Become part of our story
Moving into 2015 the Rabbit Island Foundation and residency program is tremendously thankful for the hard work and dedication of our artists, collaborators and administrators. Looking ahead to next year’s residency season and beyond, we have a lot to be excited about. The program continues to push the boundaries of what a residency can be, while asking its creators, residents, and audience to engage with critical and conceptual issues concerning the environment—all from a remote and symbolic watershed sitting in the largest freshwater lake in the world.
We’d also like to thank our community for continuing to share the Rabbit Island story, and aiding in its future telling. Our new donation page makes it easy to pledge support for the project. Donations help fund artists-in-residence, enable us to communicate more effectively, present our growing archive thoughtfully and contribute towards our future development of conservation tools.
The Rabbit Island Foundation is a 501c3 organization registered in the state of Michigan. All donations are tax deductible.
+ Donate
The 2014 Rabbit Island Residency Exhibition Catalogue was designed by Edwin Carter and published by the DeVos Art Museum. It is a beautiful collection offering a concise window into the experiences of six artists who spent time on Rabbit Island in the summer of 2014. The full color, limited run catalogue features work and essays by Elvia Wilk, Nich McElroy, Nicholas Brown, Dylan Miner, Suzanne Morrissette, and Julie Nagam.
The tone set by these artists’ interpretations is varied–terse, hopeful, exasperated, celebratory, critical, introspective–yet the common denominator of residence allows one to gaze into daily life and the creation of art on Lake Superior, isolated from the noise of civilization. Each artist expresses conclusions as well as new questions, and several topics are particularly interesting. Elvia Wilk’s description of her experience with inclement weather while alone for several uncomfortable days, as well as her resolution, is raw and revealing. The Waboozaki group’s collective criticism of the postcolonial narrative that is common in our time, as expressed from within the cultural history that has been pushed back, is cogent, emotional and fundamental. Nich McElroy’s thoughtful photographs, made over 26 days in June and July, are subtle and evidence his shifting emotions while in residence. This newest publication thus adds a chapter to our evolving story as Rabbit Island continues to exist in the lake, unchanged by man as a matter of morality, culture and principle. We encourage you to take the time to download it, and especially to read the essays critically.
Download the 2014 Exhibition Catalogue here (PDF, 18.5 MB.)
Physical copies of the catalog were printed in a run of 150. The majority of these were distributed free of charge to the public who visited the exhibition. A small number of catalogs are still available from our online store. All proceeds beyond the nominal cost of administrating the store will be placed in a Rabbit Island Foundation savings account and earmarked for a conservation fund dedicated to addressing issues of parcelization of our land ownership grid.
Four-toed Salamander: Hemidactylium scutatum
On the evening of June 7th, 2014, we discovered a new resident of Rabbit Island. A few minutes after sunset, between 11pm and 12am, dozens of these four-toed salamanders were seen scurrying from the rocky shoreline to the island’s forested interior. Andrew Ranville and resident artist Elvia Wilk were at camp to witness the event.
+ This amphibian is rare in forested regions of the Eastern United States due to forest fragmentation and habitat loss.
+ It exhibits features that may differ from those described previously. Curiously, it lacks the prominent “basal constriction” at the base of the tail, a distinguishing telltale of most Four-toed Salamanders. Perhaps this is a product of population isolation.
+ Biology texts report the salamander’s habitat to be near water sources and made up of mixed coniferous-deciduous forests containing woodland debris, rocks and mosses—a perfect match to the Rabbit Island environment, which makes sense.
+ On June 7th the air was cool and the ground was quite damp. In 2014 a long winter had pushed spring back in the Keweenaw Peninsula region and on the island itself (which is often two weeks behind the mainland anyway). Considering the most opportune time to witness the salamander is during their nesting season of April-May, the delayed island climate might have presented ideal conditions for the species to become active, and thus visible, later in the season than normal.
If anyone is interested in pursuing research related to this salamander on Rabbit Island, or have proposals related to any other research, please get in touch. You can learn more about scientific research on Rabbit Island on our Science page.
Additional salamander info:
This Weekend: Closing events for the 2014 Rabbit Island Residency Exhibition
Friday, September 26, 2pm
Reading by Elvia Wilk
DeVos Art Museum
Sunday, September 28
3pm: Great Lakes Rooms at the University Center
Panel discussion with the artists & residency co-founders Robert Gorski & Andrew Ranville
Sunday, September 28
5-7pm: Closing Reception
DeVos Art Museum
All events are free and open to the public.
The Rabbit Island Residency unofficially launched in 2010. In 2013, 115 applications were received for our first official residency program, representing broad disciplines from the United States, Australia, South Africa, South America and Europe. This exhibition highlights the work of six artists and writers who spent 1-4 weeks on the island between June and July, 2014.
The work displayed is a mix of projects completed before the artists’ time on Rabbit Island as well as work made during or immediately after the residency. Some of the work is presented in-progress as the artists begin to reflect on their experiences.
Elvia Wilk is a writer based in Berlin, Germany. Her work explores themes of isolation, connection and the relationship between physical and virtual space through essays and poems. The written pieces in the exhibition were designed in collaboration with designer Edwin Carter.
Nich Hance McElroy is a photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia. During his time in residency he focused on documenting the movements and migrations of people, nature and objects on and between the mainland and island. He also worked in the adjoining Rabbit Bay and on the Keweenaw Peninsula.
Waboozaki consists of four inter-disciplinary artists, writers and curators: Dylan Miner (East Lansing, Michigan), Julie Nagam (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), Nicholas Brown (Iowa City, Iowa), and Suzanne Morrissette (Toronto, Ontario, Canada). During their residency the artists spent time working on individual projects as well as collectively remapping the island from indigenous perspectives.
A full color, fully illustrated catalogue will be released at the reception.
This exhibition is supported in part by an award from the Michigan Council for the Arts and Cultural Affairs and the National Endowment for the Arts. Support also provided by the NMU Department of English, NMU Center for Native American Studies, the NMU UNITED Conference, the Canada Arts Council for the Arts and Ontario Arts Council. Special thanks to Sweet Deliverance.
Congratulations 2015 Residents
We are excited to announce the 2015 awarded residencies on Rabbit Island. Five artists will receive funding to travel to Rabbit Island as well as a materials stipend, access to our network of mainland facilities, and an exhibition at the DeVos Art Museum with publication in the yearly Rabbit Island catalogue. We are absolutely thrilled to be working with such intelligent and accomplished artists from around the world.
This year the Rabbit Island Residency received 200 proposals from 36 countries encompassing a variety of disciplines. The quality of ideas was inspiring, making selection difficult. Committee members reviewed each proposal, placing significant weight on the quality of each artist’s previous work, strength of specific proposal, the artist’s ability to demonstrate competence in wilderness environments, and the relationship of proposals to Rabbit Island itself and wider contemporary issues. We then held video conferences with 9 shortlisted artists before making final decisions.
Thank you again to everyone who submitted proposals, and congratulations to the following artists:
Beau Carey. A landscape painter from Albuquerque, New Mexico, Beau embeds himself in challenging environments to experience and record a sense of place, often uncovering historical and contemporary issues through his interaction. Beau has travelled extensively to remote places to pursue such practice. He has painted in the Arctic Circle in Norway, was the first wintertime artist resident in Denali National Park, and has created bodies of work set in ecologically contentious open spaces such as the Rocky Mountain Arsenal National Wildlife Refuge. He is a founding artist of TANK Studios in Denver, CO.
An excerpt of Beau’s proposal and statement:
Coastal surveying/profiling has long played an important part in my work. First employed by the Portuguese and then the Dutch in the 14th-17th century these navigational profiles ultimately played a huge role in how modern landscape came to be spatially structured. This structure while fully absorbed into the cliché of modern landscape painting is not innocuous. It is rooted in a history of globalism and environmental dominance. As someone who resides in a land locked desert exploring this structure is difficult, as it historically requires a coast. Rabbit Island with the aide of the small boat provided is perfect to continue this research in how we came to see and structure our pictures this way. I also enjoy the idea of surveying an island, not for navigational purposes related to commerce, but to “rediscover” a wild place that has been excluded from development.
Working in the field creates variables that cannot be created the studio. Painting with mittens on in -15 degrees and having to make and mix your paints with walnut oil so they don’t freeze creates marks that are reflective of a situation in a way a photograph isn’t. You can tell when a painting was painted in 45 mph winds because of the dust stuck in it. You make different decisions when you are tired, hungry and exposed. These field paintings come back to the studio and result in larger finished works that reflect observations and ideas obtained in the field.
At the heart of my works lies the central idea that all our experiences of landscape are culturally created. How we interact with spaces is informed by how we are taught to see them. I work with landscape painting, a decidedly un-contemporary genre that is often easily dismissed by a more critical crowd. On top of that I choose to deal with it sincerely, a double blow against initial readings of my work. However it is the difficulty of the subject that ultimately attracts me to it. Its spatial language is accessible, subtle and essential when it comes to how we choose to deal with issues like conservation, wilderness and development.
Eugene Birman and Scott Diel. Eugene is a Latvian-born composer based in Oakland, California. He received his M.M. in Music Composition from the Juilliard School, a B.A. in Economics from Columbia, and is currently pursuing a D.Phil in Musical Composition from Oxford University. Scott is an American-born writer based in Tallinn, Estonia, who has freelanced widely. The two have previously collaborated on several operas to critical acclaim. Their recent work, Nostra Culpa, eclectically weaves together the global debate surrounding post-financial crash austerity and a Twitter feud between a Nobel laureate columnist from the New York Times and the president of Estonia. Their unlikely inspiration results from a desire to step away from the formal opera genre and engage a wider audience with classical music that investigates contemporary issues.
An excerpt of Eugene and Scott’s proposal:
“The machine has won,” some have concluded after witnessing the construction of the American interstate highway system, coupled with vast concrete intersections that rise to the heavens. Yet these structures are being dismantled in many places, and a more human-friendly environment is sometimes the result of re-thinking the way we interact as human beings in an urban space. Our project will examine such a possibility in a musical space. The resulting piece of music, which will constitute an extended 40-minute one act opera, will focus not on mythological monsters but on how the very real issues facing the world could inspire people to re-consider their role in their urban environment and the world around them, though the piece will not be overtly utopian. Much like the outmoded machine must be destroyed to form closer bonds of communication in the real, urban world, our opera must first destroy the “deus ex machina” that is so essential to dramatic denouement in the operatic world.
Thus our project will not only challenge audiences to consider their role in an urban society and how to improve it on an individual scale, but essentially all of the existing rules of opera as well.
A residency at Rabbit Island would enable us to complete a full-length opera within three months of the residency’s conclusion. During our stay, we would make meaningful progress on the piece and use the incredible natural surroundings to influence and focus the material to create a piece that reflects both the urban environment we have left behind, and its essential antithesis in the serenity and isolation of the residency itself.
Josefina Muñoz. Josefina is a multi-disciplinary artist from Santiago, Chile, who often works nomadically creating pieces in and about environments she encounters. Josefina’s seemingly disparate projects focusing on material, architecture, location, and culture come together in an overarching impulse to answer questions of global concern. Josefina’s ambitious research project Is_Land will take her to Rabbit Island, Scotland, Chiloé, and Tristan da Cunha–the most remote settled island in the world. Her goal is to create a critical body of work informed by numerous manifestation of the island concept: as space, culture, and metaphor.
An excerpt from Josefina’s proposal:
The work I have developed over the past years is based on the space/place dialectic. Highly influenced by architecture, demographics, and space distribution, I employ different media/processes to comment upon the particularities of the places where I live and work.
I adhere to the premise that an island is a symbol of our larger society. However, if secluded lands develop and transform in the same way as congested territories do, what specific elements characterize their spatiality? How do the 300 Tristans represent the other 7 billion people on Earth? Can 90 undeveloped acres within a lake stand as a mirror for the rest of The Americas?
Noam Enbar. Noam is a composer and performer from Tel Aviv, Israel. His anti-establishment band, Habiluim, formed in 2003, has become one of the main radical voices in the Israeli music scene. The dark, political content of Habiluim’s songs is often juxtaposed to ecstatic music, drawing from Russian and East-European folk traditions and inspired by composers such as Kurt Weill and Hanns Eisler. His many musical projects, choral-theatrical pieces and inventive, starkly political works in collaboration with filmmaker Avi Mograbi have been performed at festivals, theaters and museums in Israel and across Europe.
Embedded in Noam’s proposal and previous body of work are themes central to major contemporary global ideological conflicts. In this context he will place himself within the solitude of Rabbit Island’s wilderness and compose a songbook that spotlights the intersection of the political and spiritual within society.
A excerpt from Noam’s proposal:
“The Leibowitz Songbook”. Yeshayahu Leibowitz (1903 -1994) is one of Israel’s great radical thinkers. A professor in biochemistry, neurophysiology and polymath, he is known for his outspoken opinions on religion and politics. Despite being an orthodox Jew, Leibowitz was a defender of the complete separation between religion and state and was amongst the first Israeli intellectuals to declare immediately after the war in 1967 that the occupation of Palestinian territories would inevitably lead to catastrophe and totalitarianism. Some of Leibowitz’s most striking radical critiques are now seen as amazingly accurate predictions and clear political-spiritual suggestions for the betterment of society (not just Israeli society, but any society).
I intend to devote my time on Rabbit Island to immerse myself in Leibowitz's writings and compose a selection of extracted fragments, using a small portable accordion, pencil and paper. These texts have great power and clarity and are asking to be reborn as expressive “speech-songs”.
I imagine the “Leibowitz Song Book” as an eclectic song cycle written for a number of ensembles, choirs and soloists, singers of different backgrounds and singing traditions, and in different languages, hopefully encapsulating something of Leibowitz’s personality—a contemporary thinker who lived and worked on the edge of spirituality, science and politics.
Our call for applications for 2015 residents is now over. We are thrilled by the thoughtful responses from around the world and are in the process of carefully reviewing each proposal submitted. Thank you to everyone who applied. Here are some general submission statistics and an estimated timeline for artist selection and notification.
+ Over 200 applications were received.
+ Applications were sent from 36 different countries.
+ A group of shortlisted applicants will be notified via email during the first week of September and scheduled for individual discussions of their proposed work shortly thereafter.
+ Awarded residencies will be announced in mid to late September.
This is the final week before the 2015 Rabbit Island Residency application deadline. To be considered for next summer please submit your proposal by this Friday, August 22, at midnight EDT. We are looking for artists of any discipline to challenge their practice in a unique wilderness environment.
All awarded residents receive the following:
+ Residence on the island with full access to the island’s infrastructure, tools, library, and research materials.
+ A generous honoraria to cover travel and other expenses.
+ Materials stipend.
+ Connection to our network on the mainland, including various archives and production facilities.
+ An exhibition and catalogue publication at the DeVos Art Museum in Marquette, Michigan.
Photos: Rob Gorski, July-August 2014. (1) A fortuitous flight from a friend of a friend enabled a recent aerial survey of the island. (2) Awakening to heavy rains and gale-force westerly winds. (3) A soundless lake and a peaceful campfire.
Last summer marked the inaugural Rabbit Island School for a group of eight high school sophomores, juniors and seniors. (Imagine NOLS + art camp + Rabbit Island). This past Tuesday the 2015 Rabbit Island School kicked off and tonight the gang is sleeping out under the stars in the midst of Lake Superior for their third night in a row. In celebration we’re highlighting some of the artwork and daily journals created by last year’s participants.
Eight students–all young women, coincidentally–will be spending August 12-19th on the island learning about art and ecology. They will be practicing simple living, low impact camping and Leave No Trace ethics under the guidance of trip leaders David Buth and Christina Mrozik. All of the students hail from southwestern Michigan with the exception of one who attends Calumet High, a local mainland school. Go Copper Kings!
More details about the Rabbit Island School can be found on its official website here. If you know any students who would be interested in applying next year please pass this along and if you are a high school student please do get in touch. The program is open to anyone nationally and internationally.
*** This year’s Rabbit Island School was supported by the KEEN Footwear Company which generously awarded the Rabbit Island Foundation a KEEN Effect grant. These grants were designed to support projects that fuel people’s passion for protecting the environment and promoting responsible outdoor participation. The KEEN Effect program received more than 600 applications and awarded 25 organizations globally with grants totaling $100,000. It was an honor to receive one. KEEN also donated a pair of island-appropriate shoes to each student for the trip. Many thanks to KEEN for helping make this possible.