Kippy Stroud Artist-in-Residence Lecture features Cedra Wood
BAR HARBOR — College of the Atlantic artist in residence Cedra Wood shares her work and discusses her vision at the 2025 COA Kippy Stroud Artist-in-Residence Public Lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 16, at 6:30 p.m. in the Thomas S. Gates, Jr. Community Center.
Wood is an artist in love with the wilderness and the complex and lonely terrain of the human heart. She makes paintings and drawings that marry the elements of both worlds in unlikely ways, creating narrative metaphors for humanity’s relationships with the environment.
Wood grew up in the Texas panhandle, and after receiving her MFA at the University of New Mexico, has pivoted around NM while participating in numerous residencies, including Teton Artlab (Jackson, WY), The Arctic Circle (Svalbard, Norway), PLAYA, Sagehen Creek Experimental Forest and Biological Field Station (Truckee, CA), Ucross, and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence program.
She is the recipient of a research fellowship at the Center for Art + Environment at the Nevada Museum of Art, as well as grants from the Harwood Emerging Artist Fund, the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, the Puffin Foundation, the RAiR Foundation, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation (via the Land Arts Mobile Research Initiative).
Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud was a talented artist, entrepreneur, generous philanthropist, and impassioned promoter of artists. She founded and funded The Fabric Workshop and Museum in Philadelphia, an experimental program for artists working in textiles and other media as well as the Acadia Summer Arts Program, or “Kamp Kippy” as it was more affectionately known, hosting hundreds of artists and their guests and families over close to three decades.
As a way to honor Stroud’s legacy and commitment to artists on the island she loved, the Marion Boulton “Kippy” Stroud Foundation and COA established a one month artist-in-residence program in 2019 to perpetuate the spirit of Camp Kippy and provide the opportunity so treasured by Stroud of being in Maine on Mount Desert Island within an artistic, intellectual, and sociable community. The program has since expanded, and now includes the Kippy Stroud Emerging Visiting Maine Artist residency in winter term and the The Kippy Stroud Memorial COA Lecture in the spring.