Since 1971, VCCA has offered residencies of varying lengths with flexible scheduling for international artists, writers, and composers at its working retreat in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

VCCA is among the nation's largest artist residency programs,[1] and since 2004, has also offered workshops and retreats at its studio center in Southwest France, Le Moulin à Nef.

Included on the original board were William Massey Smith, Alex von Thelen, Peter Taylor, and MacDowell Colony's longtime director, George Kendall.

In 1973 Edith Newcomb's daughters reclaimed Wavertree Farm, but in 1974 Rosamund Frost Lowell donated the use of historic Prospect Hill estate east of Charlottesville.

Elizabeth Taylor Warner and William Styron were the honorary chairs for VCCA's tenth birthday at New York City's Harold Reed Gallery in 1981.

Upon her death, she willed the estate, then called Mount Saint Angelo, to the legally nonexistent Catholic Sisters of Lynchburg, and so the property reverted to her brother.

Installation of a 13,000-square-foot (1,200 m2) Normandy-style barn complex, overseer's cottage and tennis courts, as well as fruit and vegetable gardens, and the name change to Mount San Angelo occurred after 1932.

During the two years it took for the residence to be replaced, Fellows lived and worked in the barn complex, and with emergency help from the National Endowment for the Arts, VCCA established the Phoenix Fund.

[10] Situated on the grounds of VCCA is the 1,000-pound cast-iron "Pasternak Bench", which was transported from the Russian artist colony Peredelkino to Mount San Angelo in 1991.

A gift of the Literary Fund of the Russian Federation of the Soviet Writers Union, the bench originally stood near the home of Nobel Prize-winning novelist, Boris Pasternak, who often visited it.

The famed bench was known to have been visited by other residents of the Pereldelkino art colony, including the renowned authors Isaac Babel, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Voznesensky, and Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

The seed of "VCCA-France" was planted by Alain and Lucy Delsol in 1994[11] when they invited a group of Denver, Colorado artists to spend two weeks working in the village of Auvillar, on the Garonne between Toulouse and Bordeaux.

The Auvillar building crews proceeded so rapidly that by June 2001 the architect, Didier Médale, could conduct the final inspection of both the Ceba and the Cloucado.

During the next three years the Moulin à Nef's exchanges came to include not only painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, literature, drama and musical composition but also filmmaking, a film festival, folk and ballet dancing, calligraphy, handicrafts, digital photography and gastronomy.

[12] VCCA's commitment to democratic meritocracy extends to patronage as well as creativity:[citation needed] the Legacy Society and "Fund a Fellow" have allowed many people from all walks of life to become art patrons in the classical sense.