COMMUNITY
“Yaddo has given me friends to paint for: you, and Dante, Jimmy, Harris, the Norrises—ever so many.” —Clyfford Still to Elizabeth Ames, 1934
Yaddo first began receiving guests in 1926. From the outset, days at Yaddo were structured to balance solitude and community. Quiet hours foster creative concentration, while conversation around the dinner table nurtures the sense of community that supports creativity. Since its first guests arrived, nearly 6,500 artists, writers, composers, and critics have worked at Yaddo, 1,700 of them between 1926 and 1980, the period of active operations emphasized in this exhibition. Their lives and work, their friendships and love affairs, piques and professional enmities, have become the material of literary lore.