The Rabbit Island Residency provides financial support, time, and pristine natural spaces to challenge creative practices in a wilderness environment. Artists live and work on the island for 2-4 weeks, engaging directly with the landscape, responding to notions of conservation, ecology, and sustainability via their research and cultural works. The residency reflects on the American continent’s four hundred year history of settlement and division of land and stems from the idea that in a developed society intelligent organization of wild spaces is one of the most civilized things we can pursue.
The island itself, an unsettled and undivided space, enables artists to present commentary on these ideas, creating interpretations and solutions to issues of global importance–climate change, loss of natural habitat, the value of pristine watersheds, the environmental implications of entrepreneurship, and so forth. Modern understanding of our natural reality, as well as our cause-and-effect relationship to it, dictates a need for principles worthy of our time. If artists do not create the work that defines this new space, who will? Art is perhaps the purest form of creation and serves fittingly as a symbol for all human constructions.
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Rabbit Island is 91 acres of forest and sandstone located in Lake Superior—the largest body of freshwater in the world—four miles east of Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula within the traditional territory of the Anishinaabe. The island is composed of a native ecosystem and has never before been developed or subdivided. It is a unique wilderness environment home to a variety of flora and fauna including large white pines, red maples, bald eagles, nesting birds, salamanders, and much more. A number of fish including salmon and native lake trout swim in the waters surrounding the island. The weather is ever-present and can vary day-to-day, creating beautiful vistas and humbling experiences.
A conservation easement assures the ecosystem will remain healthy in perpetuity. The island serves as a platform for contemporary art, science, and conservation.
The Rabbit Island Foundation is a registered non-profit 501(c)(3). The Board of Directors are David Gorski, Rob Gorski, and Andrew Ranville.
The Foundation’s public records, including our Mission Statement, board member biographies, funding reports, and federal returns can be found in the up-to-date Rabbit Island document cloud here.
Contact
Rob Gorski, Cofounder
rob@rabbitisland.org
Andrew Ranville, Cofounder, Executive Director
andrew@rabbitisland.org
