How does art give back to a community and place that holds space for it? 

Reciprocity at Mendocino Art Center

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Artist: Jas Lin, “Sea Goat” Photo: Tristan Crane

An invitation to practice reciprocity

At the Mendocino Art Center, we believe creativity grows through reciprocity—a continual exchange of care, resources, imagination, and possibility. Nothing embodies this more than the Greenhouse Residency, our newest program designed to nurture artists the way a greenhouse nurtures living things: with shelter, warmth, time, and a community that tends the soil together.

Why Reciprocity Is at the Heart of the Greenhouse

The Greenhouse Residency is built on a simple truth: artists thrive when they are supported, and communities thrive when artists are able to create.

Artists bring their vision, courage, experimentation, and the slow, steady work of making meaning. MAC offers time, space, mentorship, and communal care. And donors bring the resources that make all of it possible.

This is reciprocity in motion—each part giving and receiving, strengthening the whole.

How Your Contribution Enters the Ecosystem

When you give to the Greenhouse Residency your gift becomes part of the conditions that allow artists to grow. With the $7,000 match, that impact doubles:

  • Your $25 → $50 of clay, ink, film, wood, or pigment for an artist exploring new directions

  • Your $75 → $150 providing an electric kiln firing for a cohort

  • Your $150 → $300 supporting teaching artists to lead classes

  • Your $500 → $1,000 helping bring a Greenhouse resident to Mendocino

  • Your $1,000+ → double the resources sustaining the residency’s future cohort

Your gift doesn’t end with you—it circulates, nourishes, and becomes part of the living fabric of this creative home.

A Circle of Care

Giving Tuesday at MAC is not a one-way gesture. It’s a continuation of the reciprocal relationships that keep the Greenhouse Residency alive:

  • Artists give their work and their presence to our community.

  • The Center gives structure, mentorship, and space.

  • Donors give the resources that let the vision expand.

  • And the community receives new art, ideas, workshops, and beauty that return the gift many times over.

Your contribution is participation. It is belonging. It is reciprocity.

You are helping build a place where artists can risk, rest, and reinvent—knowing the community is rooting for them.

Help the Greenhouse Residency Bloom

Join the circle. Help us grow what grows all of us.

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