Welcome to Camp El
About
Camp El provides artists, creatives, designers, gardeners, and thinkers with space to explore, reflect, and retreat in a quiet Maine landscape far from the distractions of life in Alton Maine, Penobscot County. Camp El is made available through a curated Artist Retreat, at no cost to accepted artists, and as an artbnb, available at a sliding scale.
Camp El offers four seasonal retreats each year, providing artists with self-guided independent time to concentrate on research or a project of their choice. Artists of all disciplines and any career stage are welcome to apply. Learn more.
If a residency doesn’t suit you, Camp El is available to enjoy year-round at a sliding fee between $50-100/night, subsidizing our Artist Retreat. Help us in our mission to provide BIPOC artists and creatives with space to work at no cost. Learn more.
Mission
Camp El is committed to increasing professional opportunity, physical space, and fostering community by providing artists of all disciplines, career levels, and identities with the space to develop, explore, research, experiment, create and find refuge with little to no financial cost.
Camp El strives to foster diversity in our operations and curation. We are committed to offering at least half of our retreats to BIPOC, Queer, and Female identifying artists each year. We will always maintain a majority BIPOC and Female identifying curation panel. We are committed to prioritizing care and healing for the indigenous land upon which we live and to operate mindfully in efforts to heal, maintain, and sustain.
Camp El is a 21-acre estate located in Alton, Maine in Penobscot County and is managed by mother and daughter duo Katrina and Eleanor.
Family Run
Katrina (she/her) is a self-taught Maine-based painter, originally from Saratoga County, Upstate New York. She has a BA in Fine Art from the University of Maine, where she later worked as a Graphic Designer. Introduced to painting at a young age, she was influenced by the farmlands, woods, and Hudson River landscapes that surround her in her youth. She moved to Maine as a young adult, and while she appreciated the beauty of Maine’s rocky coasts and lighthouses, it was the inland farmlands, pastures, woods, and rivers that she still felt compelled to paint. After the passing of her husband, she relocated to Florida where she began Plein Air painting and was represented by Brush Strokes Gallery in Fort Pierce Florida. Katrina returned to Maine where she built a house and now lives and works. Katrina’s work has frequently been shown in group exhibitions in Sohns Gallery in Bangor, Maine.
“After the death of my husband, and my return to Maine to raise my children, I was reminded that there are times as artists when we are forced to stop and take care of life’s events and tragedies; but we continue, despite the setbacks. A good friend, also an artist, encouraged me during one of these times. She reminded me of who I was. ‘We may not always be making art but we are still artists inside.’ I’m not quite grown up yet, but I am an artist.”
Eleanor (she/her) is a New York-based artist, educator, and arts administrator. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the experience of the Black Diasporic female body in the united states of amerikkka through the examination and deconstruction of historical and contemporary narratives. She is interested in the public, private, and civic negotiations of race, gender, and class in addition to the effect and practice of violence, and surveillance on the body. This hybrid work exists as performance, video, and photography, poetry/spoken word, collaborative education, educational collaboration, installation, & writing but often draws on other methods such as social practice, and design. Eleanor is originally from Maine and has a BS in Video Production from the New England School of Communications (2007), an MFA from the University of Maine (2018), and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 2018.
Current exhibitions include Are You Happy at the Portland Museum of Art as part of Untitled, 2020: Art From Maine in a ______ Time. She is also a Guest Curator with this year’s Yellow Fish Durational Performance Festival. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot her at Camp El during your visit!
