Dear Friends,

When I founded Yucca Valley Material Lab in 2019, I wanted to create the kind of place I believed artists needed: somewhere to work with their hands, learn from one another, experiment without having to know the outcome, and have access to tools and ways of making that have disappeared from many art schools.

What began small has grown quickly. Since 2019, more than 1000 students have taken workshops at YVML. We have fully funded 60+ artist, musician and writer residencies, awarded 49 scholarships, and continued to offer free public programs to our community. We have done this with a small staff, a lot of resourcefulness, and a belief that access to serious creative work should not depend on where you live or how much money you have.

We have now outgrown the spaces where much of this happens.

In 2024, YVML was given an extraordinary gift: a 2.5-acre property that made it possible to imagine a permanent future for the organization. We are now turning that property into a place where artists can live, work, teach, learn, and exchange ideas year-round.

At its center will be a new 1,700-square-foot adobe studio: climate-sensitive, fire-resistant, fully accessible, and made by hand for hands-on making.

For the first time, artists, musicians, and writers in residence will live and work on site while workshops, youth programs, music, and public events happen around them. Disciplines will cross paths every day instead of by appointment.

And the building itself will teach.

Residents and students are making the adobe bricks that will become its walls. We will restore the surrounding land with drought-resistant native plants and create a site designed from the first drawing for many different bodies and ways of learning. Dedicated space for research, professional development, and workforce training will allow us to hire more local artists to teach and contribute to a stronger creative economy in the Morongo Basin.

This building is curriculum.

We're 80% There

We set an ambitious goal of $1.5 million for the Campaign for Creative Access. Before publicly launching this campaign, a relatively small group of individuals, foundations, and partners brought us more than 80% of the way there.

More than $1.2 million is already committed. Approximately $285,000 remains.

The campaign funds the new studio, renovation of the artist residence, accessibility and site improvements, restoration of the land, organizational capacity, and an endowment reserve that will help sustain YVML long after construction is complete.

Your gift helps us finish a building, but more importantly, it gives us the ability to say yes: to another student who needs a scholarship, another artist who needs time and space to work, another local artist we can hire to teach, another experiment whose outcome we can't predict.

That ability to say yes is what YVML has always been about.

If you believe in what we are building, I hope you will help us bring it home. And if you would like to see it for yourself, I would be delighted to walk the site with you, show you the bricks already being made, and talk about what your support can make possible here.

With gratitude,

Heidi Schwegler
Founding Director

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