The National Parks Arts Foundation announces a call for artists for the Chaco Culture AiR: October 2020, an all media artist residency at Chaco Culture National Historical Park. Call open to any level artist working in any medium including writers, poets, filmmakers, video artists, new media, screenwriters, sculpture and 3D artists, and visual artists. Outdoor site specific installations are generally not accepted due to the delicate setting and may require special permissions and permitting for the National Park Service.
Click Here For The Application / Registration
Deadline: 29 Nov 2019
The Chaco Culture National Historic Park October residency is one of two residencies offered to artists at the park in 2020. The residency is inside the park, in National Park Service housing, and there is no studio. Artists will work plein air or in their lodging. This is a very isolated location.
Located in the four corners area of New Mexico and founded as an Antiquities Monument in 1907, Chaco Culture National Historical Park was operated for most of the 20th century as an anthropological storehouse of knowledge and evidence of the Chacoan Culture. This beautiful and isolated complex preserves the historical traces of the sacred ancestral culture to many of the existing pueblos of the Southwest. The park is a Dark Skies certified location, an ideal place for astronomy and astrophotography. The Monument expanded to its present boundaries and park designation in 1980.
The park is located in the open plains of Northwestern New Mexico, sharing borders with the Navajo Nation and BLM land. It is approximately one and a half hours from the closest city, Farmington, and two hours and forty minutes from Albuquerque. A vehicle is definitely required for this residency. (Lyft or Uber are never practical workarounds in the beautiful, isolated open spaces of this corner of New Mexico.)
Chaco Culture AiR: October 2020 Artist Benefits
Selected artists will receive a $1000 stipend and one month housing at NPS Housing in the National Park. This is a rare privilege usually available only to occasional visitors and anthropologists. The residency includes at least one public event at the park which allows the artists to engage with park visitors and discuss their work. Selected artists are eligible to donate a single artwork through NPAF that will (by mutual agreement) be a part of the NPS’s historic art collection. The National Parks Arts Foundation’s residencies were recently named one of 7 Artist Residency Programs ‘with career launching power.’ NPAF and this park were recently the subject of a Hyperallergic Feature about the usefulness of art in the National Parks as a way to counter rampant oil and gas development strategies.
About National Parks Arts Foundation
National Parks Arts Foundation (NPAF) is a 501(c)3 non-profit dedicated to the promotion of the National Parks of the U.S. through creating dynamic opportunities for artworks that are based in our natural and historic heritage. They have programs running currently at 10 national parks and monuments around the USA. This project is supported by the National Endowment for the Arts, Friends of Hawaiʻi Volcanoes National Park, and other generous benefactors. All NPAF programs are made possible through the philanthropic support of donors of all sorts ranging from corporate sponsors, small business, and art patrons and citizen-lovers of the Parks. They have received coverage in Hyperallergic, Stars and Stripes (for US Veteran Artists residencies) various newspapers around the country, and NPR’s All Things Considered.
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Previous call for artists from the National Parks Arts Foundation