The Alternative Art School (TAAS) is a global, membership-based online art community offering live lectures, workshops, critiques, and exhibition opportunities — without debt or gatekeeping.

Founded to expand access to critical art education, TAAS connects artists worldwide in a flexible, networked environment. It blends online classes, live events, and a global peer community in all mediums, from painting and sculpture to digital and performance art.

www.thealternativeartschool.com

The residency centered on storytelling as a living, regional practice—one shaped by the Ozark landscape and the deep Southern traditions of oral history, song, craft, and survival.

Artists will explore how stories are carried through land, bodies, and materials, and how art becomes a vessel for telling what has often been held quietly, passed down, or coded over time.

Rooted through a Ozark perspective, the program invites artists to examine how stories move through their work—how meaning is formed through process, gesture, memory, and making.

The program provided time, space, and community for artists to deepen their practice while engaging the Ozark landscape and one another. Programming included visits to regional art spaces, conversations with invited guest speakers rooted in local creative communities, and guided story-writing workshops and discussions.

Participants also took part in field experiences connected to seasonal cultural events, offering opportunities to observe how storytelling circulates through public gathering, celebration, and place. Storytelling was approached as a shared process of listening, exchange, and presence.