The Goetemann Artist Residency Program: 2025 Residents
The Goetemann Artist Residency (GAR) program was created to inspire artists from near and far to invigorate the community of longstanding artists and art lovers who live on Cape Ann. The program currently consists of three distinct residencies: the Distinguished Artist/Teacher, the Environmental/Installation Artist, and the Gloucester Invitational Artist. Learn more here.
This year, we are thrilled to welcome Talya Baharal as the Distinguished Artist/Teacher, the Ocean School Collective as the Environmental/Installation Artist, and Deborah Read as the Gloucester Invitational Artist.
GAR Distinguished Artist/Teacher: Talya Baharal
August 2025
The GAR Distinguished Artist/Teacher (DA/T) is an annual appointment, by invitation of the GAR Committee. The DA/T receives an honorarium and is provided with housing on Rocky Neck. At the start of their seven-day August residency they present a free, public lecture at the at The Cultural Center at Rocky Neck, followed by a four-day workshop at Montserrat College. This year, in addition to the lecture and workshop, Talya Baharal, will have a two-week exhibition at Cove Gallery to coincide with the dates of the residency.
What’s In a Voice, Paintings by Talya Baharal Exhibit: August 7-17 | Cove Gallery, Gloucester, MA
Talya Baharal is a multi-disciplinary artist, living and maintaining her painting studio in New York’s Hudson Valley. Widely recognized, exhibited and published as a studio art jeweler and sculptor for over three decades she was also the recipient of a NYFA fellowship and other grants and awards and was a juror on NYFA sculpture/craft category in 2011. Baharal was the curator of a well-respected anthology of contemporary silver jewelry published by Lark Books in 2011. While Baharal is primarily a self-taught artist, upon moving to Maine in 2012 she began focusing exclusively on painting and took several workshops with the renowned abstract painter/teacher, Steve Aimone. Upon her return to New York in 2016 she studied with Fran O’Neill and John Lees at the NY Studio School. Her abstract painting work has since been presented in several solo exhibitions in Chelsea, NYC, Healdsburg CA, Torrington, CT, and Rockland, Maine. Baharal is represented by Lulo Gallery, Healdsburg CA and Triangle Gallery, Rockland Maine.
Abstract painter and sculptor Baharal, the 2025 Goetemann Distinguished Artist/Teacher, led an inspiring four-day artist workshop, WHAT’S IN A VOICE, at Montserrat College of Art in Beverly, MA. Baharal shared her irreverent approach and process to making art and spoke to the role of discovery and growth in non-traditional ways using collage as a dialogue with paint. The workshop focused on exploring the making of a painter’s voice through experimentation and use of prompts to expand participants’ abstract vocabulary. The workshop provided a supportive place to review and discuss current work of the participants.
PDF What’s in a Voice book | Talya Baharal Paintings Website | Talya Baharal Instagram
GAR Environmental/Installation Artist: The Ocean School Collective
September 2025
The Environmental/Installation artist (E/IA) is selected via jury and receives a stipend for the month-long residency, typically held in September. Artists are encouraged to work outdoors and develop their ideas and concepts pertaining to the region concurrently working on a “site-specific” installation located at the Ocean Alliance Center on Rocky Neck. This residency has made art both visible and accessible to the public. Artists are encouraged to engage the public and draw attention to questions and challenges posed by environmental policies, politics, and/or social change.
The Ocean School Collective (OSC) is an art collective made up of artists, philosophers, poets, and musicians from Boston’s North Shore and Cape Ann who have been doing artistic research in the archives of the Ocean Alliance on Rocky Neck since 2022. The OSC designs installations, performances, and creative public education events in order to promote an environmental ethic called “ocean thinking”. This collective aims to expand the cultural sphere to include the world of whales by combining creative futurism and fabulation with the advances in whale science and the ocean conservation efforts of Ocean Alliance. Their work opens creative space for artists, scientists, technology, and whales to meet together “in the safety of the song.”
GAR Gloucester Invitational Artist: Deborah Read
October 2025
The Gloucester Invitational was created to offer a talented Gloucester artist the opportunity to experiment and explore new directions. They are provided a stipend and are asked to present an opening talk at the beginning of their one-month residency and a closing talk in their studio at the end.
Gloucester-based artist Deborah Read joined the Goetemann Artist Residency at Rocky Neck Art Colony with a deceptively simple but urgent inquiry: Does art have to be an object?
For Read, the answer has long been “not necessarily.” Her interdisciplinary practice—spanning installation, performance, writing, and collaborative projects—frames art as an act of generosity. As co-founder of Gallery RAG in Gloucester and the international foundation Art+Everywhere, she has created platforms that dissolve boundaries between artist and audience, centering collaboration, care, and mutual support.
Read’s projects invite participation and dialogue: immersive performances with Coco Haze that turn galleries into collective canvases, hybrid works with poet Joel Iwaskiewicz where language becomes performance, and community-based installations like Tejido Vivo, which weave craft traditions into living art. In each case, connection outweighs the object itself.
Her foundation Art+Everywhere embodies this vision, described by Read as “a global, artist-led ecosystem built on mutual generosity.” Its mission: expand access to funding, programming, and creative opportunities while removing barriers of gatekeeping institutions. “The challenge is not scarcity, but activation,” Read explains. “Compassion already exists—in hundreds of hands and eyes—ready to help.”
At Rocky Neck, her residency continues this ethos—not as a retreat into isolation, but as a public process of listening, generating, and sharing. “The question is never just ‘what did I make,’ but ‘what did we generate together?’ Generosity is generative—it can enrich lives, spaces, and even economies.” For Rocky Neck—a community shaped by both maritime labor and artistic innovation—Read’s residency is both a philosophical question and a practical experiment: What if art is not possession, but presence? Not scarcity, but abundance?
