_(cropped).jpg) Yaddo, circa 1905 | |
| Formation | 1926 |
|---|---|
| Type | Artist colony |
| Purpose | To nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment |
| Headquarters | Saratoga Springs, New York |
| Coordinates | 43°04′07″N73°45′29″W / 43.06848°N 73.75813°W /43.06848; -73.75813 |
Region served | United States |
| Website | yaddo |
Yaddo is anartists' community located on a 400-acre (160-hectare) estate inSaratoga 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."[1] On March 11, 2013 it was designated aNational Historic Landmark.[2]
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 82Pulitzer Prizes, 34MacArthur Fellowships, 70National Book Awards, 24National Book Critics Circle Awards, 108Rome Prizes, 49Whiting Writers' Awards, a Nobel Prize (Saul Bellow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction andNobel Prize in Literature in 1976), at least oneMan Booker Prize (Alan Hollinghurst, 2004) and countless other honors.[1] Yaddo is included in theUnion Avenue Historic District.
The estate was purchased in 1881 by the financierSpencer Trask and his wife, the writerKatrina Trask. The first mansion on the property burned down in 1891,[3] and the Trasks then built the current house. Yaddo is aneologism invented by one of the Trask children and was meant to rhyme with "shadow".[4]
In 1900, after the premature deaths of the Trasks' four children,[4] Spencer Trask decided to turn the estate into an artists' retreat as a gift to his wife. He did this with the financial assistance ofphilanthropistGeorge Foster Peabody. The first artists arrived in 1926. The success of Yaddo encouraged Spencer and Katrina later to donate land for a working women's retreat center as well, known asWiawaka Holiday House, at the request of Mary Wiltsie Fuller.[5] At least in its early years, Yaddo was funded by profits from theBowling Green Offices Building in Manhattan, in which Spencer Trask was extensively involved.[6]
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In 1949 during theMcCarthy Era, a news story accurately accused writerAgnes Smedley of spying for theSoviet Union.[8] Smedley had traveled withMao Zedong to report on the Chinese Communist Revolution and, beginning in 1943, had spent five years at Yaddo. PoetRobert Lowell pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by theFBI. Ames was eventually exonerated of all charges but learned from the investigation that her assistant Mary Townsend was an FBI informant.[9][10] Ames remained director until her retirement in 1969, having overseen the Yaddo community from its creation in 1924.[11] Ames was succeeded by Newman E. Waite who served as president from 1969 until 1977 when Curtis Harnack assumed the position.[12]
Literary critic and eventual Yaddo board memberLouis 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."[13]
In May 2005, vandals, usingpaintball guns, damaged two of the Four Seasons statues, the Poet's Bench, a fountain, and pathways with blue paint.[14] Repairs cost $1,400.[15] In 2018, Yaddo elected photographerPeter Kayafas and novelist Janice Y.K. Lee as co-chairs of its board of directors.[16]
Yaddo has received large contributions fromSpencer Trask & Company andKevin Kimberlin, the firm's current chairman.[17] NovelistPatricia Highsmith bequeathed her estate, valued at $3 million, to the community.[18][19]
Yaddo's gardens are modeled after the classical Italian gardens the Trasks had visited in Europe.[20] The Four Seasons statues were acquired and installed in the garden in 1909.[21] 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."[22] While visitors are not admitted to the main mansion or artists' residences, they may visit the gardens.[21]
Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists including:[23][24]
Jonathan Ames' bookWake Up Sir! (2004) is partially set at Yaddo.
Dagger of the Mind (1941), a novel by 1930s Yaddo residentKenneth Fearing, takes place in Demarest Hall, an art colony modeled after Yaddo.[26]
InYou season 1, episode 8: "You Got Me Babe", Blythe helps Beck focus on writing and break through writer's block by disconnecting Beck from her cellphone and the Internet, and setting up Beck's apartment to make her "own Yaddo".[27]
Yaddo is mentioned repeatedly throughout theTheresa Rebeck playSeminar.
In the 2018 Netflix comedy-dramaPrivate Life, aspiring writer Sadie (played byKayli Carter) gets the opportunity to spend a month at Yaddo to focus on refining her writing skills. It is also repeatedly mentioned and referenced throughout the movie, e.g. by a coffee mug showing the Yaddo name on it. A few scenes of the movie are set at Yaddo's location as well.
Mentioned in theShowtime seriesThe Affair season 2, episode 11 where Noah Solloway's agent offers to set him up at Yaddo to write his second novel.
Creating at Yaddo last week, at mid-season of the colony's twelfth year [1938], was a typical group of writers and artists who have given substance to Katrina's vision. But whether or not they fit her romantic conception was an open question. By contrast with aristocratic Katrina and the elegant surroundings she provided, most of the season's 27 guests stood out in striking left-wing contrast: PoetKenneth Fearing(Angel Arms, Poems), CriticNewton Arvin(Hawthorne), NovelistsJoseph Vogel(At Madame Bonnard's),Leonard Ehrlich(God's Angry Man),Henry Roth(Call It Sleep),Daniel Fuchs(Low Company).
"One of the show places of the U.S., Yaddo is a 500-acre [200-hectare] estate with pine groves, vast lawns, artificial lakes with ducks, famous rose gardens, and white marble fountains. The name Yaddo was a baby pronunciation given by the Trask children (all four of whom died in childhood) to The Shadows, a famousinn formerly on the site of the Trask estate, where the Trasks had spent their summers. It was one of the dozen places wherePoe was supposed to have writtenThe Raven, and Katrina said it inspired her own poetry.
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