About
We offer immersive, place-based residencies that support interdisciplinary artists, musicians, thinkers, and organizers. Our residencies prioritize creative freedom, restoration, and site-specific inquiry. Artists are invited to engage deeply with the land, with each other, and with their own practice without the pressure to produce.
Our artist residency programs provide participants with opportunities to build rapport with one another and the land while learning off-grid skills that strengthen sovereignty in relation to the natural world. These skills include using compost toilets, fire pits, solar power, rainwater catchment, generators, and propane systems.
We host workshops, salons, community meals, listening sessions, panel discussions, and movement instruction that bring people together across disciplines and identities. These offerings center embodied knowledge, deep listening, mutual aid, and care.
Mission
As a Black-led, artist-run space, we prioritize creative experimentation, ecological connection, and embodied practice. We believe art thrives when artists are supported emotionally, spiritually, and materially.
Values
Care Infrastructure
We build systems (from how we host residents to how we design the land) that prioritize rest, nourishment, consent, and mutual support.
Black Agrarian Futures
We center Black, queer, trans, and Indigenous futures and uphold decolonial approaches to land, learning, and creative practice. We work to redistribute resources to communities historically denied access.
Experimentation & Play
Art is allowed to be unruly and indeterminate. Our spaces invite improvisation, failure, curiosity, spaciousness, and joy.
Community Roots
Our work is built in collaboration with neighbors, local growers, artists from the city, and community partners. We believe creative ecosystems grow through shared effort, transparency, and relationship.
Story
In its first year, twenty artists gathered at the Outlier Inn in Woodridge, New York. They shared meals, skills, grief, visions, and experiments, leaving with lifelong friendships and a collective belief that communal creativity could be a force of liberation. In the years that followed, the residency took many forms, evolving to meet the real needs of artists and becoming a flexible, responsive, ever-shifting constellation rooted in mutual growth.
In 2020, everything changed. The global uprisings following the murder of George Floyd prompted a deep reckoning. The residency had outgrown its original structure and demanded a new direction that centered Black agrarianism, sovereignty, and generational land stewardship.
Five years later, that turning point has blossomed into a sibling project; Forest Fringe Farm, a diversified vegetable farm and social arts gathering space committed to nurturing the next generation of queer cultural workers of color. Here, artists learn how to design and host their own programming in the very woods this community helped purchase.
We are now entering the next phase of our development by building the infrastructure and ecological systems needed to support the land for generations to come. Kamra has continued their training in permaculture, integrating Black and Indigenous land-based technologies to repair oversaturated soil and stabilize the ecosystem.
We have made it this far together, and there is so much further to go. If you believe in Black futurity, ecological repair, and creative freedom, we invite you to join us in building what comes next.
Artists-in-Residence
Artist
2019
Writer
2019
Artist
2019
Artist
2019
Artist
2019
Artist
2019
Musician
2019
Filmmaker
2019
Musician
2019
Facilitator
2019
Artist
2019
Chef
2019
Artist
2019
Artist
2019
Creative Producer
2019
Facilitator
2019
Artist
2019
Photographer
2019
Filmmaker
2019
Artist
2019
Artist
2019
DJ
2019
Musician
2019
Musician
2019
Photographer
2019
Writer
2019
Videographer
2019
Dancer
2019
Programs
Three to five-day residencies form the core of our program. We support artists at all stages of their practice, from emerging to established professionals, by facilitating cultural development . Residents are given a platform to share ideas, explore interests, and build meaningful connections.
After years at the Outlier Inn in Woodridge, New York, we now host programs on our own land at Forest Fringe Farm in Bethel, New York, located in the historic hamlet associated with the 1969 Woodstock festival.
Earthly Pleasures was a weekend-long gathering that invited artists to slow down, connect with the land, and explore creative practice through sensory engagement and ecological presence. Residents participated in guided walks, shared meals, somatic and sensory exercises, and workshops focused on Black and queer ecological futures, alongside spacious time for independent making and rest.
The program blended structured grounding practices with open studio days, communal dialogue, and optional skill-shares. Free from production pressure, the residency offered a rare environment for restoration, deepened ecological awareness, and the cultivation of lasting community bonds.
Many participants left with renewed clarity, practical tools for land-based creativity, and an expanded understanding of how pleasure, care, and environment can shape artistic practice.