Artist Residency and Visitor Support Cottage

The Artist Residency and Visitor Support Cottage was dedicated February 24, 2024.  It provides for space for short term residencies by artists/historians/writers, support of the Wallace House with two outside ADA bathrooms and a kitchen for small-scale catering, and office, conference and storage space.  This building is a game changer for the Wallace Center.  It enables us to hold more events, to have open houses, and in the future to be open as a tourism venue between Montgomery and Birmingham.  We do not have a formal Artist Residency Program.  That will come later.  However, we have learned over the past years of working with artists who are doing site-specific sculpture, our poet who is working on her book Healing Harpersville, and historians who have been gathering oral histories to create a reparative narrative that a place to stay when they are on site is essential. 

We are grateful to the Alabama State Council on the Arts for their design and construction grants, to the Mike and Gillian Goodrich Foundation, the Daniel Foundation of Alabama, and generous individual donors and to the Hope Credit Union for financing. Our architect is Wayne Hester (Hester & Associates, Inc.) and the contractor is Douthit Builders LLC.