Yaddo, an artists' retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, was founded in 1900 by Katrina "Kate" Nichols Trask (1853–1922) and the New York financier Spencer Trask (1844–1909), and was opened to artists in 1926. Its mansion, guesthouses, and studios are situated among more than four hundred acres of woodland, lake, and gardens. Yaddo is the largest artist-residency program in the United States, entertaining as many as two hundred guests annually (up to thirty-five at a time in the summer and twelve to fifteen in the winter). Guests typically remain for two to eight weeks. Advisory committees of artists review 1,100 applications annually. There are only two rules: studios may not be visited without an invitation, and visitors are admitted to the grounds only between 4 and 10 P.M.
Yaddo, heralded by the New York Times in 1926 as a "new and unique experiment [with] no exact parallel in the world of the fine arts," has been successful not only because of its physical facilities but because its sense has centered on the creative life. Its founders' reverence for art and artists has been transmitted in the stories told by the very artists it supports. The estate was named by four-year-old Christina Trask "because it makes poetry. … [Yaddo] sounds like shadow, but it's not going to be." It became the Trasks' means of revival after their four young children died and the original house called "Yaddo" burned to the ground in 1891. Their attitude is expressed in the motto in the phoenix mosaic (Tiffany) on the fireplace of the mansion: "Yaddo Resurgo ad Pacem." Katherine Anne Porter explained: "The Trasks were both quite complicated people, working within a perfectly conventional moral and religious and social code … both apparently had more than a streak of real mysticism, and both were as wildly romantic as any two Babes in the Woods."
The Philanthropist George Foster Peabody (1852– 1938), who oversaw the financial affairs of the Trask fortune after Spencer Trask's death, and who became Katrina Trask's husband in the last year of her life, formally established Yaddo as a nonprofit corporation in 1923. Elizabeth Ames (1885–1977), appointed executive director of Yaddo in 1923, made the Trasks' dream a reality by inventing, in the words of John Cheever, "an administration so intelligent and comprehensive that at times when one found seven writers of vastly different temperaments working happily under the same roof it seemed magical" (Bird, "Elizabeth Ames," 1977). Ames served in this position until 1963, vindicated of Robert Lowell's charge (1949) that she headed a dangerous communist conspiracy. In the 1930s and 1940s Yaddo served as a haven from Nazi persecution for Jewish and left-leaning artists.
Notable guests have included Hannah Arendt, Milton Avery, James Baldwin, Leonard Bernstein, John Cheever, Aaron Copland, Philip Guston, Patricia Highsmith, Langston Hughes, Ted Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Carson McCullers, Sylvia Plath, Katherine Anne Porter, Philip Roth, Meyer Schapiro, Clifford Still, Virgil Thomson, and William Carlos Williams. Yaddo is supported by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, and private and corporate funding. Artists themselves act as patrons and board members.
Bibliography
Bird, David. "Elizabeth Ames, Creator of Yaddo, Upstate Cultural Haven, Dies at 92." New York Times, 30 March 1977.
Cheever, Susan. "Yaddo Artists' Colony." Architectural Digest, August 1996, 34–38.
Ciccarelli, Barbara L. "Kate Nichols Trask." In Dictionary of American Biography. Edited by John A. Garraty, and Mark C. Carnes. Volume 21. American National Biography. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
Waite, Marjorie Peabody. Yaddo, Yesterday and Today. Saratoga Springs, N.Y.: Argus Press, 1933.
