Artist Garland Farwell Felt The Staying Power Of York, Alabama
By Anne Kristoff
Most artists spend their lives trying to get to New York or Los Angeles. For Garland Farwell, it was the opposite. For the Los Angeles native, and sometime New Yorker, light bulbs of inspiration and curiosity went off when he started thinking about the South.
He took to Google to explore his options and found an artist residency offered by The Coleman Center for the Arts in York, a tiny town in west Alabama, 7 miles from the Mississippi border. He was accepted and packed his bags, expecting to visit long enough to complete the two-month gig. Nine years later, he’s still there.
“The minute I drove into town I knew that this was where I wanted to stay,” he said. “The feeling of, ‘this is what I’ve been looking for and didn’t even realize it.’”For his residency, Farwell took the work of Alabama artist Mose Tolliver and created community projects that reimagined Tolliver’s work as sculpture, installation and giant puppets.
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