Update to 2021 Summer Session
Letter From Sarah Workneh, Skowhegan Co-Director
When I last wrote in March, all of us—and the world—knew so little about what lay ahead. When we canceled the summer program in March, I was scared of what was to come in the immediate, but perhaps remained overly hopeful in what the summer months would bring.
At Skowhegan, we have still not returned to our offices for admissions or even every day work. Yet as the fall has progressed, we have continued to envision summer 2021 while cautiously monitoring health and safety recommendations, protocols, and realities throughout the world and locally in Maine.
As of today, I write to ask for your continued patience as we determine how to proceed for the summer of 2021. We will make a firm decision about if and how the program can run in early January.
In January, if we decide to proceed with the program for 2021:
We will let you know what, if any, accommodations or changes to the program may occur to ensure health and safety in regards to COVID-19.
We will resume admissions to be completed by early March.
In January, if we decide NOT to proceed with the program for 2021:
We will address how to deal with application fees submitted for 2020 at that time. We will make a holistic and comprehensive, considered decision for the entire applicant pool in January. We are a small staff, and don’t have the capacity to adjudicate individual requests.
Until that point, as we are not in the office, please direct all questions to help@skowheganart.org.
I am consulting with peers at colleges and universities, artists who run shops and facilities, public health experts and medical professionals; including our own alumni who are artists, but also doctors and nurses dealing with COVID-19 on the frontlines.
Please know that all of us at Skowhegan—myself, faculty, staff, and our boards—want the program to move forward in 2021, but we have a responsibility to you, to our neighbors in Maine, and to ourselves to prioritize everyone’s physical and emotional health as well as the integrity of the program over our own desire to gather in Maine. Skowhegan is an incredibly special, rigorous, and thrilling experience, and while we all miss it, its longevity as a school and organization allows us to feel as though part of protecting that experience and the ethos it embodies relies on protecting the people who make up Skowhegan—applicants and participants alike.
You all have been very gracious with Skowhegan thus far. Your kindness, as we all have experienced some of this together, has meant a lot to us and to me. Sometimes, I rewind back to March and it seems almost like a dream with all that has transpired over the past eight months, these past weeks in the US, in particular. It is impossible to acknowledge everything that has transpired over the last weeks, months, lifetimes in an admissions update, but of course, I want to say something to all of you.
When I began drafting this note, I started to think about that optimism I held that 2021 would return to normal (as if that’s actually a thing or even a thing that I necessarily want), and more recently, I briefly entertained the idea of what seems like a collective hopelessness. We have begun to acknowledge that notions of universality can be dangerous, and it is important to acknowledge that in the face of this pandemic and the political moment that we have faced these challenges differently, some of us from positions of real and embodied danger and real and embodied isolation. But it is also important to recognize that for perhaps the first time, as a globe, we are actively experiencing something simultaneously.
We should have been linked empathetically at least, through countless conflicts, occupations, illnesses, wars, oppressions for a long, long time. The opportunity that we find at Skowhegan to traverse some of the distance between our lives and experiences in order to see differently, is one we might apply abstractly in this moment. As the virus surges and re-surges, I hope we all start to envision some space forward that uses the simultaneity of this distance and this global experience to recognize the limitations we have accepted thus far, and move beyond them. Where that work begins for each of us is different, but even if the personal isn’t universal—the opportunity, even in the smallest ways, is.
I will be in touch in January.
Until then be safe and be good to each other,
Sarah Workneh
Co-Director
Previous Letters to Applicants: