Artist in residence news in November and December

The Arts Retreat artist residency program is excited to host three new visiting artists during the months of November and December. Arriving in mid-November is Kelley Meister from Minneapolis. Kelley constructs interdisciplinary, multi-media installations that fuse sculpture, printmaking, and drawing with time-based media such as video, sound-manipulation, and performance. She considers her role as an artist to be that of a storyteller, and one of the best ways that she knows how to communicate is through new media; to her, technology is a language that feels current.  While she is in New York Mills, Kelley will be preparing for her upcoming (May 2013) public installation of Welcome to Coal Country at Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis. First in December is writer Jackie Lea Sommers, also from Minneapolis. Jackie is joining us for a short 1-week residency, and will be working on her second novel, a story based in a fictional small town in Minnesota. Jackie hopes to generate content in our midst, as well as edit and revise her novel. Closing out 2012 will be Leland Cheuk, a fiction writer from New York. For the past several years Leland has been writing both novels and short fiction that portray the Asian-America experience in a new way: one that isn’t connected to familiar American immigrant tropes, but instead, “…turns the contemporary American immigrant story on its head with an irreverent and satirical take on one Chinese-American family’s inability to hug it out and kiss and make up.” Leland will spend the middle of December here working on his novel, The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong.