Fresh Milk Art Residency
When : Rolling
Where : Barbados
Application Deadline : Rolling
Application Fee : None
Stipend : None
Fresh Milk supports excellence in the visual arts through residencies and programmes that provide Caribbean artists with opportunities for development and foster a thriving art community. Our mission is to nurture, empower and connect Caribbean artists, raise regional awareness about contemporary arts and provide global opportunities for growth, excellence and success.
The idea for Fresh Milk developed over years of conversations around the need for artistic engagement among artists in Barbados, to strengthen regional and diasporic links and shape new relationships globally. The platform was established in 2011 as a social practice experiment to counter the nearly 100% attrition rate of BFA students at Barbados Community College, the only institution on the island offering a BFA program.
Fresh Milk is located on a working dairy farm; however, the name is also derived from the act of women turning their blood into milk to nurture their young. Given the traumatic history of the Caribbean, the region is not always associated with the idea of nurturing. By offering a safe space for people to innovate, gather, and create, Fresh Milk engages in an act of resistance, moving against a traumatic history as a platform of excellence and diversity. Operating out of a former seventeenth-century sugar plantation, Fresh Milk aims to shift the kind of activity that happens in this historically loaded site by fostering an open, critical environment.
Fresh Milk spans creative disciplines, generations, and linguistic territories in the Caribbean by functioning as a “cultural lab,” thriving as a dynamic space for artists through local, regional, and international programming including residencies, lectures, screenings, workshops, projects, etc. We aspire to be a sustainable organization contributing to a healthy cultural ecosystem.