Carl Djerassi turned his ranch into a haven for artists

Person: Carl Djerassi
Lived: 1923–2015
Field: Chemistry
From: Austrian-American

The story

Carl Djerassi's success at Syntex, where he helped create the contraceptive pill, had allowed him to buy a large tract of land in the hills of San Mateo County, California, where he ran a cattle ranch called SMIP, originally short for Syntex Made It Possible. His daughter Pamela, born in 1950, became an artist. On 5 July 1978 she took her own life, a loss Djerassi later described in his autobiography.

With the help of his companion and later wife, the Stanford English professor and biographer Diane Middlebrook, Djerassi began to think about how he could help living artists rather than only collecting the works of dead ones. He visited established artist colonies such as Yaddo and MacDowell, then decided to create his own. He closed the cattle ranch and converted its barn and houses into studios and living space for artists, and he and Middlebrook moved to an apartment in San Francisco.

The Djerassi Resident Artists Program, founded in memory of Pamela, opened in Woodside, California, in 1982, with Djerassi and Middlebrook as co-founders. Its 583 acres lie in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The program selects artists from many disciplines, backgrounds and countries, including writers, visual artists and composers, and gives them uninterrupted time for work, reflection and conversation with fellow artists in purpose-built studios. Part of its mission is also to preserve the land on which it sits.

The program is now recognised internationally as one of the leading artist residencies. Djerassi, who wrote novels, plays and poetry himself in his later years, understood how precious undisturbed time could be, and how hard it is for working artists to find.

For Djerassi it was a way of turning private grief into something lasting. The residency has outlived both its founders and continues to give artists from around the world the time and space to make new work.