For seven years, the Pajama Factory has hosted an Artist In Residence program inviting artists from all different genres, cultures, and countries to come and create in the factory, working alongside other artists and taking advantage of what Williamsport has to offer.
Inspiration can be as valuable as air to artists so introducing new creative minds into the community through the residency program helped feed that need. This year, the four artists that were part of the residency program were from as close as Philadelphia and as far away as Amsterdam. In addition to hosting a closing gallery show, the four residents were asked to give back to community with free workshops and programs.
The artists this year included:
Brigid O’Brien, of Philadelphia, who works in sculpture and installation. During here time at the Factory, she worked on 2-3 larger-scale paintings and two-dimensional works. Her community outreach program focused on teaching new techniques of pulp-making and creating a textured surface with an overlay of sculpture and painting.
Carlijn Claire Potma, of Amsterdam, Netherlands creates, in her own words, “art made with pricks in paper.†These “light drawings” as well as other series of pencil drawings were a beautiful inspiration to the community. Her class explored the relationship of art and nature using the ideas of Paul Klee.
Jacquelyn Hurwitz, of Dover, New Jersey, a recent graduate in photography from Kutztown University, worked on building her portfolio. She focused on her “make it, shoot it” approach and “unusual humorous content.” Jacquelyn taught her class how to make the perfect pinhole camera, and then practiced shooting with it and exploring the creative possibilities of low-tech photography.
Matthew Adams, of Cape Coral, Florida, is a candidate for a masters degree in fine arts at Florida State University. He was drawn to the residency program because of the unique darkroom here capable of wet plate collodion. While at the Pajama Factory, he worked to create pieces using that process. Matthew led a community outreach program in teaching tintype photography.
On another note, there is also now a space on the 4th floor – donated by Boulder Design Group – that has been transformed into an educational “Maker†Space, available for anyone to come and collaborate on projects. The group is starting with micro-controllers and single board computers, as that’s what they have the most experience with, i.e., Raspberry Pi, Arduino, Wemos D1 and ESP8266 programming (Beyond my understanding!!) There will also be a heavy focus on how to use this knowledge towards interactivity with art projects which will be particularly relevant for building tenants!