DESTINATION: VERMONT

Summer’s recent storms left several Vermont counties devastated. While no strangers to the ruthlessness of weather, Vermonters once again rose to the occasion with resilience, compassion and generosity. As we know, recovery sparks creativity. Art endures, connects, and helps us rebuild. Visit Vermont this fall. Support its recovery: add an extra day to your long weekend, visit a few galleries and museums, bring home a piece of art, hike a new trail, and bask in the state’s unwavering hospitality. The following pages will spark your wanderlust.

Hall Art Foundation—Reading

The Hall Art Foundation, founded in 2007, has multiple exhibition spaces. The museum in Reading is a museum of contemporary art housed in a 19th century farmhouse and three barns surrounded by 400 acres of former dairy farmland and woods. Exhibitions are held seasonally, on view weekends from May through November.  Exhibitions this year include Andy Warhol: small is beautiful, Susan Rothenberg, and Ron Gorchov. Advance reservations are recommended, yet not required. View art from renowned contemporary artists, explore the sculpture garden on a warm day, and enjoy refreshments at the café, situated in a 19th century clapboard house.

Vermont Artisan Designs—Brattleboro

Vermont Artisan Designs is celebrating fifty years of promoting fine art and contemporary American craft in historic downtown Brattleboro. The family-owned gallery features the work of more than 300 mostly local and regional artists and craftspeople. New featured artists are recognized during the town’s Gallery Walk on the first Friday of each month, so be sure to stop by if you are around town. In addition to fine art, the 7,000-square foot, award-winning gallery is home to jewelry, pottery, turned wood, furniture, sculpture, metalwork and fiber art. The gallery is open every day throughout the year except for major holidays.

Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts—Brattleboro

Mitchell-Giddings Fine Arts, situated in the heart of downtown Brattleboro, is celebrated for its contemporary, airy design with natural light and high ceilings. The gallery is committed to presenting innovative contemporary artwork which informs and inspires, as well as hosting and promoting events aimed at connecting the community with the arts. Two exhibits are scheduled for September. Fran Bull: The Art Life shows paintings and prints by the internationally acclaimed artist Fran Bull who lives, paints and teaches in Vermont, and works in collaboration with master printer Virgili Barbara in Barcelona, Spain. Also featured is Vermont artist Helen Schmidt in her solo exhibition Helen Schmidt: Between Worlds. Schmidt is drawn to that which has been discarded or left behind, to be used, repurposed, reimagined or transformed into sculpture or hand-pulled prints.

Furchgott Sourdiffe Gallery—Shelburne

Furchgott Sourdiffe Gallery is a destination for discerning art lovers seeking a stylistically diverse range of contemporary art by established and emerging artists. Located in historic Shelburne Village, just two minutes from the Shelburne Museum and twenty minutes south of Burlington, this Queen Anne Victorian showcases over forty of the region’s finest established and emerging talent in a variety of media. Besides painting, sculpture, and mixed media, the gallery also offers many unique handcrafted items to choose from including jewelry, glass, wood, and ceramics. A full range of archival custom framing services is offered by the gallery, designed for longevity with the option of uniquely created hand-finished frames and mats. All are welcome.

The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center—Brattleboro

The Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) is a non-collecting contemporary art museum focused on the art of our time. An anchor of southern Vermont’s vibrant cultural life, BMAC brings notable art and artists to Brattleboro and provides a platform for its region’s many artistic riches. Filling the museum’s large Wolf Kahn & Emily Mason Gallery and spilling out onto its entrance canopy is “Human Nature Walk,” an immersive site-specific installation by artist Aurora Robson, fashioned entirely from plastic debris intercepted from the waste stream. Visitors are invited to contribute to it by collecting and cleaning plastic bottle caps and placing them in specially designated sections of the installation.

The Southern Vermont Arts Center—Manchester

The Southern Vermont Arts Center (SVAC) is a multidisciplinary arts organization in Manchester, with a mission to promote and nurture the arts. SVAC works towards this through exhibitions, events, performances, classes in a variety of media for children and adults, and an opportunity to explore the over 100-acre campus and sculpture park. Enjoy lunch, brunch and dinner at SVAC’s curATE café. This season visitors will view The Spirit of Joy, opening September 30, which examines the interior of award-winning illustrator and author Ashley Bryan’s home and its relationship to his creative output. The exhibition will bring the interior of Bryan’s home to life through a selection of toys, objects, puppets, and paintings borrowed from the Ashley Bryan Center as well as images documenting the space, taken by Boston-based photographer Parrish Dobson. In addition, The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art is lending several of Bryan’s book illustrations for the exhibition.

The Current—Stowe

The Current is an innovative contemporary art museum in Stowe. Founded in 1981 out of a community project and desire to save the historic
building, The Current continues to give back to the community that built it. The museum hosts year-round exhibitions as well as public programming such as lectures, panels and film screenings related to current exhibitions. Visitors will experience A Place of Memory on view through October 21, featuring artists Woody De Othello, Nicholas Galanin, vanessa german, Deborah Kass and Nyugen E. Smith. This exhibition questions public representation of history and how cultures and countries define their pasts through monuments, memorials and sculptural objects. Artists in the show reclaim their ancestral stories through their work, asking the viewer to rethink how history and values are represented.

Burlington City Arts—Burlington

Burlington City Arts (BCA) has served the Burlington community for over thirty years. BCA carries out its mission by supporting Vermont artists, offering a wide spectrum of arts education and programming, crafting events and exhibitions that place Burlington in a global context, and cultural planning for the City of Burlington. Visit the organization’s BCA Center, a three-floor, year-round contemporary art gallery and exhibition space on Burlington’s iconic Church Street Marketplace. Two exhibitions open in the gallery on October 20: Terry Ekasala: Layers of Time shows improvisational paintings exploring the threshold between abstraction and representation from Vermont-based artist Terry Ekasala. In Texture and Response, three New England artists working in craft media including glass, wood and paper prompt recognition of our fascination with texture. Exhibitions at the BCA Center are always free and open to the public.

BigTown Gallery—Rochester

As BigTown moves into its third decade of programming, it’s focused on people and places in the throes of today’s great and worldwide changes. The exhibition on view through October 30 on the democratization of the documentary impulse, one of three from A Year in Photography: An Exploration of The Assault on Man and Nature, originally slated for 2020, looks at the role photography plays in influencing and documenting change. Through these exhibitions BigTown honors the work of artists, photographers, photojournalists, scientists, and writers around the world who have worked to shed light on all aspects of human life, illuminating the most urgent challenges facing world-wide humanity and the environment. BigTown Projects, the non-profit arm of the gallery, is excited to announce the upcoming Curator Series inaugurated by guest curator Peter Moriarty, educator, photographer, veteran exhibitor and BigTown Projects’ board member. In a suite of exhibitions on view through October 29, titled, No Place Like Here: Photographs from Vermont, Past and Present, BigTown presents, in three parts, the culmination of an ongoing conversation between gallery owner Anni Mackay and Moriarty, circling around the question of how Vermont, and the country at large, sees its rural centers.

Leslie Fry—Winooski

Leslie Fry is an artist whose forty-eight-year career shows incredible diversity of style, media and method. Fry’s work has been widely exhibited and commissioned across the country and beyond. Visit the artist’s sculpture garden next to her studio in Winooski, a tiny city with Vermont’s most diverse population. Fry’s work primarily centers on the female figure, revising and revisiting historical depictions and replacing them with visuals of strength and freedom. The hedged garden integrates concrete and bronze sculptures with a flowering landscape, making it the perfect place to wander, relax and experience her art in a secluded setting. Fry’s studio is also open for viewing drawings, prints, and works in progress. Fry is receiving the 2023 Governor’s Award for Artistic Excellence.

The Woodstock Gallery—Woodstock

Located in the heart of Woodstock, The Woodstock Gallery has been a part of this community for more than twenty years. Two new artists are showing in the gallery this fall. Massachusetts artist Cecile Ganne has a distinct abstract style evocative of Cezanne and early Bauhaus artists, a new direction for the gallery. Jon MacAdam joins the gallery with his contemporary landscapes. Much of his paintings on display were painted from his visits to Vermont. The gallery’s focus has always been modern New England artists, and MacAdam explores his visions of beauty in modernity. Classical at first glance, they present a contemporary pastoral image upon examination. The Gallery is pleased to show a special collection of Megan Woodard Johnson’s abstract collages this fall. These pieces are mixed media incorporating collage, paint and sketching. Together, they draw the viewer into the images to understand the complex interaction of multiple media. Drop in at The Woodstock Gallery and see what these brilliant contemporary artists have to offer.

Art at the Kent—Calais

Visit Kents’ Corner State Historic Site in beautiful Calais to witness TRACES. In this once-a-year exhibition, Art at the Kent highlights work from over twenty Vermont artists that captures the still and the frenetic, the beautifully ordinary and the sublime. Works in a variety of media stitch together remnants of experiences, connections, observations, dreams, and discoveries. On view September 8 through October 8, visitors can view works inside the rambling historic structures of the Kents’ Corner State Historic Site, as well as throughout its grounds. An opening celebration will feature music, food, and drink on Saturday, September 9, from 3 to 5 p.m., with a closing celebration planned for October 8. The theme of TRACES is revealed in numerous ways, both
subtle and overt. Whether expressed through mark making or directly in subject matter, the viewer might see connections to seasonal change, energetic forces, and the power of memory through familiar objects, story, and repetition. Art at the Kent will also host a variety of associated events, including Words Out Loud, a popular Sunday afternoon reading series occurring September 17 and 24, and October 1 at the nearby Old West Church. An extensive array of events and programs can be found on the website including multiple artist demonstrations, mosaic and cyanotype workshops, as well as illustrated talks.

Hexum—Montpelier

Located in beautiful Montpelier, Hexum is a contemporary art gallery, recently launched by artist/collector John Zaso, dedicated to presenting work from emerging and mid-career artists. The gallery curates solo presentations and group exhibitions on a rotating basis, and is active in the community by offering a space for events, readings and gatherings. The gallery also offers an ongoing selection of works on paper from their flat files. Two solo drawing exhibitions are currently on view. By Myself With You with works from Erickson Díaz-Cortés and Rock, Paper, Scissor featuring Fiona McTeigue are on view through September 15. A new exhibition opens Friday, October 6, with an opening reception planned from 4 to 8 p.m. Visit Zaso and his gallery Hexum when you’re next in Vermont’s capital city. And ask him about the origin of the name Hexum!

Robert Paul Galleries—Stowe

Robert Paul Galleries have been a staple of the Stowe art scene for thirty-three years. After recently coming under the new ownership of Jack Morris and Alexandra Weathers, the Galleries will continue this legacy while exploring new artists and more exploratory acquisitions and representation. This fall, visitors will see the work of photographer/filmmaker Jim Westphalen in VANISH – disappearing icons of a rural america through September 30. Throughout October, self-described contemporary impressionist Amy Everhart’s work will be on view. A meet-and-greet with Everhart is planned for October 6, with a demonstration to follow on October 7 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. New artists in the gallery include Morris, Craig Mooney, Emilio Perez and the first American representation of Italian painter Sonia Bakhalter. In the coming months, Robert Paul Galleries is set to evolve with a rebranding and renaming of the gallery. Morris and Weathers look forward to these exciting changes and becoming more active than ever in the community.