The Mountain Lake Workshop
Since 1983, Ray Kass and the Mountain Lake Workshop have conducted a continueing series of inter-related art workshops that have resulted in many unique (usually non-objective) works of art that endeavor to extend the creative scope of the collaborating artists and deeply involved in the local community and technical resources in the production of the artworks.
Artists who have completed several workshops at Mountain Lake include folk-artist Howard Finster, Japanese artist & sculptor Jiro Okura, the late avant-garde composer, writer and artist John Cage, waster management installation-artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles (official artist in residence of the New York Sanitation Dept.), ceramic artist, poet and author M.C. Richards, Shanghai watercolorist Xiao Yan Gen, Colorado Eco-artist Lynn Hull, internationally prominent sculptor Jackie Matisse, and others. These individual workshops seek to provide an interface between the concepts and discipline-centered activities of the visiting artists.
Works produced at the Mountain Lake Workshop are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), The Whitney Museum of American Art (NYC), The Menil Collection (Houston), The Phillips Collection (Washington D.C.), The Sackler Gallery of the Freer (Washington D.C.), The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Art Museum of Western Virginia, and many museums in Europe.
For more information: www.mountainlakeworkshop.org
"All the works produced in the Mountain Lake Workshop are the result of collaborative efforts between guest artists and members of the artistic, academic, student, and local community in the Appalachian region around Mountain Lake in Giles County southwest Virginia. The Mountain Lake Workshop is testimony to the high level of aesthetic achievement that can be reached when people, motivated by a common intertest, come together in collaborative undertaking. These efforts, which began in 1983, are still an on-going project series."
-Howard Risatti