Founder's Focus

June 18, 1984 was the first day of operations for the Vermont Studio Center. Actually, it was the first day of the Vermont Studio School, the disguise we used to launch VSC.

To say we were going to build “an international, creative, contemplative community” in Johnson, Vermont would have engendered skepticism (you’re going to build what? where?) and undercut our ability to inspire the support we need to get started; whereas the easily grasped concept of “school” wouldn’t.  After 2 years the Vermont Studio School became the Vermont Studio School and Colony, and 2 years later the Vermont Studio Center emerged from its previous incarnations…and here we are 25 years later “having a wonderful time, wish you were here.”

We are indeed having a wonderful time, and feel as if we’re back in 1984 with all of the inspiration, enthusiasm, optimism and idealism we had then…but with the added benefit in 2009 of a 25 year track record, 11,000 alumni, 31 buildings, an excellent staff and an excellent board, so its not surprising that we’re having more fun.

The Residencies VSC offers artists and writers from across the country and around the world are the same valuable and sometimes life-changing experiences they have been for 25 years; but the support of many individuals and foundations has allowed for the expansion and improvement of the Center’s studios, housing, dining, lecture/reading series, yoga and meditation facilities, etc. (from 6 buildings in 1984 to 31 in 2009 to improve and enrich each participant’s Residency.

In addition to the central activity of uninterrupted, distraction free work in a studio, there is the interaction and exchanges that happen with each month’s community of artists and writers, and they (especially the VSC staff) regularly interact with the larger community in Johnson.  This month’s blog includes several of those recent community activities.

Riding my road bike through the verdant green Vermont countryside surrounding VSC on a sunny June day, I’m regularly reminded how favored we all are to be artists and writers, and to be connected in many different ways to this utopian adventure in creative world community.

Regards,

Jon

May 2009 Residents:

Photo by Howard Romero

Photo by Howard Romero

June Visiting Artists:

Susanna Coffey	Halsey Rodman
Carol Hepper	John Lees

June Visiting Writers:

Excerpt from Mitz
by Sigrid Nunez

It was a Thursday in July. That afternoon Leonard and Virginia Woolf drove from London to Cambridge to visit their young friends Barbara and Victor Rothschild. The Rothschilds had been married the December before. They lived in a grand old gray house called Merton Hall. When the Woolfs arrived, they found Barbara waiting outside for them. She sat on a chair on the lawn, a large straw hat shading her pretty face. They had known her since she was a baby. Now here she was expecting a baby herself.
They had tea—just the three of them; Victor was napping. Fresh lemonade—with gin, if they liked—and thin, freshly cut sandwiches. The room was filled with flowers set in large alabaster bowls. A bee had got indoors and kept drifting from bowl to bowl, from red rose to yellow rose, murmuring indecisively. Barbara was indecisive too. What to name the child if a boy? What to name the child if a girl? She and Victor were going abroad soon—where should they stay? Then Victor joined them, ruddy and bright-eyed from his nap and all eager to show them the garden. Virginia, who was very particular about gardens, did not like this one (“stuck like a jam tart . . . a pretentious uncared for garden,” she derided it two days later in her diary).

Excerpt from A Great Piece of Elephant
By Lee Abbott

Even five years after he’ d tried to kill himself on the Bureau of Management bladed road just outside the gates to his brother’s spread the Capitan Mountains almost within a stone’s throw of the birthplace
original Smokey Bear, LT couldn’t figure out why. His life, he’ d thought, been dandy. Well, semi-dandy. Maybe dandy with an asterisk, which infernal punctuation led you to the finest of fine print where you learned about two ex-wives and the ribs he’ d busted doing deep-sea salvage out of Astoria, Oregon, and the four years playing softball for the Navy during Vietnam the bankrupt Baskin-Robbins 31 Flavors franchise and the booze—oh, the and oceans and rivers of booze: Oso Negro and vodka and Gordon’s Early Times and Miller and Coors and Robitussin and Listerine and, lordy, grape or grain that might take one vale and turn it into another. But suicide? Seemed like a good idea at the time,” he told the first AA meeting he attended on Buckle Street in east Lubbock, where he now worked building cabinets playing guitar and knocking the golf ball around on occasion while generally trying to keep his head screwed on straight. Sometimes—the blue times, times when the modern world seemed to be missing a handful of its precious parts, the times when he felt each of his fifty-five years falling from him like old skin—he was tempted to quote one long-gone comic crucifixion of Christ: “Just one of the parties that got out of hand.”

July Visiting Artists and Writers:

Michael Ryan Emily Cheng Barbara Gallucci Robert Henry Willie Cole Doreen Gildroy         We all name ourselves. We call ourselves artists. Nobody asks us. Nobody says you are or you aren’t. -Ad Reinhardt

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During our 25th year we’re sharing the stories of  VSC fellows on our website. This month we are profiling three wonderful writers.  Please visit our website for more about Carlos, Kyle and Rose, as well as excerpts of writing from all three.

Carlos René Escobar Garcia is in residence this month (June, 2009) as the first Fellow of the International Writing Program at the Vermont Studio Center. Carlos is working on a non-fiction book about his research in Guatemalan cultural anthropology and traditional dances over the past twenty-five years.

Kyle Booten, the first Helen Zell Fellow to be sponsored by the University of Michigan’s Creative Writing Program, says his VSC residency has encouraged him to be reflective as well as productive.  “At VSC I have had the time to slow down and examine the results of various modes or styles of composition I had adopted more or less unconsciously.”

Rose Nash, from nearby Wolcott, Vermont, is the first recipient of the annual Rona Jaffe Foundation / Vermont Studio Center Fellowship.  “There’s a vibrant sense of community, and the environment is conducive to great productivity. I truly appreciate having this space and time to work on my first novel,” says Rose.

American guitarist and composer, Bill Frisell, visted VSC in May to see his wife Carol, a visual arts resident.  We had the honor of him performing for us one evening in an intimate show in our Lecture Hall.

Bill has been a leading jazz guitarist since the late ’80s.   His eclectic music touches on progressive folk, classical, noise and more and he is known for using an array of effects (delay, distortion, reverb, octave shifters, and volume pedals, to name a few) to create unique sounds from his instrument.

The town of Johnson celebrated Memorial Day with a parade honoring our veterans.  The Vermont Studio Center is currently seeking funding to support arts and writing fellowships for returning veterans in 2010.

Vermont Studio Center’s Learning in Art & Culture Program has been providing innovative hands-on multicultural art instruction at Johnson Elementary School for fifteen years. Through the program students receive weekly hour-long art instruction from VSC’s professional staff artist Arista Alanis and VSC’s visiting international artists, exposing them to a wide range of aesthetic traditions and cultural values.

Fashion show in the cedar grove at VSC by Meep! fashion designer and staff member Sarah Norsworthy.

On May 7th Vermont Studio Center alumni and friends gathered in New York  at Ameringer & Yohe Fine Art to celebrate renowned painter and Vermont Studio Center Trustee Wolf Kahn’s exhibition:  Toward the Larger View.  A Painter’s Process.