With long time friends, the renowned critic/art historian Barbara Rose and Italian artist Rossella Vasta, Don Kimes and his wife Lois Jubeck established the ACI residency in Umbria in 2018 after working for several decades with Rose and Vasta to develop numerous exhibitions, study abroad programs, collaborations and other initiatives in Italy. Their idea was to break down the fragmentation and silos of academia, to avoid superfluous tourist oriented experiences, and to create the opportunity for genuine, independent, cross-pollination between creative people. ACI is for established and emerging artists, writers, scholars, composers, etc. who need uninterrupted time to focus on their work in a small community of creatives in the midst of an incredibly conducive environment.  We do this in the same area where Perugino taught the young Raphael five centuries ago; where Giotto, Duccio, Piero della Francesca and countless others discovered their voices, and where the mystic Saint Francis explored our humanity through spiritual rejuvenation.

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Things aren't all so tangible and sayable as people would usually have us believe; most experiences are unsayable, they happen in a space that no word has ever entered, and more unsayable than all other things are works of art, those mysterious existences, whose life endures beside our own small, transitory life. 

Rainer Maria Rilke