There are places — 100s of them, in fact — where artists of all disciplines can go to work on their art: painters and play writes, filmmakers and fiction writers, composers, choreographers, printmakers, and poets, sculptors, scholars, and songwriters. They are research-and-development labs for the arts, providing artists with time, space, and support for the creation of new work and the exploration of new ideas. You might be surprised to hear about some of the more famous artists and works that started at one of these Communities: Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs, Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, Gregory MacGuire’s Wicked; Ruth Reichl’s Comfort Me With Apples, Tender At the Bone, and Garlic and Sapphires; Thornton Wilder’s Our Town; Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Allen Ginsberg, David Sedaris, Marcel Duchamp, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Robert Rauschenberg, James Baldwin, John Lennon, Truman Capote, Bill T. Jones, and many more