![]() ![]() Additional residential opportunities for visiting artists, scientists and collaborators are hosted at a nearby 80-acre site surrounded by US Forest Service land (purchased by Sitka in 2017) and Estuary House, a private cottage within the Cascade Head Ranch community (purchased by Sitka in 2021). Today, a cluster of cedar-clad studios, private cottages and welcoming spaces hugs the forested hillside and hosts practitioners and instructors in residence. ![]() As the residency program evolved to include artists and scientists of national and international stature, as well as those just beginning their careers, and as the summer workshop program continued to expand, the Sitka campus grew as well. In 1981, Sitka invited its first artist-in-residence to spend the winter. By the late-1970s, the summer program had evolved to focus primarily on adults, with a wide range of workshops including landscape painting, low-fire ceramics, calligraphy, writing and coastal ecology. But the center's relatively remote location made transportation difficult. In the early years, Sitka partnered with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry, and local schools to bring in summer day-campers, who explored ocean tide pools, hiked old-growth forests and played handmade instruments on a makeshift stage in the meadow. A 270-acre Nature Conservancy preserve borders this community, which also is part of a national Scenic Research Area and a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve. The Center operates on roughly an acre of coastal Sitka spruce forested land donated by the developer of Cascade Head Ranch, an environmentally sensitive residential community at the mouth of the federally protected Salmon River estuary. ![]() Named for the majestic spruce trees that shelter the property, the Sitka Center invites people of all ages and abilities to explore their creative potential in a place of ecological significance and rare natural beauty.įrom the beginning, Sitka has been about collaboration between art and science, across diverse groups of people and with the land itself. Their vision was to create a community where artists and scientists could live, work and teach, freed from the demands of academia and deeply immersed in the natural world.įrom those early workshops in music, pinhole photography and marine biology grew the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In 1970, in the midst of the back-to-nature movement, two young artists, Frank and Jane Boyden, along with other early collaborators, started a summer camp for kids on the Oregon coast. The Sitka Center for Art and Ecology is operated as a public educational project of the Neskowin Coast Foundation, which received its federal non-profit 501(c)(3) status in 1970. ![]()
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