ARTS Southeast Revives Artist Residency on Georgia's Ossabaw Island for October Launch

A barrier island off the Georgia coast will once again host working artists this autumn. ARTS Southeast, a Savannah-based arts organisation, is reviving its Ossabaw Island Residency programme with a launch scheduled for October 2026, according to ARTnews.

Ossabaw is Georgia's third-largest barrier island — a narrow strip of land parallel to the mainland, shaped by tides and storms, reachable only by boat. The residency will bring two cohorts of artists to spend focused, uninterrupted time working on the island, according to ARTS Southeast's programme page.

The new residency takes inspiration from the historic Ossabaw Island Project, an earlier interdisciplinary programme that drew writers, scientists and artists to the island beginning in the 1960s, as reported by Savannah Agenda. The project was the vision of Eleanor "Sandy" Torrey West, whose family owned the island and opened it to creative and intellectual retreats for decades before the state of Georgia acquired most of the land in 1978.

ARTS Southeast first announced the revived residency on its Instagram account in August 2025. In the months since, the organisation has been raising funds to support the programme. A silent auction fundraiser ran in May 2026, with bidding extended beyond its original closing date, according to a Facebook post from ARTS Southeast.

For artists, a residency means dedicated time and space to make work — often weeks free from the routines and pressures that fragment a practice elsewhere. On Ossabaw, that isolation is more literal than most: the island remains largely undeveloped, its 26,000 acres of marsh, beach and maritime forest protected as a heritage preserve.

ARTS Southeast has not yet publicly named the participating artists or specified the exact dates for each cohort. The organisation's website describes the programme as offering artists the chance to engage deeply with the island's environment and history.

What makes this revival notable is the lineage it continues. The original Ossabaw Island Project hosted figures ranging from Margaret Mead to Aaron Copland over its roughly three decades of operation. Whether the new residency will reach for that breadth remains to be seen, but the setting itself — remote, tidal and thick with live oak — carries its own long artistic history.