As part of the endowment agreement, the established month-long fall residency program will continue as it has, while two new programs, the Kippy Stroud Emerging Visiting Maine Artist and the The Kippy Stroud Memorial COA Lecture will further add to the offerings. The two-week visitor program allows a Maine artist, chosen by COA arts faculty, to contribute directly to the studio classroom as a collaborative shared space, incorporating the program into a COA arts course in the late winter or early spring term in context with COA’s core human-ecological field of study. The public lecture, set for late May each year, honor’s Stroud’s original Acadia Summer Arts Program in Bar Harbor, which included several lectures per week. Lecturers will be selected from three nominations from COA and three candidates identified by the MBSF board.
Artist Pamela Moulton has been chosen as the inaugural recipient of the Kippy Stroud Emerging Visiting Maine Artist in winter 2024, and Serubiri Moses will present the Kippy Stroud Memorial COA Lecture in spring 2024.
“The aggregate of this new year-long program expansion encompasses the full range of activities that COA excels in. The college’s nationally and internationally renowned human-ecological ethos will be powerfully amplified and perpetuated through this endowed partnership,” said COA Allan Stone Chair in the Visual Arts Catherine Clinger, who has led development of the program. “COA wishes to join all who knew and cared for Kippy in preserving her generous commitment to art and artists and her deep affection for Mount Desert Island and Maine.”
Kippy Stroud Emerging Visiting Maine Artist
This year, artist Pamela Moulton is joining faculty members Dru Colbert and Jodi Baker in their Production Monster Course, during which students collaboratively research and build a hybrid performance installation performed for the public at the end of the term. Moulton join the class for a full-time stint in the studio during weeks three and four of the term, and will return for the performance during week nine.
A prolific collaborator as both teacher and artist, Pamela Moulton tries to foster an ethos of generosity and creative exchange through making art and collaborating with multi-generational communities both near home and faraway, like Albania and India. Her installations are playful, large scale, hands on, and exploratory. Moulton is a multi-disciplinary environmental artist rooted in world-building. She recently collaborated with over 5,600 community partners, including lobstermen, neuro-divergent patients, schools, artists and many more in her TempoArts installation in Portland’s Payson Park. Her interactive spaces may be crawled through, climbed upon and occupied—allowing the public to explore its environmental consciousness in a direct, material way.
Moulton’s recent energetic sculptures and woven environments are built from abandoned fishing equipment, known in the industry as ghost gear. Her ambiguous sculptures and installations are reminiscent of macro and microorganisms often gone unnoticed or unseen by the human eye. The accessibility and joyousness of this work lends itself to a greater consciousness about the fragility of our ecosystem and inspires better futures worth imagining.
The concept of community members as collaborators continues after the work is installed. The invented spaces encourage the public to gather and engage in creative events, including dance, music, poetry, picnics, and meaningful discourse. Theatrical concepts saturate Moulton’s practice. Her human-scale environments prompt viewers to react viscerally. Costumes are provided to viewers as an invitation to become active performers in the space. The interactive pieces spur the public’s consciousness through activities of exploration and play. Moulton’s art acts as an elixir that transports you to a child-like state of mind, awakening your curiosity and senses.
Kippy Stroud Memorial COA Lecture – Spring 2024
Serubiri Moses is a writer and curator who currently adjunct assistant professor in the Dept. of Art and Art History at Hunter College, where he teaches contemporary African and Afro-diaspora art history. He is also co-curator for the fifth edition of the perennial survey of contemporary art, Greater New York, at MoMA PS1. Previously, Moses was part of the curatorial team for the tenth Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art entitled “We Don’t Need Another Hero” (2017-2018). From 2013-17 Moses travelled extensively to participate in curatorial residencies, he held the position of Stadtschreiber at the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies and in 2014 he co-curated the second public art biennial in Kampala, KLA ART, entitled “Unmapped,” and organized a four-volume public program at the Goethe Zentrum Kampala. From 2011-2012 he was a critic at the Ugandan daily newspaper New Vision Daily. With his interests ranging from historical narration, African feminist theory, indigeneity, and iconography, Moses is currently an associate researcher in “African Art History and the Formation of a Modern Aesthetic,” a long-term project founded by the Bayreuth Academy of Advanced African Studies in Germany. Moses completed an MA in curatorial studies from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, where his thesis focused on exhibition histories of small projects in Africa.
Recent and forthcoming essays, books, and conference talks include: Co-editor of Forces of Art: Perspectives from a Changing World (Valiz: The Netherlands, 2020); “The Problem of Mastery: Criticism from Kampala,” forthcoming in a catalog published by Museum Ludwig, Cologne; “Which Art History in Africa?: A Question of Method,” forthcoming in Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture; “Counter-Imaginaries: ‘Women Artists on the Move’, ‘Second to None’, and ‘Like a Virgin …” in Afterall 47 (2019); “Byron Kawadwa and FESTAC 77” in FESTAC ’77: Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (Chimurenga and Afterall Books, 2019); “The Hiss and Steam of a Pot of Blood” (online) commissioned by Haus der Kulturen der Welt, as part of Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology (2018); “Women on the Move (1985-2015): A Comparative study “(2017) at Para-Site International Conference in Hong Kong; the 17th Triennial Symposium on African Art of the ACASA (Arts Council of the African Studies Association) in Accra, Ghana (2017); “La Vida del Plátano” (Calypso Editions, 2016); The Place from Which We Look (Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, and Betón Salon at Université Paris Diderot, 2015); The Use and Abuse of History (Mukono, Uganda, 2015) organized by the School of Oriental and African Studies; and the 41st annual meeting of the African Literature Association in Bayreuth, Germany (2015).
About Kippy Stroud
Credit: Carlos AvendañoMarion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud was a talented artist, teacher, generous philanthropist, and impassioned promoter of contemporary art and artists. Starting in 1977, she founded, funded, and directed The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, an experimental program for artists working in textiles and many other media. Stroud oversaw and funded on Mount Desert Island, where she spent summers throughout her life, the Acadia Summer Arts Program, or, as it was affectionately known, “Kamp Kippy.” For almost three decades Kamp Kippy hosted hundreds of artists with their guests and families. Stroud passed away in 2015 and her foundation is committed to carrying her passion for art forward.
