Founder’s Focus

February Visiting Artists:

Penelope Umbrico	David K. Anderson
Robert Berlind	Stanley Whitney

February Visiting Writers:

“Abandoned Asylum, Northampton, Massachusetts”
By Baron Wormser

I stroll the grounds, as a grander era
Would have phrased it, and listen for lost screams.
In the town below, other cries are blasting
The grace of this shy, spring afternoon.
I’m here to recall what I never knew.

Broken glass trills softly, wood weeps rot.
I stand on tiptoe and stare through begrimed windows.
The flannel nightshirts are gone, the leather straps
And the tubs in which to take cold baths.
A whole hymn-singing century is mouse shit.

I listen for the ghosts of regimens. I listen
For bright eyes throbbing with dizzy faith.
I listen for the taciturn, the bleary, the mopey.
I sit in a shadow and wait for the manna of grief.
Here, the engines of betterment roared

With iron understanding. Here, moral fear
Played its riffs on the bent hearts of living bodies.
Here, the most awful beauty bloomed like lilies.
Behind the main building sumac is growing like crazy.
Lord, I pray to the bricks and splintered casements, lighten me.

March Visiting Artists and Writers:

Joanna Scott

Jon Imber

Carol Hepper

Angelo Ciotti

Marjorie Portnow

Robert Lopez

A Selection of Recent Resident Portraits:

Photos by Howard Romero

February 2010 Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

February 2010 International Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

January 2010 resident, JoAnna Johnson, has made 30+ dresses by hand which she has used as the starting point for an extended photography series.  JoAnna attentively arranges the dresses in different formations in relation to a varied landscape.  The photographs below are a selection from her recent VSC residency.  Click here to visit her website and to read her statement.

A quote from JoAnna’s website that complements her work well:

“If you go there and stand in the place
where it was, it will happen again;
it will be there for you waiting.”

Toni Morrison, Beloved

Here is a photo of long-time VSC friend and collaborator, Tom Mason, with his winter’s ice fishing catch.

The Team VSC polar bear snow sculpture. Thank you to Harlan Mack for leading the charge, and to all of the February residents who helped with its creation.

Johnson Seniors Art Show opening at the Red Mill Gallery with friends from the local community.

A selection of work from the Johnson Seniors Art Show exhibition.

Pearl Street bridge is coming along. Workers are buzzing outside at this very moment.

The ice is breaking up on the Gihon River…writers contemplate its meaning from Maverick.

The ice flow outside of Red Mill.

A New Year, A New 25 Years :

When we began the Vermont Studio Center in 1984,
we envisioned it as a 50 year adventure ……25 years to build and establish the mission, program, board, staff, facilities and funding for artists’ and writers’ residencies; and a second 25 years to build national and international funding partnerships and an endowment to secure VSC’s future.

As noted in the Founder’s Focus blogs of our just completed 25th Anniversary year, we are right on course, and the Studio Center:

• is the largest international residency for artists and writers in the country;
• has held firmly to the simplicity of our founding principles of supporting artists and writers in their
  personal searches within and towards the universality of human creativity and compassion;
• has attracted an excellent dynamic board of strong trustees, and a talented and committed staff,
  as the ongoing heart and core of the VSC creative world community;
• has built and continues to upgrade our 31 building campus;
• has awarded  $1,400,000 each year in Full and Partial Fellowships.

Despite dire economic forecasts, 2009 turned out to be the most successful year in VSC’s history, at all levels, for which we are extremely grateful for all of your support.   You’ll be happy to share in the news that at the beginning of our second 25 years, 2010 has also started off with the receipt of the largest contribution and accompanying long term commitment VSC has ever been fortunate enough to receive (more information on this incredible gift will be presented as our Board considers how to integrate it into VSC’s long range goals and plans).

I hope this finds you off to a strong 2010, and I send you the best wishes of all, from all of us here at the Studio Center.

Onward!

Jon Gregg
Founder

About 25 VSC Residents joined the Bread and Puppet Theater Company, Live from the Core, The Green Mountain Mahler Festival, and others on Saturday at St. Michael’s College in Burlington to honor victims of the earthquake in Haiti and to raise funds in support of present relief efforts. The performance was accompanied by music of Brahms’ Requiem.

Through its Fund for Displaced Artists, the Vermont Studio Center will fund two month-long residencies for Haitian artists and writers in 2010.  These awards honor Flo McGarrell, son of longtime VSC Visiting Artist and friend James McGarrell, who was killed in Haiti’s recent earthquake while in the art center where he worked.

The Vermont Studio Center community is saddened by this loss, and by the loss of so many others who have died in the quake. We hope that the international efforts in Haiti will soon bring relief to the Haitian people and that those efforts to heal and rebuild will be bolstered by the creative impulse and spirit of its artists.

The Studio Center’s Fund for Displaced Artists was conceived in 2007, when VSC Trustee Marina Day wanted to do something to support California artists whose lives and studio practices had been disrupted by wildfires.  In previous years, the Studio Center hosted two artists from New Orleans displaced by Hurricane Katrina and, with the support of the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, hosted a number of New York artists displaced by the events of 9/11.

Nominations and applications for the McGarrell Award may be sent by email to admissions@vermontstudiocenter.org, and the award will be made by July 1, 2010.  The fellowship will include room, board and studio, as well as a travel and materials stipend.  For more information, please call (802) 635-2727.  Outlets for financial support of the relief effort in Haiti can be found at the Vermont Community Foundation website.

January Visiting Artists:

Peter Schumann	Brenda Garand
Jill Moser	Susan Jane Walp

January Visiting Writers:

Excerpt from “On Water”
(first published in Kitty Snacks)
By Leni Zumas

When the sea churns, the green sailors fall to swithering. But the churn is nothing more bad than a quease from the monthly. Some of the boys cry. Boys young enough to cry are here, younger than we were when our hairs came. In sleep they call for their mothers; awake, they puke. Two are brothers, with heads the red of a schoolhouse, both sick from the minute we left shore. The younger can’t stop throwing up. The older is bony too, but his brother has shrunk to the bigness of a rabbit, no food in days, only spoonmeat. Ned advised to cut an eel into portions and feed the kid the raw bits, but the older refused. Instead he trickles biscuit into cups of milk, tilts them careful at his brother’s mouth.

Leni Zumas is the author of the story collection Farewell Navigator (Open City, 2008). Her work has appeared most recently in Salt Hill, Gigantic, New York Tyrant, Quarterly West, Harp & Altar, and New Orleans Review. She was a 2008 Fellow in Fiction from the New York Foundation for the Arts and a 2008-2009 Artist-in-Residence in the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Workspace program. She has taught creative writing at the University of Massachusetts, Hunter College, and Columbia University.

February Visiting Artists and Writers:

A. Van Jordan

Robert Berlind

Penelope Umbrico

David K. Anderson

Stanley Whitney

Baron Wormser

VSC Residents ventured north to Glover, Vermont on a very cold January day to visit the legendary Bread and Puppet Museum.  Many thanks to Peter Schumann for the tour of the Paper Mache Dirt Floor Cathedral, the Museum itself, and for hot tea and bread afterward!

Alexis Avlamis, in his studio at VSC below, is a recent resident from Greece.  He was just a featured artist in the prestigious Art 21 blog.

See the excerpt below about his time here at VSC, and click here to read the full interview with Georgia Kotresos.

A Selection of Recent Resident Portraits:

Photos by Howard Romero

January 2010 Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

Photo by Howard Romero

Yu-Hang Huang combines performance and installation to investigate the notion of “moving identity” which relates to displacement, subjectivity, and race, as well as to the interactions between the body and surroundings. She received the Freeman Asian Artist Fellowship from VSC for a two-month residency in November and December of 2009. During her residency, Huang made a series of documentary photos, a fabric installation and video, see above.

In the video, VSC’s Lowe Lecture Hall, a historic building, is featured as an integral component of the work. Huang fabricated a simplified New England style house, and one that echoes the architecture of the Lecture Hall.  This, she wears, so that the meaning of the structure, combined with her simple actions of slowly entering and exiting the historic building, suggests a layering of echoes, implications and questions.  What does it mean to be protected, to be an intruder, to be included, to be excluded, to be a part of the local community, etc?  What is real and what is staged?  What do these questions mean today, as well as in the larger context of history?

As a recent MFA graduate from The School of The Art Institute of Chicago, Huang has shown her work at the Museum of Fine Art in Boson, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts in San Francisco, the World Ceramic Biennale in Korea, the Yingge Ceramics Museum in Taiwan, as well as in galleries in New York, Chicago and Vancouver.  For more information, please go to: www.yuhanghuang.com