The Endicott Studio's Name & History
The Endicott Studio was founded by Terri Windling in 1987 and named after the street on which it first came into being: Endicott Street in Boston's historic North End. (The name was a deliberate nod to Thomas Canty's Newbury Studio, over on Boston's Newbury Street.)
In those early days, the Endicott Studio was a physical place: a large work and exhibition space in an old warehouse close to Boston harbor. We held art shows there, discussion groups for women artists, and "salon" gatherings co-hosted with Ellen Kushner -- who was then best known in Boston for her late night show on WGBH Radio.
In 1990, Terri left Boston for Tuscon, Arizona, and the Endicott Studio moved with her. By this time, the studio was not just a workspace but also a nonprofit arts organization, supporting collaborative projects of a mythic nature: publications, art shows, readings, workshops, and the like.
In 1997, an Endicott website was launched. We'd envisioned the site as a resource for people who made, or studied, or loved Mythic Arts -- and we wanted it to feel like a gathering place, as the studio in Boston had been -- but the Internet was still young in those years, and there were no clear models to follow. The website turned into The Journal of Mythic Arts, an online quarterly edited by Terri, featuring new and reprinted works by a wide variety of writers, artists, and scholars. Blogging platforms were still in their infancy then, so every issue and every page of the journal had to be designed and coded by hand -- a staggering amount of labor compared to the ease of online publishing now. Nonethless, JoMA ran for more than a decade, and was honored with the World Fantasy Award in 2008.
Our other big project in those years was the Endicott West Arts Retreat: providing writers, artists, and others with work and retreat space on a magical desert ranch on the outskirts of Tucson. E-West opened its doors in 2001, and ran for the next thirteen years.
The photograph at the top of this page shows the Boston neighborhood where Endicott began (very close to the white spire of Old North Church, of Revolutionary War fame).
The next pair of photographs shows the Castignetti Building on Endicott Street, circa 1989 (left), and the view of the Boston skyline one of the studio's windows (right). The ground floor of the Castignetti Building housed a tuxedo shop, with five floors of studio space above rented by artists (including Candy Nartonis, Lois Fiore, Rick & Sheila Berry, Phil Hale), writers (including James Carroll, Delia Sherman), graphic designers, and filmmakers. The Endicott Studio was on the top floor.
The photographs below are of the Endicott West Arts Retreat, nestled into the desert foothills below the Rincon Mountains east of Tucson, Arizona. This nonprofit Retreat space (co-directed by Ellen Kushner, Delia Sherman, and Terri) welcomed writers, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and others from 2001 to 2014.
When Terri left Tuscon to settle in England in 2008, the Endicott Studio drew to a close.
An odd bit of serendipity: Boston's Endicott Street, where the studio began, was named for John Endicott (1588-1664), the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony -- who grew up in the same small village in Devon, England where Terri lives now. Stranger still, her first home in the village, the 16th century stone cottage pictured below, had at an early point in its long history belonged to the Endicott family.
