BRATTLEBORO — Everyone likes to talk about the vibrancy of Brattleboro's arts scene and how it makes the town more interesting and alive.
But can that vibrancy be quantified? And what is it about Brattleboro that makes it such an attractive place to create and enjoy the arts?
Those are questions the town and the Arts Council of Windham County sought to answer on Saturday when about 50 people -including representatives of many local arts organizations - jammed into the meeting room of the Brooks Memorial Library.
Brattleboro Town Planner Rod Francis said the purpose of Saturday's event was “to reflect on and share your cultural engagement with Brattleboro.”
With the help of student consultants from The Conway School, the Brattleboro CoreArts Cultural Mapping Project seeks to identify and access the cultural assets of the town.
Francis said the project is being funded through a $50,000 Our Town Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts that the town and the Arts Council received last summer. The town has committed $10,000 in matching funds, and efforts are under way to raise the rest of the required match.
Willie Gregg, one of the Conway School graduate students, opened the session by outlining the project's areas of focus - examining the town's authentic identity (“What makes Brattleboro vibrant?”), its participation and experience (“How do you experience 'culture' in Brattleboro?”), and its visions for the future (“How can we create a more livable, creative community?”)
Gregg said there is lots of artistic activity in Brattleboro, and that is important to the future sustainability of the town. “The more that culture is part of a town, the better and more vibrant and sustainable that a community can be,” he said. “We're looking at what makes art possible on a personal level and on a community level.”
He called cultural assets mapping “a new sort of idea, but basically, you're mapping the assets in many different ways. It focuses on what's here, and the opportunities that present, and places that can be built upon and strengthened.”
The mapping areas broke down into four groupings - social (the people, organizations, events, and gatherings that inspire creativity), natural and geographical (the natural features and resources used in creative expression, and their proximity to other places), places and spaces (the places where art is created and shared), and financial and material resources (what fuels the creation of art).
The people seated at the four tables at the workshop each were handed one of these four groupings and were asked to compile a list of what Brattleboro had in each.
After about a half hour, every table had filled up a big sheet of paper.
Very visible, very unknown
Marilyn Buhlmann, one of the organizers of the Brattleboro Film Festival and a local artisan, spoke of the nonprofit, commercial, and individual art sectors, and said that only about 10 percent of the artists in Brattleboro have visible gallery space.
“In those sectors, there are both the very visible and the very unknown,” she said.
“We get a little glimpse into that during Gallery Walk,” Buhlmann said. “There's just tons of things going on, but 90 percent of it we never hear about because it is one-on-one stuff. And if you make art on top of trying to earn a living, there's not a lot of time to make those social connections.”
Jacob Allen Roberts, co-founder of Equilibrium, talked about Brattleboro and how it is roughly three hours away from major cities such as Boston, Hartford, Conn., and New York City. That proximity “is a major niche for this area” and attracts people from all over the Northeast “who come here, fall in love with the area, and relocate here or buy a second home here,” he said.
Both the natural and man-made landscapes are a big part of the attraction, Roberts said. The natural beauty of Windham County inspires plenty of art, he said, adding that the streetscape of Brattleboro and the adaptive reuse of so many older buildings also is a draw.
“A lot of people are attracted to a place like this. It's not too big and bustling. We don't have skyscrapers or a 24-hour nightlife. We do have a good mix of a small, hometown-meets-viable-city-environment in our downtown.”
The group tasked with compiling the list of places could barely begin to catalog all the venues big and small where art happens.
“Basically, every inch of Brattleboro generates art,” said group spokesperson Martha Ramsey.
As for financial and material resources for making art, Luz Elena Morey of Mahalo Art Center said that everything began with the people “who are supporting the arts, learning about the arts, and creating art.”
It is multi-generational and multi-disciplinary, she said, and it is well-supported by the business and nonprofit communities.
Zon Eastes, who along with Francis and Kate Anderson of the town Arts Committee drew up and applied for the NEA grant, said he was impressed by the turnout and the thoughtfulness of the people at the workshop.
“Sustainability is a question worth looking at,” he said. “If people are engaged in making, showing, and critiquing art, it is more sustainable.”
The data collected at the workshop, as well as from other submissions, will be gathered up and posted on the Web by late March, Smith said.
After that, Francis said the project is expected to convene a series of panel discussions and community conversations that will focus upon whether Brattleboro needs to create a Cultural District in the town.
And a definite destination for the data the project gathers is the updated edition of the Brattleboro Town Plan, which is nearing completion.
Anderson sees the project as a way of better understanding the art sector in town.
“Our quality of life and our quality of place are things that we can't take for granted,” she said. “How can we understand what the possibilities can be without knowing what we have now.”