Yaddo is an

artists' community An art colony, also known as an artists' colony, can be defined two ways. Its most liberal description refers to the organic congregation of artists in towns, villages and rural areas, often drawn by areas of natural beauty, the prior existence o ...

located on a estate in

Saratoga Springs, New York Saratoga Springs is a city in Saratoga County, New York, United States. The population was 28,491 at the 2020 census. The name reflects the presence of mineral springs in the area, which has made Saratoga a popular resort destination for over 2 ...

. Its mission is "to nurture the creative process by providing an opportunity for artists to work without interruption in a supportive environment.". On March 11, 2013 it was designated a

National Historic Landmark A National Historic Landmark (NHL) is a building, district, object, site, or structure that is officially recognized by the United States government for its outstanding historical significance. Only some 2,500 (~3%) of over 90,000 places listed ...

. It offers residencies to artists working in choreography, film, literature, musical composition, painting, performance art, photography, printmaking, sculpture, and video. Collectively, artists who have worked at Yaddo have won 66

Pulitzer Prizes The Pulitzer Prize () is an award for achievements in newspaper, magazine, online journalism, literature, and musical composition within the United States. It was established in 1917 by provisions in the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made ...

, 27 MacArthur Fellowships, 61 National Book Awards, 24

National Book Critics Circle Award The National Book Critics Circle Awards are a set of annual American literary awards by the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC) to promote "the finest books and reviews published in English".Rome Prize The Rome Prize is awarded by the American Academy in Rome, in Rome, Italy. Approximately thirty scholars and artists are selected each year to receive a study fellowship at the academy. Prizes have been awarded annually since 1921, with a hiatus ...

s, 49 Whiting Writers' Awards, a Nobel Prize (

Saul Bellow Saul Bellow (born Solomon Bellows; 10 July 1915 – 5 April 2005) was a Canadian-born American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only w ...

, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976), at least one Man Booker Prize ( Alan Hollinghurst, 2004) and countless other honors. Yaddo is included in the Union Avenue Historic District.

History

The estate was purchased in 1881 by the financier

Spencer Trask Spencer Trask (September 18, 1844 – December 31, 1909) was an American financier, philanthropist, and venture capitalist. Beginning in the 1870s, Trask began investing and supporting entrepreneurs, including Thomas Edison's invention of the el ...

and his wife, the writer

Katrina Trask Katrina Trask (May 30, 1853 – January 8, 1922), also known as Kate Nichols Trask, was an American author and philanthropist. Life account She was born Kate Nichols in Brooklyn, New York to George Little Nichols and Christina Mary Cole. ...

. The first mansion on the property burned down in 1893, and the Trasks then built the current house. Yaddo is a

neologism A neologism Greek νέο- ''néo''(="new") and λόγος /''lógos'' meaning "speech, utterance"] is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the process of entering common use, but that has not been fully accepted int ...

invented by one of the Trask children and was meant to rhyme with "shadow".

Artists' colony

In 1900, after the premature deaths of the Trasks' four children, Spencer Trask decided to turn the estate into an artists' retreat as a gift to his wife. He did this with the financial assistance of philanthropist

George Foster Peabody George Foster Peabody (July 27, 1852 – March 4, 1938) was an American banker and philanthropist. Early life He was born to George Henry Peabody and Elvira Peabody (''née'' Canfield) as the first of four children. Both parents were New Eng ...

. The first artists arrived 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 Wiawaka is a holiday house for women. It has lake front property on Lake George, New York. It is one of the few remaining fully operational vacation/retreat centers which arose out of the women's rights movement in the early part of the twentieth ...

, at the request of Mary Wiltsie Fuller. At least in its early years, Yaddo was funded by profits from the Bowling Green Offices Building in Manhattan, in which Spencer Trask was extensively involved. In 1949 during the

McCarthy Era McCarthyism is the practice of making false or unfounded accusations of subversion and treason, especially when related to anarchism, communism and socialism, and especially when done in a public and attention-grabbing manner. The term origina ...

, a news story accurately accused writer Agnes Smedley of spying for the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, ...

. Smedley had traveled with

Mao Zedong Mao Zedong pronounced ; also romanised traditionally as Mao Tse-tung. (26 December 1893 – 9 September 1976), also known as Chairman Mao, was a Chinese communist revolutionary who was the founder of the People's Republic of China (PRC) ...

to report on the Chinese Communist Revolution and, beginning in 1943, had spent five years at Yaddo. Poet Robert Lowell pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by the FBI. Ames was eventually exonerated of all charges but learned from the investigation that her assistant Mary Townsend was an FBI informant. Ames remained director until her retirement in 1969, having overseen the Yaddo community from its creation in 1924. Ames was succeeded by Newman E. Waite who served as president from 1969 until 1977 when Curtis Harnack assumed the position. Literary critic and eventual Yaddo board member Louis Kronenberger wrote in his memoir that to call Yaddo "a mixture of some of the most attractive, enjoyable, generous-minded people and of others who were weird, megalomaniac, intransigent, pugnacious is only to say that it has housed and nourished most of the finest talents in the arts of the past forty-odd years—the immensely fruitful years of Elizabeth Ames's directorship."

Recent years

In May 2005, vandals, using

paintball Paintball is a competitive team shooting sport in which players eliminate opponents from play by hitting them with spherical dye-filled gelatin capsules called paintballs that break upon impact. Paintballs are usually shot using low-energy a ...

guns, damaged two of the Four Seasons statues, the Poet's Bench, a fountain, and pathways with blue paint. Repairs cost $1,400. In 2018, Yaddo elected photographer Peter Kayafas and novelist Janice Y.K. Lee as Co-Chairs of its Board of Directors. Yaddo has received large contributions from Spencer Trask & Company and Kevin Kimberlin, the firm's current chairman. Novelist Patricia Highsmith bequeathed her estate, valued at $3 million, to the community.

Facilities and gardens

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."At Yaddo, statues truly are for all seasons,"
''Daily Gazette''

Schenectady, New York Schenectady () is a city in Schenectady County, New York, United States, of which it is the county seat. As of the 2020 census, the city's population of 67,047 made it the state's ninth-largest city by population. The city is in eastern New Y ...

, January 21, 2017. 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." While visitors are not admitted to the main mansion or artists' residences, they may visit the gardens.

Alumni artists-in-residence

Yaddo has hosted more than 6,000 artists including: * Hannah Arendt *

Michael Ashkin Michael Ashkin is an American artist who makes sculptures, videos, photographs and installations depicting marginalized, desolate landscapes. He is a professor at Cornell University College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Ashkin was a 2009 G ...

Newton Arvin Fredrick Newton Arvin (August 25, 1900 – March 21, 1963) was an American literary critic and academic. He achieved national recognition for his studies of individual nineteenth-century American authors. After teaching at Smith College in N ...

* Milton Avery * James Baldwin * Louise Belcourt *

* Leonard Bernstein *

Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American poet and short-story writer. She was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 1949 to 1950, the Pulitzer Prize winner for Poetry in 1956, the National Book Awar ...

* Sharon Butler * Truman Capote * Henri Cartier-Bresson * Jordan Casteel * Rebecca Chace * John Cheever *

Aaron Copland Aaron Copland (, ; November 14, 1900December 2, 1990) was an American composer, composition teacher, writer, and later a conductor of his own and other American music. Copland was referred to by his peers and critics as "the Dean of American Com ...

* Roger Crossgrove * Beauford Delaney * Arthur Deshaies * Blane De St. Croix *

Sari Dienes Sari Dienes (8 October 1898 – 25 May 1992) was a Hungarian-born American artist. During a career spanning six decades she worked in a wide range of media, creating paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, ceramics, textile designs, sets and c ...

John Dilg John Dilg (born 1945) is an American painter based in the Midwestern United States, Midwest. He is known for idiosyncratic landscapes that use a pared-down visual vocabulary drawing on imagination, Vernacular#Metaphorical usage, vernacular artif ...

* Torkwase Dyson *

Mary Beth Edelson Mary Beth Edelson (born Mary Elizabeth Johnson) (6 February 1933 - 20 April 2021) was an American artist and pioneer of the feminist art movement, deemed one of the notable "first-generation feminist artists." Edelson was a printmaker, book art ...

* Jonathan Elliott *

Kenneth Fearing Kenneth Flexner Fearing (July 28, 1902 – June 26, 1961) was an American poet and novelist. A major poet of the Depression era, he addressed the shallowness and consumerism of American society as he saw it, often by ironically adapting the lan ...

* Jonathan Franzen *

Daniel Fuchs Daniel Fuchs (June 25, 1909 – July 26, 1993) was an American screenwriter, fiction writer, and essayist. Biography Daniel Fuchs was born to a Jewish family on the Lower East Side, Manhattan, but his family moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn whi ...

William Gass William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven vol ...

* Steve Giovinco *

Philip Guston Philip Guston (born Phillip Goldstein, June 27, 1913 – June 7, 1980), was a Canadian American painter, printmaker, muralist and draftsman. Early in his five decade career, muralist David Siquieros described him as one of "the most promising ...

Daron Hagen Daron Aric Hagen ( ; born November 4, 1961) is an American composer, writer, and filmmaker. Biography Early life Daron Hagen was born in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and grew up in New Berlin, a suburb west of Milwaukee. Hagen was the youngest of t ...

* Michael Harrison *

Ruth Heller Ruth Heller Gross (1923–2004), professionally known as Ruth Heller, was a children's author and graphic artist known for her use of bright color and detail in both geometric design and the representation of creatures, plants, patterns, and puz ...

* Patricia Highsmith *

Chester Himes Chester Bomar Himes (July 29, 1909 – November 12, 1984) was an American writer. His works, some of which have been filmed, include '' If He Hollers Let Him Go'', published in 1945, and the Harlem Detective series of novels for which he is be ...

* Marilyn Gayle Hoff * Langston Hughes *

Ted Hughes Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest wri ...

Alfred Kazin Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. He wrote often about the immigrant experience in early twentieth century America. Early life Like many other New York Intellectuals, Alfred Kazin was ...

* Jeanne Jaffe *

Ulysses Kay Ulysses Simpson Kay (January 7, 1917 in Tucson, Arizona, Tucson, Arizona – May 20, 1995 in Englewood, New Jersey, Englewood, New Jersey) was an American composer. His music is mostly neoclassicism, neoclassical in style. Life and career Kay, the ...

* Wlodzimierz Ksiazek * Louis Kronenberger *

Stanley Kunitz Stanley Jasspon Kunitz (; July 29, 1905May 14, 2006) was an American poet. He was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress twice, first in 1974 and then again in 2000. Biography Kunitz was born in Worcester, Massach ...

* Jacob Lawrence * Alan Lelchuk * Robert Lowell * Grace Lumpkin * Alison Lurie * Carmen Maria Machado *

Carson McCullers Carson McCullers (February 19, 1917 – September 29, 1967) was an American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and poet. Her first novel, '' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter'' (1940), explores the spiritual isolation of misfits ...

* Melissa Meyer * Robert Nozick *

Flannery O'Connor Mary Flannery O'Connor (March 25, 1925August 3, 1964) was an American novelist, short story writer and essayist. She wrote two novels and 31 short stories, as well as a number of reviews and commentaries. She was a Southern literature, Southe ...

* Dorothy Parker *

William Ordway Partridge William Ordway Partridge (April 11, 1861 – May 22, 1930) was an American sculptor, teacher and author. Among his best-known works are the Shakespeare Monument in Chicago, the equestrian statue of General Grant in Brooklyn, the ''Pietà'' at S ...

Sylvia Plath Sylvia Plath (; October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963) was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer. She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for two of her published collections, '' Th ...

* Katherine Anne Porter *

Mario Puzo Mario Francis Puzo (; ; October 15, 1920 – July 2, 1999) was an American author, screenwriter, and journalist. He is known for his crime novels about the Italian-American Mafia and Sicilian Mafia, most notably '' The Godfather'' (1969), whi ...

* Carl Rakosi *

Tom Raworth Thomas Moore Raworth (19 July 1938 – 8 February 2017) was an English-Irish poet, publisher, editor, and teacher who published over 40 books of poetry and prose during his life. His work has been translated and published in many countries. Rawor ...

* Esther Rolick *

Ned Rorem Ned Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) was an American composer of contemporary classical music and writer. Best known for his art songs, which number over 500, Rorem was the leading American of his time writing in the genre. Althoug ...

* Henry Roth *

Philip Roth Philip Milton Roth (March 19, 1933 – May 22, 2018) was an American novelist and short story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophicall ...

Carl Schmitt Carl Schmitt (; 11 July 1888 – 7 April 1985) was a German jurist, political theorist, and prominent member of the Nazi Party. Schmitt wrote extensively about the effective wielding of political power. A conservative theorist, he is noted as ...

Delmore Schwartz Delmore Schwartz (December 8, 1913 – July 11, 1966) was an American poet and short story writer. Early life Schwartz was born in 1913 in Brooklyn, New York, where he also grew up. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when ...

* Ann Loomis Silsbee * Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones *

Clyfford Still Clyfford Still (November 30, 1904 – June 23, 1980) was an American painter, and one of the leading figures in the first generation of Abstract Expressionists, who developed a new, powerful approach to painting in the years immediately follow ...

Stephanie Strickland Stephanie Strickland (born February 22, 1942) is a poet living in New York City. She has published ten volumes of print poetry and co-authored twelve digital poems. Her files and papers are being collected by the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book And ...

Virgil Thomson Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music. He has been described as a modernist, a neoromantic, a neoclass ...

* Colm Tóibín * Lionel Trilling * Anne Truitt * Byron Vazakas *

David Foster Wallace David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel '' Infinite Jest'', whi ...

Eudora Welty Eudora Alice Welty (April 13, 1909 – July 23, 2001) was an American short story writer, novelist and photographer who wrote about the American South. Her novel '' The Optimist's Daughter'' won the Pulitzer Prize in 1973. Welty received numerou ...

In popular culture

Jonathan Ames Jonathan Ames (; born March 23, 1964) is an American author who has written a number of novels and comic memoirs, and is the creator of two television series, '' Bored to Death'' ( HBO) and ''Blunt Talk'' ( STARZ). In the late '90s and early ...

' book ''Wake Up Sir!'' (2004) is partially set at Yaddo. ''Dagger of the Mind'' (1941), a novel by 1930s Yaddo resident

, takes place in Demarest Hall, an art colony modeled after Yaddo. In ''You'' season 1, episode 8: "You Got Me Babe", Blythe helps Beck focus on writing and break through writer's block by disconnecting Beck from her cellphone and the Internet, and setting up Beck's apartment to make her "own Yaddo". Yaddo is mentioned repeatedly throughout the

Theresa Rebeck Theresa Rebeck (born February 19, 1958) is an American playwright, television writer, and novelist. Her work has appeared on the Broadway and Off-Broadway stage, in film, and on television. Among her awards are the Mystery Writers of America's ...

play '' Seminar''. In the 2018 Netflix comedy-drama '' Private Life'', aspiring writer Sadie (played by

Kayli Carter Kayli Carter (born July 8, 1993) is an American actress. She portrayed Sadie Rose in the Netflix western TV series '' Godless'', and Amber McCarden in the movie '' Bad Education'', opposite Hugh Jackman and Allison Janney. Her role in ''Priva ...

) gets the opportunity to spend a month at Yaddo to focus on refining her writing skills. It is also repeatedly mentioned and referenced throughout the movie, e.g. by a coffee mug showing the Yaddo name on it. A few scenes of the movie are set at Yaddo‘s location as well. Mentioned in the Showtime series '' The Affair'' season 2, episode 11 where Noah Solloway's agent offers to set him up at Yaddo to write his second novel.

Notes

References

External links

* * {{Authority control American art Artist residencies 1926 establishments in New York (state) Saratoga Springs, New York Artist colonies Tourist attractions in Saratoga Springs, New York National Historic Landmarks in New York (state) National Register of Historic Places in Saratoga County, New York