Artist in Residence Program: The Magician
Our week-long Artist in Residence programs each draw inspiration from a single tarot card, using its symbolic language as a framework for communal exploration.
Teaching artists visit throughout the week to offer workshops, lead rituals, and guide participating residents through interdisciplinary practices. These residencies are spaces where artists and mystics gather to experiment, collaborate, and create new works in dialogue with the natural world.
Past programs have taken place in Twentynine Palms, CA; Joshua Tree, CA; Woodstock, NY; and Wurtsboro, NY, each site shaping the residency with its own landscape, atmosphere, and elemental presence.
The Magician — Artist in Residence (2015, Woodstock, NY)
Guadalupe Maravilla, performance, Magician Artist Residency, Woodstock, NY, 2015, photograph by Eliza Swann.
Our Magician residency invited participants into a week of performance, sound, and esoteric study, all centered on the archetype of the Magician as a transformer of energy, perception, and matter. The program featured workshops and teachings from Frank Haines, Brendan Landis, Guadalupe Maravilla, Mollie McKinley, Zeljko McMullen, Linda Montano, and Eliza Swann, each contributing a unique perspective and artistic lineage.
Throughout the week, Linda Montano guided us through early childhood ideas of acceptance and love, grounding the residency in tenderness and presence. Frank Haines constructed a coffin and ceremonially buried each participant during a sound healing, offering an initiation into surrender, trust, and psychic renewal. Guadalupe Maravilla led a healing sound ritual rooted in his experience working with shamans during his cancer journey, teaching us about the body as a vessel for transformation. Eliza Swann introduced tarot and methods of cultivating the soul through Western esoteric practice, opening intuitive and spiritual pathways for the group. Zeljko McMullen brought us into the worlds of punk, sound, and noise, threading these experiments together with teachings on the esoteric principles of the Tree of Life. Brendan Landis expanded our relationship to experimental sound and its many imaginative forms. Mollie McKinley guided us through performance art practices designed to help locate the self and mend psychic and emotional fragmentation.
Over the course of the residency, artists developed both communal and personal performances reflecting their evolving relationship to the Magician archetype. The week culminated in a collective initiation and an improvised sound performance at the Edgar Cayce A.R.E. in New York City, a final rite that gathered together everything we had explored, crafted, and transformed.
