Purcell Scheu Palmer ’62 made it big in finance at a time when few women worked in the field. She and her husband Jim—a former pro-basketball star—were ardent travelers who traversed the world. But when it came time to look for their “forever home,” they set their sights on the Northeastern United States, which they both loved.

Barbara Doran, a long-time friend of Purcell’s and Board Chair for the Catwalk Art Residency, says, “Many people think that Purcell acquired this property and later decided to turn it into an artists’ residency, but as she searched high and low for the perfect location, finding a peaceful place for artists to work was in the forefront of her mind.”

In 2004, that dream became manifest when the Palmers founded the artist residence Purcell dubbed Catwalk. (The name refers to a narrow walkway that connects the main house to a three-story tower.) The grand estate in Catskill, NY, about 45 miles north of Poughkeepsie, sits high upon a bluff overlooking the Hudson River and the Rip Van Winkle Bridge. Visitors can catch a glimpse of Olana, home of the Hudson River School painter Frederic Edwin Church, right across the river. The grounds themselves are as exquisite as the view.

In addition to the sprawling mansion built in 1865 by Charles Herbert Moore, another Hudson River School painter and a friend of Matthew Vassar’s, several additions to the Palmers’ home were constructed, and separate structures were placed around the property, making room for artists to pursue work away from the bustle of their everyday lives. Residents—several of them profiled in this issue—remark upon the beauty and serenity of the environment and the ability to work with few distractions.

Shiela Henderson, Catwalk’s Executive Director, says, “Purcell was keen on providing the time and space to create. Yes, every applicant submits a proposal, but ultimately, nothing is curated or set in stone. You have the freedom to do whatever it is that you want to do. Let the beauty of this estate, the magic of the Hudson River, the entire Catskill-Columbia-Greene area—the trees, the landscape, the water—inspire you.”

The opportunity also inspires friendships. Shiela says she gets a kick out of seeing the relationships that develop between the artists. “They go out to dinner together. They cook dinners together. They just hang,” she says. “If you’re a writer meeting a filmmaker or a musician, maybe there’s a collaboration that comes out of that. We want everyone to be inspired by other people’s work.”

Since its inception in 2004, Catwalk has hosted painters, sculptors, poets, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and multidisciplinary artists. There have been almost 800 residencies to date, with some artists returning multiple times. Residents are selected from among the alums, faculty, and staff of five academic institutions: Columbia, New York University, Vassar, the Art Institute of Chicago, Penn State, and Mannes School of Music.

The residency hit some bumps after Jim died in 2013 and Purcell’s health began to wane. She finally died in 2024 after a long illness. Victoria Meguin, who came to work at Catwalk 23 years ago, says Purcell’s presence was sorely missed. “She was a force, and everybody loved her, including the artists,” says Victoria, who serves as Resident Director. “Even as her health was declining, she would still light up a room just with her presence.”

After Purcell’s death, staff members stepped in to shore up operations. Along with Shiela and Victoria, there is Property Manager Chuck Irwin, who has been there for more than 30 years. (He jokes that he “came with the house,” having worked for the previous owner, too.)

Victoria started as a housekeeper, but as Purcell’s health declined, she pivoted to managing the house and coordinating health-care aides. She now oversees day-to-day operations and curates artists’ experiences.

Shiela, who arrived five years ago as Catwalk’s bookkeeper, says that when the previous executive director left, “the choice was either closing the residency down or having us take the lead on it. We knew how much the residency meant to Purcell, so we said ‘Challenge accepted!’”

The first year was really difficult, but Shiela reports that Catwalk is now in full swing. The staff and board are focused on steady growth. The priority, of course, is continuing to support their residents. Another is to honor Purcell’s legacy as a supporter of arts and educational organizations such as Vassar. (A dedicated alum, Purcell served on the Alumnae/i Association of Vassar College’s Board of Directors and chaired the Friends of the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center.)

Purcell was also famous for hosting grand fundraising dinners at Catwalk to benefit other organizations. “There are a lot of new leaders of arts-focused organizations who have never heard of Purcell,” says Shiela, “but I want to keep her spirit of generosity alive.”

These days, there are more opportunities than ever for Catwalk to link arms with the Hudson Valley creative community. The staff often invites former residents back to share their work with those in the area.

And Shiela says she’d love to expand on what Catwalk currently offers. “We have 65 acres here, and most of them are raw fields or woods. Wouldn’t it be lovely to have our own outdoor performance space, where we could showcase our artists’ work for a larger audience?

Is that possible?

Maybe.

“Catwalk is blessed to be in good financial shape. We don’t even need to fundraise,” Shiela acknowledges. “There has to be smart, balanced growth, but the possibilities are endless.”

by Greg Costello ’00

quick glance at the journalistic pieces Ludolph has published since graduating from Vassar as an English major will confirm her love of the not-so visible. Her New York Times pieces, for example, tend to focus on the forgotten characters of the 20th century whose lives make for such compelling reading that it becomes impossible to imagine their stories have been so seldom told. Her subjects line up with moments in history—WWII, the Cold War, the Space Race—that Ludolph likes to call “moments of rupture.”

Just such a moment inspired Ludolph’s first foray into historical fiction—and her residency at Catwalk this spring. Her nascent novel takes place in post-WWI England as the smoke of battle is clearing to reveal a world of shifting gender norms and new technologies. “It’s an incredibly destabilized time when all these assumptions about society, work, and what new tech makes possible are up for debate,” says Ludolph. “That’s an open playing field for entrepreneurial thinkers. My main characters see that opening and step right in.”

The space they create is the real-life cottage industry fueled by the Spiritualism craze that gripped Europe in the aftermath of the Great War and the Spanish Influenza when mediums, channeling, and even publishing posthumous voices became social fixtures.

Ludolph has nothing but enthusiasm for her characters. “They’re playing with the question ‘What is authorship?’ at a time when the idea of women’s authorship, women’s authority, is fraught,” she says. “Historically, the topic of spirit mediums raises the specter of fraud, but I wanted to look at them as experimental, entrepreneurial, scrappy … Also, if we’re going to talk scams, it’s a scam that women were being paid half the wages of men at the time. I’m drawn to the idea that my characters don’t feel the need to follow the unspoken rules of an unfair environment.”

In the Catwalk residency, Ludolph found both a writer’s retreat and a source of inspiration. “You could wake up in the morning and see the river, and barges going up and down the Hudson, and Frederic Church’s Olana right on the other side of the bridge,” she gushed. “I would go to the bakery and get a loaf of bread and cheese, and that was part of my toolkit for the day. I would pack my sunscreen and a big hat, and I would wander the property to find a place to write —these big Pride and Prejudice meadows, these little gazebos, this big pond with a rowboat. The residents were a composer and a playwright and another writer, and it was incredibly nice to be working alongside people who were so kind and so smart and so driven.”

That love for different academic fields crossing paths was something nurtured years ago in Poughkeepsie. Born and raised in Brooklyn Heights (“when that meant the Promenade, the Historical Society, and the Jehovah’s Witnesses”), Ludolph spent a year at Georgetown before transferring to Vassar. There, she discovered an English department that was “so unbelievably interdisciplinary.” She recalled several of her favorite professors, like “Dan Peck, who was doing 1820s and 1920s art and literature. Then there was Miriam Cohen, and Pat Wallace, who were from two different departments, co-teaching a class about lit and history. Everything about how the humanities were taught at Vassar was collaborative, interdisciplinary, clashing all these ideas together.”

Vassar stayed in Ludolph’s heart after she graduated and began an eclectic writing career, ultimately providing the springboard to apply to Catwalk—a decision for which Ludolph is grateful. She speaks with reverence of Catwalk’s founder Purcell Palmer and her mission to nurture creativity. “It was very important to her that she protect artists over the course of their whole careers. So, it’s not just that she would pick people and they would come for two weeks and off they went, but once they were in the family, they were in the family for life.” Ludolph pointed out that the fall and winter months at Catwalk are reserved not for new artists but for alums of the residency. “They want you to come back all the time and feel like you have a place where you can keep making work. It’s a really wonderful thing to become a part of.”

by Elizabeth Randolph

isual artist Spence Holman says, “I thought I would be dead before fifty. How did I get from thinking the future was wide open to having an expiration date?”

His series of postcards, created during a Catwalk residency in 2025, sought to answer that question via a conversation with his younger self. “Between my time at Vassar in the late 1990s and the pandemic in 2020, a lot happened,” he explains.

Looking back, he says returning to the Hudson Valley from Baltimore, where he lives, was a big draw in deciding to apply to Catwalk. He remembers his Vassar days as an “open-ended time full of possibilities,” and part of his process during his residency was to revisit and re-experience the campus.

“Vassar was great. I mean, a lot of different things happened, formative experiences, all the things one can say about college,” he recalls. “Being there really allowed me to find myself, find my tribe.” The difficulties began after college, including “a troubled relationship, and prolonged relational and medical trauma,” he says. “So that was the point of going back to campus, to connect with that positivity and that sense of self that I had at Vassar. There was a sense that I was not fully formed, but being there was helping me figure out what I wanted fully formed to look like.”

Holman visited the campus twice during his residency and says he was very intentional about how he spent his time. It was “about remembering and just being in the space, really, not overthinking it,” he reports. “Just seeing what happened, being curious about what came up and then taking that back to Catwalk.”

The seven-by-five-inch ink-and-pencil sketches he produced for the series “Wish I was there / Wish I was here” illustrate glimpses of what Holman calls “hope, healing, resilience, and rebirth.” The pieces are as deeply emotional as they are gracefully rendered. On the front of the cards, he drew trees or flowers. (One of his pieces has the famously large London plane tree on the lawn in front of the library.) On the other side, Holman placed text that often seems to illustrate two sides of the same emotion. In one example, he placed “It’s so beautiful” right above “It’s so overwhelming.” Another of his cards paired “Anything can happen” with a phrase that seems to indicate a slipping locus of control: “Things keep happening.”

“I got divorced in 2019 and the pandemic, in a way, is what saved my life,” says Holman. “It was a lot of things for a lot of people, but as difficult as it was, I can look back and say if I hadn’t been forced out of my regular life, I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to face the past and figure it out.” He says the “downtime” allowed him to get back in touch with himself. “I started making work again. I started playing music again. A lot happened,” he says.

Today, he is happy to report he’s entered his Content Period. He is back where he grew up in Maryland. “I’ve got my little house. I’ve got three kids. I’ve got a garden that I love. I’ve got good people in my life. And I’m figuring it out as I go along.”

Holman returns to Catwalk for a second residency this fall.

For more information about the artist and his work, visit jspenceholman.com.

by Emma Fiona Jones

he scene opens in a city on the banks of the Hudson. The protagonist is a professor at a liberal arts school called Waverly College, who’s long been her family’s self-appointed historian. One day, she makes a life-altering discovery that sends her world spiraling. That’s the premise of the pilot that Shona Tucker, Chair of the Drama Department, wrote in a six-week workshop with playwright Chisa Hutchinson ’02.

Tucker—who’s an accomplished actor (of both stage and screen), director, and writer—entered the Catwalk Art Residency program this past March, intending to flesh out the screenplay, accompanied by friend and collaborator James Michael Marshall, a writer and filmmaker. Marshall was there to work on his own project as well as offer feedback on Tucker’s along the way.

“I’m calling it What Had Happened Was—that’s the working title, anyway,” explained Tucker. “Waverly College is similar to, but not the same as, Vassar. The protagonist is a fifty-something African-American woman professor, like me, and her discovery is not unlike a recent one of my own.”

Stylistically, Tucker’s vision for the saga is “a cross between The Chair (starring Sandra Oh) and Greenleaf, the HBO show centered around a prominent Black family in the South,” she said.

This wasn’t Tucker’s first Catwalk experience. She first attended in summer 2023.“Catwalk has been very good to me,” she said. “I came back because it gave me the space to write [the first time].”

During her 2023 residency, she spent most of her time working in the long back room of the house; this time, Tucker and Marshall mainly sat at the kitchen table or in the living room. “Dynamics are different with different people,” Tucker reflected. “But you knew you had a limited amount of time in this beautiful setting; you knew that [the people who run Catwalk] understand artists and that they enjoyed having artists there.”

Tucker has been telling pieces of her family’s story ever since Alex Haley’s Roots first aired. “It shook America,” she recalled. “That series gave me both mission and permission. I grew up attending a predominantly Black church and living in a Black neighborhood, but going to an 87 percent White public school in suburban Louisville, Kentucky.” Most television shows centered on White characters, as well. “I had no idea that my family, my little life, held stories anyone else would care about. But [Roots] ignited something in me,” said Tucker.

From there, she began interviewing her great-grandmother, then her younger family members. Those interviews became vignettes in a one-person show, then evolved into the trilogy Mississippi Mud and the screenplay Growing Wild. What Had Happened Was is the most recent facet of her intergenerational memory.

Though Tucker is often immersed in multiple projects at once, the pieces all fit together. “They’re all very much connected, and they make me joyful,” she said.

Sometimes her academic and cinematic worlds collide in unexpected ways. She just wrapped up work on a movie that’s currently shooting at Vassar. The writer/director and many of the actors are alums. In the movie, Tucker plays a Vassar professor—almost. “They don’t say the name ‘Vassar,’” said Tucker. “But being a small college professor playing a small college professor was really cool.”

She says teaching itself is as important to her as acting or directing. “I want to be a teacher that students are proud to say they had as a professor,” said Tucker. “There are a couple of people working on this film that were my students at one point, and they don’t seem to be like, ‘Oh my God, here she comes.’ So, I feel like, maybe I’m okay in that regard!” she laughed.

Next up? “I wrote my trilogy, Mississippi Mud, and then haven’t touched it for years, because I’ve been working on other things,” she said. “I’d like to finish it and get it published.”

She would love to return to Catwalk, but she also feels a responsibility to give other artists a chance to experience it. “Catwalk is a wonderful resource,” said Tucker. “I pray it continues to be around for artists for a long time.”

Interview By Larry Hertz

Jacob Rivkin ’07, an animator and interdisciplinary artist, spent time as an artist-in-residence in Catwalk’s bucolic setting in June of 2025.

Rivkin’s hand-drawn animations are featured in documentary films at the intersection of art, history, and science. These films have screened nationally on PBS’s Great Performances and at the Animation Block Party in Brooklyn, NY, and internationally at the Japan Media Arts Festival in Tokyo, the Factual Animation Film Festival in London, and the National Museum of Australia.

He is an Assistant Professor of Visual Storytelling at Kutztown University (Pennsylvania), where he teaches courses in pre-production for animation and film.

My original plan was to make a series of cyanotype animations based on compositions from Hudson River School painters and studies of natural arrangements in the landscape. Catwalk is a stone’s throw from Thomas Cole’s home and also just across the Hudson River from Olana, the former home of Frederic Church. Catwalk provided the perfect opportunity to be influenced directly by the land itself. I also wanted to have time to make small landscape paintings.

I switched gears a little. While I worked a bit on developing a process for cyanotype animation and made a few paintings of the treetops at Catwalk, I became quite inspired by the landscape at one of the local swimming holes, in the town of Leeds. My time at Catwalk was shared with three other residents, and to cool off from the heat wave, we went swimming together in Leeds several times. The hundred or so people finding moments of calm and joy among the tiered waterfalls and small wading pools felt both communal and felt very intimate. So I made a short hand-drawn digital animation based on some of my sketchbook doodles from my time there. This film, Inn at Leeds, was completed in August and screened this past fall at the Philadelphia Animation Festival in Philadelphia, PA, and the Open World Animation Festival in Northampton, PA.

I also completed the storyboard for a ten-minute narrative animated documentary titled Drawing Exercise, a project I’ve been working on since 2023. Beginning with a recorded phone call during the COVID-19 pandemic, the film traces the cultural changes to exercise routines since 1970 alongside my mother’s lung cancer diagnosis, my father’s scientific research in Antarctica, and the familiar routines that ground us in times of grief, change, and healing. The film moves back and forth between the phone call and a recorded lyrical essay, featuring small vignettes of my own relationship to family history and daily practices. I am currently in the rough animation production process.

The best thing about working at a place like Catwalk was having the gift of time and space to work creatively in a beautiful environment, among fellow passionate artists and writers. My studio was at the top of Catwalk’s tower, which had a 360-degree view of the Hudson River and beyond, and at its base were gardens and walking trails throughout the property. This was one of the most unique spaces I’ve ever worked in.

My time at Catwalk continues to inspire my work. Developing a method for making cyanotype animations at the residency has led to a recent project titled The Shape of Seeing. This is an animated short documentary film, made from cyanotypes, poetically exploring the way infants perceive the world in the first year of life.

by Emma Fiona Jones

“I need a chamber with a view of the sky and a door that closes,” Josie Bettman ’17 reads into the thin white cord of her earbuds, looking up from the script grasped in one hand. The video, originally presented as a livestream for POUSH, a multidisciplinary arts space in a Paris suburb, is part of a project that has been brewing since her first Catwalk residency in summer 2024.

Bettman, a New York-based choreographer and performance artist, graduated from Vassar with a degree in art history and earned her MFA in experimental choreography at UC Riverside. She went on to present her work around New York City at PAGEANT, La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club, Cathy Weis Projects, Bossa Nova Civic Club, and Printed Matter’s NY Art Book Fair, and at Dripping festival in Sparta, New Jersey.

In her practice, movement serves as a way of filtering information and a means of telling stories that evade language.

She arrived at Catwalk seeking a place to make work that “can feel too playful or risky to attempt elsewhere.” And she found it. Out of that summer came the first draft and the overall contour of a short film, which she continued to develop during her second Catwalk residency in winter 2026.

The intensity of this second residency provided the perfect conditions to move her project forward. “I was there during the first of this past winter’s epic storms,” she says. “It was so cold, and the snow was so relentless.” While Chuck Irwin, the property manager, plowed and shoveled through the night, Bettman baked a loaf of bread for him in the warmth of the Tower. “The drama of frigid temperatures and cascading drifts of snow coincided with a total hush—things became very ‘Overlook Hotel’ quite quickly,” Bettman remarks.

In the midst of the blizzard, she raced to finish a draft and shoot a livestream with multiple cameras. “I ended up in a closed-loop workflow, trudging back and forth wearing this dramatic white coat between the Tower apartment and the Garage Studio, finding an immediacy between composition and production that’s only possible under conditions of total immersion,” she says.

Then this past spring, Tilhenn Klapper, an artist who was an exchange student at Vassar when Bettman met her, invited her to participate in an open studio event at POUSH. She responded with allegory of the cyclorama: TEST, which oscillates between clips of Bettman reading from a script, shots of a partially demolished building she is considering as the site of a future project, and crabs slithering through the surf on a beach at night.

Though the script remains in flux, this state of endless transformation is intrinsic to Bettman’s work. The tension between the impulse to create freely and the responsibility to maintain a consistent practice is ever-present. “Having a reprieve from the fraught formula of daily life,” she explains, gave her space to “measure how the shape, force, and momentum of a story sweeps through my body as it crashes ashore.”

The “slow peacefulness” of Catwalk has allowed her to bring an element of intentionality into her everyday practice. As a maturing artist, Bettman says, she now strives to have the faith to let something generate slowly, “seeking something more subtle that maybe doesn’t have such an urgent need for an audience to witness it.”

This bears fruit in allegory of the cyclorama: TEST: “The room was coming to me as a feeling in my dreams … an intense pressure on all sides looming over a hollow core, a warning that the meticulously studied exoskeleton was wearing thin.”

From that first summer and frigid winter at Catwalk came not just a fleeting respite, but a blueprint for sustained self-discovery.

“At Catwalk, I realized I can find myself even without knowing the way—and perhaps bring you along too,” says Bettman. “I’m putting together a methodology that sustains space for dreaming, and doesn’t insist so emphatically upon resolving itself.”