Sept. 17 will mark the 40th anniversary of the Ragdale Foundation’s prestigious multidisciplinary artist residency program located on the historic site of Ragdale in Lake Forest, originally built by Chicago architect Howard Van Doren Shaw in 1897 as a summer home for his family.
The public 40th birthday celebration will pay tribute to four decades of Ragdale’s success as a center for creative production and thought, and the legacy of 3,000 writers and artists who have created important new work while in residence.
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“What we are actually celebrating,” Executive Director Jeffrey Meeuwsen said, “is the original vision of Shaw’s granddaughter, Alice Judson Hayes, a poet, creative thinker, and educator who founded the Ragdale Foundation in 1976 in what had been her family home.”
In “Ragdale A History and Guide,” Hayes describes the original naming of the country estate by her grandfather after a Tudor house in Leicestershire, England. “To him, Ragdale meant meadows and woods and hollow apple trees and country vistas. The raggedy look of the shrubbery, the low hanging branches of trees, and the invasion of the lawn by violets were all deliberate effects.”
Shaw’s tribute to nature is still relevant today, “where residents are encouraged to respond and connect to the house and to the natural environment and to the five-acre site,” Meeuwsen said. “In this tradition artists have the freedom to play, in a setting where nothing is too serious or too precious, and always centered around nature.”
Ragdale’s birthday reception will begin in the courtyard at 4:30 p.m., (the grounds open at 4 p.m.) with food tastings and beverages presented by an array of the area’s finest caterers. Festivities will include sparklers, pop-up performances, American fusion music with Jonas Friddle and the Majority, solo dramatist Arlene Malinowski as MC, and a “40 Cakes for 40 years” exhibition by Ragdale alumni.
Guests will gather on the lawn of the Ragdale Ring, (a contemporary garden theater, designed and constructed by SPORTS), together with descendants of Ragdale’s founding architect Howard Van Doren Shaw, current and past residents, donors, trustees, volunteers and families and friends, in an event co-chaired by past President Phoebe Turner, Life Trustee Roland Kulla, and former Trustee Maureen Grinnell.
While Ragdale now owned in partnership between the Foundation, The City of Lake Forest and Lake Forest Open Lands Association will continue their primary focus to provide artistic sanctuary — Meeuwsen describes their future with an eye towards a balance of public and private programming to support audience development and community engagement, like the official launch of Ragdale in Schools, this fall.
“Ragdale has the right combination of history, location, and a highly educated globally minded affluent community with the potential to create a transformational residency program, the potential is here,” he said.
Ragdale 40th birthday celebration
When: 4 p.m. Sept. 17
Where: Ragdale, 1260 N. Green Bay Road, Lake Forest
Tickets: $40 general admission (cash bar and general parking); $80 VIP admission (open bar and valet parking)
ContactL 847-234-1063; www.ragdale.org. RSVP by Sept. 12.