Heartwood songwriting residency at Slough Farm

January 2024
November 2022
April 2022

Heartwood is a trio of singers and composers, including Heidi Wilson, Sarina Partridge, and Willy Clemetson, who create new music born from time in wild places. With simple lyrics and rich vocal harmonies, these singers and
instrumentalists compose music in collaboration with the natural world and seek to create songs that invite people to connect more deeply with the cycles unfolding around and within us.
In April 2022, the Heartwood artists came together for a twelve-day stay at Slough Farm. During their time creating new works the singers invited the community to engage with their music through  a Baby-and-Caregiver Sing-a-long and Community Sing! event. 
The Heartwood singers returned in November 2022 for a second residency focusing their time on their most current project. This second creative stay culminated in an intimate dinner and song-sharing session held at the Farm. 

Slough is excited to host the Heartwood artists again in January 2024.

Iconoclast Dinner Experience Collaboration with The Trustees of Reservations and the Farm Institute

August 2023
August 2022

The Iconoclast Dinner Experience (IDE) is an interdisciplinary platform challenging  paradigms through programming that invites the diverse voices of those, from around the globe, making significant contributions to culture. Annually, IDE hosts five signature events designed to elevate the representation of chefs and beverage professionals of color in the higher echelons of culinary culture.
In 2022, Slough Farm partnered with IDE to host the chefs and provide food for “The King is Dead”: a reception and dinner promoting Island-based sustainable agriculture and emerging female culinary and beverage professionals. The highlighted professionals that year included Jessica Craig, Cassandra Felix, Jae Jung, Misti Norris, Whitney Thomas.
In 2023, Slough was home base, again, for visiting chefs Courtney Evans, Zarah Kahn, Kim Mok and Lateisha Wilson in the week leading up to the second “The King is Dead” dinner.
The chefs and culinary artists invited to contribute to this event spent their time on island visiting local farms, meeting with representatives from various Island-based food equity groups to discuss and explore the challenges that face the community, and hosting a “family dinner” at the farm for IDE partners and supporters.

Read more about The King is Dead and the Iconoclast Dinner Experience on their website

JuNe 2023 Studio North Intensive Hosted at Slough Farm

2023 marked third year Martha’s Vineyard received a unique creation by Moskow Linn Architects’  Studio North intensive. Studio North is a week-long intensive building workshop which offers ten college-age students interested in architecture the opportunity to imagine, develop, and construct design
solutions. Each session investigates a specific use for the site and responds with the design and construction of a complete prototype structure. All projects share a vocabulary of two-by-four framing members, galvanized metal fasteners, translucent fiberglass, and materials gathered on site.
Slough Farm hosted the students as they spent their week working at and with local non profit Island Grown Initiative to construct a multi-purpose shed deemed the “Tool Temple.”

Read more about the project and past Studio North  projects here and in the MV Times

March 2023 Firelight Media Residency at Slough Farm

Founded by award-winning filmmakers and Island seasonal residents Marcia Smith and Stanley Nelson, Firelight Media is a nonprofit organization that supports and develops nonfiction filmmaking by and about communities of color. Four filmmakers supported by Firelight—Brittany Ferrell, Sequoia Hauck, Karla Murthy, and Raúl Paz-Pastrana—were in residence at Slough Farm ahead of the 2023 M.V. Film Festival. Each artist spent time focusing on new documentaries at various stages of development, and the week culminated with a public, ticketed screening of the works at the Grange Hall in West Tisbury

Read more about the artists and the 2023 film festival on the M.V. Times

November 2022 Slough Farm & Literary ARts At Featherstone Center for the Arts Residency At Slough Farm

In its second year, this collaboration between Slough Farm and Featherston invited underrepresented writers/poets from off-Island and paired them with Vineyard writers/poets. The participants in 2022 included non-fiction writer Damon Young; African American fiction writer and producer Essie Chambers;  local teacher, writer, essayist, artist, entrepreneur and activist Jessie Jennings; and, Island poet Donia Elizabeth Allen.
Over the course of one week, the chosen individuals worked on new and ongoing writing projects at the Farm, hosted public workshops for the community and lead workshops at the Featherstone campus for Vineyard high school students from Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School and Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School. The workshops were designed for students who will benefit from hearing diverse expertise, histories, and perspectives that further develop a sense of place and belonging while also honing the students’ writing skills.

Read more about the residency program in the MV Times

September 2022 Radio Play(s) Writing Residency At Slough Farm

The Radio Play(s) Series is a collection of works with each episode presented  “like a stage-performed podcast…unpack[ing] a timely theme(s) through a collection of real world stories told through the spoken work, music and theatrically projected sand animation.”  In September 2022, Slough Farm hosted Guy Mendilow, Regie Gibson,  Alison James and Chris Baum in a
residency to support the creation of Episode 3.
The interdisciplinary collaborators explored themes surrounding myths and used their time together to write, compose and gather stories. In addition to pursuing their own creative process, the artists’ worked with students from the Martha’s Vineyard Public Charter School. The week-long residency concluded with a community dinner event held at the farm.  

Read more about their experience, in their own words, here.

October 2021 Slough Farm & Literary Arts at Featherstone Center for the arts writers residency at slough farm

Slough Farm and Literary Arts at Featherstone (formerly Noepe Center for the Arts) partnered to create an invitation and application-based writing residency for historically underrepresented writers from on and off Martha’s Vineyard. The residency was designed to provide established and emerging writers alike with the time, resources, and community necessary to develop their craft.
In its inaugural year, the residency brought together Brooklyn-based writers and poets Shira Erlichman and Angel Nafis, along with Island-based writer Esper Gaspardi. The three writers devoted their time to new and ongoing projects. Together they lead a single session, intensive writing workshop for students from the Martha’s Vineyard Charter School and the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School, hosted at the Featherstone campus. 

Read more about the residency and the participants on the MV Times

March 2021 Slough Farm & The Yard interdisciplinary residency at slough farm

Curated collaboratively with The Yard and Slough Farm, our March 2021 residency exemplified the foundation’s interest in exploring the intersection between the culinary and the creative arts. For ten days, acclaimed dancer and tradition-bearer of Black Social Dance forms LaTasha Barnes and dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher came together with
culinary artists Katie Yun and Sachi Nagase to live and work together in creative proximity at Slough Farm.  All four artists engaged the Island community through workshop, performance, and by contributing to Slough Farm Suppers. 

Read more about the collaboration in the MV Times and Vineyard Gazette