About the Rocky Neck Art Colony
The Rocky Neck Art Colony is one of the oldest continuously operating art colonies in the United States. Situated on a peninsula within Gloucester's working harbor, Rocky Neck is an energetic, creative community well known for its exceptional geographic beauty and rich cultural history. Artistic practices on Rocky Neck spanned plein air realism (Winslow Homer, Edward Hopper) and a progressive modernist movement (Stuart Davis, Arshile Gorky, Milton Avery) through the 19th and mid-20th century. Rocky Neck Art Colony artists now represent a range of post-modern abstraction, traditional media, new media, and fine craft.
The central mission of the organization is to respect and promote the artistic traditions of excellence that arose on Rocky Neck while assimilating the theories and practices of contemporary visual arts culture. To serve this mission, education and professional development lead our organizational objectives. To date, those efforts have primarily served the organization's members: artists, business owners, individual non-artist members, community partners, and the annual artists in residence. Through recent strategic planning and in response to changing cultural and socio-economic factors in the region, we recognize our many strengths and tremendous potential to expand our educational mission to a much broader demographic. To further our stewardship to the greater North of Boston community, we are actively forming stronger working partnerships with our community and cultural partners and are leading efforts to become a state-designated Cultural District in 2012. Selfsustaining, the Rocky Neck Art Colony derives its operating revenues from grants, fundraising efforts, and membership dues. As in our past, the Rocky Neck Art Colony embraces a dichotomy that bands us together: we maintain an artistic community within Gloucester's broader culture of marine and tourist industries. Today, however, unlike our predecessors, we comprise a much broader range of creative expression — from experimental abstraction to traditional plein air painting and new media. Recognizing the various interests within our community, we are 
artistically inclusive. What we share, and what the organization represents, is a demand for artistic excellence, a commitment to community, a thirst for innovation and progression, and a passion for our stewardship of the place where we work and reside.
So the vision for our artistic future cycles back to our primary mission: to build and nurture a community of artists and supporters of the arts on Rocky Neck and beyond who come together to create, support and celebrate excellence and free expression in the arts. While respecting the artistic traditions that arose on Rocky Neck, we promote innovation in interpreting those roots in the context of contemporary culture. Celebrating our differences, creating educational opportunities to promote artistic growth, and connecting our community on Rocky Neck to a broader social context are vital for our future as artists.