Ep. #47 An Ecotopia Conversation with Artist Kelly M O’Brien

Carol and I walked up the road in early September to visit the Open Studios of the Artists-in-Residence Program at Woodstock’s Byrdcliffe Arts Colony. The Byrdcliffe Arts Colony was founded in 1903 by Ralph Whitehead, the son of a wealthy mill owner from Yorkshire, England. Whitehead was influenced by utopian ideas when he studied at Oxford, and he developed an enduring vision to found his own “brotherhood of artists” community. The Artists-in-Residence program is one of the many Byrdcliffe programs today that carry on Whitehead’s legacy. Carol and I saw some really interesting works at the Open Studios and were really struck by an outdoor installation by my guest, artist Kelly M O’Brien. On the podcast, Kelly and I discussed her installation, which is called “Ecotopia Conversation”, and its relationship to the 1975 novel Ecotopia: The Notebooks and Reports of William Weston, by Ernest Callenbac. “Ecotopia” describes a utopian world created by the secession in 1980 of Oregon, Washington and Northern California from the United States. It was a cult novel at the outset, and over the years became required reading as environmental studies took off. We truly had an Ecotopia Conversation.