Steven and William Ladd, who are hosting four Scrollathon workshops at East Hampton’s LongHouse Reserve on Saturday, are no strangers to the East End.
The Ladds were invited by Beth Rudin DeWoody, an important collector and curator, to participate in “What’s Your Hobby?” — a group show at the Fireplace Project in Springs in 2007.
In 2014 the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill hosted their exhibition “Mary Queen of the Universe,” which led to “1960s TV Dinner,” a Scrollathon project with over a thousand participants.
They realized their first major public outdoor commission at LongHouse in 2022. “Right Here. Right Now” was a 40-foot cedar passageway the walls of which were constructed entirely from zip-tied cedar discs or beads that were woven into textiles.
But the Ladd Brothers, who began officially collaborating on artworks in 2000, are now known throughout the United States, having exhibited widely across the country since their landmark show at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in Manhattan in 2006.
Because that show was the genesis of Scrollathon, which is having its culmination next year at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., for the nation’s 250th anniversary, some readers might wonder what a Scrollathon is.
A Scrollathon is a collaborative workshop with four components. The first is the personal scrolls, which are two strips of fabric rolled together by each participant, pinned, and put in a tin to be taken home. For the second scroll, two strips are wound around a wooden dowel whose visible portion can be personalized with markers or ink. The scroll is then placed in a wooden tray with the second scrolls created by the other attendees. Those trays are then assembled in what is called the finished collaborative master work.
Each participant is subsequently photographed for a photo mural of the group. A fourth step, which is voluntary, involves interviews with those who wish to have their stories recorded. Those interviews are posted to the Scrollathon Instagram page.
When asked about the hundreds of tiny scrolls embedded in each of the wooden trays, Steven Ladd noted that typically the scrolls made in the workshops don’t completely fill up each tray. “At the end of the day, we bring all of those trays back to the Airbnb, where our mom and dad make all of the tiny scrolls that fill out the landscape. Those are glued into place.” Talk about collaboration!
Considering the Ladd Brothers’ extensive résumé of exhibitions and commissions, it is unusual that neither went to art school. Steven and William were born in St. Louis in 1977 and 1978 respectively. Steven attended Rockhurst College in Kansas City, Mo. “William went to the same school for a second and dropped out to travel the world as a model,” Steven said during a phone conversation. “We both moved to New York in 1999 and were incorporated as a business a year later.”
Their forays into creativity started early, with Steven making his own and later his brother’s clothes, and William becoming captivated with bead work when he was 15. At first William was doing bead work on the clothing, but once they moved to New York they began to make handbags and accessories with intricate beadwork that were contained within hand-sewn, handmade boxes.
Their first exhibition took place in Paris at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in 2004. “We were broke,” they say on their website. “We saw a photo of curator Olivier Saillard in a magazine and something sparked — what if he’d be interested in our work? We scraped together $300, flew to Paris, and stayed in a budget hotel.”
They cold-called the museum and met with Mr. Saillard the following day. “By the last piece, he declared, ‘You have to keep making this work. I’ve studied the history of the handbag and I’ve never seen anything like this before.’ ” They were included in “Le Cas du Sac,” the next show at the museum.
The scrolls had their origin on a camping trip in 2005 the brothers took with Angela Veninga, a childhood friend. They broke down canvas from their grandmother’s collection and spent the weekend creating scrolls.
Ms. Veninga, an art teacher in St. Louis, invited the Ladds to collaborate with students from the fourth, fifth, and sixth grades. It was there that in April 2006 they took fabric to the classroom, tore it into strips, and made scrolls, which became the foundational layer for the artwork at the Cooper Hewitt later that year.
They were invited to that museum by Barbara Bloemink, then the curatorial director, who had heard about their work from Ms. DeWoody. They were selected for “Design! Life! Now!” — the museum’s triennial — and created an intricate diorama that included 25 hand-sewn boxes filled with beaded trees, objects, and accessories, each inspired by a person or place from their childhood, all built atop a base of scrolls, some of which had been made in St. Louis.
Fast-forward to 2017, when the Kennedy Center asked for a proposal. “We said it would be amazing to do a permanent artwork and work with a thousand people in your community,” Steven said. They were invited to go to Washington, and two years later, after several visits and conversations, the Ladds engaged with 750 people and together made “Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow,” a tactile mural of more than 8,000 hand-rolled scrolls.
Their engagement with the Kennedy Center involved “deep thinking about who we are as artists, what we wanted our impact on America and the world to be, and who we wanted that impact to be with,” Steven said. It also involved a conversation with Deborah Rutter, then the Kennedy Center’s president, who suggested the Scrollathon would be a perfect project for the semiquincentennial, the country’s 250th anniversary.
The logical next step was the National Scrollathon, which launched at the Dallas Museum of Art in 2019 with “Scroll Space,” a tactile room whose walls were composed entirely of more than 10,000 scrolls created in collaboration with over 1,700 community members.
Since then, there have been Scrollathons in 19 states, as well as American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C., with the ultimate goal to have all 50 states and U.S. territories represented at the Kennedy Center next year.
Asked if they envisioned what that first Scrollathon at Hancock Place Middle School in St. Louis would become, Steven said, “We’re huge dreamers and big doers, so we’re always thinking five, 10, 15, 20 years in advance. Also thinking what does our work and our impact mean 500 years from now, what does that look like and what would we want. So while we didn’t necessarily know the specifics of its evolution, we knew since that first moment it was something special, and now it’s 20 years later.”
The brothers begin each workshop with “a super-high theatrical introduction of ourselves that gets everybody in the mood and hyped and makes them feel it’s going to be the most important thing they’ve ever done in their lives. And then it’s this super super super simple task. Everybody can be successful at it, which sets up a kind of tone of confidence.”
That in turn leads to people given an opportunity to tell the titles of their scrolls and to tell their personal stories. “We tell them their stories are important and that theirs are the stories that make up America’s story and that the legacy artwork they are creating will represent their state.”
When it was mentioned that this is a time of severely heightened disunity in this country, Steven said, “We just believe that this is one program that can bring people together. Everybody has a role to play, and this is our role to play, and we think it’s very important for there to be very strategic steps taken to bring our country together.”
The four workshops at LongHouse sold out in advance, but the finished projects will become part of the National Scrollathon.
