednesday8AM–7:30PMThursday8AM–7:30PMFriday8AM–7:30PMSaturday8AM–7:30PMSuggest an edit

Similar
  
Canfield Casino and Congress, Saratoga Spa State Park, Saratoga Automobile Museum, Children's Museum at Saratoga, National Museum of Dance an

Profiles

Yaddo saratoga springs new york


Yaddo is an artists' community located on a 400-acre (1.6 km²) estate in Saratoga Springs, New York. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment." On March 11, 2013 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

Contents

It offers residencies to artists working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. Collectively, artists who have worked at Yaddo have won 66 Pulitzer Prizes, 27 MacArthur Fellowships, 61 National Book Awards, 24 National Book Critics Circle Awards, 108 Rome Prizes, 49 Whiting Writers' Awards, a Nobel Prize (Saul Bellow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976), and countless other honors. Yaddo is included in the Union Avenue Historic District.

What is yaddo


History

The estate was purchased in 1881 by the financier Spencer Trask and his wife, the writer Katrina Trask. The first mansion on the property burned down in 1893, and the Trasks then built the current house. Yaddo is a neologism invented by one of the Trask children and was meant to rhyme with "shadow".

Artists' colony

In 1900, after the premature deaths of the Trasks' four children, Spencer Trask decided to turn the estate into an artist's retreat as a gift to his wife. He did this with the financial assistance of philanthropist George Foster Peabody. The first artists moved in 1926. The success of Yaddo encouraged Spencer and Katrina later to donate land for a working women's retreat center as well, known as Wiawaka Holiday House, at the request of Mary Wiltsie Fuller.

In 1949 during the McCarthy Era, a news story accurately accused writer Agnes Smedley of spying for the Soviet Union. Smedley had traveled with Mao Zedong to report on the Chinese Communist Revolution and, beginning in 1943, had spent five years at Yaddo. Poet Robert Lowell pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by the FBI. Ames was eventually exonerated of all charges but learned from the investigation that her assistant Mary Townsend was an FBI informant. Ames remained director until her retirement in 1969, having overseen the Yaddo community from its creation in 1924.

Literary critic and eventual Yaddo board member Louis Kronenberger wrote in his memoir that to call Yaddo "a mixture of some of the most attractive, enjoyable, generous-minded people and of others who were weird, megalomaniac, intransigent, pugnacious is only to say that it has housed and nourished most of the finest talents in the arts of the past forty-odd years—the immensely fruitful years of Elizabeth Ames's directorship."

In literature

The retreat was the partial setting of Jonathan Ames' book Wake Up Sir! (2004).

Dagger of the Mind (1941), a novel by 1930s Yaddo resident Kenneth Fearing, takes place in Demarest Hall, an art colony modeled after Yaddo.

Recent years

In May 2005, vandals, using paintball guns, damaged two of the Four Seasons statues, the Poet's Bench, a fountain, and pathways with blue paint. Repairs cost $1,400.

Entering its second century, Yaddo accepts contributions to its endowment and underwriting for specific projects to ensure that the artists' community will always be a place of inspiration. During the Centennial Gift Campaign, Yaddo received large contributions from Spencer Trask & Company and Kevin Kimberlin, the firm's current chairman. Novelist Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her estate, valued at $3 million, to the community.

Facilities and gardens

Yaddo's gardens are modeled after the classical Italian gardens the Trasks had visited in Europe. The Four Seasons statues were acquired and installed in the garden in 1909. There are many statues and sculptures located within the estate, including a sundial that bears the inscription, "Hours fly, Flowers die, New days, New ways, Pass by, Love stays." While visitors are not admitted to the main mansion or artists' residences, they may visit the gardens.

Notable alumni

Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists.

References

Yaddo Wikipedia


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