Applications are now open❤️🔥for our annual spring session: May 16-24, 2026!
Scroll through for details + 🔗 link in our bio 🔗for info + applications.
🌀Early Admission student deadline: January 7th
🌀Faculty Deadline: Tuesday, January 27th
🌀Scholarship deadline: February 26th
🌀Final student deadline: March 5th
DEEP APPRECIATION to our incredible, generous sponsors for providing so many beautiful products to help nourish and support us in session this Spring! We are so grateful!
Student applications for our May 16-24 session are due this Thursday 3/5!
SotA is more than an artist residency; it’s a living model of mutual care, shared knowledge, and creative liberation that gives us room to practice the kind of world we wish to live in.
At SotA, you will live communally, learn collaboratively, and you will be a part of sustaining our community in real time. You’ll have the chance to teach what you’re excited about, and you will learn firsthand the joy of sharing your knowledge vs guarding it. You will experience the pleasure of living in a creative, non-competitive, wildly affirming space.
We are very excited to share our Class List for our Spring 2026 session (May 16-24)!
We’re so excited to host these radical folks. This year’s faculty review committee included 10 community members: past faculty, staff, students, and Board and Advisory Committee members – who have spent the past several weeks scoring all of the incredible bye applications that came in. There’s still time to apply to join us for this year’s session! 👀
L🔗NK in our bio for full class descriptions and session information.
📣Last calll 📣 Faculty applications for our Spring 2026 session are due Tuesday, Jan 27th
Anyone can apply to teach anything - there are no prerequisites or requirements. Come share your radical ideas! Come lead a class in making something wild (hello, studio classes! We are craving you!😛). Come to SotA and you will be a full participant: taking other classes, helping maintain the community through work service, and living amongst 50 radical strangers as we collectively create and dream together.
If you have questions, comment here, maybe others have the same questions?
We are seeking faculty for our Spring session, and the deadline is approaching: 🌀January 27th!🌀
SotA is a communal, non-competitive, wildly affirming space shaped in response to the restrictive and oppressive learning environments many of us have survived. This is not just an artist residency. It is a shared experiment in mutual care, creative liberation, and collective imagination.
📸 @suzmurrayy
Come teach at SotA! Faculty applications due🌀JAN 27🌀! What are you obsessed with that you want to explore with a community of wild wonderful freakssss?
At SotA you will live communally, learn collaboratively, and you will be a part of sustaining our community in real time. You’ll have the chance to teach what you’re excited about, and you will learn firsthand the joy of sharing your knowledge vs guarding it. You will experience the pleasure of living in a creative, non-competitive, wildly affirming space. We can’t wait to read your proposals! There are no prerequisites to apply and anyone can apply to teach anything👀
Our faculty deadline for our Spring 2026 session is fast approaching! What idea or practice do you want to explore with a group? What knowledge are you trying to build in your own practice and life? What skill are you eager to share?
You can apply to teach either a SOLID or a LIQUID class at SotA.
🪨Solid classes are based in sequential learning, most like a traditional class structure. Students will be encouraged to attend all classes; each class builds on the last. Solids should aim to fully complete a project, either collectively or individually.
🧪Liquid classes function as a series of workshops, so each session should be able to stand alone. Students are welcome to attend a different Liquid class each day, or to stick with the same one all week.
Flyer by @ohmamastrange
Our early admissions deadline for students is coming up: January 7th!
This option is intended for people who are confident they want to attend before the full class list is released, or who need more time to plan than our usual deadlines allow. We encourage applicants to apply early for the best chance of joining our 2026 session. Our deadlines are below!
📸 @liminals
Beautiful words and images from longtime SotA community member @liminals :
“The heavy keeps getting heavier and the nonsensical more wild every day. I know you know what I mean, it’s redundant to harp. But this dark, slimy background serves as context for the warm pockets - the small, compassionate clusters of community at the center. These bright spots feel brighter with the world so dark. It can’t be understated, this is crucial sunlight - without which, no day would never break, no crop would ever grow.
I’ve found this light in an artist residency, you might have heard me talk about it before. In May of 2017 I went to School of the Alternative in Black Mountain, North Carolina because I’d read about a program that attempted to progress the legacy of Black Mountain College. I’d soon find out this way of describing SotA is actually sort of laughably reductive - it shared a campus and an ethos with BMC but took on a multifaceted, ever-unfolding identity of its own. There were classes on anti-product painting and ritual dreaming, shared living quarters and work duties, a nonhierarchical structure. But I guess I didn’t expect my fellow residents to be so… playful? Reverently irreverent? I guess I had been a little intimidated, it was my first artist residency out of state, I knew no one, it was early in my career. Imposter syndrome followed me like a curse. But the way SotA cultivated this very freeing, very immediate, very nonjudgmental space for all of us to fuck around, with no pretension and no perfectionism in sight, was life-changing. My favorite example (I’ve told this many times) is that all my life I had desperately wanted to make music but was afraid. I held music with such religious reverence. So I never tried! I thought I’d definitely suck at it, which I couldn’t bear. But it only took one class at SotA to change that for me (shoutout Zach Cooper) and I jumped right in. Now I make music - simple as that.
So much has shifted and initiated for me as a result of so many years attending School of the Alternative. This community means so much to me, and keeping it funded and nurtured is the only way to keep it alive.”
Transparency is radical and important.
We’re in the final days of our annual fundraising campaign, and we’re still a ways from our goal. We are fundraising to:
🌀hold our next session
🌀 keep tuition at the price that it’s at ($575 for a 9 day session)
🌀keep offering Black equity and need based scholarships
🌀 pay small travel stipends to our faculty and staff
🌀 meet the operational deficits that tuition doesn’t cover.
We do this work on a shoestring budget and all of the work to put together our sessions is done by wildly dedicated volunteers. We’re fundraising this month to continue our current model: we need your support. Whether that is through a $5 or $20 or $500 donation or by sharing this campaign, we’re asking for your help to sustain this space!
