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Natalie Wilkin
Upstate Diary Issue 10

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2024: Year of the Crow!

YEAR OF THE CROW!
Announcing Summer Sessions

Click image to download zine

Why the crow, you ask? Crows and ravens, both members of the Corvus family, carry auspicious mythological histories across cultures. In Norse mythology ravens are spiritual guides, while in Buddhist and Hindu traditions they accompany periods of rebirth and transformation. In Native American stories, the crow teaches lessons of adaptation and survival. And, like witches, crows and ravens are known for their laughter. Please, crow raucously with us in 2024 as we celebrate our resiliency through years of obstacles. We are shape-shifters, beginning again as a nonprofit for art, ecology, and education, becoming a center for collaborative and intra-disciplinary creative practice.

In these pages we announce our 2024 summer intensive residency sessions, a program rooted in 25 years of experimental pedagogies emphasizing collaborative learning, interdisciplinary exchange, and sustainable living practices. The 2024 sessions create space for exploring new modes of teaching / learning / researching / making / being together.

More details on session collaborators and additional events will be announced in the coming weeks. In the meantime, please inquire via email with interest in the summer program, and to help us fund scholarships through academic institutions or private donations.

SESSION | JUNE 10–15

Land Stewardship Skill-Share 

A week of workshops at Mildred’s Lane to share land stewardship skills and cultivate regenerative practices. 

Read more about the skill-share session here

SESSION | JUNE 17–23

Bibliophantics IV: Marx For Cats, and other interspecies dialogues

A residency session for readers and writers coinciding with the Deep Water Literary Festival (June 21–22), Narrowsburg’s most prestigious cultural gathering!

Read more about Bibliophantics here

SESSION | JULY 1–19

In the Cloud of Unknowing: Encounters With the UFO Phenomenon

An immersive residency for art practitioners, theorists, researchers and students interested in exploring the broad spectra of discourses emerging from the global UFO phenomenon.

Read more about the UFO session here

SESSION | JULY 29–AUGUST 4

Queer Ecologies Research Collective II: CREATION/BECOMING/CHAOS

 A space for embodied and performative research in pursuit of creative entanglement and co-evolution

Read more about QuERC here

SESSION | AUGUST 19–25

Disentanglement / Re-Embodiment

Artists, writers, and activists gather to unravel structures of oppression, fostering collective dialogue and action
Read more about Disentanglement / Re-Embodiment here

You can find our more about being there, applying for sessions or, email us any questions by following the links.

We hope to see you this summer!

We hope to see you this summer!

With love, Mildred’s Lane Inc

Fugitive in Archives Opening Mid-February 2024

Fugitive in Archives

Opening Mid-February 2024 at

The Mildred Complex(ity) /

HQ Field Office of Mildred’s Lane Inc.

37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY

Credit/ The Labor Portraits / Fugitive in Archives / 8X10 Tintype / Nick Olsen in collaboration with Mildred’s Lane 2009

A re-installation of the Mildred’s Lane Archive at our Field Office in Narrowsburg, NY, also known as the Mildred Complex(ity), will continue throughout the 2024 season. We have over two decades of material history to catalogue and digitize as we work towards the publication WORKSTYLES OF MILDRED’S LANE, a monograph compiling twenty-five years of social engagement.

Featuring:
The Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane by J. Morgan Puett,
Rebecca Purcell, and Jeffrey Jenkins, with Fellows of Mildred’s Lane 2013. Includes Ephemera and Curiosities from the Archives of Mildred’s Lane.

If you are interested in archival residencies or internships, please inquire with us at workstyles@mildredslane.com

The Year of the CROW:
2024 Program To Be Announced in March!
Calling for Institutional Partners

We are currently engaged in a co-curatorial effort to organize an annual program of sessions, events, and special projects.

Mildred’s Lane is an emerging arts nonprofit organization and center of interdisciplinary, research-based practice for art & ecology.

We are seeking to build new partnerships with institutions and supportive Individuals that will sponsor fellowships for graduate students and faculty for the 2024 summer season. If you are a faculty member, visiting artist/critic, or curator at a university or museum, contact us to see how we can work together flexibly! workstyles@mildredslane.com

Tickets on Sale Now For Mildred’s Sake! An Art Sale to Benefit Mildred’s Lane

For Mildred’s Sake! is a blind art sale of works donated by over 100 artists associated with Mildred’s Lane and their allies. Please buy a ticket! Proceeds will directly fund programming for the 2024 season in service of our mission.

  • $300 buys 1 brown-paper package containing a mystery artwork

  • $1,000 buys 1 package AND a special edition print by Mark Dion

  • $4,000 or more buys 3 packages, an editioned print by Mark Dion, and an exclusive artist experience:

    > Tour of the Museum of Natural History with Mark Dion

    > Studio visit & fly fishing with James Prosek

    > Brooklyn waterfront walk with David Brooks

    > Foraging with Laura Cháves Silverman of The Outside Institute

Packages can be picked out at our special one-night installation event at Pierogi Gallery, Brooklyn on December 2. For those who can’t attend in person, we will ship your packages after the event!


We are grateful to announce the Delaware Valley Arts Alliance ( DVAA ) is our provisional fiscal sponsor while transitioning to our pending 501(c)(3) entity. We are strengthening and building our cultural community through this unique partnership, which ensures that all donations are tax-deductible.

Or make a donation by mailing a check to:

DVAA

37 MAIN STREET

NARROWSBURG, NY 12764

MEMO: MILDRED’S LANE

Please see the ticket purchase webpage for information on wire transfers.

Mildred’s Lane Fundraising Committee

Nick Bennett, David Brooks, Mark Dion, Alastair Gordon, Jill Goldman, Pablo Helguera, Asti

Hustvedt, Jon Kessler, Abby Lutz, Richard Klein, J. Morgan Puett, Tomas Vu

Thank You to Our Sponsors!

Mildred's Lane Inc.

Announcing Mission & Vision for our new 501(c)(3) organization

After 25 years as an emergent art complex(ity), Mildred’s Lane is becoming a 501(c)(3) nonprofit arts organization.

Mildred’s Lane Inc. is an experimental cultural organization and residency program where interdisciplinary visionaries collaborate on new forms of critical social engagement at the intersections of art, ecology, science, and history.

Mildred’s Lane Inc. is becoming a nonprofit charitable organization on Main Street in Narrowsburg, New York, in the Upper Delaware Scenic and Recreational River Corridor. Building upon 25 years of history, we will continue to serve and grow as an impactful interdisciplinary project fostering a diverse program of lectures, exhibits, workshops, symposia, collaborative projects, and events by creative thinkers and makers working across fields of contemporary art and culture.

The engagement of Mildred’s Lane Inc. encompasses art, ecology, and education, seeking innovative ways to connect these topics with interdisciplinary projects, always in a spirit of exchange with the greater community, including the nonhuman environment.

Mildred's Lane Inc. forms a significant center for new forms of creative practice by hosting and supporting local and international cultural producers, and by organizing symposia to activate nexuses of art, science, environmental conservation, history, and critical theory. Core principles are to:

  1. Facilitate research-based, project-based, and context-specific learning that fosters creative communities

  2. Develop sustainable practices for art and life in this challenging century

History

The Mildred's Lane Project was originally formed around an old agrarian landscape renovated by artists J. Morgan Puett and Mark Dion deep in rural northeastern Pennsylvania bordering Narrowsburg, New York, beginning in 1997. Early iterations of the project defy easy categorization; it began as a home, fostering exchange and collaboration across disciplines, consistently reinventing itself in response to a rapidly changing world. Puett, Dion, and collaborators are currently publishing a book outlining twenty-five years of contributions to contemporary art history at Mildred’s Lane.

Mildred’s Lane has co-evolved as an energetic, artist-driven, grassroots project serving hundreds of artists and creative thinkers through programs, residencies, workshops, and events. The project has grown, moving out of the woods and onto Main Street in Narrowsburg, NY, to rigorously rethink the contemporary art complex. Topics which continue to animate the ecosystem of Mildred’s Lane include experimental education, environment, economic strategies for art workers, and expanding creative practitioners’ roles in contemporary society.1

New projects include Mildred’s Lane collaborators developing a long-term forestry and land-use plan for the Upper Delaware River Valley Region. Outreach strives to bring together creative thinkers nationally and internationally, as well as locally, culturally benefiting people in diverse, rural, and underserved communities. Mildred’s Lane Inc.’s organizational impact will be to continue programming to expand our diverse, interdisciplinary community and civic engagement.

2023 Fundraiser

For Mildred’s Sake! will be a blind art sale of works donated by over 100 artists associated with Mildred’s Lane and their allies. Proceeds will directly fund 2024 programming and staffing.

The wrapped packages’ contents will be a mystery to buyers. This concept echoes the original Brown Paper Package Fundraiser 2010 held at Mildred’s Lane, where buyers were asked to keep their packages permanently wrapped, affording perpetual mystique to the works inside. Tickets start at $300 per brown-paper package. Special edition prints and one-on-one excursions with artists will be offered to higher donations.

Save the date: Saturday, December 2 from 6:30-8:30 PM at Pierogi Gallery in Brooklyn.

A link with participating artists and more details including ticket purchases will be live soon!

The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space

MILDRED’S LANE INC Field Station HQ and The Department of Interstitchiaries / 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, New York

The upcoming installation featuring the Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane is a dense slice of Gesamtkunstwerk of the greater project and archives as it slips into the new entity, a 501( c)(3) arts and cultural organization. This workspace is activated by coming and going participants of Mildred’s Lane, with occasional readings, workshops, and events throughout fall and winter. Moreover, the Field Station HQ will house several contents of the new book, WORKSTYLES of Mildred’s Lane, coming out next year.  

From the Archives

Hear from artist Shelley Spector on her recent exhibit before the hill. For interest in purchasing work, contact mildredslane@gmail.com.

Our next project will be the installation of the Mildred’s Lane Inc. Field Station / Dept. of Interstitchiaries. Stay tuned!

Support Art & Ecology by Donating to Mildred’s Lane & The Mildred Complex(ity)

The costs are never-for-profit. Mildred’s Lane functions as a generosity project working towards a conservation land trust and site for collective art-making. All proceeds support the projects, maintenance, and repairs needed to become an official 501(c)(3) organization that will allow Mildred’s Lane to thrive for generations to come.

General Donations

Larger Donations (Fiscal Sponsor)

1 The entity is not engaged in any activity regulated by the New York State Department of Education.

The YEAR of TURNS Announcing Summer Swarmings 2023

Summers at Mildred’s Lane have been slow since the plague. Opportunities for gathering fallowed everywhere over the last few years. Now, we are turning our hearts and minds to the future as we resume a modest summer program, while continuing to work on site repairs and upgrades required to fully re-open. 2023 is a year of turns.

turn | tərn | verb and noun / – go on to consider something next: we can now turn to another aspect (other aspects) of the problem.

Sustainability is an urgent ideal. We are orienting ourselves around this notion completely, seeking a sustainable future in more than one sense. Summer Swarmings 2023 focus on ecology and the land—as we look ahead, we find ourselves turning to our roots, not least the ground beneath our feet.

If you have the means, please consider sponsoring a fellow or swarming.All donations are tax-deductible via our fiscal sponsor, Creative Visions, with details below. For all reservations, inquiries, and proposals, contact us at workstyles@mildredslane.com. We look forward to connecting with you.

—J. Morgan Puett, Alex A. Jones, Nick Bennett

Looking to the Future: Mildred's Lane in Frieze

Looking to the Future: Mildred's Lane in Frieze

Envisioning a self-regenerating art complex


A message from J. Morgan Puett:

As you all know, Mildred’s Lane has been navigating challenges to its sustainability over the last several years. To ensure our collective legacy, we are all looking to the future and the changes required to grow. 

I want to announce out loud that I am stepping aside from my role as Ambassador of Entanglement. It is time. I put aside so many personal projects and interests for over a decade to act out increasingly demanding executive and administrative roles—in other words, being the director of Mildred’s Lane. It is far more than one person can mentally and physically do, yet all have been labors of love for art, friends, landscape—LIFE! 

I have been living in this expanded garment of a landscape for so long, raising a child, witnessing friends and colleagues come and go—expressing themselves, taking and making a small bit of its history—I feel it deeply, intimately. But now I see that it needs some mending, which requires thought, care, and calm retrospect. The next phase for me is emerging—a new, more focused role—a Land Stewardship to Mildred’s Lane. 

Land Stewarding is a way to pattern and tailor the landscape, establishing a stronger ecological program. Meanwhile, I will clear the path for a new executive generation for Mildred’s Lane. I would like to introduce those brave souls who are helping me in this transition from Ambassador of Entanglement, until we establish a rotating directorial position. 

Alex A. Jones (she/her) is now acting as Minister of Strategic Possibilities(one of seventeen Labors of Mildred’s Lane, this one initiated by Abby Lutz, whose ongoing collaborations with me include A Guide to the Field Project). Alex is helping to manifest and co-curate new conceptual potentialities for this mutable subject of Mildred’s Lane. 

Nick Bennett (he/him) is now Ambassador of Transhistorical Agency (another one of the Labors; Natalie Wilkin carved out this labor in all aspects of life here during her residency from 2011–2014). Nick’s labor of communication and administration is the core of the greater project. He will be critically negotiating entanglements forward. 

Alex and Nick can be reached at workstyles@mildredslane.com.

Now, to the future: 2023 brings new turns for Mildred’s Lane and the Mildred Complex(ity). The future of our lives and work depends on healthy ecology; hence, we put environmental conservation at the forefront of our artistic agenda. Mildred’s Lane is becoming a conservation land trust, shifting our attention to an innovative experiment in creative ecologies, including all creative non-human life.

I am excited to share a new piece published in the March 2023 issue of Frieze, which speaks to the heart of this vision, framing Mildred’s Lane in terms of sustainability and regeneration.

Yours, in complexity.   

J. Morgan Puett

Land Steward-in-Residence 2023

Mildred’s Lane is a Self Regenerating Art Complex

The constantly evolving event site uses perpetual adaptation and new notion of creative practice to face the challenges to sustainability

By J. Morgan Puett, written in collaboration with Alex A. Jones and Alastair Gordon

Frieze | March 2023

An excerpt from the article:

“We are all entangled beings here, experimenting with ideas and with one another – sometimes uncomfortably, but more often in wonderment – from the skilled artists who construct vernacular dwellings to the cultivated mildew that later blooms across their canvas walls. Raccoons scamper in the eaves of the Barn Lyceum (1997–ongoing) during evening lectures, making their nests as we exchange conversation. In early summer, seasonal colonies of bat pups learning to fly fall from the cracks of 200-year-old outbuildings. Hickory nuts drop and bang sharply upon the roof of the Lunar Camp (2015–ongoing) in autumn, startling the sleepers. Each year, the smallmouth bass in the Algorithmic Pond Project (2006–ongoing) grow larger. Some visitors swear that Mildred Steffens, the property’s previous owner who died here in 1986, still inhabits the old homestead, which has been rechristened The Mildred/Lillie Archaeology Project (1997–ongoing). If there are spirits afoot, they are as likely those of the Lenape people from whom this land was once stolen.”

Read the full article here

Support Mildred's Lane!

The costs are never-for-profit. You can make a donation through one of the following options. Every cent goes directly to supporting our most immediate needs towards establishing a land trust and becoming an official 501c3 organization that will allow Mildred’s Lane to thrive for generations to come.

Our Fiscal Sponsor (Creative Visions)

Our Website

Thank you to The Silbert Foundation / The Goldman Foundation / and all supportive individuals who prefer not to be mentioned.

,

Opening March 11: VIROSA

,

VIROSA Presents:

Degenerate Cinema

Opening Saturday, March 11 from 2–5pm

The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY


VIROSA Presents:

Degenerate Cinema

Opening Saturday, March 11 from 2–5pm

The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, 37B Main Street, Narrowsburg, NY

In cinema, degeneracy creates new possibilities for storytelling. VIROSA works to reconfigure conventions of filmmaking, undermining longstanding barriers between cinema and the finer arts. VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema shines a light on potentials beyond the event horizon of Hollywood. 

Two short films are presented as part of the exhibition, Poor Magic (2020) and Fishbowl (2022). Poor Magic is VIROSA’s first narrative short, shot on location at Mildred’s Lane in winter 2020, on the cusp of the COVID-19 plague. The narrative concerns a precocious magician who tries to catch his shadow. VIROSA’s second short film is Fishbowl, named after the specimen lab at the LaBrea Tar Pits Museum in Los Angeles, where visitors observe scientists prepare remains extracted from the tar. In the film, a strange man sneaks into the museum by night to clean prehistoric specimens; his motives are unclear, as are those of an entity who watches him from the deep future.

The film screenings are interspersed by VIROSA Reels (2019-22) that showcase the collective’s moving image experiments. The exhibition also includes a new series of prints, Tar Pit Specimen (2023), featuring a 4-color silkscreen edition printed on plastic paper resembling oversize slide films. In addition to the edition is a limited series of unique, hand-painted prints that evoke the laborious process of colorizing black & white film. The print works invite reconsideration of “the screen” in expanded cinema.

Selected props from VIROSA productions are also on view. Film props are often treated as disposable material in conventional film productions, but VIROSA presents these objects as degenerate sculptures that outlive the filming process; as with radioactive decay, they are fragments emitted from an unstable center. 

About Studio VIROSA

Directions

Support Mildred's Lane!

The costs are never-for-profit. You can make a donation through one of the following options. Every cent goes directly to supporting our most immediate needs towards establishing a land trust and becoming an official 501c3 organization that will allow Mildred’s Lane to thrive for generations to come.

Our Fiscal Sponsor (Creative Visions)

Our Website

Thank you to The Silbert Foundation / The Goldman Foundation / and all supportive individuals who prefer not to be mentioned.

Photo credits / First image: FISHBOWL, 2022. Digital video, 10m 51s. Starring Austin Kase and Megan Zerga, with special thanks to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum, Los Angeles / Second image: Phantom at Mildred’s Lane, 2022. Digital c-print on cotton paper, 18 x 24 inches (framed).

Mildred's Lane Reports: February 2023

Updates from Mildred's Lane & The Mildred Complex(ity)

February 5–August 27, 2023

Mildred’s Lane / Robert Williams, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum—The Alchemist’s Shack (1998–2023) included in Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art,curated by Richard Klein, The Aldridge Museum, Ridgefield, CT

Robert Williams is a British artist and academic whose interests include alchemy, archaeology, folklore, speculative fiction, and popular culture. Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum—The Alchemist’s Shack (begun in 1998) is an ongoing project by the artist that presents an idealized past and an unrealizable and lost future of alchemy through connecting the life and work of alchemist Eirenaeus Philalethes (George Starkey; 1627–1665) with the deep traditions of alchemical practice in Europe, particularly England. The title of the work, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum, is taken from a scrapbook of alchemical texts assembled by Elias Ashmole (1617–1692), the founder of the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at Oxford University. The Alchemist’s Shack exists as a specifically designed, freestanding building at Mildred’s Lane, the ninety-four-acre project site in rural Pennsylvania founded in 1998 by artists Mark Dion and J. Morgan Puett. For Prima Materia, the contents of the Shack have been disassembled and moved to The Aldrich and reconfigured to fit into the museum’s camera obscura space.

Opening March 11, 2023

VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema at The Mildred Complex(ity) Project Space, Narrowsburg, NY

Degenerate adj. ||  1 having declined, as in function or nature, from a former or original state   2 morally corrupt or given to vice   3 [mathematics] being simpler than the typical use, i.e., a degenerate hyperbola   4 [physics & astronomy] characterized by atoms stripped of their electrons and by very great density, i.e., degenerate matter; a degenerate star

Degenerate v. ||  1 to pass from a higher to a lower type or condition   2 to sink into a low intellectual or moral state   3 to decline in quality   4 [biology] to evolve or develop into a less autonomous or functionally active form

VIROSA Presents: Degenerate Cinema is an exhibition of experimental film, prints, and sculpture by VIROSA. Two recent narrative short films will be on view, both with deep ties to Mildred’s Lane. Poor Magic, a surrealist short about a foolish magician in pursuit of his shadow, was filmed at Mildred’s Lane during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Fishbowl, an experimental narrative about a man who breaks into a museum to clean fossils by night, was edited at Mildred’s Lane in the deep winter of 2022 after filming in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. In addition to the films, VIROSA will exhibit objects in materials including glass, paper, clay, and 3D-printed plastic which have emerged from their filmmaking practice.

The exhibition will be on view through April 2023.

SUMMER 2023

CALL FOR OPEN SESSIONS 

Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA

Mildred’s Lane is forming the summer 2023 calendar of co-curated events, lectures, and workshops for and with our community in the deep woods of Beach Lake, PA and The Mildred Complex(ity) in TOWN on Main Street in Narrowsburg, NY. We are inviting letters of interest for small groups and individual retreats for the upcoming 2023 season. Application details can be found on our website.

→ → →

We are currently accepting letters of interest, seeking rotating Ambassadors of Entanglement to direct Mildred’s Lane into the future. Please contact mildredslane@gmail.com.

→ → →

We continue working on the long-awaited publication WORKSTYLES of Mildred’s Lane. More information is coming soon.

Support Mildred's Lane!

This year we are fundraising $150,000

Mildred’s Lane is planning for the future. Although we are a Pennsylvania Nonprofit Corporation, in order to ensure our legacy and future, we are filing to become an official 501c3 organization.

To do this, we must make crucial updates to our landscape to satisfy local zoning laws. Though much has been accomplished to meet the township’s demands, there are still many maintenance projects ahead of us. These changes are expensive.

Please contribute today 

You can make a donation through one of the following options. Every cent goes directly to supporting our most immediate needs towards becoming an official 501c3 organization that will allow Mildred’s Lane to thrive for generations to come.

Our Fiscal Sponsor (Creative Visions)

Our Website

Thank you to The Silbert Foundation / The Goldman Foundation / and all supportive individuals who prefer not to be mentioned.

Photo credits / First image: Prima Materia: The Periodic Table in Contemporary Art (installation view: Robert Williams, Theatrum Chemicum Britannicum – The Alchemist’s Shack, 1998–2023, Collection of Mildred’s Lane, Beach Lake, PA), The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, February 5 to August 27, 2023. Photo: Jason Mandella / Second Image: Courtesy of Studio VIROSA / All other images courtesy of and copyright Mildred’s Lane

Upcoming News

MILDRED'S LANE

UPCOMING in 2023

JANUARY

Exhibition at The Mildred Complex(ity) Storefront/ Last days of Jeffrey Jenkins, RESURFACING. Open Saturdays and by appointment. Contact mildredslane@gmail.com

FEBRUARY/MARCH
RESIDENT-ARTISTS-IN-COMPLEX(ity)
This winter, Alex A. Jones and Cameron Klavsen of Studio VIROSA are visiting artists supported by the Abakanowicz Creative Community Fellowshipand Mildred's Lane.

Exhibition at The Mildred Complex(ity) Storefront/ Studio VIROSA will exhibit two recent narrative short films, both with deep ties to Mildred's Lane. Poor Magic, a surrealist short about a foolish magician in pursuit of his shadow, was filmed at Mildred's Lane during the pandemic lockdown of 2020. Fishbowl, an experimental narrative about a man who breaks into a museum to clean fossils by night, was edited at Mildred's Lane in the deep winter of 2022 after filming in Los Angeles and Brooklyn. In addition to the films, VIROSA will exhibit objects in materials including glass, paper, clay, and 3D-printed plastic which have emerged from their filmmaking practice. Opening date TBA. 

CALL FOR OPEN SESSIONS / SUMMER 2023
Mildred's Lane is inviting letters of interest for small groups and individual retreats for the upcoming 2023 season. We are co-curating Events / Lectures / Workshops for and with our community in these deep woods and in TOWN at The Mildred Complex(ity) Storefront on Main Street Narrowsburg, NY. 

FUNDRAISING 2023
This year we are fundraising to raise $150,000.00! Mildred's Lane is a Pennsylvania Nonprofit Corporation aiming to reopen as a Foundation later this year. We would appreciate your support. Recent events have slowed our efforts; with covid, local government demands, and general maintenance. 

THANK YOU! 
We are:
•  accepting letters of interest, seeking new Ambassadors of Entanglement to direct us into the future.
•  accepting letters of interest to be a part of our staff and team as Mildred Fellows, learning the fineries of Workstyles of Mildred's Lane.
•  continuing our work on the long-awaited publication, WORKSTYLES of Mildred's Lane, 2023. More information coming soon.


SUPPORT

Mildred's Lane is planning for the future. Please contribute today through our portal at the website, SUPPORT Mildred's Lane; Or through our fiscal sponsor,
Creative Visions / Workstyles of Mildred's Lane


THE SILBERT FOUNDATION / THE GOLDMAN FOUNDATION / and other supportive individuals who prefer not to be mentioned. Thank you all! 

Photo: Mildred's Lane / Erik Freeland
Lane Photo: Mildred's Lane

Planning for the Future of Mildred's Lane

HAPPY NEW YEAR 
2023
from Mildred's Lane
 

We send best wishes and hope for an awe-inspiring year ahead. Thank you for being part of our creative community! 

 

Mildred’s Lane is celebrating its 25th year of hosting international artists and cultivating shared experiences. Together,  pushing the limits of what art can do – collapsing the boundaries that separate life from art and inspiring methods of integrating environmental activism with everyday creative living. 

Mildred's Lane is a Pennsylvania Nonprofit Corporation aiming to reopen as a Foundation this year. We need your support in doing so. Recent events have deterred our efforts; covid, local government demands, and general maintenance.
 

We need to raise $150,000.00 in 2023!

Our goals are:
• Complete the renovations and upgrades required by our local government to establish a public facility.
• Seek a new Ambassador of Entanglement to direct us into the future. (Please inquire with a letter of interest.)
• Complete our work on the long-awaited publication, WORKSTYLES of Mildred's Lane, 2023.

 

Mildred’s Lane is planning for the future. Please make a contribution today through our SUPPORT portal on the website,  
 

Please SUPPORT Mildred's Lane


OR, SUPPORT through our fiscal sponsor,
 

Creative Visions / Workstyles of Mildred's Lane

 

Special gratitude goes to The Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, The Silbert Foundation, The Goldman Foundation, and every individual generously supporting Mildred’s Lane. Thank you!

Reception for the Artist/ December 3 / 4 PM – 6 PM

RESURFACING
Jeffrey Jenkins

The Mildred Complex(ity)

37B Main Street / Narrowsburg / NY 12764
November 7 through December 31, 2022
Reception for the Artist/ December 3 / 4 PM – 6 PM

In Jeffrey Jenkins’ recent work, Resurfacing, unexpected areas of his nonagenarian mother’s Longmont, Colorado home are illuminated solely by the light of projected 35mm slides taken by his father in the 1960s and 70s. Found in a box stored under a bed, the recently uncovered archive revealed connections to both memories and identity, linking both photographers to their shared interests and individual perceptions.         
 
Like a theatre constructed in the subconscious, the house in the post-midnight hours offered unconventional niches and vestibules to project his late father’s views of the world once again. The thin, ephemeral images of the past were painted onto the architectural surfaces of our present, mixing time and place in surreal juxtapositions. The exhibit is arranged much like a proverbial paternal slide show, with images recurring at a continuous and measured rate.
 
The vintage slides included images of activities and family members, typical of amateur photos of the era. His father, an astrophysicist, college professor, and aspiring photographer, captured the banal domestic scene, scientific observation, and framed view of nature. Images of the sky and the landscape were interspersed with family vacations, technical star and solar system photos, and NASA-sourced images used in his lectures. (There is even a slide of a frolicking nude, reputedly inserted into his colleagues’ lecture slides as a prank.) For Jenkins, the photos of nature and anonymous places were of particular interest, suggesting connections to his work in similar genres. 
 
With the unexpected death of Jenkins’ brother during the same time as this project, the nostalgic considerations of his father’s images were given a more poignant weight. All three men have spent their lives pursuing insight into the natural world through creative and scientific endeavors. With this genealogical foundation of visual and conceptual experiences, the evolving nature of time, place, and family are unexpectedly represented once again on the walls of a darkened home.

Untitled (Me with Lunar Module) / 2022 / 28 x 38 / Archival Giclee Print

RESURFACING - Reception for the Artist/ December 3 / 4 PM – 6 PM

RESURFACING
Jeffrey Jenkins

The Mildred Complex(ity)

37B Main Street / Narrowsburg / NY 12764
November 7 through December 11, 2022
Reception for the Artist/ December 3 / 4 PM – 6 PM

In Jeffrey Jenkins’ recent work, Resurfacing, unexpected areas of his nonagenarian mother’s Longmont, Colorado home are illuminated solely by the light of projected 35mm slides taken by his father in the 1960s and 70s. Found in a box stored under a bed, the recently uncovered archive revealed connections to both memories and identity, linking both photographers to their shared interests and individual perceptions.         
 
Like a theatre constructed in the subconscious, the house in the post-midnight hours offered unconventional niches and vestibules to project his late father’s views of the world once again. The thin, ephemeral images of the past were painted onto the architectural surfaces of our present, mixing time and place in surreal juxtapositions. The exhibit is arranged much like a proverbial paternal slide show, with images recurring at a continuous and measured rate.
 
The vintage slides included images of activities and family members, typical of amateur photos of the era. His father, an astrophysicist, college professor, and aspiring photographer, captured the banal domestic scene, scientific observation, and framed view of nature. Images of the sky and the landscape were interspersed with family vacations, technical star and solar system photos, and NASA-sourced images used in his lectures. (There is even a slide of a frolicking nude, reputedly inserted into his colleagues’ lecture slides as a prank.) For Jenkins, the photos of nature and anonymous places were of particular interest, suggesting connections to his work in similar genres. 
 
With the unexpected death of Jenkins’ brother during the same time as this project, the nostalgic considerations of his father’s images were given a more poignant weight. All three men have spent their lives pursuing insight into the natural world through creative and scientific endeavors. With this genealogical foundation of visual and conceptual experiences, the evolving nature of time, place, and family are unexpectedly represented once again on the walls of a darkened home.
 

Untitled, (Mom Napping), Early 1970s / 2022 / 28 x 38 / Archival Giclee Print

Planning for the FUTURE of Mildred's Lane

Mildred's Lane
YEAR OF SILVER
Fundraising Drive 2022


Mildred’s Lane is an artist residency and creative community compound celebrating its 25th year of hosting international artists. Mildred’s Lanecultivates shared experiences and interdisciplinary collaborations, pushing the limits of what art can do – collapsing the boundaries that separate life from art and inspiring each other to integrate political activism with everyday creative living.

To ensure that Mildred’s Lane continues in the future, its co-director, artist J Morgan Puett, and her co-founder, artist Mark Dion, have started the process and strategic planning needed to donate and shift the 93-acre site into a foundation.

Everything about Mildred’s Lane resists commodification. In our hyper-consumerist culture, Mark and Morgan believe in its mission: a place where the hierarchies of the outside world disappear in shared labor and collaborations on discreet landscape interventions and event-based projects.

Mildred’s Lane and its participants advocate for the environment – central to all planning for the future.

Last year, the local government ordered Mildred’s Lane to ‘cease and desist.’ They demand an upgrade to the site to meet newly passed ordinances for public gatherings and overnight accommodations. Though a lot was accomplished to meet the township's demands last summer, Mildred’s Lane hopes to make further changes to continue to house and grow projects with artists for years to come, but these changes are expensive.

Please consider a contribution to this incredibly important and special place.

Mildred's Lane announces partnership with a new fiscal sponsor – CREATIVE VISIONS – a 501 c3 EIN: 39-1902814.

Here is how to send a check to Mildred’s Lane. We are directing all donations to Creative Visions. Suggested contribution of 1000. to 5000. But any amount helps! Forward this to anyone you think might help. Thank you!

• Make sure checks are made out to Creative Visions.

• WORKSTYLES/Mildred’s Lane should be written on the memo line.

• Send checks to:

CREATIVE VISIONS
c/o Grace Breuer
1047 Ford Drive
Nipomo, CA 93444

Special gratitude goes to The Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Foundation, The Silbert Foundation, The Goldman Foundation, and every Individual generously donating to Mildred’s Lane. Thank you for all your support!

OPENING RECEPTION - DISENTANGLEMENT / RE-EMBODIMENT

JILL GOLDMAN
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT

The Mildred Complex(ity)
37B Main Street / Narrowsburg / NY 12764

Opening reception / October 8 / 3 pm – 5 pm


Mildred's Lane and The Mildred Complex(ity) proudly present the installation Disentanglement/Re-embodiment by Los Angeles-based artist Jill Goldman.

In this new body of work—a response to two years of research into patriarchy—Goldman continues her ongoing exploration of transformative ritual and the gendered body. Developed at Mildred’s Lane during a residency in 2021, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is an ambitious attempt to disentangle the bonds of gender-based oppression and imagine a re-embodied self, unencumbered by patriarchal power and domination. In videos, photographs and performances Goldman interrogates the intangible ways that patriarchy creates fictions of the body and then insists that these fictions are natural, essentializing socially constructed traits as biologically and divinely determined, thereby simultaneously constructing and compelling gendered realities.

While it's impossible to know if we can ever fully experience our bodies outside of the linguistic and patriarchal social institutions that not only regulate them but define them, Disentanglement/Re-embodiment challenges the viewer to take seriously the possibility of a self independent of a system based on power relations. In performances that use ropes and women's hair, music and dance, Goldman makes visible the invisible structures of patriarchy and attempts to untangle them, extricating female bodies from their insidious and subjugating webs. Goldman, a long-time activist who advocates for the rights of those marginalized by patriarchy is skilled at pragmatic resistance, fighting injustice from a position inside our political and social systems. In her art and Tantric meditation practice, however, she explores a more radical form of resistance, a resistance that is founded on an expansive consciousness that demolishes the oppressive structures the political right is so hellbent on solidifying.

The Sanskrit word Tantra derives from the verbal root tan, meaning to weave, and while Goldman attempts to unravel one fabric, she weaves another one, represented visually in videos and photographs printed on muslin in which the boundaries between the self and the world blur. From its origins in 6th century India, Tantric initiation has always been open to all genders and all social classes. With its revolutionary shapeshifting goddesses and panpsychism Tantra dissolves borders and erases binaries. By embracing this profoundly non-dualist consciousness, Goldman imagines a dematerialized liquid reality, an alchemical transformation that occurs in the world, via the body, revealing the sacred in the profane. Because this state of "oneness" entails a radical solidarity with every human, indeed, with every particle in the universe, the boundaries that separate the terrestrial from the numinous, the self from other, subject from object, collapse, and all hierarchies are razed. Patriarchy is rendered not only absurd but cosmically powerless.

-Asti Hustvedt

Jeffrey Jenkins Photography / Performers include Veronica Caudillo / Louise Hamagami / and Roxanne Steinberg / with music by Livia Reiner and Rose Reiner.

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FLEA MARKET PROJECT // The Mildred Complex(ity)

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The Mildred Complex(ity)

FLEA MARKET PROJECT
Everything Could Go

Opening Saturday / July 23, 2022 / 12 – 5
37 b Main Street / Narrowsburg, NY 12764

MARK DION / AMY YOES
with
MARY JANE JACOB / MERETE RØSTAD

in collaboration with the Abakanowicz Fellows:

Inés Arango / Elisa Benzo / Sophie Buchmueller / Johnny Doley / Miguel Espinoza / Ella Fainaru-Wada / Kelly Johnston / Jad El Khoury / Alice Matthews / Meghan McCray / Scott O'Brien / Vanessa Payne / Kirsten Schuck / Sarah Sekles / Katherine Skwira-Brown


A transient site for gathering and commerce, flea markets attract a range of publics: discerning collectors, professional pickers, resourceful vendors, and casual browsers. This summer, a cohort of Magdalena Abakanowicz Fellows attended the Circle Drive-in Flea Fair in Scranton, PA to delve into the mechanisms of the flea market and engage in alternative modes of production and exchange. 

Drawing from the ethos of Mildred's Lane, this project builds off the social ecology of the flea market while collapsing boundaries between art and life. The interdisciplinary project plays with the layered dynamics between objects, place, time, and interpersonal connections. 

The exhibition Everything Could Go, opening at The Mildred Complex(ity) Saturday, July 23, is one of a few iterations of this investigation. The show features artworks made from reimagined flea market finds, documentation of the group's booths at the Flea Fair, and records of conversations and interactions that unfolded.

The Flea Market Project and Exhibition are made possible by The Madalena Abakanowicz Arts and Culture Charitable Trust and The Department of Arts and Crafts in the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO). Thank you all.

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MARK DION is an American conceptual artist best known for using scientific methodologies in his installations. His work examines how prevalent ideologies and institutions influence our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, according to him, is to "go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention." ( Art 21). Dion is the co-director of Mildred's Lane, Pennsylvania.

AMY YOES works in a multi-faceted way, alternately employing installation, photography, video, painting, and sculpture. An interest in decorative language and architectural space permeates all of her work. She responds to formal topologies of ornament and style that have reverberated through time, informing our mutually constructed visual and cultural memory. Visit Hot Corners, a site-specific installation at MASS MoCA in North Adams MA. It is a multi-room, immersive environment with thematic forms and functions. 

MARY JANE JACOB is a curator and writer who championed public, site-specific, and socially engaged art as a shared practice and discourse. She is Professor and Director of the Institute for Curatorial Research and Practice at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2018 she published Dewey for Artists with the University of Chicago Press. She is curating the Magdalena Abakanowicz exhibition at the Tate Modern opening this November.

MERETE RØSTAD is an interdisciplinary artist, educator, and artist-researcher whose projects are rooted in examining collective memory, representation, and archives in the public sphere. Røstad is an Associate Professor in Art and Public Space (MFA) and head of research at the Department of Arts and Craft at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts (KHiO).

THE MILDRED COMPLEX(ity) project space is the public face of Mildred's Lane. Located on Narrowsburg's Main Street, working-living-making-researching exhibitions, programs, and events by artists questioning our impact as cultural producers in every aspect of life in the 21st century. 

YEAR of SILVER / Exhibition - The Mildred Complex(ity) presents Susanna Crum and Rudy Salgado 'On the Map'

YEAR of SILVER / Exhibition
The Mildred Complex(ity) presents
Susanna Crum and Rudy Salgado
On the Map
May 28 through July 4 / Reception / Saturday / May 28th / 1 pm through 5 pm

How and when does a town begin? In the US, the naming and establishment of a post office have inscribed the intention and identity of a town on maps and within communities. From the 1860s to the 1930s, itinerant tintype photographers traveled the country with mobile portrait studios. They summoned ghosts in the atmospheric backgrounds of their images or documented soldiers and the deceased for inclusion in the newly-popular family photo album. Tintypes were the first affordable means for Americans to share images with distant family and friends, as the photographs on metal could be reliably placed in the mail. Rudy Salgado and Susanna Crum traveled with a mobile darkroom around the state of Kentucky, investigating historical post office sites with this 170-year-old method. In their hours spent producing hand-poured plates on site, they met property owners and history keepers who shared stories of the post office as a crucial community-powered site for information and social exchange. On the Map includes photographs, drawings, and postcards from this research-led journey
                                                                                                                      _ The Artists / May 2022

Susanna Crum and Rudy Salgado live in Louisville, Kentucky, where they operate Calliope Arts, a shared workspace for artists working in print media. They received MFA degrees from the University of Iowa in 2012 and moved to Louisville to work as artists, collaborators, and educators. Together, they care for property and a house built in 1885 in downtown Louisville, including their residence, printmaking, wet plate collodion photography studios, a large kitchen garden, and a chicken coop. They have exhibited solo and collaborative projects across the US and abroad, and have received numerous grants and awards. They have recently attended artist residencies at Kunstarhuset Messen, Ålvik, Norway; Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh, Scotland; Kala Art Institute, Berkeley, CA; and Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA. Susanna and Rodolfo have made many ongoing contributions to Mildred's Lane Projects, including Mildred Archaeology. 
Insta/ @susannacrum and @rivercitytintype
Image / Bryants Store, 2021 /Wet plate collodion tintype, 8x10

Year of Silver marks our 25th anniversary – hence Mildred's Lane is closed to refresh the site, the artist projects, and upgrade our organization. We are fundraising to expand our impact as a cultural site for the future throughout the year. To support these efforts in fundraising, in the landscape, supported internships, and general assistance, please send letters of interest with your skills and available working dates to mildredslane@gmail.com 

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ARTFORUM / On Site

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image / Views of Mildred's Lane, Beach Lake, PA. Kitchen Laboratory, 2018. Photo: Robyn Lea.

... Mildred’s Lane is not a product to be consumed or an “experience” to be Instagrammed. It is a link in a larger countercultural chain that, like the variegated ecosystems of the property, may be critically endangered.
Read the article /

ARTFORUM / ON SITE

GOOD HOUSEKEEPING

Ian Bourland on Mildred’s Lane
Please DONATE / Help Protect Mildred's Lane
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