The Frontier Fellowship is an artist residency in rural Green River, Utah, that invites creatives to engage in dialogue with our region’s history, culture and landscapes.
The residency
The Frontier Fellowship invites creative practitioners to live and work with Epicenter in Green River, Utah (pop. 952). Our collaborators generate innovative work that is in cooperation and conversation with the region’s history, people, and environment. In a place that is prone to the passer-by, we invite artists, designers, writers, folklorists, musicians, and other creatives from around the world to stay awhile and discover what makes Green River worth listening to, learning from and celebrating. Fellowship projects bring the town together, strengthening local identity and providing opportunities for critical reflection. The Frontier Fellowship seeks to elevate rural voices within our region; instead of speaking for the community, Fellows seek ways to offer the residents the tools needed to self-document, express, and reflect to ultimately shape their own futures.
Typical residencies are month-long, with the possibility to return at a later time to continue work or complete a larger project. While in residence, Fellows are provided with housing, a small stipend, and access to Epicenter’s office and work space as well as the tools and supplies within those spaces. Apply for more information.
The Place
Green River, Utah (pop. 952), has long been a waypoint for travelers. Even before the town was established in 1876 as a ferry crossing, the Old Spanish Trail was crossing the river at the same location in the early 19th century. The town grew alongside the railroad boom and was later bolstered by nearby uranium mines and a Cold War-era missile launch complex on the outskirts of town. Like many rural communities, Green River has historically been at the mercy of outsider industries, creating an unending boom-and-bust cycle.
While the built environment of Green River bears the scars of its past, the town’s fluctuations led to creative innovations; the town’s working class residents have turned a defunct gas station into a thriving taqueria, the old river bed into a state park, a ceramics shop into a thrift store and an old trading post into a coffee shop, among other transformations. Though the town’s residents are resilient and adaptable, tradition still runs strong here; Green River has long been known for growing some of the best melons in the world, and the annual Melon Days festival is over a century old.
Today, our town relies on its isolated seat alongside Interstate 70, where it remains a stopover for those who are mostly on their way to somewhere else. But for those who pause to listen, observe, and delve beneath the rusted, sun-peeled surface, there is a substratum rich with cultural and historic significance.
WHO WE ARE
Epicenter’s work explores the new field of engaged contextual practice. Navigating the borders and confluences of art and design, creativity and community service, and pragmatism and experimentation, we strive to re-contextualize the narrative of rural places. Epicenter seeks to support and further our community’s existing inclination to reclaim not only their built environment and public spaces from outside influences, but strengthen their cultural identity through co-creation with artists and designers.
While artist residencies can all too easily become extractive and self-serving, we believe in developing avenues for visiting artists to invest in this place, intertwining their practice with the fabric of our community. Our staff and collaborators work in dialogue with residents to offer them a platform for expression and problem solving; our multi-faceted, flexible practice mirrors the adaptable, resilient nature of rural residents.
The Frontier
The word frontier, especially in the context of the American west, often refers to the terms of violent Westward Expansion. The Frontier Fellowship seeks to recognize this and to engage with it, while at the same time complicating the facile sense of place which would reduce the idea of “Western” to just stories of “cowboys and Indians.” The frontier is also a border, a line, and so our concept of the frontier walks both these paths. The Frontier Fellowship is the exploration of the new field of study of socially-engaged contextual practice, and it plays at the borders and “the confluences of art and design, creativity and community service, and pragmatism and experimentation.” Our town is remote, but it is no longer an outpost from which to claim and to enclose. Instead, it is a node in a network -- of transportation, culture, experimental practice, industry, environment, and history. We seek to honor this place and its position within those networks, and Epicenter’s Frontier Fellows are an integral part of this process and our ongoing partnership with the community of Green River, Utah.
Thanks to Charlie Macquarie for editing this Frontier text for Epicenter. Quote taken from Nicole Lavelle’s essay in our A Call to Place: The First Five Years of the Frontier Fellowship book.