How much does it cost?

Our tuition for 2025 is tiered depending on single or double occupancy room choices. Double occupancy tuition is $300/person and single occupancy is $400/person. Single occupancy is subject to availability. Tuition covers all fees including, gas, transport, most meals (see bottom of Itinerary page for more details), workshops, utilities, accommodations. Being our pilot year, our team is not being paid with tuition payments. The retreat is currently priced at cost with any extra amount going toward our startup costs. As such, we do accept tips for our facilitators at the close of the retreat (there will be two for each session) for their time, but this is not required or expected at all!

Do you have any scholarships available?

Yes! We are so proud to partner with Dunamis Boston, a non-profit organization that provides professional development for emerging artists and arts-managers of color, to help supplement tuition costs. Being an artist is hard, and we never want cost to be a prohibitive factor for artists applying to SPARC. Scholarships through our Dunamis partnership are available for any and all of our applicants whom otherwise would be unable to attend the retreat. If you would benefit from this scholarship opportunity, please let us know on your application. At this time, we are unable to offer scholarships for the single-occupancy tuition tier.

You can find more information about Dunamis and their work here.

What workshops do you offer?

Our workshops vary depending on seasonal and scheduling availability from our partner organizations and businesses. We seek out partnerships with local businesses to help grow and expand the creative process. The workshops may have something directly to do with your medium, and they may not. Being creative in ways that deviate from how you usually create art can act as an incredible enhancement to the work.

What’s on the menu?

The meals on our retreats are plant-based vegetarian, meaning we don’t make anything with fish or meat, but do use animal by-products like dairy, eggs, and honey. Chef Dmitri, our culinary director, will be curating the menu to provide our artists with delicious, healthy, and fresh foods, featuring organic produce from Good Find Farm.

Another component to our programming is our nightly cooking class with Chef Dmitri! If you’ve always wanted to dip your toes in plant-based cooking and eating, but didn’t know how to start, this is a great way to do so!

What materials do you provide?

We have several instruments available for use including an electric keyboard, an acoustic guitar (with a second one available upon request), an electric bass, drum set, cajon, djembe, portable ballet barre, pens, pencils, colored pencils, crayons, and some water color paints.

How do we get to The Cabin?

We offer roundtrip transportation in our family cars (a Honda CRV and a Honda Civic) from Inwood in upper Manhattan to the retreat location as apart of tuition. If you have your own car, you are welcome to drive yourself. The exact location is given to the artists two days before the retreat. The trip is about 2 hours and 15 minutes from NYC, and we will make one rest stop along the way.

How do I make my tuition payment?

Tuition payments must be sent electronically via Venmo, Zelle, or Cashapp, with the balance being fully paid one week prior to the retreat start date. This ensures we are able to purchase all of the meal supplies we need for the week.

I’d like to make a donation to the organization, how can I do that?

Thank you so much for your interest in helping us keep this little artist retreat alive! If you would like to make a contribution to our organization or to our scholarship fund for future participants’ tuition, please fill out our contact form here.