Happy December. We write to you today with much gratitude after a successful GivingTuesday. Thank you to everyone who participated! Your donations surpassed our goal of $5,000, garnering a match from a special anonymous supporter. We loved seeing your words of support and your engagement with our video revealing updates around Mt. San Angelo. VCCA is grateful to have Fellows and friends who give back — especially now! Thanks for spreading the love and sharing in this artist community.

This holiday gift-giving season, we encourage you to support VCCA Fellows by buying and sharing their art with your loved ones. You can browse our VCCA Fellows page on Bookshop for a wide variety of incredible books released this year during the pandemic. We also encourage Fellows to share their books, artwork, CDs, etc. that are available for purchase online in our new "Marketplace" topic in Virtual VCCA. We're hoping this can be a community-driven resource for gift-giving ideas that support our Fellows.

We're less than two months away from our January 15 application deadline for summer 2021 residencies at Mt. San Angelo. Today, we happily spotlight the Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship, which is one of several fully-funded fellowships available for this application and scheduling cycle.

Take a virtual tour of the progress we've made around Mt. San Angelo since purchasing the property. Kevin, Sheila, and Asta lead the way. Special thanks to Craig Pleasants for the camerawork! Watch the video.

The Open Call is a new podcast on "contemporary art in response to a pandemic landscape" hosted by VCCA Fellow Anne Stagg and Laura Tanner. Enjoy their chat with Kevin and Sheila about the value of an artist residency, insights on how VCCA has navigated the pandemic, and more. Listen to the episode.

Visual artist Laurie Krasny Brown will introduce us to her latest children’s book, Democracy for Dinosaurs, which was released in September 2020 by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers.

Award-winning journalist and fiction writer Robin Farmer will read an excerpt from her debut young adult novel, Malcolm and Me, which was released in November 2020 by SparkPress.

Our host for the evening will be nonfiction writer and Fellows Council member Iraj Isaac Rahmim. Tune in Thursday, December 3, at 7:30 p.m. ET.

You're invited to join us for a bittersweet Zoom party as we say farewell to longtime staff member Bea Booker. Join us on December 10 at 7:30 p.m. ET to give her a proper send off before she heads on to new pursuits.

Bea's on the email list for this newsletter, so we won't say TOO much about what we have planned for the evening. Just register to join us and consider wearing purple for the occasion. RSVP on our website.

Fellows, please submit a message. This is a way to tell the VCCA community about how you're navigating these times as an artist and human and to spread the word about work affected by or created during the pandemic.

"The lock down in NYC went into effect when the proofs for my book Doppelgangers, Alter-Egos & Mirror Images in Western Art 1840-2010 were on the horizon. Not owning a laptop, my Dean sent me a Chromebook enabling me to teach. He didn’t send a printer, however, and I did not dare ask for one. So, I had to send my publisher corrections of the proofs in the form of email attachments. Then came the index. Luckily an 85-year-old neighbor down the hall does have a printer. I would send her each iteration of my alphabetized index terms via email, and she would slip the printouts to me under my door. Unfortunately, her printer was broken and so the top margin was 4 inches deep and the bottom margin was somewhere in thin air, so the last two lines of each page of index terms was absent. But we made do.

If you want to read my book but cannot afford it, please consider asking your local library to buy it for you. Thank you and stay well."

"I will be speaking about my project Passages: An Installation in Progress on December 4, 2020, for a symposium organized by the Philadelphia Avant-Garde Studies Symposium (PASC).

The first version of the project was at the Maier Museum in Lynchburg, VA, earlier this year. The next will be in Philadelphia in the summer of 2021."

The Richard S. and Julia Louise Reynolds Poetry Fellowship is a fully-funded, three-week residency for poets.

The VCCA residency at Mt. San Angelo includes a private bedroom with private bath, a separate individual studio, and meals in a community of cross-disciplinary artists.

To be considered for a Reynolds Poetry Fellowship, complete the “Application for Mt. San Angelo Residencies” by January 15, 2021. In the very first question on the application, you can indicate fellowships for which you'd like to be considered.

Did you know that if you make a gift to VCCA between now and the end of the year, your gift can have a greater impact under CARES Act tax provisions? Under the pandemic relief program, taxpayers can deduct up to $300, even if they take the standard deduction. This New York Times article, It's Easier to Get a Tax Deduction for Donations This Year, breaks it down for you.

Look to this comprehensive list of ways to stay virtually engaged with our creative community during VCCA's temporary closure.

🧡 Stay safe, and be well.

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