BELLOWS FALLS — Creating art is often a solitary pursuit, but once in a while, you need to get out of the studio and meet with your colleagues.
That's the thinking behind the Rockingham Arts and Museum Project's “town meetings” for local artists at 33 Bridge St., home to WOOL-FM. The potluck and discussion event, which is hosted quarterly, brings together artists, artisans and local growers in the area to discuss ideas, challenges, and opportunities.
RAMP Director Robert McBride says the goal of these meetings is to strengthen the artist constituency.
“The more we know each other and can identify ourselves as a viable constituency, the more strength and credibility we gain,” he said. “There is an ever-growing community of working artists and local growers in our midst, all of whom are contributing greatly to the cultural and economic vitality of our community.”
RAMP, a community arts organization founded by McBride in Bellows Falls in 1995, organizes galleries, collects funding, and promotes projects that will strengthen the community of artists in the area.
At the most recent meeting last month, McBride, along with artists Chris Sherwin, Jeanette Staley, and Clare Adams, began the meeting with a roundtable discussion involving all who were present regarding different upcoming projects, both individual and collective.
Other items included a debriefing of the Vermont Open Studio Tour and Flat Iron exhibit held over Memorial Day Weekend as part of another RAMP initiative; the designation of the month of May as “Art Month” in Bellows Falls; the screening of Pollock and planning for the next art film; and discussion about the Vermont Arts Council Creative Network Initiative.
To sustain and support
At the forefront of the discussion was the Vermont Arts Council and its role in gaining credibility for art and a community for artists.
“Vermont [has] the only arts council in the nation that is also a nonprofit organization,” said Zon Eastes, director of Outreach and Advancement at the Vermont Arts Council. “In every other state, the arts are part of government, whether it's the tourism department, economic development department, or part of a cultural department. We are a nonprofit organization designated by the government to take care of arts and culture in the state of Vermont.”
The goal of the Arts Council is to make Vermont a state that can sustain and support artists socially and economically. Many at the meeting shared the view that to accomplish this, the stigma of art as a non-viable career must first be overcome.
“I get really frustrated with the idea that art has to be somehow justified by being related to history or other fields,” said Lynn Barrett, publisher of Southern Vermont Arts and Living Magazine. “It's a career for its own sake.”
Barrett spoke of the difficulties of describing to the public the role of artists in the economy and the workforce, suggesting that the solution to the problem of “how do we create another way of describing ourselves?” seems to be in finding a new way to define the role of art in society.
Eastes spoke of the progress that artists have made in moving away from the concept that art has to be connected to another field to be a viable career.
“Certainly for the last five to 10 years, the national discussion has been about how the arts need to get on the coattails of fields like education or healthcare. What's starting to happen is that, instead of the arts being connected to health, we are starting to see more studies and evidence of the fact that actually art is a thing that makes good health, [or] that art is a thing that makes good education. The studies are starting to flip.”
Spreading awareness
Spreading awareness of the value and presence of art in Vermont to both the community and the government is seen as vital to the continued growth of the field.
The Creative Sector of the Vermont Creative Network, a project implemented by the Arts Council, aims to connect Vermont art organizations and businesses.
According to Eastes, the Vermont Arts Council has “seven aspects to the creative sector - the performing arts, literary arts, visual arts, media, design, culture, and artisanal food, which all together encompass 37,000 jobs in Vermont.”
With such a large number of Vermont residents working in the arts, connecting that community creates opportunities to strengthen both the economy and culture.
“That's what I love about Vermont,” McBride said. “The scale of Vermont allows you to have a lot of contact with people. When you live in Vermont, you actually feel like you can roll up your sleeves and make a difference in the community, and I don't think most of the world gets to experience that.”
McBride has high aspirations for strengthening the artist community in Bellows Falls.
“There is a four-pronged approach to community development at RAMP that is based on the concept of accessibility in the general sense,” he said. “Physical and cultural accessibility, affordable housing for artists, and collaboration - that is what we have been trying to work on for the past 20 years.”
It is these factors that the local artists of Bellows Falls continue to work towards individually and collectively, and progress has been made.
Throughout Vermont, artists are identifying the struggles in their field and are combating them with efforts to inform the public of the economic and societal benefits of art.
These have taken the form of collaborative projects with organizations like the Vermont Performance Lab or Windham Regional Commission, work with community media through Falls Area Community Television, and control of the Exner Block in downtown Bellows Falls, which provides artists with housing, studio, and gallery space.
The most recent meeting concluded with the goal of establishing Bellows Falls as an art-friendly community that won't exclude non-artists from the benefits of such an environment, building credibility for the profession and connecting individual efforts to do so into a collective force.