Get to Know Kyle Hobratschk, the Founder of Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency Hobratschk, a printmaker, painter, and furniture maker, breathed new life into an 1890s build in Corsicana. It's now a thriving hub for Texas creatives. Kyle Hobratschk knows good things take time. The SMU-trained painter, furniture maker, and intaglio printmaker describes his mediums as “patient practices.” But his latest work is his most ambitious to date: transforming a decommissioned 1890s-era Odd Fellows Lodge into the hub of the Corsicana Artist and Writer Residency, located in the titular town 55 miles south of Dallas. Since 2015, the program has brought more than 100 creatives from around the world to the town of 24,000 people—the “human scale” and slower pace of which has so creatively invigorated Hobratschk that he’s made it his home (though he visits Dallas weekly). In the nine years since he purchased the building, dubbed 100 West, Hobratschk’s work has been almost entirely in service to the residency—preserving the architecture and furnishing it with beds, desks, and other functional works of art. And though the goal is for the residency to become self-sustaining enough that he can pursue other expressions more freely, the experience has been a patient practice of its own that’s brought him satisfaction of a higher kind. “I feel like I’ve put my own career on hold for some time, and I’m OK with that,” he says. “I like making things to service others’ creative practices—making the desk that someone else will then come to, to write their book. The idea of authorship—whose name is on the thing—is less important than just the thing came into being by nature of this place.”