Confluence Hollow

# Confluence Hollow — Program Description

Confluence Hollow is an artist residency rooted in the Nebraska Sandhills, founded by working mixed media artist and educator Tim O'Neill (Tim O'Neill Studios). The program is currently in its early development and due-diligence phase, and we are joining the Artist Communities Alliance to learn from the field as we build toward our first hosted residencies.

## Why "Confluence Hollow"

The name reflects both the physical geography of the region, where creeks, rivers, and watersheds meet across the Sandhills, and the spirit of the program itself: a place where disciplines, practices, and people converge. "Hollow" grounds that convergence in a specific, inhabitable place rather than an abstract idea. We wanted a name that could function the way the best residency names do, as a place first, a program second.

## Founder Background and Motivation

Tim O'Neill has spent over four decades building a working creative practice spanning encaustic, oil and cold wax, resin, silk dyeing, eco printing, and mixed media collage, alongside a parallel career teaching art, humanities and coaching at the Middle school, high school and college level. He also currently teaches experimental art workshops at the Prairie Arts Center, where he has developed entry-level, hands-on programming for adult learners.

That dual life, studio practice and education, is the foundation Confluence Hollow is built on. Years of teaching workshops to adult beginners, watching artists rediscover process-based, tactile work after long stretches in digital or production-driven creative careers, surfaced a recurring need: time and space without urgency. Not a retreat in the spa sense, and not a production residency oriented around output quotas, but something closer to what slow food is to fast food, a deliberate counter to hustle-culture creative practice.

This instinct is also personal. O'Neill's own relationship to land, water, and the Sandhills landscape directly informs his studio work, and he wanted to build a program that gives other artists access to that same kind of grounding, the specific, quiet, expansive character of this part of Nebraska, which is largely absent from the current national residency map.

## Mission

Confluence Hollow exists to give working artists uninterrupted time, modest but well-equipped studio space, and direct contact with the Sandhills landscape, without the pressure of public-facing output, sales expectations, or productivity metrics. We are especially interested in supporting artists working in process-intensive, tactile, or slow media (encaustic, fiber, printmaking, hand bookbinding, natural dye, and related practices), though the program is not exclusive to those disciplines.

We believe meaningful creative work often requires friction-removal rather than stimulation, fewer inputs, not more programming, and we are designing Confluence Hollow around that belief from the ground up.

## Who We Hope to Serve

Our initial focus is on:

- Mid-career and established artists who have an active studio practice but limited access to dedicated, distraction-free time
- Artists working in encaustic, mixed media, fiber, natural dye, and other tactile/process-based disciplines that benefit from extended, uninterrupted studio access
- Artists interested in working in direct relationship to a specific rural ecology — the Sandhills grasslands, wetlands, and waterways — rather than a generic studio environment

As the program matures, we anticipate developing secondary tracks (short workshop-based residencies, possible international exchange components), but our founding focus is a small, well-supported, single-track model rather than a broad multi-program launch.

## Current Stage of Development

Confluence Hollow is in early, active development. We are currently:

- Evaluating organizational structure (independent nonprofit, fiscal sponsorship, or operation under an existing studio entity)
- Assessing physical space and site requirements for studio and living accommodations
- Researching governance, insurance, and liability considerations specific to hosting resident artists
- Building a realistic financial model for a small-scale, sustainable launch rather than scaling prematurely

We recognize this puts us at the very beginning of the field's typical program lifecycle, and we are seeking ACA membership specifically as an Emerging Program in order to learn directly from peer programs who have navigated this same early-stage process, particularly around organizational structure, funding models, and the practical realities of hosting artists for the first time.

## Why ACA

We are drawn to ACA because the field-level knowledge it offers, programmatic, legal, financial, and ethical, is exactly the kind of accumulated expertise that is difficult to reconstruct independently, and because we want Confluence Hollow to be built thoughtfully from its foundation rather than retrofitted later. We are also drawn to ACA's emphasis on equitable and generative creative environments, which aligns directly with our founding intention: a residency that removes pressure rather than adding to it, and that treats time itself as the primary resource being offered to artists.

We see ACA membership not as a credential to acquire, but as the educational foundation we need before we host our first resident artist. We look forward to learning from the network, and in time, contributing back to it as Confluence Hollow develops from an early-stage concept into an active program.