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Working to advance and preserve the arts at the center of Vermont communities.
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I am frequently asked, what is the state of the arts in Vermont? My response?
Vermont.
Vermont is the State of the Arts.
Census figures for 2010 are not available, but based on 2000 data, Vermont is first in writers, seventh in visual artists, and fifth overall in the per-capita ratio of artists-to-citizens out of all 50 states. I believe, however, that visual artists are extremely under-reported in Vermont, and that once the 2010 data is out, we will find ourselves ranked first overall.
From communities as diverse as Brattleboro, White River Junction, Island Pond, Rutland, Bennington, and the greater Burlington area, Vermont’s artists leave an indelible impression on citizens and visitors alike. We are a creative state whose character is hewn as much from the keyboard and the brush as it is from the soil and the forest. For most Vermont artists, the natural landscape informs their creative core. For others, Vermont’s independent streak inspires provocation and even outrage, as certainly art should from time to time. The critical note, here, is that of all states I have heard about, Vermont artists describe themselves exactly this way: “I’m a Vermont artist”—using Vermont as an adjective to encompass the depth and variety that very name conjures in the imagination. No other artist from any other state does this, to my knowledge — at least not with the same degree of commitment.
Arts institutions in Vermont—the “healthy” ones—are nimble, have strong community support, and make the most of digital media and social networking tools to reach out well beyond our border. Virtually all who regularly apply to the Vermont Arts Council for funding fulfill the “artistic excellence” requirement with ease. Grants, therefore, tend to be awarded based organizational capacity and the value and impact that their activities have in/on their communities, not on the past record of accomplishment; a subtle but important difference. If nothing else, it indicates a sector that is fully mature, with very high standards, and aware of its important role in bringing quality programs and services to the public.
From the consumer’s perspective, therefore, the arts in Vermont are thriving. There are many arts events to choose from, not just on the weekends, but on any day of the week. And with very few exceptions, they are all of really high caliber. A glance through any community newspaper will prove the point.
The view is very different, however, from the creative/producing end.
Whether the root cause is the economy, donor fatigue from massive weather cataclysms, or the increasingly vocal, but very ill-informed, national movement to remove all so-called “nonessential government services,” the issue for all is survival. The Kennedy Center’s Michael Kaiser believes that the key to survival lies in the diversity and excellence of programming coupled with an ever-expanding commitment to marketing and promotion.
Therein lies the rub. Arts organizations are mission driven. If there is an extra dollar left over at the end of the year, the mission mandates that it be spent on programming. The result is that Kaiser’s advice to focus on diverse, excellent, new programming with an emphasis on marketing is difficult to sell to trustees and audiences.
What the sector really needs are tools for analyzing the impacts of artistic activity on education, community economic development, and social services. With the Pew Trust’s Cultural Data Project just getting started here in Vermont, and the new fields of “Social Impact Analysis” and “Brain-based Learning” coming into their own, we will soon provide policy analysts and state/local officials with much better information about why they should be advocating for significantly more resources to be spent on supporting and promoting the sector.
Artists and arts organizations are generally pretty capable at corralling what they need to put on a show. What they are less good at is reaching audiences in Boston, New York, Montreal, Albany and the Berkshires to let them know what is available less than a half-day’s drive away. This is where the state’s interests and the arts sector’s interests are currently most in alignment and where immediate returns are already beginning to be found. (There are many others, but this is the lowest of the “low-hanging fruits.”)
Vermont’s arts sector is, from an economic policy perspective, one of its last great un(der)-tapped resources. With the right kind of collaborative, strategic and socially-integrated investment, the arts sector could easily thrive and become integral to Vermont’s economic vitality, not just a pleasant, icing-on-the-cake afterthought.
The Vermont Arts Council has awarded $152,330 in grants to improve existing community arts facilities and to expand their capacity to provide cultural activities.
Two Burlington institution were among the recipients. The Flynn Center for the Performing Arts won $30,000 for new seating and improvements to its wheelchair seating area and the Fletcher Free Library was awarded $16,720 for audio/visual and technical improvements to its public spaces.
In neighboring counties, recipients included: the Vermont Folklife Center in Middlebury, $7,500 for improvements to its new Vision and Voice Gallery; $5,500 to the town of Ferrisburgh for curtains in its community center; Friends of the Opera House in Enosburg Falls, $18,601 to support the purchase and installation of drapes and sound equipment.
VERMONT ARTS COUNCIL AWARDS $152,330 IN CULTURAL FACILITIES GRANTS
Nine grants will improve existing facilities and expand their capacity to provide cultural activities
Montpelier – The Vermont Arts Council is pleased to announce the recipients of 2012 Cultural Facilities Grants. The grants, totaling $152,330 will be awarded to nine institutions to improve existing facilities and expand their capacity to provide cultural activities for the public. The recipients will be honored in a ceremony at the Vermont State House on Thursday, January 19 at 3:00 PM.
The recipients were chosen by a panel of community members and experts in cultural facilities, historic buildings, and accessibility. Thirteen Vermont organizations applied for Cultural Facilities funding this year.
The Cultural Facilities Grant program is administered by the Vermont Arts Council in conjunction with the Vermont Historical Society and the Vermont Division for Historic Preservation. The program is funded through an annual appropriation in the Capital Budget.
Now in its 22nd year, the purpose of this program is to assist Vermont nonprofit organizations and municipalities enhance, create or expand the capacity of an existing building to provide cultural activities for the public. As a result of these grants, improvements to public cultural facilities have enabled citizens of all ages and abilities to enjoy more cultural events while increasing their participation in the heritage of their communities. More than 100 organizations have been funded in the past eight years alone.
“More and more people recognize Vermont as a place where art is created and where artists gather to experiment with new forms and get important feedback from discerning audiences. It is important to make our venues-whether that is a concert hall or a multi-use town hall theater-as up-to-date, as accessible, and as responsive to the needs of artists as possible,” said Alex Aldrich, Executive Director. “These grants, in effect, legitimize our description of ourselves as one of the most creative and resourceful states in the nation.”
The Vermont Arts Council and the Department of Buildings & General Services invite the public to celebrate the permanent installation of a series of sculptures by artist Gregory Miguel Gómez at the new training facility at the Vermont Fire Academy, 672 Academy Road, in Pittsford, VT. A reception for the artist will be held on Friday, December 17th from 3:30 – 5:00 p.m.
The Vermont Fire Academy recently added a new training facility. The addition of the new building included the installation of a series of permanent sculptures titled, Tools of Command. Works of art were commissioned through the Vermont Art in State Buildings Program.
Gregory Miguel Gómez of Newtonville, MA and Putney, VT was chosen as the lead artist for this public art project. Gómez is a painter and sculptor from a family of physicians and scientists. He has lived many places: Buffalo, New York, Detroit, Michigan, Havana Cuba, and Rochester, Minnesota before ultimately moving to Boston and Vermont. He received his undergraduate degree from Grinnell College and an MFA from Washington University, in St. Louis, Missouri. He has taught at the Maryland Institute, in Baltimore Maryland; The Rhode Island School of Design; and Wellesley College, before coming to Wheelock College, in Boston.
The Art in State Buildings Program is a partnership between the Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services. Funded by the Art in State Buildings Act, the program allows up to two capital construction projects be selected each year. Site-specific works of art are chosen by Local Review Committees that are made up of agency and community representatives and visual art experts. Selection criteria includes “. . . high artistic merit and inherent quality of work; and demonstrated experience and ability to work with design professionals, engineers, community leaders, and other artists within a collaborative team context.”
A passion for the natural environment not only links Dartmouth with its neighbors across the Connecticut River, it also connects many local artists who draw inspiration from snowy winters and coniferous forests. On Nov. 4, the Vermont Arts Council awarded two such artists — former Dartmouth professors Christian Wolff and Sydney Lea — for their contributions to Vermont’s cultural fiber.
Wolff, a celebrated composer of experimental music and a former music, classics and comparative literature professor at Dartmouth, received the Walter Cerf Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Lea, a poet and former English professor at the College, was named the poet laureate of Vermont, the seventh in the state’s history.
Though Wolff began his exploration of experimental music in New York City, he said his Newbury, Vt., house overlooking the White River “out in the boondocks” has most inspired the natural sound and space used in his recent musical compositions.
“When you walk out in the springtime, you hear peepers and all sorts of natural sounds in that setting,” Wolff said. “That’s had an effect on my work, no question. It’s not that I write some kind of spring symphony, but it’s more about listening and paying attention to sounds and the rhythm and the feeling of sound outdoors in space.”
Wolff, who said he was “basically self-taught,” completed his formal musical education in six weeks by studying under New York-based composer and music theorist John Cage when he was 16 years old. In that short period, Cage introduced Wolff to fellow avant-garde artist Merce Cunningham, the founder of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which performed at the Hopkins Center in July as part of its final tour. Wolff has composed for and collaborated with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on several occasions, and currently plays piano for its music ensemble.
Along with Cage, Cunningham and other experimental composers, Wolff created original compositions, later labeled as the New York School of music. Wolff referenced Cage’s famous song “4’33”,” composed of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence, to describe the movement.
For composers of the New York School, sound matters “more than anything else,” Wolff said.
“Another feature, especially of time, was considerable use of silence … sound being isolated by virtue of silence.”
Because his radical music did not guarantee a steady income, Wolff also pursued his collegiate interest in classics for steadier work.
“When I started in the ’50s, what we were doing was regarded as completely far-out, and by traditional music standards, completely unacceptable,” Wolff said. “I had to find a day job, so to speak.”
After completing an eight-year stint in the Harvard University classics department, Wolff came to Dartmouth in 1971 to teach classics and comparative literature. Fellow composer and Dartmouth professor John Appleton also recruited Wolff to the music department, which at that time housed the first music studio in the Ivy League. Wolff taught in all three departments until his retirement in 1999.
“My music has a kind of teaching dimension to it,” Wolff said. “A lot of it is written for people to play who are not necessarily professional musicians, and a lot of it is about learning the music.”
Wolff said his favorite class to teach at Dartmouth was “A Workshop in Experimental Music,” which he designed to include any interested stduents. The course had no prerequisites and relied upon unconventional, prose-oriented composition and instruction.
Lea’s time at the College was more disjointed than Wolff’s decades-long career. A prolific writer who has published nine volumes of poetry, a novel and an essay collection, Lea laughed that his Dartmouth career was fractured by the “publish or perish” mentality in the English department when he arrived in 1969.
“I decided to go full bore for poetry and I was denied tenure,” he said.
After leaving Dartmouth in 1976, Lea taught in the burgeoning creative writing department at Middlebury College for 15 years and founded the prestigious New England Review, a literary magazine that he edited until 1989. He returned to Dartmouth in 2000 to teach creative writing in the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program and periodically taught at the undergraduate level until earlier this year.
“I was always energized by the students,” Lea said. “I was excited to see the best of them and their writing. That seemed to charge me up to keep at it myself.”
Though honored as the poet laureate in Vermont, Lea writes in several other genres, most commonly essays.
“I find an almost perfect continuity between lyrical poetry and lyrical essays,” Lea said. “Those modes allow me to operate in a non-rational, unplotted way to record the ways in which my mind comprehends things.”
Lea’s lyrical writing, which delves into the American Northeast’s natural environment and inhabitants, has been compared to the work of Robert Frost, who was Vermont’s first poet laureate. Though Lea conjectured that Frost would not approve of his frequent use of first-person narration, he said that Frost heavily influences his writing
“It feels to me that Frost, writing about everyday characters and situations in a very natural and unaffected way, was a model for me,” Lea said. “I have a sort of enabling fiction when I write, [so] that the most rudimentarily educated neighbor would be able to come to my poetry and get something.”
Though Frost remains a poetic precedent and guiding figure, Lea is primarily inspired by the people he has met in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine over the course of almost 50 years.
“I’m old enough to have known men and women in the north country like we’ll never see again, people who lived in this region before the arrival of electricity in the woods, people who preceded the television industry and made their own entertainment,” Lea said. “They were wonderful storytellers and wonderful poets.”
As poet laureate, Lea said he will visit community libraries to read and promote discussion with “smart people out there who don’t necessarily have Ivy League educations.” He will also write a monthly column to be published in five Vermont newspapers.
“I’m a guy who lives in the woods,” Lea said. “The natural world of New England is very much what I’m about.”
Declaring herself unequivocally a Vermont writer, Weybridge’s Julia Alvarez received the 2011 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts from Gov. Peter Shumlin at aceremony Friday.
“To have such a master storyteller as a Vermont writer is a great tribute to this state,” Shumlin told the audience of some 250 family members and friends of the honorees, politicians and members of the Vermont arts world who filled the Governor’s Ballroom at the Capitol Plaza Hotel in Montpelier.
The Vermont Arts Council, the state-chartered agency that sponsors the awards and the ceremony, also honored Barnard avant-garde composer Christian Wolff with its Outstanding Achievement Award and installed Newbury poet Sydney Lea as Vermont poet laureate.
Shumlin postulated that Vermont has more artists per capita than any other state.
“It’s critical to our culture,” he said.
Alvarez, 61, a writerinresidence at Middlebury College, is the author of five novels, including “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents” (1991) and “In the Time of the Butterflies” (1994), four books of poetry, a book of essays and several books for young readers. She was born in New York but spent her first 10 years in her parents’ native Dominican Republic. Many of her works reflect her growing up as a Dominican-American.
“She brings to the fore the problems of gender as well as ethnicity,” novelist Jay Parini, a fellow Middlebury faculty member, told the audience.
“Julia Alvarez is us,” he said. “She’s never them. She’s a spokesperson for the human race.”
“I was deeply humbled (by the award),”said Alvarez, who has made this state her home for more than 30 years.
“This award settles it: I AM a Vermont writer,” she said.
Alvarez is the 39th Vermont artist given the award, which first went to pianist Rudolf Serkin in 1967, and last year to puppeteers Eric Bass and Ines Zeller of Putney’s Sandglass Theatre.
Lea, 69, who has lived in Vermont since the 1990s and teaches at Dartmouth College, was invested as poet laureate through 2015. His recently published collections include “A Little Wilderness: Some Notes on Rambling” (2006) and “Young of the Year” (2011).
“He’s a Vermonter,” Shumlin said. “He loves the woods — we don’t think of a poet being a hunter. He gets his inspiration in the woods.”
“I think his work reflects Vermont,” Shumlin said.
Wolff, 77, is best known outside Vermont, though he has had ties since childhood to Marlboro Music Festival. Born in France, he moved at an early ageto New York, where he studied with composer John Cage. The two became colleagues in the avant-garde New York School. He is also known for his collaborations with dance pioneer Merce Cunningham.
“He was one of the composers who revolutionized music,”said Margaret Lawrence, director of programming at Dartmouth’s Hopkins Center, when bestowing the honor. “He lived on the edge.”
Receiving the award, Wolff said, “What pleases me most of all is it’s from Vermont.”
Governor Peter Shumlin and the Vermont Arts Council are pleased to present the Vermont Arts Gala: A Celebration of the Arts in Vermont this Friday, in Montpelier.
The even will be held in the Governor's Ballroom at the Capitol Plaza, with a cocktail hour and reception at 6pm, and award presentations beginning at 7pm.
Awardees include Julia Alvarez, receiving the Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts; Sydney Lea, the newly appointed Vermont Poet Laureate; and Christian Wolff, receiving the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts.
This event is free and open to the public. The Vermont Arts Council is asking attendees to bring a non-perishable food item to the event. All donations will be brought to a local food shelf.
It was the mid-1970s, and Sydney Lea was an English professor at Dartmouth, bound by the cliche of the tenure track: publish or perish. He pulled out of hiding his dissertation, in hopes of finding within it the seeds of an article or two he could write to meet the academic requirements.
"In those days, you didn't need to publish a book no one would read," Lea said. "But a couple of articles no one would read."
When he opened the document he had written to earn his Ph.D. in comparative literature at Yale, "it was like looking into an abyss," Lea said.
"I spoke aloud," Lea recalled last week. "I said, 'I don't want to do this when I grow up."
He was 34.
Instead, Lea wanted to write poetry. He had had written some verse years earlier - the standard "break-up with your girlfriend poetry that we all do, and hope will disappear into the great void."
Nonetheless, staring into the abyss of his past scholarship, Lea recognized he wanted to write.
"I decided to let the chips fall where they might, and where they would," Lea said.
Last month, the chips fell in a big and wholly unexpected way for Lea: Gov. Peter Shumlin named Lea poet laureate of Vermont.
Lea, 68, who lives in Newbury, will formally assume his position Nov. 4 at a ceremony at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier. He succeeds Ruth Stone of Ripton and will become the seventh poet to hold the title that first belonged to Robert Frost.
"It never occurred to me that I'd be on the list," Lea said. "I could think of at least half a dozen people to which it could go," he said. "I have to say that if I had thought about it, I find it more gratifying than I would've thought.
"I really love Vermont. I love just about all the things about it. To get that kind of ratification, it feels right. I've been writing the right kinds of things for my locale, and to have it acknowledged is very gratifying."
Lea is the author of nine volumes of poetry, including the 2011 collection, "Young of the Year" (Four Way Books). He has four books in the works, including the planned 2013 publication of "I Was Thinking of Beauty."
Lea's 2000 collection, "Pursuit of a Wound" (University of Illinois Press), was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He has taught at a number of colleges, including Middlebury and Dartmouth, and is a founding editor of the acclaimed literary journal, "New England Review."
"Syd is a great explorer of the interior, that's really what he's always been," said Stephen Donadio, current editor of New England Review, which has been under the auspices of Middlebury College for more than 20 years. "He's got what Frost calls a lot of in-and-outdoor schooling, which he has never worn ostentatiously. He's a great, intrepid explorer who is not fond of self-advertisement."
'The more remote, the better'
Lea intends to be an active state poet and is contacting 130 or so local libraries to visit as many as he can. He's interested in programs that bring poetry to people who aren't necessarily well versed in it.
"I'm hoping to get out and talk to people," he said. "The more remote, the better."
For anyone who has thought they never quite understand poetry, Lea could be the state poet for you. In his writing, he has been guided by "an enabling fiction."
"I like to think that if I finish a poem, I can take it to my 90-year-old Newbury native neighbor, and he'll get something out of it," Lea said. "He and people who are like him: People who are bright, just as he is. But they're not schooled people."
He has found that people without formal education in poetry tend to ask "productively uninformed questions" — basic questions that are the crucial ones:
Who's talking to whom?
Where are we?
Why did you break the line there?
His longtime support of poetry in Vermont, his commitment to education, and his body of work (including writing in other genres), make Lea a "fantastic choice" for poet laureate," said Ellen Bryant Voigt, a former Vermont poet laureate who lives in Cabot.
"He's a wonderful poet, he's widely published and he has a very strong body of work," Voigt said. "In a way, he represents all writers, which I think is the idea behind having the laureate. ...Vermont is very much present in his writing: his regard for the natural world, which I think all Vermont will be able to relate to.
"He's a worthy descendant of Frost, not only because of the concern with nature, but because he writes great narrative. And stories, I think, are a bit more accessible to people who don't read a lot of poetry. And he's sly in the same way Frost was."
Lea isn't sly about his likes: the woods and old-time New Englanders who live in them - Lea likes the rhythm and cadence of the woodsmen's speech, and their tradition of storytelling. His family: his wife, Robin Barone, a "recovering lawyer" who is a court mediator and his "one and only critic" before he sends his work out, and his five children.
Lea's oldest son is Burlington guitar-maker Creston Lea; there's also a snowboarder who teaches at Stowe, a social worker in Brooklyn, N.Y., and two daughters wrapped up in their own interests (urban agriculture; singing) but each an excellent writer, he said. "If they decided to write, seriously, they would be what I'm remembered for," he said.
He likes, as well, the work of writing, but he doesn't care to promote it or himself.
"I'd rather be ambitious for the work than for advertising it," he said. "I haven't cultivated the right people."
Lea grew up in suburban Philadelphia, but was drawn to his uncle's farm in Ambler, Pa., the place where he came to appreciate and value country living. "That was really my heart's home," he said. He spent weekends at the Ambler farm, until he discovered girls, Lea said.
At Yale, he started writing short stories — prose that had a select audience: his roommates.
Lea was a student at Yale when the university was active in the anti-war movement. This effort was of great importance to Lea, who turned in his draft card to the late William Sloane Coffin Jr., a longtime Strafford resident who was an influential anti-war activist when he was chaplain of Yale. Lea's opposition to the Vietnam War played a part in his decision to stay at Yale for graduate studies in comparative literature.
"The time came when I graduated, I didn't want to go to Vietnam," Lea said. "I liked literature classes and thought, what the heck, I'll go to graduate school."
After graduate school, 43 years ago, Lea moved to the Upper Valley — first to the New Hampshire side of the Connecticut River, and 20 years ago crossing over to settle in Newbury. He came to the area for the teaching job at Dartmouth, a reluctant and resistant scholar who wrote his dissertation on 19th-century German supernatural fiction.
"Even I don't understand it," he said.
Only he knows if that's so - but he put in the work: reading his topic in Spanish, French and Italian. In any event, he came to feel the work was a kind of "albatross," and turned his attention to writing.
He was pointed in this direction, in part, by a writing class he taught at Dartmouth, a course he was assigned as a "kindness," Lea said.
"I had no credentials to teach the course," he said. "But I found it rekindled my interest in writing."
He had always felt that to be a writer "you needed a secret, and nobody had told me what that was," Lea said. He discovered, rather, you need discipline and practice - and luck doesn't hurt, either.
"Poetry is like anything else," Lea said. "You've got to put in the time."
Soon, Lea's poetry was published in magazines including The New Yorker and The Atlantic. He got a book deal.
Of the many meaningful aspects of Lea's laureate appointment, one is the position's association with Frost, a poet whom Lea calls a "hero."
Frost, who served as Vermont's poet laureate from 1961 until his death two years later, wrote poems you can read in the grange hall or in elementary school classrooms, and people understand them, Lea said. At least on a certain level.
This is a quality Lea shares with Frost shares, according to Voigt.
"You read (Frost) again, you see something new," Voigt said. "It's full of paradox and suggestion and nuance. I think Syd's work is like that, too."
Donadio, editor of the New England Review, also described Lea's ability to reconcile the two Frosts:
"When you spend a lot of time around here, you enter into a deep relation with Frost, whether you like it or not," Donadio said. "Syd's been able to negotiate between readers who think when they read Robert Frost that he's writing some kind of greeting card verse, and readers who think he's really a dark malevolent soul, a match for the vindictiveness of New England winter."
In the August issue of The New England Review, Lea published an essay, "Robert Frost and the End of Poetry." He writes:
"Poets are of course famous for brooding, often on what has been. Many, myself included, worry that we are at this point really, absolutely, at the end, just now because of the racing development of technology: e-books, Kindle, texting, Twittering, etc. Poets, though, have pretty much always thought their art to be in its sunset phase. Like men and women who reach a certain biological age, we all must come to mourn a vanished and — inevitably, to our way of thinking — a better age."
If, as Lea proposes, poetry is in a particular "sunset phase," Vermonters get a shot of light from a poet laureate who plans to drive his pick-up truck around the state, stopping to read poetry and talk about it.
Contact Sally Pollak at spollak@burlingtonfreepress.com or 660-1859; www.twitter.com/vtpollak
Christian Wolff, a renowned composer and a retired Dartmouth College faculty member, will be the 2011 recipient of the Walter Cerf Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council. Wolff will be honored in a ceremony on November 4 at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier, VT.
Wolff’s remarkable career in the arts includes a long association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, which culminated in his performance as part of the live musical ensemble accompanying the company when its farewell “Legacy” tour came to Hopkins Center this past July.
The Walter Cerf Award is presented to individuals who have made a sustained contribution to the arts and have had an impact on Vermont’s cultural life. The award is named in honor of the late philanthropist Walter Cerf whose generous gifts, exceeding $5 million, have benefited numerous Vermont institutions including the Arts Council. Cerf was instrumental in establishing the Arts Endowment at the Vermont Community Foundation, and his contributions have created a $1 million fund to assist Vermont’s artists and arts organizations.
An active performer, improviser and composer, Wolff studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition, briefly, with John Cage. Mostly self-taught as composer, the work of Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown have been important to him. His work has been especially concerned with allowing performers (both professional and amateur) various degrees of freedom in the process of performance.
His work as a composer and performer included decades of work, on and off, with the Cunningham company, one of the most influential companies in the history of modern dance. Wolff was 16 when first met Cunningham in 1952, meeting him through Cage, Cunningham’s longtime friend and eventual life partner. He composed his first piece for Cunningham in 1953 and went on to collaborate on many other projects over the decades that followed, sometimes composing for a dance and sometimes giving Cunningham permission to use a previously written work. After Wolff retired from Dartmouth in 1999, he became the MCDC’s house pianist for the next dozen years, accompanying the company on international tours.
Academically trained as a classicist, he has taught at Harvard and from 1971 to 1999 at Dartmouth College where he taught classics, comparative literature and music. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award), and honorary degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Huddersfield. He is a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Wolff will be honored as part of the Vermont Arts Gala: A Celebration of the Arts in Vermont on Friday, November 4. The Gala will take place at the Capitol Plaza in the Governor’s Ballroom and will begin with a reception and cocktail hour at 6pm, with award presentations beginning at 7pm. Additional recipients include Julia Alvarez, receiving the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and Sydney Lea, the newly appointed Poet Laureate of Vermont.
This event is free and open to the public. The Arts Council is requesting that attendees bring a non-perishable food item, which will be collected at the event, and given to a local food shelf.
Vermont's new Poet Laureate, Newbury writer Sydney Lea has been described as "a man in the woods with his head full of books and a man in books with his head full of woods."
VPR's Jane Lindholm talks with Lea about his poetry, his new role, and how he plans to use it to promote poetry around the state, including visiting as many community libraries as will have him. Lea's latest collection of poems, from Four Way Books, is called Young of the Year.
Listen Here
The Vermont Arts Council is pleased to announce that renowned musician and composer, Christian Wolff, will be the 2011 recipient of the Walter Cerf Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. Mr. Wolff will be honored in a ceremony on November 4, 2011 at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier, VT.
The Walter Cerf Award is presented to individuals who have made a sustained contribution to the arts and have had an impact on Vermont’s cultural life. The award is named in honor of the late philanthropist Walter Cerf whose generous gifts, exceeding $5 million, have benefited numerous Vermont institutions including the Arts Council. Mr. Cerf was instrumental in establishing the Arts Endowment at the Vermont Community Foundation, and his contributions have created a $1 million fund to assist Vermont’s artists and arts organizations.
Christian Wolff studied piano with Grete Sultan and composition, briefly, with John Cage. Mostly self-taught as composer, the work of Cage, Morton Feldman, David Tudor and Earle Brown have been important to him. His work has been especially concerned with allowing performers (both professional and amateur) various degrees of freedom in the process of performance.
Wolff is active as performer and improviser. Academically trained as a classicist, he has taught at Harvard and from 1971 to 1999, and at Dartmouth College where he taught classics, comparative literature and music. He has received awards and grants from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Fromm Foundation, Meet the Composer, DAAD Berlin, the Asian Council, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts (the John Cage award), and honorary degrees from the California Institute of the Arts and the University of Huddersfield. He is a member of the Akademie der Kuenste in Berlin and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mr. Wolff will be honored as part of the Vermont Arts Gala: A Celebration of the Arts in Vermont on Friday, November 4. The Gala will take place at the Capitol Plaza in the Governor’s Ballroom and will begin with a reception and cocktail hour at 6pm, with award presentations beginning at 7pm. Additional recipients include Julia Alvarez, receiving the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and Sydney Lea, the newly appointed Poet Laureate of Vermont.
This event is free and open to the public. The Arts Council is requesting that attendees bring a non-perishable food item, which will be collected at the event, and given to a local food shelf. More information, including an RSVP form are available online at www.vermontartscouncil.org
“What has been most inspiring about Vermont is that I’ve been able to stay put here. Nothing is as good as stability for getting your work done.”
Julia Alvarez, a Weybridge writer who has also taught at Middlebury College for nearly 25 years, wrote those lines in her essay “A Vermont Writer from the Dominican Republic.”
Alvarez, who grew up under the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, will receive Vermont’s highest arts award this fall — the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. The distinction is presented annually to a Vermont artist with national or international stature in their art form.
“Julia has been an international presence for years,” said Alexander Aldrich, executive director if the Vermont Arts Council, which suggests candidates for the Governor’s Award. “To be honest, it was a really easy choice.”
Gov. Peter Shumlin and the Vermont Arts Council will present the award on Nov. 4 at the Vermont Arts Gala at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier.
“Arts councils like ours tend to be of service to artists in the earlier parts of their careers,” Aldrich said. “We don’t often interact with the artists who have ‘made it.’ So, we’re excited to have Julia come over to this side of the Green Mountains and rub elbows with her. The Governor’s Award is a great chance to show off some of the incredible talent here, and we love that we can accommodate this kind of diversity.”
Previous recipients have included writers Howard Frank Mosher and David Mamet; printmaker Sabra Field; and Rob Mermin, the founder of Circus Smirkus.
Alvarez has published several novels with Latino themes, including “How the Garcia Girls Lost their Accents,” “In the Time of Butterflies,” “¡Yo! In the name of Salomé” and “Saving the World.” The final installment in her Tía Lola children’s series came out earlier this month. Her new non-fiction book, “A Wedding in Haiti,” will be published next spring by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Alvarez said she calls the Dominican Republic, or “DR,” her first home, “even though I only lived there for 10 years.”
The DR might be her native soil, but Alvarez has found an artistic home in Vermont. She and her family moved to New York when she was 10 years old, and she came to Middlebury College as an undergraduate. Alvarez returned to Middlebury as a professor in 1988, and remains with the college today as a writer-in-residence. She also advises Alianza, the campus Latino organization.
“I wasn’t a writer before coming to the States,” she said, “but the Dominican Republic was a storytelling culture, an oral culture. So I suppose the seed was planted then. I had to come to a new country and learn a new language when I was 10 to get me attuned to writing.”
Alvarez hasn’t left her homeland entirely behind. She and her husband, Bill Eichner, are involved in a coffee plantation and literacy program in the Dominican Republic called Alta Gracia. She based her book “A Cafecito Story,” which she calls a modern “green” fable, on the Alta Gracia project. Though fictional, the journey to owning a small, shade-grown coffee plantation in the Dominican Republic is touchingly autobiographical.
“Alta Gracia is up in the mountains,” she said. “They don’t look just like Vermont, but it’s similar. A rural life. You’re living with the rhythms of a community.”
“I started the teaching down there just to keep busy while Bill worked on the farm,” she joked. The Vermont Coffee Company of Middlebury roasts and sells Alta Gracia’s coffee beans, returning a part of the profits to educational work in the Dominican Republic.
When she’s not visiting the DR, Alvarez lives with her husband on a small farm in Weybridge. She considers writing her full-time job.
“Writing for me is all about the work,” Alvarez said. “The farmer next door has his sheep, and I do my writing. I’ve never liked the segregation of ‘being an artist.’ I’d rather have my work fit into the weave of the community. This is just my job. When something like (the Governor’s Award) happens, I’m always surprised.”
Aldrich, who oversaw the selection process for the Governor’s Award, said Alvarez does her job very well indeed.
“Whether writing for children, young adults, or a mature audience; whether writing poetry or prose, she has a distinct voice and a unique cultural perspective that distinguishes her from her peers here in Vermont and throughout the U.S.,” he said. “Vermont has more writers per capita than any other state in the country and you can be sure that we will be celebrating this award with her and many of her literary friends and admirers in November.”
The Vermont Arts Council and the Vermont Department of Buildings and General Services invite the public to join them in opening a new exhibit of outdoor sculpture in the Council's Sculpture Garden, on Friday, October 7, from 4-7 pm. The reception will be held in conjunction with Montpelier's Art Walk, and will include an exhibition of paintings by Candy Barr in the Council's Spotlight Gallery, music by Mayfly and a special presentation of the first-ever Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service in the Arts.
The Arthur Williams Award will be presented to Steve Ames of River Arts in Morrisville. The award is named in honor of Arthur Williams, the Arts Council's founding Executive Director. His long career in the Arts included chairing the effort to restore the Vermont State House, and he has served the highest artistic standards while remaining grounded in the type of community-based activism that is the hallmark of Vermont's essential character. The award will be presented by Mr. Williams and other Vermont dignitaries. "Steve Ames is a perfect 'first recipient,'" said Alex Aldrich, the Council's executive director. "The work he does in Morrisville is very much up to the standard set by Arthur himself, even though the tools available to someone in Steve's generation are very different."
The Sculpture Garden is a rotating exhibit of contemporary work by Vermont artists. The 2011-2013 exhibition was curated by Lindsey Carlson of the Vermont Arts Council and includes sculpture by Thea Alvin, Ria Blaas, Rob Hitzig, Steve Procter, Brian-Jon Swift and James Irving Westermann. The six pieces feature work in stone, steel, wood and ceramics. The works range in style from figurative to abstract with conceptual themes that are both whimsical and thought-provoking. To see photos and artist statements please visit www.vermontartscouncil.org.
The Sculpture Garden was designed in 2002 by Burlington landscape architects H. Keith Wagner and Associates. Special thanks to State Buildings Curator David Schutz and his assistant Tracy Martin for their ongoing dedication to bringing art into Montpelier's downtown Capitol complex. The Sculpture Garden is open to the public year-round, 7 days a week. The Spotlight Gallery is open Monday - Friday, 8:30 AM - 4:30 PM. The Vermont Arts Council and the Spotlight Gallery are accessible.
Governor Peter R. Shumlin and the Vermont Arts Council are pleased to announce Julia Alvarez as the 2011 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts. Alvarez will be honored in a public ceremony as part of the Vermont Arts Gala, happening on November 4 at the Capitol Plaza in Montpelier.
The Governor’s Award is Vermont’s highest honor in the arts. Since 1968, it is has been presented annually to artists who have achieved national or international stature for making a significant contribution to the advancement of their chosen art form.
Julia Alvarez is the author of five novels, How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo! In the Name of Salomé, and Saving the World. She has also published four books of poems, including Homecoming and The Other Side/El Otro Lado, The Woman I Kept to Myself, as well as a book of essays, a work of non-fiction, Once Upon a Quinceañera, and many books for young readers.
Alvarez is a writer-in-residence at Middlebury College. She is also involved with her husband, Bill Eichner, in Alta Gracia, an organic farm-literacy arts center, in her homeland of the Dominican Republic. Her book, A Cafecito Story, is a modern “green” fable based on this project. She is the recipient of many awards, including the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for Outstanding Achievement in American Literature and the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature, to name a few. Her books have been translated in eighteen countries and several of them have been adapted for film and the stage. Her latest work of non-fiction, A Wedding in Haiti, will be published in Spring 2012 by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
“We are delighted that the Governor has selected Julia Alvarez to receive the 2011 Governor’s Award in the Arts,” said Arts Council Executive Director Alexander L. Aldrich. “Whether writing for children, young adults, or a mature audience; whether writing poetry or prose, she has a distinct voice and a unique cultural perspective that distinguishes her from her peers here in Vermont and throughout the U.S. Vermont has more writers per capita than any other state in the country and you can be sure that we will be celebrating this award with her and many of her literary friends and admirers in November.”
More information about the Vermont Arts Gala will be released later. For more information, about the Governor’s Award visit www.vermontartscouncil.org.
Sydney Lea, of Newbury, is Vermont's new poet laureate.
Gov. Peter Shumlin appointed Lea to succeed Ruth Stone for the next four-year term.
Lea is author of several poetry collections published over the last three decades, including his latest, Young of the Year. He's also published a novel, essays and stories. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal among other publications.
According to the Vermont Arts Council, the advisory committee reviewing laureate candidates found Lea's work accessible to a broad audience and evocative of Vermont themes.
"Through all of his books, Lea has paid particular attention to the stories of generations living alongside one another in north-country villages, including the interactions of 'old-timers' and relative newcomers," the Arts Council said in a statement.
The honor includes an honorarium of $1,000 provided by the Vermont Arts Council.
The Vermont Arts Council is pleased to announce that Gov. Peter Shumlin has appointed Sydney Lea of Newbury as Vermont’s next Poet Laureate to succeed Ruth Stone, whose four-year term ends in 2011. A public ceremony honoring Mr. Lea will be held on Nov. 4 at the Capital Plaza Hotel in Montpelier. The ceremony will be attended by Gov. Shumlin as part of an evening celebrating the arts in Vermont.
Sydney Lea lives in Newbury and has been a Vermont resident since the early 1990s. He is the prolific author of a number of collections of poetry, including Young of the Year (Four Way Books, 2011); Ghost Pain (Sarabande Books, 2005); Pursuit of a Wound (University of Illinois Press, 2000); To the Bone: New and Selected Poems (University of Illinois Press, 1996); Prayer for the Little City (Scribner’s, 1989); No Sign (University of Georgia Press, 1987); The Floating Candles (University of Illinois Press, 1982), and Searching the Drowned Man (University of Illinois Press, 1980).
Syd Lea has been described as “a man in the woods with his head full of books, and a man in books with his head full of woods.” Renowned as a prose writer as well as poet, he has also published a novel and two books of essays that combine the precision of an active naturalist and ecologist with the erudition of a multilingual professor of literature. His stories, poems, essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The New York Times, Sports Illustrated, Gray’s Sporting Journal, and many other periodicals, as well as in more than forty anthologies. Lea co-founded the literary quarterly New England Review in 1977, oversaw its move to the Bread Loaf Writers Conference at Middlebury College, and edited this esteemed journal until 1989. His poetry collections have earned special critical acclaim, with Pursuit of a Wound, (2000) named one of three finalists for the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. His preceding volume, To the Bone: New and Selected Poems, was co-winner of the 1998 Poets’ Prize, one of the nation’s highest honors for a single collection of poems.
Lea has received fellowships from the Rockefeller, Fulbright, and Guggenheim Foundations, and has taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges as well as at Franklin College in Switzerland and the National Hungarian University in Budapest. Lea has also been very active for the past quarter century in land conservation and the promotion of literacy. (www.sydneylea.net )
The Advisory Committee found Sydney Lea’s poetry to be virtuosic in texture and form, yet likely to be engaging to a diversity of readers and listeners because of the work’s dramatic intensity, narrative momentum, and musicality, and because of this poet’s extraordinarily evocative descriptions of northern New England’s landscapes, animal and plant life, and the seasonal panorama. Through all of his books, Lea has paid particular attention to the stories of generations living alongside one another in north-country villages, including the interactions of “old-timers” and relative newcomers. He continues the tradition of Vermont poets who are both singular — one of a kind — and broadly accessible.
Philadelphia—The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the launch of the Cultural Data Project (CDP) in Vermont, giving nonprofit arts and cultural organizations state of the art technology to help them strengthen their management capacity and demonstrate their impact across Vermont. The project—a web-based data collection tool for arts and cultural organizations and their advocates—launched with funding from the Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Community Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.
“As cultural organizations navigate a challenging economic climate with limited resources, the CDP provides the information they need to track programmatic, operational and financial trends,” says Neville Vakharia, CDP director. “Arts and cultural organizations in Vermont will be better able to understand their financial condition, improve management practices and plan for the future.”
Operated by The Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, the Cultural Data Project has emerged as a national resource for collecting and disseminating reliable, standardized data for the cultural sector. The CDP is in use by more than 11,500 nonprofits in Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and now, Vermont. With support from national arts grantmakers including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Kresge Foundation, the CDP is on track to be operational in 22 states by 2014.
Those participating in the Vermont CDP will receive free assistance from a team of on-call database specialists and financial consultants. Once participants supply the wide range of financial, programmatic and operational data, the CDP serves as a repository and financial management tool. Organizations can instantly generate information for grant applications, or create on demand 77 different analytic reports on topics such as program activity, free and paid attendance, balance sheet trends, or marketing expenses to present to their donors or boards. Organizations can also use the CDP to understand how they operate in comparison to groups of similar organizations in their community, or communities in other CDP states.
“Understanding not just how financially healthy an organization is, but how the entire sector is doing, is just one aspect of this effort,” says Vermont Arts Council Executive Director Alexander L. Aldrich. “Giving managers contextual information is critical to their planning, as is giving hard, defensible data to funders and policy-makers. Added to all this is the convenience of Vermont organizations being able to apply for funding from some of our major national foundations or creating an annual report with just a few clicks of a mouse.”
With the CDP, research and advocacy organizations can provide a clearer snapshot of arts and culture in a region, demonstrating how vital a role the sector plays. In regions where the project has been in existence for many years, the CDP has been used successfully to provide policymakers evidence of the sector’s assets and needs. For example, arts advocates in Pennsylvania used data collected from the project to defeat a proposed “arts tax” that would have removed the tax exemption on ticket sales and membership revenue for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations.
“Supporting this project is a natural fit for the Vermont Community Foundation’s goal of strengthening the state’s nonprofit sector,” says Foundation President & CEO Stuart Comstock-Gay. “Having access to this data and other CDP resources will allow arts and cultural organizations to fine tune their financial management, create stronger messages about their community impact, and better understand the value of their sector.”
About Cultural Data Project
The Cultural Data Project, which originated in Pennsylvania, is governed by a consortium of organizations including the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, The Heinz Endowments, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation.
The Pew Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life. www.pewtrusts.org
The Pew Charitable Trusts announced the launch of the Cultural Data Project (CDP) in Vermont, giving nonprofit arts and cultural organizations state of the art technology to help them strengthen their management capacity and demonstrate their impact across Vermont. The project—a web-based data collection tool for arts and cultural organizations and their advocates—launched with funding from the Vermont Arts Council, The Vermont Community Foundation and The Kresge Foundation.
“As cultural organizations navigate a challenging economic climate with limited resources, the CDP provides the information they need to track programmatic, operational and financial trends,” says Neville Vakharia, CDP director. “Arts and cultural organizations in Vermont will be better able to understand their financial condition, improve management practices and plan for the future.”
Operated by The Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia, the Cultural Data Project has emerged as a national resource for collecting and disseminating reliable, standardized data for the cultural sector. The CDP is in use by more than 11,500 nonprofits in Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and now, Vermont. With support from national arts grantmakers including the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and The Kresge Foundation, the CDP is on track to be operational in 22 states by 2014.
Those participating in the Vermont CDP will receive free assistance from a team of on-call database specialists and financial consultants. Once participants supply the wide range of financial, programmatic and operational data, the CDP serves as a repository and financial management tool. Organizations can instantly generate information for grant applications, or create on demand 77 different analytic reports on topics such as program activity, free and paid attendance, balance sheet trends, or marketing expenses to present to their donors or boards. Organizations can also use the CDP to understand how they operate in comparison to groups of similar organizations in their community, or communities in other CDP states.
“Understanding not just how financially healthy an organization is, but how the entire sector is doing, is just one aspect of this effort,” says Vermont Arts Council Executive Director Alexander L. Aldrich. “Giving managers contextual information is critical to their planning, as is giving hard, defensible data to funders and policy-makers. Added to all this is the convenience of Vermont organizations being able to apply for funding from some of our major national foundations or creating an annual report with just a few clicks of a mouse.”
With the CDP, research and advocacy organizations can provide a clearer snapshot of arts and culture in a region, demonstrating how vital a role the sector plays. In regions where the project has been in existence for many years, the CDP has been used successfully to provide policymakers evidence of the sector’s assets and needs. For example, arts advocates in Pennsylvania used data collected from the project to defeat a proposed “arts tax” that would have removed the tax exemption on ticket sales and membership revenue for nonprofit arts and cultural organizations.
“Supporting this project is a natural fit for the Vermont Community Foundation’s goal of strengthening the state’s nonprofit sector,” says Foundation President & CEO Stuart Comstock-Gay. “Having access to this data and other CDP resources will allow arts and cultural organizations to fine tune their financial management, create stronger messages about their community impact, and better understand the value of their sector.”
For more information on the Vermont Cultural Data Project, visit www.vtculturaldata.org.
The Cultural Data Project, which originated in Pennsylvania, is governed by a consortium of organizations including the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, the Greater Pittsburgh Arts Council, The Heinz Endowments, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, The Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation.
The Pew Charitable Trusts is driven by the power of knowledge to solve today’s most challenging problems. Pew applies a rigorous, analytical approach to improve public policy, inform the public and stimulate civic life. www.pewtrusts.org
Several Windham County artists and organizations will share in more than $311,000 that the Vermont Arts Council has distributed around the state.
Fifty-four awards totaling $215,243 will be funding Arts Learning, Community Arts, and Creation projects across Vermont. In addition, eleven organizations will each receive $7,000 and three organizations will receive $6,300 as the first installment in the multi-year Arts Partnership Grant program.
Arts Learning grants fund in-school and out-of-school educational programs that enhance student learning through the arts. The 13 grants awarded total $50,233.
Community Arts grant projects support participation and engagement in the arts. The 28 Community Arts grants total $126,010.
Creation grants support the development and presentation of new work. Thirteen artists were awarded a total of $39,000.
Arts Partnership Grants, totaling $95,900 for this year, provide operating funds over a three-year period to help local arts service organizations maintain, develop and/or strengthen relationships in their communities.
Competition for funding remained as stiff as ever; in the Creation Grant category requests were seven times greater than the resources available. Of the 91 applicants, only 13 received funding. Of the 60 applicants for Community Arts grants, 28 received funding, and 13 of the 23 applicants for Arts Learning Grants were approved.
Applications were reviewed by peer panels of professional artists, educators, arts administrators, community leaders and others with specialized knowledge in each grant category.
Windham County recipients included:
• Brattleboro Museum and Art Center, a $7,000 Arts Partnership Grant to support a series of public exhibitions, lectures with film screenings, concerts with artist talks, family events, and school-museum partnerships.
• Building a Better Brattleboro, a $2,500 Community Arts Grant to support expenses for travel and lodging, venue rentals, and marketing of the Brattleboro Literary Festival.
• Friends of the Brattleboro Music Center, a $5,000 Arts Learning Grant to support the Music in the Schools program.
• Vermont Performance Lab, Guilford, a $4,650 Community Arts Grant to support a residency with choreographer Victoria Marks for underserved girls in Bellows Falls.
• In-Sight Photography Project, Brattleboro, a $7,000 Arts Partnership Grant to support its programs and partnerships, providing photography education in schools and in the community.
• Main Street Arts, Saxtons River, a $1,800 Arts Learning Grant to support the after-school Creative Arts Program.
• New England Youth Theatre, Brattleboro, a $7,000 Arts Partnership Grant to support theater programs and educational services to youth of all ages and abilities.
• Rockingham Art and Museum Project (RAMP), Bellows Falls, a $7,000 Arts Partnership Grant to support artists’ activities and to support activities that create healthy communities.
• Sandglass Center for Puppetry, Putney, a $5,000 Community Arts Grant to support the Puppets in the Green Mountains Festival.
• Vermont Center for Photography, Brattleboro, a $5,000 Community Arts Grant to support monthly exhibitions in 2011 and 2012.
• Vermont Jazz Center, Brattleboro, a $5,000 Community Arts Grant to support the Center’s concerts and educational programming.
• Julia Zanes, Saxtons River, a $3,000 Creation Grant to support the creation of puppets for the “The Green Gold Tree.”
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