Our Town

Joe Jeffers; Jeffers Tree Farm during last year's Harold Arts summer residency

Lucas Blair (Jeffers)

A Tree Farm in the Forest and No One Is Around

How a New Trier punk came to start an artists’ residency in Appalachia

By Burt Michaels

February 28, 2008

In 1948 Harold and Elizabeth Jeffers, a young Methodist minister from Maryland and his bride, moved to southeastern Ohio, where they embarked on what would become their life’s work: to replenish the forests that had been cut down to create farmland. The couple started with a hillside plot in Morgan County, about 30 minutes outside of Athens, planting pines for lumber and paper and hardwoods for local craftsmen. As their business grew, they bought adjacent land and dug ponds and built housing for their workers. By the time Harold and Elizabeth died in early 2006, just three weeks apart, Jeffers Tree Farm comprised 3,200 acres. It’s still a working tree farm today.

Harold’s grandson Joe Jeffers recalls visiting with his family as a kid. Jeffers was raised on the North Shore, went to New Trier high school, and by 14 was fronting his first punk band. His grandparents’ Appalachian property was traversed by dirt roads sprinkled with gravel; the nearest town, Chesterhill, still populated mostly by Amish and farming families today, was 15 minutes away. “It was a culture shock for me, a kid from Wilmette who hung out at Broadway and Belmont in Chicago. The farm wasn’t clean, there were bats flying above the dining table—it was all pretty intimidating,” Jeffers says. “But it’s also beautiful—pine forests, snapping turtles, and bluegill in my grandfather’s ponds—a perfect place to make art and record music.”

Jeffers went on to study art at UIC, dabbling in everything from painting to industrial design; he even did a semester in fashion at Parsons. But after three years he was floundering. “I knew school wasn’t working out for me,” he says. “The art department was not as interdisciplinary as I’d hoped.” In the spring of 2006 he was working for the Nova Art Fair (now the Bridge Art Fair), converting space and installing art. So was Nick Wylie, a new-media artist and Carnegie Mellon graduate a few years Jeffers’s senior. At the time Wylie was searching for an artist’s residency that was “short, affordable, and alternative rather than academic.” Jeffers thought of the tree farm, which his father, uncle, and aunt had recently inherited.

“There was something of a precedent for it,” he says. “A local craftsman who made hardwood jewelry boxes for upscale urban department stores had a workshop on the property, and I’d always toyed with the idea of bringing artists and musicians and maybe even filmmakers out there.”

Jeffers introduced Wylie to his friend Jaimie Branch, a jazz trumpeter and graduate of the New England Conservatory in Boston, and the three began formulating a plan for the Harold Arts summer residency. “As we fleshed out the idea, it became more formal and ambitious,” says Branch, now the program’s music director and a member of its board. They settled on a not-for-profit summer program to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration among new, emerging, and midcareer visual artists and avant-garde musicians, with an eye toward developing an organization to support artists and musicians throughout their careers. “I think assembling creative people for serious collective effort is as much a contribution as making art or music,” says Jeffers, “though I still do both.”

They set the first residency for July 2006 and began fund-raising and recruiting right away. Wylie drew in alumni from Carnegie Mellon; Branch brought in musicians from her alma mater. Through a job at the Bucket Rider Gallery, Jeffers met Jason Lazarus and Greg Stimac, fine-art photographers from Columbia College who joined the board and brought in more artists and funds. By summer Jeffers had formally dropped out of school, and Harold Arts had a staff of volunteers and more than 25 residents, including painter and sculptor Michael Gumhold, who came from Austria in search of insight on the U.S. jazz-improv scene. The following year Harold Arts hosted more than 40 residents, including printmakers, sculptors, cellists, drummers, and photographers. They worked together in discussions, critiques, and concerts and attended lectures by guest speakers like professors and collaborators Suzie Silver and Hillary Harp of Carnegie Mellon. (Silver creates video works inspired by Harp’s sculptures.)

“Our first two residencies saw barriers between disciplines collapse all over,” says Jeffers. “Rock and jazz musicians paired up. Visual artists collaborated with improv musicians on graphic scores instead of conventional notes. Trumpeter Jacob Wick created a metal sculpture for people to stand in while listening to his music—like a big inverted bowl that both amplified and altered the music.”

Harold Arts hauls in equipment especially for the residency. There’s a recording studio staffed by two paid, professional engineers. There are video cameras and an edit suite, computers for digital art, and studios for printmaking, papermaking, and fiber art. Residents also have access to the farm’s woodshop. Artists pay a nominal fee, depending on their length of stay and the success of fund-raisers, held at venues as disparate as the River North nightclub Underground and the North Shore’s tony Kenilworth Club. For this year’s session one week will cost $300, two weeks $500.

Residents can stay in tents or in cabins originally built for farmworkers. Some have running water, some have electricity, and one has both. Seclusion is key; there are no phones, and the nearest Internet connection is at the library in Chesterhill. There are a few businesses in the area, including a diner and a charity shop, but even the BP station, which stocks everything from buck knives to porn, doesn’t carry alcohol—the county is dry. When the residency is not in session, the tree farm, now managed by Jeffers’s uncle, an attorney in California, rents accommodations to hunters and vacationers.

“My grandfather would have enjoyed seeing the city people squirming in the country, but we have fun there,” Jeffers says. “Our chef is Ben Carver from Treat in Humboldt Park, and the food is great.” The kitchen is stocked mainly with local produce. “Last summer we had a Buddhist concert where improv musicians timed their music to their breathing. We have a makeshift boat race—everybody makes their own pondworthy boat.” He couldn’t say what his grandfather would make of the residency itself, “except he’d like the fact that we named it after him. Last summer we went to a church he had preached at to bang on their piano.”

In January Harold Arts held a six-night festival at various Chicago venues to celebrate work from the 2007 residency, including the CD Harold, a compilation of music recorded on the farm and released on Sundmagi, a label run by bassist Jason Ajemian, a Harold Arts staffer. Jaimie Branch’s group Princess, Princess, which performed at the prestigious Festival of New Trumpet Music in New York last fall, played the kickoff party at the Darkroom. At Heaven Gallery, Jason Lazarus showed a photo diptych, Boys on the Phone With Their Lovers, that captures with humor and elegance young Harold artists in “secluded” Appalachia calling home to the city on cell phones. Jeffers can be clearly identified in a portrait in cotton thread on vellum by Emily Green that is amazing not only for its representational craftsmanship but for its expression of the young impresario’s rakishness. One night at Heaven Gallery, Jeffers assembled a hot tub especially for the afterparty.

Harold Arts is accepting applications (downloadable at haroldarts.org) through March 30 for its next residency, July 7-27. Judges include faculty at traditional art schools and some pretty established music producers, but Jeffers says they’re all committed to an alternative educational environment. “A great artist who’s hermetic, not collaborative, isn’t a good fit,” Jeffers says. “We can accept about 60 people. The hard part when you’re dealing with avant-garde and interdisciplinary work is to ferret out the nonsense. ‘It’s Tough to Call Bullshit’ is our motto.”   

Send a letter to the editor.

From the Reader blogs

Chicagoland Whet Moser: The FDIC closed down five Illinois banks today.
Thursday at 5:31 pm