Mildred’s Lane Inc 2025:
YEAR OF THE HOOSH
Welcome to our 2025 program of sessions, residencies, retreats, visiting artists, and special events. The program’s underlying vision is built on the 25-year history of experimental pedagogies played out at Mildred’s Lane by its founding collaborators. Pedagogy, which can be defined as learning with a social aim, remains a fundamental idea for Mildred’s Lane. We will continue to work toward new and emergent curriculums, guided by the following propositions:
Sites of engagement for collaborative and transdisciplinary research and experimentation are largely missing from traditional institutions of education.
Pedagogy is non-hierarchical exchange between disciplines, generations, and cultures.
Education should fundamentally contribute to new ways of sustainable living in this challenging century.
The collection of 2025 residency sessions, co-curated with numerous collaborators, propose unique embodiments of these ideas. They create space for exploring new modes of sharing / learning / researching / making / being together.
We hope you will join us!
WORKSTYLES: The Labor Portraits of Mildred’s Lane
SESSION | JUNE 2–15, 2025
J. Morgan Puett, Rebecca Purcell, Jeffrey Jenkins, and Fellows
Mildred’s Lane is a significant world-making endeavors. It’s core philosophy posits that as artists, we embody our work and intertwine our lifestyles with it. This necessitates an inventive and rigorous rethinking of the everyday as a process for creative and collective domesticating toward environmental sustainability for the future.
This is a complete introduction to Workstyles. In collaboration, we will create the HOOSH for the last five of seventeen Labor Portraits that tell the story of Workstyles. These large-scale photos are whimsical and informative allegories representing the system aesthetics of Mildred’s Lane. They will be featured in an upcoming publication, and this project session will culminate in an installation and exhibition of our collective work.
BIBLIOPHANTICS
SESSION | JUNE 16-23, 2025
Mildred’s Lane is in cahoots with The Narrowsburg Deep Water Literary Festival by One Grand Books, Delaware Valley Arts Alliance (DVAA), and other organizations - more to be announced.
If you enjoy reading, meet other book lovers during this inspiring session. We will explore the libraries in the landscape at Mildred’s Lane, listening to readings from working authors and artists. You will have free and open access to all Deep Water Literary Festival programming and events during your stay.
Watch for postings from us and One Grand Books for a list of the events and creative practitioners performing during the week.
WHAT IS A BIRD?
SESSION | JULY 28–AUGUST 7, 2025
The session “What is a Bird?” is motivated by passion: the love of birds, and the activity of observing them in their habitats, popularly known as “birding.” Inevitably, our thirst for intellectual exchange, good-natured debate, and convivial company, so endemic to the Mildred’s Lane ethos, will also drive our time together. We will contemplate the ways that birds have been persistently present in the history of art and culture. Our curiosity is also prompted by the current popularity of bird watching in a time of extraordinary global ecological stress. The last 125 years of community-led bird counts in the US alone, account for the largest citizen science dataset of any living organism in the world. What does it mean that birding is the fastest growing outdoor activity, and a significant economic and cultural force in our society?
The fastest moving animal on earth is a bird, and the longest known migration of any animal is that of a bird. Various birds function as indicator species, keystone species, charismatic species, iconic species, invasive species and endangered species. Birds can be weaponized, ritualized, mechanized, romanticized and politicized. In the end,
however, they are a group of warm-blooded vertebrates who exist everywhere humans do, and many places where humans do not. During this session, we will see birds recently arriving from the Amazon making their summer home in the woods of Pennsylvania. And possibly see early arrivals from the tundra getting a head start on autumn migration. We have a lot to learn from them, and even more to marvel about them.
Artists, ecologists, landscape architects, cultural theorists, bird enthusiasts and bird curious, are encouraged to apply to this focused and exuberant session. Binoculars are essential! Activities will include basic birding, insightful readings and discussions, drawing workshops, generative writing practice, a look at the place of birds in film and visual culture, and local field trips. This promises to be one of the most fun sessions in the history of Mildred’s Lane, and that is saying a lot.
PAPER WORKS
SESSION | AUGUST 11-17, 2025
Monique Milleson, and others TBA . Drawing, painting, printmaking workshops to be announced.
Several years ago, one of our colleagues donated an old Printing press machine. We have been waiting for the right time to make this gorgeous object operational. We will create the right space and gather the materials for getting the press up and working! The possibilities are endless for creating a series of editions out of Mildred’s Lane on this old machine. We will collaboratively consider ways to bring this machine into the 21st century!
Join us in daily practices that build into this practice.
QUEER ECOLOGIES RESEARCH COLLECTIVE III
SESSION | AUGUST 18-25, 2025
In its third annual gathering at Mildred’s Lane, the Queer Ecologies Research Collective (QuERC) resumes its investigations of embodied and performative research methods in pursuit of creative entanglement and co-evolution. This year, ancient mystery rites and esoteric practices of the Surrealists provide a mytho-historical frame through which to explore the accessibility and legibility of knowledge, its power to define social and ontological standards, and its potential to disrupt the transhistorical status quo. This week-long session decomposes hierarchies between traditional academic work, social practice, and performative pedagogy as participants contribute to an emergent syllabus. The QuERC will continue to identify key terms and concepts within the dynamic framework of queer ecologies, contributing to the ongoing collective QuERC publication, “A Glossary for Queer Ecologies.” A virtual symposium will present the findings of the QuERC to a wider public.
MORBID ANATOMY - DEATH
SESSION | SEPTEMBER 8-14, 2025
Joanna Ebenstein and other creative practitioners, to be announced.
Detailed updates of this special session will be posted on our website as session leaders co-curate their respective guest speakers and project artists.
Uniquely, the Mildred’s Lane curriculum is an emergent possibility, and both town and country programming will expand as we move into the spring, summer, and fall seasons.
Stay tuned, more to come!
DISENTANGLEMENT/RE-EMBODIMENT III: (RE)SISTANCE,(RE)CIPROCITY,(RE)SOLUTION
SESSION | SEPTEMBER 15-19, 2025
Jill Goldman and other creative practitioners, to be announced.
Disentanglement/Re-embodiment is a multi-year project of extrication from bonds of gender-based oppression, undertaken by Jill Goldman and collaborators through film and performance works. The project strives for personal and collective re-embodiment based on values of equality, community, and reciprocity. We will cover research areas, including Dystopian/ Post-Apocalyptic Fiction, Utopian Societies, Matriarchal Studies, the Gift Economy, and post-capitalist economies. These topics will inform this session’s curriculum, encouraging research and praxis for all participants.
ARBOREALITY
SESSION | OCTOBER 19-25, 2025
Info and programming will will be announced in late August.
Mildred’s Lane will bring together artists, architects, foresters, conservationists, tree experts, and other creative thinkers to envision the future of this landscape. Daily walks and lectures will accumulate into a study of the possibilities and tactics for a caring collaboration with the forest.
Mildred’s Lane is navigating numerous challenges to sustainability, not least of which is the threat facing our wooded landscape – the Ash and Hemlock trees—two of the land’s principal tree populations—quickly succumb to pestilent insect species. During our daily walks and discussions, we will discover more about our environment by identifying trees and recognizing the invasive species that threaten them. We will envision and strategize, outlining how to navigate troubled landscapes in this era of rapid climate change.
COLLECTOR’S COLLECTIVE & BROWN PAPER PACKAGE HOLIDAY FUNDRAISER
EVENT | NOV/DEC, 2025
Details to be announced!
We are building funds for 2026 programming. It is essential that we connect with our colleagues and our donors and forge new relationships for our growth and philanthropy in mind. We will celebrate together with festive events in the city as well as in the country. We seek innovative, creative thinkers who can help us reach our goals! Please inquire for more information and visit our project site, where artists sell work to benefit Mildred’s Lane.
