Main Street Arts (MSA) says it is “springing back to life with events, art exhibits, new programming, and much more to come” following a year of COVID-19 restrictions.
The organization suspended all of its operations last July.
“We can't wait to see our neighbors and friends once again,” said MSA Co-chair Gina Cote in a news release.
As MSA reopens, “normal” means a focus on outdoor activities, and programs compatible with social distancing, including a series of “Summer Picnic Events” in the new Saxtons River Park just off the center of the village that will include theater and puppets, food trucks, and spin art. In addition, an outdoor music series is planned for MSA's side lawn.
Voters of the Windham Southeast School District will decide on Tuesday, May 11 whether to authorize borrowing up to $2 million to renovate the Academy School in West Brattleboro, which serves students in kindergarten through sixth grade. The proposed renovations include measures to improve indoor air quality, replacing windows...
Health Care and Rehabilitation Services (HCRS), southeastern Vermont's non-profit community mental-health agency, will host a free special screening of Angst: Raising Awareness Around Anxiety as part of Children's Mental Health Awareness Week, followed by a panel discussion. The 56-minute documentary has sparked global conversation about anxiety through its candid...
Harmony Collective, an artist-run gallery at 49 Elliot St., has lived most of its life during the COVID-19 pandemic. When the gallery opened in October 2019, founders Kay Curtis and Kate Greenough acknowledged the usual difficulties of running a gallery but were eager to provide a space that had been missing downtown. Their mission statement called for the Harmony Collective “to be an extraordinary place for artists and art lovers, where artists benefit from the sales of their work.” The...
The next generation of circus stars will perform Impetus, a high-flying, awe-inspiring theatrical circus production for a pair of shows at 2 and 4:30 p.m. on Saturday, May 15. The New England Center for Circus Arts' graduating class of ProTrack students - NECCA's three-year professional training program - will take the outdoor stage in the backyard of NECCA's Trapezium for their socially distanced Circus Capstone Project. “This daring show captures the ways in which humans connect to influence, inspire, and...
The Sarasa Ensemble offers two concerts at the Brattleboro Music Center which celebrate the young orphan girls under Vivaldi's tutelage, whose virtuosic talent put the composer's name and the city of Venice on the proverbial map. Performers of “Vivaldi's Orphan Girls: Virtuosi della Pietà” include soprano Kristen Watson; violinists Susanna Ogata, Susannah Foster, and Keats Dieffenbach; Jenny Stirling on the viola; cellists Jennifer Morsches and Timothy Merton; and John McKean on the harpsichord. The all-Vivaldi program will include Sinfonia in...
Brattleboro releases water quality reportBRATTLEBORO - The Water Department's annual Consumer Confidence Report/Water Quality Report for 2020 is now available at brattleboro.org/ccreport. Printed copies are available at the Department of Public Works, the Tri-Park Co-op Office, and the Guilford Country Store. Questions about this report can be addressed to the Department of Public Works at 802-254-4255. Silent vigil planned at Wells FountainBRATTLEBORO - Under a banner that reads, “Holding a Space of Loving Kindness for All Living Beings,” a silent...
Obituaries • Mary Jane Bosworth, 77, of Saxtons River. Died peacefully in her sleep on April 26, 2021. Mary Jane was a proud member of the Bellows Falls High School Class of 1961, continuing her education to earn a bachelor's degree in music education from Castleton State College. Mary Jane studied the Kodaly Music Theory in Hungary and taught music in the Rockingham schools for 27 years. Actively involved in her community, Mary Jane served as bell choir director of...
All across Vermont, community media stations like BCTV were asking the same question: “How could we keep productions small and outdoors to stay safe, while having video campers create something significant and feel connected?” Enter Crowdsourced Cinema Vermont, based on Northampton Open Media's long-running project of the same name, which organized 36 teams from Vermont and New Hampshire to re-create every scene from the 2000 Tom Hanks movie Cast Away. Each team took creative license with casting and film techniques,
“Eyes Wide Open,” Everyone's Books' first in-person event in a year, will feature four Windham County women showcasing new and diverse works: • Ann Braden's The Flight of the Puffin, releasing May 4, is about one small act of kindness that ripples out to connect four kids who feel isolated. When a message of hope takes flight and starts a chain reaction, it helps each kid summon the thing they need, whether it's bravery, empathy, or understanding. But best of...
Author Ann Braden shares her experiences and steps leading up to writing The Flight of the Puffin. Braden, who wrote The Benefits of Being an Octopus, said that with the new young adult novel, she set out to use her 11 years of writing to promote kindness, lessons, and hard topics for an audience of a younger age group. This book tells the journey of the protagonist, Libby, and how her past with bullies and hardships evolves into her spreading...
Tim Mayo and Jeff Friedman will read from their work at an online event sponsored by Brooks Memorial Library. The poems of Mayo, of Brattleboro, have appeared in numerous publications and have been contenders for a number of awards. Two books of his poems - The Kingdom of Possibilities and Thesaurus of Separation - have been published, as well as a chapbook, Notes to the Mental Hospital Timekeeper. Friedman's newest book, The Marksman, was published in 2020. The West Lebanon,
Canal Street Art Gallery Business/Marketing Director Emmett Dunbar is fairly bursting with energy and excitement that a live Third Friday art event is returning to his gallery May 21. “We're really excited,” says the energetic Dunbar, who is co-owner of the gallery with friend and oil painter Mike Noyes. Dunbar is also president of the Bellows Falls Downtown Development Alliance and part of a group of artists and interested folks who have been meeting for the past year to reinvent...
State and local officials are scrambling to help the 91 employees of Vermont Bread Company who suddenly lost their jobs when its owner, Burlington's Koffee Kup Bakery, shut down operations on April 26. In the aftermath of the closing, one former employee, Matthew Chaney of Brattleboro, is the first plaintiff in a class action suit that alleges the abrupt shutdown was a violation of the federal Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) Act. The closure came after a majority of...
The U.S. Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) will conduct the 2021 Maple Syrup Survey for the Northeast Region. The survey will collect information from approximately 1,600 Northeastern producers. “The Northeastern Region produced 3.94 million gallons of maple syrup in 2020. Vermont was the top Maple Syrup state with 51 percent of the United States' maple syrup,” King Whetstone, director of the NASS Northeastern Regional Field Office, said in a news release. “Taps in the Northeastern Region totaled...
Funding for infrastructure work at the Tri-Park Cooperative Housing is one of 10 projects selected by U.S. Rep. Peter Welch, D-Vt., for Community Project Funding (known as earmarks) in the federal fiscal year 2022 appropriations bill. If authorized, the organization could receive up to $1.3 million. “This is very exciting and very wonderful,” Tri-Park Board President Kay Curtis said. According to Curtis, in 2011, Tropical Storm Irene damaged 20 homes in the park. If the park keeps losing homes to...
The Rockingham Free Public Library's first-ever Peeps Literary Diorama Contest has concluded with the announcement of the winners in seven categories. View all the winners on Facebook or at rockinghamlibrary.org/peepdioramacontest. Ten dioramas were submitted, and all were displayed online due to the pandemic. Winners have received small prizes, such as gift cards to local businesses. • Best Diorama in Age Group: “The Blue Cat of Castle Town Sings to Zeruah,” by Sarah Vowles (adult); “The Lorax and the Peep Trees,”
The Connecticut River is home to many types of wildlife that move throughout the river and rely on parts of the river and riverbanks during their life cycles. Tiger beetles lurk on river beaches in sandy hideouts to hunt for prey. Ancient shortnose sturgeon migrate from the estuary to areas upstream and congregate on the river bottom in the winter. Dragonflies live as larvae in the water and emerge to transform into adults on the banks of the river each...
I'm coming up on my 16th year working for the Windham County Sheriff's Office. This story became a cornerstone for my philosophy on how to treat people, first as a sheriff's deputy and now as a sheriff. When asked what a sheriff's deputy does, most people would first assume law enforcement. Yet that represents only about a quarter of the work that those of us in the Windham County Sheriff's Office do. In 2005, I was assigned to transport an...
NFTs, or non-fungible tokens, have taken the art world by storm. In February, collectors and speculators spent more than $200 million on NFT-based artwork, memes, and GIFs, and that was before digital artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, sold a piece at famed auction house Christie's on March 11 for $69 million - the third-highest price ever fetched by a living artist. But what exactly are NFTs, why are they commanding such astronomical prices, and what effect are they having...
Gallery Walk returns to the downtown area on Friday, May 7 from 5 to 8 p.m. after two years - and it's all new. Formerly organized by the Arts Council of Windham County and led for years by volunteer Joy Wallens-Penford before her death last year, this year the Downtown Brattleboro Alliance (DBA) has taken the reins. Are organizers excited? “Oh, my God! The thing that's great is we're getting to imagine and manifest the Gallery Walk of our dreams,
First there are no leaves, then there are, and so April rolls into May - each year the same, each year a surprise. I remember the same shock of recognition, a presentiment of immeasurable intimacy and eventual physical distance, when I saw the first series of sonograms of my daughter, still in utero: She seemed to be waving to me, her hand as tender and tremulous as a new leaf; in the next shot, she had turned away and was...
The private art collection of artists Wolf Kahn (1927–2020) and Emily Mason (1932–2019) will be auctioned from Christie's New York on Tuesday, May 18 with a live auction, with online sales open from May 6 to 20. The collection of modern artworks is expected to produce strong financial results to benefit the artists' foundations: the Wolf Kahn/Emily Mason Foundation and the Emily Mason/Alice Trumbull Mason Foundation. According to estimates published on the auction website, the artwork is valued between $4.4...
The Brattleboro Women's Chorus will perform its spring “Singalong Finale” via Zoom on Mother's Day. As the chorus's 25th anniversary season draws to a close, members will be singing songs led by Director Becky Graber and some guests as well. “Some of the songs are very easy to join along with, and Graber will teach a song or two to all,” organizers of the concert - this year, called a “singalong” - write in a news release. Singers will hear...
The Bellows Falls Terriers girls' softball team could have ended their season last week, and everyone would have understood. The pain of losing a teammate, suddenly and tragically, is a lot to ask a high school athlete to deal with. But the players chose to honor the memory of Jada Spaulding and continue their season in her memory. On April 30, before the start of their game against the Leland & Gray Rebels, the Terriers stood in the middle of...
Last week, the statewide Everyone Eats! program celebrated an important milestone by serving its one millionth meal. The program, which has provided meals prepared by local restaurants to Vermonters experiencing any of the negative effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, started in Brattleboro last summer. It soon grew into a statewide initiative, thanks to an allocation of $5 million of the state's Coronavirus Relief Fund by the Vermont Agency of Commerce and Community Development to Southeastern Vermont Community Action (SEVCA), which...
Growing up here as a teenager, I hung out with the skaters, punks, artist, and proud weirdos - people with real character and immense amounts of talent. Most of my friends have grown up to venture out in the world to do very cool shit, and many have become very successful. Some of them are household names and can be found in the mainstream media for creating wonderful things. I am so proud of them and love seeing the success...
From Abenaki petroglyphs and the first known African American poet, Lucy Terry Prince, to Nobel Laureates like Saul Bellow, Jody Williams, Rudyard Kipling, and a pantheon of colorful characters along the way, writers and the words they have written have shaped the Brattleboro area into something special. Now, a product of a multi-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) backed exploration of People, Places and History of Words in Brattleboro, Vermont offers a new way to make these creators' stories...