the University of Arkansas and the Museum of Contemporary Craft, Portland, Oregon. Julia Harrison has taught at the 92nd St Y, Snow Farm, and Penland, and was a 2015 Windgate ITE Fellow at the Center for Art in Wood, Pennsylvania. She balances artmaking with research on sweet foods, and can happily talk for hours about mochi. juliaharrison.net
4 / W OO D The Poetic Heart
The activity of this workshop is to enjoy and embrace the making of a joyful object—one may build a chair, ladder, table, stool or carved box. So, let obligation and the world disappear, grab your inner child and free play with your poetic heart. It has been certified that play is the medium/source for the presence of creativity. Consequently we will chip, gauge, pound, paint, stain, sand, saw, twist, laminate. We may even jog, doodle, and smile. Experience with power tools is required. T O M M Y S I M P S O N is an interna-
tionally recognized artist, woodworker, sculptor, furniture maker, painter, and poet—he works in nearly every medium. After he received an MFA in Painting from Cranbrook Academy of Art, he turned to furniture as both a subject matter and a three-dimensional canvas. Tommy Simpson’s work has been in gallery and museum exhibitions, including at the Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC; Museum of Arts & Design, New York; and Gallery NAGA and Fuller Craft Museum in Massachusetts. He and his work have been profiled in Art in Review and Tommy Simpson – Homemade, written by Ken Johnson for The New York Times.
Intimate Beats by Tommy Simpson, 2004. Cherry, butternut, walnut, and mahogany, 80” x 25” x 3”. Photo by Brad Stanton.
4 / VISITING CRITIC* Jazz and the Abstract Truth
How does the sound of improvised music stimulate creativity? Awaken emotions? Reflect and reshape communities? Express human truths? Through deep and shared listening to a wide range of recorded music, active discussion, writing, and personal expressions in any media, we will explore the spiritual, aesthetic, and social function of jazz, free of pedagogy and categories, and its power to arouse and refine artistry of all types.
focused on social justice, spirituality, and improvisation as a reflection of contemporary life. Larry Blumenfeld has been a regular contributor to The Wall Street Journal for the past decade; his culture reporting and criticism have appeared in The Village Voice, The New York Times and Entertainment Weekly, among other publications, and at websites including Salon and Truthdig. His jazz blog, “Blu Notes,” (blogs.artinfo.com/blunotes) is hosted by Blouin Media, publishers of Art & Auction magazine and his essays have appeared in many collections, including Best Music Writing, 2008 (Da Capo Press). Larry Blumenfeld was a National Arts Journalism Program Fellow at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a Katrina Media Fellow with the Open Society Institute, researching cultural recovery in New Orleans. He has lectured and presented at a wide range of festivals, schools, and cultural institutions, including Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, and the National Jazz Museum in Harlem. Larry Blumenfeld’s residency at Haystack is in conjunction with the 17th Annual Deer Isle Jazz Festival at the Stonington Opera House, produced by Opera House Arts, August 12-13, 2016. operahousearts.org * Visiting artists augment the session with informal activities and are not workshop leaders.
L A R R Y B L U M E N F E L D has curated
the Deer Isle Jazz Festival for Opera House Arts since its inception in 2000, in collaboration with Haystack. His writing spans jazz criticism, narrative journalism, essays, profiles, and opinion pieces, addressing a wide range of music, often
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