arts administrator – Whirligig

A Conversation with Macy Chadwick

Macy Chadwick is the founder and director of In Cahoots Residency in Petaluma, California. Macy is remarkable as a creative residency host in part because she is exceptionally personable with a wonderful gift of giving a story, often with unpredictable humor and resulting laughter. Her own work as a printmaker and book artist is visually poetic and imbued with a sensitive essence of personal reflection. We talked about her work and the running of In Cahoots while sitting under a large oak tree on the residency grounds.

Macy Chadwick in the studio. Photo: Edie Overturf

Nanette: How did you come to art?

Macy: When I was little, I loved all kinds of art, and my mom really encouraged it. I took some after school art classes starting in third grade and continued with that until high school. In order to take the advanced art classes in high school, I had to commit to being an art major in college because the goal of the advanced art classes was to help you prepare a portfolio to apply to college. So I said, yeah, I’ll be an art major in college. Then I decided I really did want to do that. I pursued my BFA, but I was never one of the artsy kids. I didn’t have purple hair or tattoos, still don’t. But I was definitely one of the creative kids, and art has always been a big part of my life.

Nanette: How did you get into printmaking and book arts?

Macy: In undergrad, I was an Illustration major and I never really loved it. I had loved drawing in high school, because that was just what we were offered. In college, I started taking printmaking classes to do my illustrations and then I realized I was actually more interested in making prints about my own ideas and concepts than I was in illustrating other people’s ideas. So, I ended up being a double major in Illustration and Printmaking.

This was at Washington University in St. Louis. I was very interested in putting my prints into a sequence. At the time, they didn’t have book arts there, so I went to the library and checked out the Japanese Stab Binding book—the one with the green cover. I don’t know why, but that’s the only book on book arts techniques that every library seems to have. So, I learned stab binding, and I taught myself a couple of other bindings in undergrad.

Between undergrad and grad school, I took Book Arts classes at Oregon College of Art and Craft with Barb Tetenbaum. It was from Barb that I learned the foundation of everything I know about book arts and letterpress printing. I’ve learned more over the years, but Barb taught me so much. As happens with your first teacher—you still reference what they taught you, and who they admired. Barb admired Tim Barrett, Hedi Kyle, Patty Scobey, Julie Chen, and Gary Frost. So, I still admire all those people, and others, too. I continued to study Book Arts and Printmaking in grad school and then I learned more when I moved to Berkeley to work for Julie Chen.

*Meanwhile* by Macy Chadwick, Limited edition artist book: Letterpress, relief printing; accordion structure in half-clamshell box. Edition of 40, 2017. Photo: Bernhard Uhl

Nanette: When was that?

Macy: I moved to Berkeley in 2003. I had graduated from Wash U in 1994. The rest of the nineties I lived in Portland, Oregon. I studied with Barb at the Oregon College of Art and Craft, which has since closed. Then I went to grad school at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, from 2001 to 2003. UArts closed recently as well.

A Conversation with Sinjin Jones, transmedia artist

Sinjin Jones is a transmedia artist, storyteller, and poet interested in the connections between diverse media forms which allow him to combine these in interesting ways. In 2019, shortly before the reality of a global pandemic, Jones became the Executive Artistic Director of The Pear Theatre in Mountain View, California.

Sinjin Jones in 2024. Photo courtesy of The Pear Theatre.

Jones has a long history of engaging in live performance. From his student days until he moved to the Bay Area, Jones spent his summers working for A Theatre Group in Silverton, Colorado where he wrote, directed, and eventually became their Artistic Director and Vice President of their Board of Directors. He has founded a non-profit, multimedia artists’ collective called Otherworld Collective; and co-founded Perplexity Pictures, a film production company. He has a background in teaching performance arts at all levels, and is currently teaching for The Pear’s outreach programs. Jones has a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre, Film, and Video Production from the University of Colorado, Denver; and an MFA in Creative Writing from Regis University.

At The Pear, Jones is developing dynamic, engaging, and fresh programming that both surprises and challenges.
His leadership consistently demonstrates his rich intellect and deep investment in local communities. We spoke over tea at an outdoor cafe on a lovely spring afternoon.

Nanette: How did you come to theatre?

Sinjin: When I was a kid I would tell stories to myself. We were very poor and didn’t have access to theatre. We would go to the dollar store and I would get to pick out one thing. I would pick out a [cassette] tape because my mom had a radio that also had a tape recorder. I would go into my room at night and tell stories to myself, improvised stories. That turned into getting together with the neighbor kids to tell stories. I would write stories and we would perform them. This was second and third grade, and I didn’t really know what theatre was, only to some small extent. Then my elementary school turned into a school of the arts and I got to take some theatre classes. I think that’s the beginning. I consider myself to be a storytelling artist, but that live act of performing in front of people or seeing story come to life in person has always interested me. That’s really the start of it all.

More formally, I did theatre in high school. I was deciding between archaeology and theatre/film for college. The University of Denver had a program where you could do theatre and film at the same time, so I was sold. The idea of storytelling is really beautiful to me. I’ve practiced a lot of different forms of art, many are less collaborative than theatre is. I like the coalescence of different artists from different backgrounds and different skill sets coming together to create one unified portrait of something.

Nanette: Did you grow up in Colorado?

Sinjin: I did.

Nanette: Denver has a really good art scene.

Sinjin: They do. I am very lucky. Downtown Denver has a ton of public art. In college, one of the assignments for one of my theatre classes was, “Here’s a map of downtown Denver. Go see as many of the public art pieces as you possibly can.” That is very lucky. It’s nice to have a lot of public art to experience and just be around.

Nanette: You demonstrate an immense amount of theatrical knowledge, and it is apparent by your presentations that developing a contemporary and engaging season requires broad and deep research. What is your process from seed to completed season?