We recently connected with Candace Jensen and have shared our conversation below.

Candace, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today What’s been the most meaningful project you’ve worked on?

In Situ Polyculture Commons, our arts residency, began as a reactionary idea over ten years ago, when my husband and I were living and working artists in San Francisco. I was making my way as a chalkboard artist and sign painter, and sometimes graphic designer after spending a number of years working in marketing and food retail. We were evicted from our art studio workspace along with dozens of other artists and small businesses from the Studio 17 building in the Mission district, and what ensued was a charade of elitist and entitled town politics that saw some landlords get clapped on the back for providing spaces to artists while many of the artists themselves ended up on the street, or in our case, with a deeply dissatisfying 90 minute commute to a new art studio space we could barely afford. It was disheartening and devastating. I remember saying “I would never do this to artists” with great indignation one night after making our long way home. And we thought, maybe we would fundraise to buy a derelict building and make art studios! Or something!(?) Lots of exclamation and not very many concrete details. We didn’t have a clear idea about what we might do, but just the feeling of being kicked to the curb and displaced by our city, it created a spark of wanting to be of service to other artists, to create a cultural bulwark against that kind of behavior. If those people with power, land and resources could unhouse and disenfranchise artists, then we could find a way to create space specifically for artists, and inspire others to do the same.

It took a few years to come to the idea of establishing an arts residency— we wanted to honor that idea of making and cultivating spaces for artists, and we also needed to establish a space for ourselves that felt stable and solid and supportive for our own creative practices. We had relocated first to Philadelphia while I attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts MFA program, and then again to Vermont after grad school. We felt very at home and grateful to be in Vermont, where we stayed.

When founding In Situ Polyculture Commons, we designated parts of our home and property to dedicate space for sharing and hosting artists. Learning exactly what boundaries we need to feel nourished for our own creative work is a work-in-progress, but we’re getting there. It’s gratifying to make and share space with artists, and to be able to enjoy the novel creative community of our residents as part of our own studio life. Artists, as a social class, don’t have a lot of resources on average— be they land, wealth, time, or money. So any venture that takes a stance against that and shores up artists’ reserves is incredibly important work. We know we are only a small part of that, but every little bit helps— we are working on a human scale to resource other human artists. Resourcing artists is really meaningful, we believe in it.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

In Situ Polyculture Commons (ISPC) is an art residency and cultural catalyst in Southeastern Vermont, on unceded Abenaki land. Our mission is to cultivate creative expression and cultural resilience by supporting the creative lives and wellbeing of artists, build opportunities for making lasting connections and relationships to place and context, and steward diverse and nourishing commons committed to regenerative practices. We also aim to inform, educate and inspire other folks to do the same. We are a registered Vermont nonprofit and our federal 501(c)3 non-profit status is pending.

ISPC was cofounded by myself, Candace Jensen, and my husband and partner, Owen Schuh. We are also the volunteer staff! We are both working artists with our own studio practices, exhibition strategies, and creative projects. For the last few years, I have focused on curatorial work through Amos Eno Gallery, an artist-run cooperative in Brooklyn, NY which I have been part of since 2018, and independent publishing projects like Iterant Magazine and an Oracle Deck that is coming out later this year. Owen is a mathematical painter and researcher, and amongst other things, collaborates with mathematician Dr. Satyan Devadoss on cutting-edge mathematics research through visual art and cross-disciplinary dialogue.

In Situ Polyculture Commons provides space and time for artists, writers and other creative folk to rest, retreat and dedicate time to their creative practice on our 10-acre Vermont homestead with a renovated art barn, live-work yurt spaces, and ample outdoor meadow and woodland. We also collaborate with other local organizations with public venues so that our visiting artists can put on performances, film screenings and artist talks for our local community. Last year was our first full pilot-year, and we hosted so many amazing humans; a leather and parchment expert, a maker of inks, quills and earth-pigment based art materials, a group of childrens’ outdoor educators who made ink, salve, collage and more, a sound artist and musician, a fantasy writer working on final edits of her novel, poets writing and editing manuscripts, game designer, painters developing a new drawing practice after years away from the studio for parenting, a group of Norse witches who undergo trances for ritual and performance, and others!

There are a lot of wonderful art residencies small and large these days, the art ecosystem is ever-growing. But there are a couple of things that are unique about ISPC; our focus on the context of art-making, and our explicit support of collaborative, cross-disciplinary groups. All artwork is made in a specific context of place, time, and material, whether or not the artist is engaged in a land-based or environmental practice of investigation. We think that centering the material reality of artistic work and discovery is very important, which means acknowledging the land, the local community, and the material origins of what is being made. And collaboration, whether cross-disciplinary or amongst close colleagues, is a vital creative tool that is too often made challenging by residency application guidelines and calendars— so we design our residency calendar around supporting collaboration and group retreat, whether for established collaborators or just for folks who want to try out working together on creative projects. The myth of the solo artist toiling away on their individual genius idea is not one we wholly buy into! Artists like all humans are very pro-social and learn well in dialogue and conversation, and by sharing their own ideas and learning how best to navigate holes in their understanding. So even if artists are working on individualized, unique projects, the fact of the collaborative and generative environment with others in creative modality can be incredibly nourishing, as well as culturally significant.

We also offer workshops for re-skilling artists on how to make their own materials, as well as more traditional fine-art courses like Plein Air painting. To offer these, we partner with brilliant and talented visiting faculty such as Brad Davis, a painter and my colleague from PAFA (where I completed my MFA), and Theresa Emmerich Kamper and Caroline Ross, itinerant materials teachers who are absolute experts in leathercraft, pigments, and more. We probably won’t be running a whole school, but whenever these sorts of partnerships present themselves we are very keen to pursue them and facilitate learning and community-building around material knowledge and techniques. I intend to offer a buckthorn berry ink-making course later this year, as a segue from art materials to invasive plant management!

This art residency has to serve its artists but it also needs to serve the local community and land— context. We try to be very aware of how our visitors can positively impact our villages and towns by sharing their work while they are here, and we try to design our programs to be accommodating for visitors as well as locals. We have an environmental ethos for our campus that includes mindful, ethical foraging constraints when gathering materials from the land for use in creative projects, for example. We don’t have everything figured out yet and we certainly don’t know everything, but we are navigating these questions of belonging, stewardship, and supporting creative life without extractive, transactional underpinnings.

We really are just getting started, and I know that in a year or two a lot more will be clear about the residency, and about the roles me and my husband/partner Owen play in it. Right now I am functioning as the Executive Director & Programming Director, and he is managing all of the facilities and accounting! So we have loads to do. But we have a very generous and intelligent board of directors, and a lot of supportive connections in our community here in Vermont and in Philly and California, where we have lived previously and studied and practiced our art. It’s really special to enact a visionary project that is fueled by idealism, and we are very lucky to have the chance to pragmatically approach that vision to give it legs, and see how far it can go.

Ultimately, our goal is to have a really organic and interesting annual calendar of residencies, visiting artists, self-directed art retreats, and workshops each year, while we both can commit to our own projects too. And we’d like to document and blueprint methods and systems to help cultivate creative community and share more privately held land and property as commons elsewhere— we would love to see our efforts inspire others to do similar (or even very different) things! Whatever improves the creative ecosystem and builds more access to the arts, while stewarding the land we are on, we are here for it.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

I am a very voracious reader, and our ISPC venture reflects the multifaceted ethos that I have developed over decades of reading words put to the page by thinkers and activists much smarter and more accomplished than I! I’m very critical of capitalism as an organizing economic modality, and strongly believe in the necessity to acknowledge the context we find ourselves in— this time of ecological collapse, rapid climate change, socioeconomic disparity and political cowardice.

Its also a time of awakening and communities coming-together, to overcome some of these challenges and reject infrastructure that dooms us to much worse in the near future. Ultimately, my reading list points to renegotiating our fundamental philosophical and material relationships to the world around us, that we are part of, and letting that ripple and evolve the relationships we have with other humans and our social & economic systems.

I wish I could write a million books down. I’m sure some important ones are missing, but here are a few:

Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer
How Not to Exclude Artist Mothers (and Other Parents) by Hettie Judah
A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
Staying with the Trouble by Donna Haraway
Gaia, A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock
Pleasure Activism by Adrienne Maree Brown
Reclaiming the Commons by Vandana Shiva
Post-Growth Living by Kate Soper
Self-Organised ed. By Stine Hebert & Anne Szefer Karlsen
Mutual Aid by Peter Kropotkin (the illustrated version by N.O. Bonzo is wonderful)
The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abrams
Down to Earth by Bruno Latour (the collection, Critical Zones: The Science and Politics of Landing on Earth edited by Latour is also wonderful)
Ecology of Wisdom: Writings by Arne Naess

In your view, what can society to do to best support artists, creatives and a thriving creative ecosystem?

Trust artists, and invest in them. Give resources to artists. Average people can collect art, can learn about an artist’s practice, can follow and appreciate the work that an artist does, especially with social media and email newsletters so rampantly available. Artists need patrons— its a time tested model. We cannot expect artists to work and share their labor for free, as a society, especially if we want great art and prolific creativity! We should want those things.

I remain somewhat skeptical, but systems like substack, patreon, kickstarter and the like are intriguing and hopeful to me because the promise of their infrastructure specifically seeks to fund and benefit the creative work that artists are doing all the time without pay, and therefore it helps to create a culture of value beyond money for their labor, for our inquisitiveness. Art can present solutions to questions that haven’t even been asked yet, or can inspire new questions— but not if the poor gal making it is struggling to pay rent and missing studio time to clock-in somewhere unfulfilling. The grind eats away at the creative ecosystem.

Folks with the resources to own and rent out airbnbs can offer rentals to artists for cheap or free. Folks with trades or skills can offer to trade artists value-for-value work. For the cost of a nice dinner out, you can own original artwork from an art student or a craftsperson. Saving up for an amazing painting or opportunity to learn from an artist offering a course is as easy as saving up for a vacation. And its not all about money but these are just examples of thinking really clearly and materially about how we as a society can resource artists— give resources to artists. Ask what artists need and trust them, and find ways to give to them. Artists are very generous people— we help each other out all the time, we devise wild and unusual wonders which we show off and share very freely. Valuing that at a very local, material level is something we should all reflect on doing more!

We cannot leave investing in artists and supporting artists up to wealthy art collectors and federal grants— too many artists fall between the cracks of the resources being doled out in these ways. And its elitist to think that only the wealthy can own art and support artists! Art can be free and cheap and accessible, we have to take it off the pedestal of expensive commodity. Grass roots funding for artists everywhere.

We can also think creatively and critically about the systems we are living in and the hierarchies we are enacting— what assumptions do we make about art and artists, and their value to society? The same questions can be applied to the ways we interact with non-human creatures, with strangers on the street. Deep introspection about what we value and why has led me to really radically reject a lot of the standard values assigned to different kinds of people, vocations, life choices, and more. We’re all in this together! I firmly believe that mutualism and collaborative attitudes can improve life for artists and everyone else at the same time.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.insitupolyculture.org
• Instagram: @in_situ_polyculture
• Other: Candace Jensen’s professional art portfolio website and instagram are: www.candacejensen.com and @artist.cjensen Owen Schuh’s professional art portfolio website and instagram: www.owenschuh.com and @owenschuh

Image Credits
Photos by: Owen Schuh, Ana Peltz and Candace Jensen