Yaddo
43°04′07″N 73°45′29″W / 43.06848°N 73.75813°W
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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". It offers residencies to artists working in any of the following media: choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video."
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 word invented by one of the Trask children and was meant to rhyme with "shadow."[1]
Artists' colony
In 1900, after the premature deaths of the Trasks' four children,[1] 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 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.[2]
Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists,[3] including Hannah Arendt, Newton Arvin, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, Truman Capote, John Cheever, Aaron Copland, Kenneth Fearing, Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Fuchs, Philip Guston, Ruth Heller, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Alfred Kazin, Ulysses Kay, Jacob Lawrence, Alan Lelchuk, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Henry Roth, Philip Roth, Katherine Anne Porter, Mario Puzo, Clyfford Still, Virgil Thomson, Colm Tóibín, Flannery O'Connor, Anne Truitt, Byron Vazakas, and David Foster Wallace.
As happened elsewhere during the McCarthy Era, the peace and quiet cultivated in the place of refuge that was the colony was shattered in 1949 when a news story accused writer Agnes Smedley of spying for the Soviet Union. Smedley had traveled with Mao Zedong to report on the Chinese Communist Revolution. In 1943, she visited Yaddo and remained there for the next five years. Poet Robert Lowell pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by the FBI. However, she was eventually exonerated of all charges, but she learned from the investigation that her assistant Mary Townsend was an FBI informant.[4] Ames remained director until her death in 1977, having overseen the Yaddo community since 1926.
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.[5] Repairs cost an estimated $1,400.[6]
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.[7] Novelist Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her entire estate, valued at $3 million, to the community.[8]
Other
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. [citation needed] 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." [citation needed] While visitors are not admitted to the main mansion or artists' residencies, they may visit the gardens.
The Trasks also built "Trayaddo" in Tuxedo Park, New York in 1900. That stone and timber mansion was sold in the early 1920s to fellow financier Alfred Lee Loomis, who would turn a portion of it into the famed Loomis Laboratories, where ground-breaking scientific research was covertly conducted.[9]
Yaddo is included in the Union Avenue Historic District.
References
- ^ a b "Yaddo and Substance". Time. 5 September 1938.
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 Trask's vision. But whether or not they fitted Katrina's 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: Poet Kenneth Fearing (Angel Arms, Poems), Critic Newton Arvin (Hawthorne), Novelists Joseph 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 (2.0 km2) estate with pine groves, vast lawns, artificial lakes with ducks, famous rose gardens, 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 famous inn formerly on the site of the Trask estate, where the Trasks had spent their summers. It was one of the dozen places where Poe was supposed to have written The Raven and Katrina Trask said it inspired her own poetry. - ^ http://www.wiawaka.org/history.html
- ^ Yaddo. "Yaddo Guests - Lists Of Artists".
- ^ The Lowell Affair: Yaddo's Red Scare; see also "Deeply and mysteriously implicated" by Carla Blumenkranz.
- ^ Kinney, Jim (May 18, 2005). "Vandals Strike Yaddo Gardens". The Saratogian. Retrieved January 1, 2011.
- ^ Kinney, Jim (May 21, 2006). "Yaddo Vandals' Damage Undone". The Saratogian. Retrieved January 1, 2011.
- ^ "$1M gift received by Yaddo". The Business Review. Albany, New York. December 17, 1998. Retrieved January 1, 2011.
- ^ Barron, James; Martin, Douglas (February 18, 1998). "Public LIves; Here and There". The New York Times. Retrieved December 31, 2010.
- ^ Alvarez, Luis W. (1980). "Alfred Lee Loomis". National Academy of Sciences. Biographical memoirs. Vol. 51. Washington D.C.: National Academies Press. p. 316.