Yaddo is an artists' community 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 hi ...

, 27 MacArthur Fellowships, 61

National Book Awards The National Book Awards are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The Nat ...

, 24 National Book Critics Circle Awards, 108 Rome Prizes, 49

Whiting Writers' Award The Whiting Award is an American award presented annually to ten emerging writers in fiction, nonfiction, poetry and plays. The award is sponsored by the Mrs. Giles Whiting Foundation Mrs. (American English) or Mrs (British English; standard ...

s, a Nobel Prize ( Saul Bellow, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and

Nobel Prize in Literature ) , image = Nobel Prize.png , caption = , awarded_for = Outstanding contributions in literature , presenter = Swedish Academy , holder = Annie Ernaux (2022) , location = Stockholm, Sweden , year = 1901 , ...

in 1976), at least one

Man Booker Prize The Booker Prize, formerly known as the Booker Prize for Fiction (1969–2001) and the Man Booker Prize (2002–2019), is a literary prize awarded each year for the best novel written in English and published in the United Kingdom or Ireland. ...

(

Alan Hollinghurst Alan James Hollinghurst (born 26 May 1954) is an English novelist, poet, short story writer and translator. He won the 1989 Somerset Maugham Award, the 1994 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2004 Booker Prize. Early life and education H ...

, 2004) and countless other honors. Yaddo is included in the

Union Avenue Historic District Union Avenue Historic District is a historic district in Saratoga Springs, New York. It was listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places in 1978. It includes at least the Congress Park portion of the Canfield Casino and Congress Park ...

History

The estate was purchased in 1881 by the financier Spencer Trask and his wife, the writer Katrina Trask. 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 Philanthropy is a form of altruism that consists of "private initiatives, for the Public good (economics), public good, focusing on quality of life". Philanthropy contrasts with business initiatives, which are private initiatives for private goo ...

George Foster Peabody. 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, at the request of Mary Wiltsie Fuller. At least in its early years, Yaddo was funded by profits from the

Bowling Green Offices Building The Bowling Green Offices Building (also known as the Bowling Green Building, Bowling Green Offices, or 11 Broadway) is an office building located at 11 Broadway, across from Bowling Green park in the Financial District of Manhattan i ...

in Manhattan, in which Spencer Trask was extensively involved. In 1949 during the McCarthy Era, a news story accurately accused writer

Agnes Smedley Agnes Smedley (February 23, 1892 – May 6, 1950) was an American journalist, writer, and activist who supported the Indian Independence Movement and the Chinese Communist Revolution. Raised in a poverty-stricken miner's family in Missouri and Co ...

of spying for the

Soviet Union The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen national ...

. 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 Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV (; March 1, 1917 – September 12, 1977) was an American poet. He was born into a Boston Brahmin family that could trace its origins back to the ''Mayflower''. His family, past and present, were important subjects i ...

pushed the Board of Directors to oust Yaddo's director, Elizabeth Ames, who was being questioned by the

FBI The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic Intelligence agency, intelligence and Security agency, security service of the United States and its principal Federal law enforcement in the United States, federal law enforcement age ...

. 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 Louis Kronenberger (December 9, 1904April 30, 1980) was an American literary critic (longest with ''Time'', (1938-1961), novelist, and biographer who wrote extensively on drama and the 18th century. Background Kronenberger was born in Cincinnat ...

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 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 Peter Kayafas (born 1971) is an American photographer, publisher, and educator based in New York City. He creates black and white photographs that are "simple and spare, yet quietly overpowering with their evocation of a history on a scale beyond t ...

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 Kevin Kimberlin is chairman of Spencer Trask & Co., an advanced technology firm. Kimberlin has distinguished himself by partnering with or backing "obsessive missionaries" including Jonas Salk, Walter Gilbert, John Wennberg and Robert Langer. T ...

, the firm's current chairman. Novelist

Patricia Highsmith Patricia Highsmith (January 19, 1921 – February 4, 1995) was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novel ...

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 Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was born ...

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 Gugg ...

* Newton Arvin *

Milton Avery Milton Clark Avery (March 7, 1885 – January 3, 1965Haskell, B. (2003). "Avery, Milton". Grove Art Online.) was an American modern painter. Born in Altmar, New York, he moved to Connecticut in 1898 and later to New York City. He was the husband ...

James Baldwin James Arthur Baldwin (August 2, 1924 – December 1, 1987) was an American writer. He garnered acclaim across various media, including essays, novels, plays, and poems. His first novel, '' Go Tell It on the Mountain'', was published in 1953; de ...

Louise Belcourt Louise Belcourt (born 1961) is a Canadian-American artist based in New York, known for elusive, largely abstract paintings that blend modernist formal play, a commitment to the physical world, and a visual language that shifts between landscape ...

* Saul Bellow *

Leonard Bernstein Leonard Bernstein ( ; August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, pianist, music educator, author, and humanitarian. Considered to be one of the most important conductors of his time, he was the first America ...

Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop (February 8, 1911 – October 6, 1979) was an American people, 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 N ...

Sharon Butler Sharon Butler (born 1959) is an American artist and arts writer. She is known for teasing out ideas about contemporary abstraction in her art and writing, particularly a style she called "new casualism" in a 2011 essay. Butler uses process as m ...

Truman Capote Truman Garcia Capote ( ; born Truman Streckfus Persons; September 30, 1924 – August 25, 1984) was an American novelist, screenwriter, playwright and actor. Several of his short stories, novels, and plays have been praised as literary classics, ...

Henri Cartier-Bresson Henri Cartier-Bresson (; 22 August 1908 – 3 August 2004) was a French humanist photographer considered a master of candid photography, and an early user of 35mm film. He pioneered the genre of street photography, and viewed photography as cap ...

Jordan Casteel Jordan Casteel (born 1989) is an American figurative painter. Casteel typically paints intimate portraits of friends and family members as well as neighbors and strangers in Harlem and New York. Casteel lives and works in New York City. Early l ...

Rebecca Chace Rebecca Chace is an American novelist, playwright, screenwriter, and actor. She is the author of the novel ''Leaving Rock Harbor'' (2010), which was recognized as an Editors’ Choice by ''The'' ''New York Times'', a June Indie Notable Book by th ...

John Cheever John William Cheever (May 27, 1912 – June 18, 1982) was an American short story writer and novelist. He is sometimes called "the Chekhov of the suburbs". His fiction is mostly set in the Upper East Side of Manhattan; the Westchester suburbs; ...

* Aaron Copland *

Roger Crossgrove Roger Lynn Crossgrove (November 17, 1921 – December 14, 2016) was an American artist and educator who served as Professor of Art at the Pratt Institute and the University of Connecticut for a total of 35 years. He was best known for his monoty ...

Beauford Delaney Beauford Delaney (December 30, 1901 – March 26, 1979) was an American modernist painter. He is remembered for his work with the Harlem Renaissance in the 1930s and 1940s, as well as his later works in abstract expressionism following his move ...

Arthur Deshaies Arthur Deshaies (1920–2011) was an American printmaker and painter who made non-geometric abstractions in a style he called "abstract impressionist." After his death a curator described a dominant aspect of Deshaies' prints, calling them "bi ...

* Blane De St. Croix * Sari Dienes * John Dilg *

Torkwase Dyson Torkwase Dyson is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York, United States. Her work has been exhibited at the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Whitney Museum of American Art, The Museum of Modern Art, New York ,the Corcoran College o ...

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 Jonathan Elliott is an American composer and teacher. Born in 1962, Elliott grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, studying piano from the age of six. He went on to study composition at Vassar College, where his teachers included Annea Lockwood and ...

* Kenneth Fearing *

Jonathan Franzen Jonathan Earl Franzen (born August 17, 1959) is an American novelist and essayist. His 2001 novel ''The Corrections'', a sprawling, satirical family drama, drew widespread critical acclaim, earned Franzen a National Book Award, was a Pulitzer Pr ...

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 *

Steve Giovinco Steve Giovinco is an American photographer. He created a hand-held large-format (8x8") camera in 1992. Life and career In the 1980s, Giovinco attended Yale University. In 1991 he had his first one-man exhibition, at the Kansas City Art Institu ...

* Philip Guston * Daron Hagen * Michael Harrison * Ruth Heller *

* Chester Himes *

Marilyn Gayle Hoff Marilyn Gayle Hoff (born 1942), also known as Marilyn Gayle, is an American author, songwriter, teacher, and activist. Her writing includes the novels ''Dink's Blues'', ''Rose'', and ''Free Ride'', as well as the co-authored book ''Bring Out Your ...

Langston Hughes James Mercer Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) was an American poet, social activist, novelist, playwright, and columnist from Joplin, Missouri. One of the earliest innovators of the literary art form called jazz poetry, Hug ...

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 *

Jeanne Jaffe Jeanne Jaffe (born 1950) is an American multidisciplinary artist known for her sculpture and installations. Biography Jaffe is Professor Emeritus of Sculpture at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. She is also a long-term visiting profe ...

* Ulysses Kay *

Wlodzimierz Ksiazek Włodzimierz Książek (1951 in Warsaw, Warsaw, Poland – body found May 18, 2011 in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, Pawtucket, USA) was a Polish-born contemporary artist based in New England, and since 2001 worked from a 6000 sq. ft. studio in Rho ...

* Stanley Kunitz *

Jacob Lawrence Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ...

Alan Lelchuk Alan Lelchuk (born 1938) is an American novelist, professor, and editor from Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.A. in World Literature from Brooklyn College in 1960 and received his M.A. in 1962 and Ph.D. in 1965, both in English and from Stan ...

Grace Lumpkin Grace Lumpkin (March 3, 1891 – March 23, 1980) was an American writer of proletarian literature, focusing most of her works on the Depression era and the rise and fall of favor surrounding communism in the United States. Most important of four ...

Alison Lurie Alison Stewart Lurie (September 3, 1926December 3, 2020) was an American novelist and academic. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for her 1984 novel '' Foreign Affairs''. Although better known as a novelist, she wrote many non-fiction boo ...

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* Carson McCullers *

Melissa Meyer Melissa Meyer (born May 4, 1946) is an American painter. The ''Wall Street Journal'' has referred to her as a "lighthearted Abstract Expressionist". Life and work Meyer received a fellowship at the American Academy in Rome in 1980, two National En ...

Robert Nozick Robert Nozick (; November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American philosopher. He held the Joseph Pellegrino University Professorship at Harvard University,

* Flannery O'Connor *

Dorothy Parker Dorothy Parker (née Rothschild; August 22, 1893 – June 7, 1967) was an American poet, writer, critic, and satirist based in New York; she was known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th-century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhap ...

* William Ordway Partridge * Sylvia Plath *

Katherine Anne Porter Katherine Anne Porter (May 15, 1890 – September 18, 1980) was an American journalist, essayist, short story writer, novelist, and political activist. Her 1962 novel ''Ship of Fools'' was the best-selling novel in America that year, but her sho ...

* Mario Puzo *

Carl Rakosi Carl Rakosi (November 6, 1903 – June 25, 2004) was the last surviving member of the original group of poets who were given the rubric Objectivist. He was still publishing and performing his poetry well into his 90s. Early life Rakosi was ...

* Tom Raworth *

Esther Rolick Esther Rolick (1922–2008) was an American painter born in Rochester, New York, on October 9, 1922. She studied at the Art Students League and was represented by Jacques Seligmann Galleries in New York in the early 1950's. She was a fellow at ...

* Ned Rorem * 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 * Delmore Schwartz *

Ann Loomis Silsbee Ann Loomis Silsbee (21 July 1930 - 28 August 2003) was an American composer and poet who composed two operas, published three books of poetry, and received several awards, commissions, and fellowships. Silsbee was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ...

Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones Elizabeth Sparhawk-Jones (born Elizabeth Huntingdon Jones; November 8, 1885 – December 26, 1968) was an American painter who lived in New York City, Philadelphia, and Paris, France. She had a successful career as a painter at the turn of the cen ...

* Clyfford Still * Stephanie Strickland * Virgil Thomson *

Colm Tóibín Colm Tóibín (, approximately ; born 30 May 1955) is an Irish novelist, short story writer, essayist, journalist, critic, playwright and poet. His first novel, '' The South'', was published in 1990. '' The Blackwater Lightship'' was shortlis ...

Lionel Trilling Lionel Mordecai Trilling (July 4, 1905 – November 5, 1975) was an American literary critic, short story writer, essayist, and teacher. He was one of the leading U.S. critics of the 20th century who analyzed the contemporary cultural, social, ...

Anne Truitt Anne Truitt (March 16, 1921December 23, 2004), born Anne Dean, was an American sculptor of the mid-20th century. She became well known in the late 1960s for her large-scale minimalist sculptures, especially after influential solo shows at André ...

Byron Vazakas Byron Vazakas (September 24, 1905, New York City - September 30, 1987, Reading, Pennsylvania) was an American poet, whose career extended from the modernist era well into the postmodernist period; nominee for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1947 ...

* David Foster Wallace * Eudora Welty

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 2000s, ...

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

play ''

Seminar A seminar is a form of academic instruction, either at an academic institution or offered by a commercial or professional organization. It has the function of bringing together small groups for recurring meetings, focusing each time on some parti ...

''. In the 2018 Netflix comedy-drama ''

Private Life Private Life may refer to: *life in the private sphere The private sphere is the complement or opposite to the public sphere. The private sphere is a certain sector of societal life in which an individual enjoys a degree of authority, unhampered by ...

'', aspiring writer Sadie (played by Kayli Carter) 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 Showtime or Show Time may refer to: Film * ''Showtime'' (film), a 2002 American action/comedy film * ''Showtime'' (video), a 1995 live concert video by Blur Television Networks and channels * Showtime Networks, a division of Paramount Global w ...

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