A seasonal artist residency rooted in art, nature, moon cycles, and the creative rhythms of Northern Michigan.

This summer, Mud Wisdom is heading north.

Through a seasonal artist residency with Whistling Frog Gallery in Alden, Michigan, artist and Mud Wisdom founder Beth Mateskon will live, make, teach, and gather in Northern Michigan—using the gallery and its artist retreat space as a temporary home for a growing series of creative experiences.

The residency is an experiment in something Mud Wisdom deeply believes:

Artists don't need to wait until they have the perfect studio, perfect gallery, or perfect circumstances to begin building creative community.

Sometimes we begin exactly where we are invited.

A Residency Built Around the Moon

Rather than following a traditional class calendar, the Northern Michigan Residency moves loosely with the moon.

Each month, Mud Wisdom will offer 2–6 intentionally curated workshops, with experiences changing according to the season, landscape, and lunar cycle.

The Full Moon is our invitation outward.

These gatherings are playful, social, colorful, and often open to both adults and children. Full Moon workshops are about making marks, trying something unfamiliar, getting messy, laughing, and remembering that creativity doesn't have to be serious to matter.

The New Moon turns us inward.

New Moon workshops are intentionally adults-only and quieter in nature. These gatherings use art as a way to slow down, listen, reflect, and make without needing to perform or produce something beautiful.

Between them are workshops inspired by whatever Northern Michigan is doing around us—wildflowers, water, gardens, stones, changing light, indigo, clay, and the woods.

Residency Workshops

🌑 New Moon Watercolor Journal

Adults Only

A quiet watercolor practice for the beginning of a new lunar cycle.

Using watercolor, simple mark-making, and guided reflection, we'll create journal pages around what we're releasing, what we're noticing, and what we'd like to make room for next.

No watercolor experience is necessary.

This isn't a painting class about getting watercolor “right.”

It's a place to listen.

🌑 New Moon Mandala

Adults Only

An intentionally slow evening of pattern, repetition, nature, and reflection.

We'll explore the ancient impulse to create circles and repeated forms before building our own mandalas through drawing, watercolor, natural materials, or clay.

The finished piece becomes less important than the process of making it.

Come tired.

Come uncertain.

Come exactly as you are.

🌑 Indigo + Intention

Adults Only

Blue hands encouraged.

Using indigo dye, folding, binding, resist techniques, and simple ritual, we'll transform natural fabric while exploring the idea of what we hold onto—and what we're ready to release.

Every piece unfolds differently.

That's part of the magic.

Participants leave with their own hand-dyed textile and a very good reason to stop expecting themselves to control every outcome.

🌕 Full Moon Family Art Night

Adults + Kids

The Full Moon is not asking us to behave.

This family-friendly art night is intentionally playful, experimental, and a little messy.

Each Full Moon brings a different project inspired by the season—giant collaborative paintings, watercolor moons, clay, printmaking, natural sculpture, lanterns, or whatever idea seems impossible to resist that month.

Kids are welcome.

Adults are expected to make art too.

This is not a drop-off class. It's an invitation for families to make alongside one another.

🌕 Paint the Moon

Adults + Kids

Look up.

Then paint what you actually see.

We'll use watercolor and mixed media to explore moonlight, night skies, reflection, and the beautiful imperfection of painting something constantly changing.

Young artists can experiment freely while adults are encouraged to loosen their grip on making something “good.”

Everyone leaves with their own Northern Michigan moon.

🌕 Wild Mandala

Adults + Kids

Leaves. Stones. Flowers. Sticks. Sand. Seeds.

Together we'll explore the landscape around us and create temporary mandalas using natural materials.

We'll photograph what we make—and then return the materials to the landscape.

An intentionally ephemeral workshop about noticing, arranging, making, and letting go.

🌕 Moon + Mud

Adults + Kids

Clay without perfection.

Using simple hand-building techniques, participants will create small moons, vessels, tiles, creatures, talismans, and other objects inspired by Northern Michigan.

The emphasis isn't technical mastery.

It's putting your hands into earth and seeing what happens.

Seasonal Workshops

Northern Michigan Watercolor Field Journal

Part nature walk, part sketchbook practice, part permission slip.

We'll wander slowly, collect colors and observations, and create loose watercolor journal pages inspired by Northern Michigan.

No perfect landscapes required.

We might paint a leaf.

A boat.

A shoreline.

A strange little mushroom.

Or simply the color of the lake that afternoon.

The practice is noticing.

Indigo Under the Northern Sky

A summer afternoon of indigo dyeing inspired by water, sky, waves, stones, and the repetitive patterns found throughout the Northern Michigan landscape.

Participants experiment with traditional resist techniques while creating their own scarves, bandanas, textiles, or fabric pieces.

Expect blue hands.

Michigan Mosaic

Using color, texture, ceramic pieces, found materials, and imagery inspired by our lakes and landscape, participants will create a small mosaic celebrating their own relationship with Michigan.

No two need to look alike.

Because there isn't one Michigan.

There's the Michigan each of us remembers.

The Artist Wake-Up

Adults Only

For the person who keeps saying:

I used to be creative.

You didn't lose it.

This signature Mud Wisdom workshop is designed for adults who haven't made art in years—or who make things constantly but somehow stopped making anything for themselves.

Through playful exercises, reflection, watercolor, mark-making, and conversation, we'll begin waking up the artist who has been waiting underneath everything else.

No talent required.

Especially no talent required.

Mud Wisdom Kids Camp

A Week of Wild Making in Northern Michigan

For several days, the adults don't get to have all the fun.

Mud Wisdom Kids Camp is a short summer creative residency for young artists built around nature, experimentation, and enormous permission to make weird things.

Instead of reproducing teacher examples, campers explore a different material or question each day.

Day One — WATER
Watercolor, lake colors, movement, reflection, and enormous paintings.

Day Two — EARTH
Clay, mud, texture, natural sculpture, and things discovered on the ground.

Day Three — COLOR
Indigo, natural dye, printmaking, pattern, and textiles.

Day Four — WILD
Nature mandalas, temporary installations, sculpture, and outdoor making.

Day Five — MOON
A celebration of everything we've made, culminating in a tiny young-artist exhibition for families.

Kids don't leave Mud Wisdom camp with 14 identical craft projects.

They leave having discovered something much more interesting:

their own ideas.

Why an Artist Residency?

An artist residency isn't simply about having somewhere to sleep while making art.

It's about place.

For this chapter of Mud Wisdom, Northern Michigan becomes part of the studio.

Whistling Frog provides a temporary home base where our family can spend meaningful stretches of the summer in Alden while Beth develops a Northern Michigan teaching practice, creates new work, and experiments with what an art-centered life here might eventually become.

In return, Whistling Frog becomes more than the location where the workshops happen.

They become the host of a working artist residency.

Throughout the residency, Mud Wisdom will document the experience through photography, writing, social media, email, and storytelling—highlighting Whistling Frog, Alden, the surrounding landscape, and the people helping creative community grow here.

Workshops will be intentionally limited to approximately 2–6 gatherings each month.

The goal isn't to pack a calendar.

It's to create experiences worth remembering.

The Beginning of Something

Mud Wisdom has a much larger dream.

Someday, we imagine our own Northern Michigan place.

A gallery.

An art teaching center.

A working studio.

A potter's garden where flowers grow between sculptures.

Paths through the landscape where mosaics appear unexpectedly.

Tables covered in watercolor.

Clay-covered hands.

Children making enormous things.

Adults remembering they are artists.

Visiting artists staying awhile.

Dinner outside.

Work that isn't afraid of being seen.

But places like that don't appear overnight.

They grow through relationships.

Through experiments.

Through communities.

Through someone saying:

You can begin here.

For this season, we're beginning at Whistling Frog.

And we're going to see what grows.