Announcing StJ Art on the Street Winter NEK Starlight Exhibition, a celebration of the arts and artists who live in the Northeast Kingdom but are also celebrated internationally. Exhibits are all accessible to view from the street and now have QR codes on windows to link you directly with artists. This provides artists and audiences an opportunity to continue celebrating art together in a COVID-safe and responsible way. We are delighted to be featuring eleven artists this season: Terry Ekasala, Tara Goreau, Megan Hack, Janet McKenzie, Ezra Ranz-Schleifer, Delia Robinson, and Sachiko Yoshida. The Exhibit also includes a Winter Landscape Group Show featuring Benjamin Barnes, Laura Heijn, Jeff MacQueen, and Anni Lorenzini. The Winter Exhibition will be showing until February 28; at that time our Spring Exhibition will be installed. Please consider purchasing art as one of the many ways we can keep this incredible vibrancy alive in St. Johnsbury! Contact information for artists is available at each of the windows.
STJ Art on the Street call to the community to Decorate Stars. All ages are invited to help. You can pick up stars at: Cosmic Cup; 142 Eastern foyer; Moose River Lake & Lodge; and Boxcar & Caboose. Return stars to 142 Eastern Avenue foyer and they will become part of the Winter NEK Starlight Exhibition.
STJ Art on the Street is now a featured excursion with the Vermont Arts Council. Check out other art excursions across the state at www.vermontartscouncil.org. In addition, STJ Art on the Street is part of the exhibit of the Vermont Curators Group – 2020 Vision: Reflecting on a World-Changing Year. To learn more go to: vermontcuratorsgroup.com
StJ Art on the Street is a public art project committed to bringing beauty to St. Johnsbury by filling available downtown storefront windows. This project involves collaborations between the community volunteers who make up the Window Warriors, part of Discover St. Johnsbury; Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild; Catamount Arts; the Foundry; the Town of St. Johnsbury; 142 Eastern; Garrett Property Management; Aine Baker; Rural Edge; and Northern Express Care. Thank you for the donations of sap buckets and street clean up from Pearlmont Farm and Greg McNally for the greens. STJ Art on the Street was designed by Craig Harrison, who is based in Peacham.
Benjamin Barnes is from Colchester, Vermont, and lives in St. Johnsbury, where he works as a librarian at the St. Johnsbury Academy. He has a bachelor’s in fine art from the Massachusetts College of Art and has been a painter of Vermont for decades. His work can be seen at The Miller’s Thumb, The Craftsbury General Store, and The NEK Artisans Guild. Charles Trotsky is an imaginary person. He has now been a popular artist in the Northeast Kingdom for almost 10 years. His work deals with pop culture and current events, with an interest in context shift and anachronisms. His work can be seen at The Miller’s Thumb and The NEK Artisans Guild. Ben’s work is part of the Winter Landscape Group Exhibit in the Garrett Corner Shop Gallery at 462 Railroad Street.
Terry Ekasala was born in Weymouth, MA. She graduated from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, Florida and set up her first studio at the Clay Hotel and Youth Hostel on Espanola Way in Miami Beach. Ekasala moved to Paris and has a studio in Belleville, the colorful 20th Arrondissement at La Forge, where she was part of a diverse artistic community that organized the first artist squat, or reclaimed studio space, to become legal in Paris. During this time, her style underwent numerous changes, moving from figurative to abstract. Terry has exhibited widely internationally and locally. She resides with her family in East Burke, Vermont and creates large and small abstract paintings in what she calls her dream studio looking out over a nearby mountainside. Terry’s work is featured in the new Northern Express Care Galleries at 1 Eastern Avenue and 331 Railroad Street.
Tara Goreau is a large-scale artist whose vivid murals have inspired and reflected communities locally and abroad. A graduate of St. Johnsbury Academy, Tara traveled extensively before returning to Vermont. She studied ecology and sustainability at the University of British Columbia, volunteered to help build a school and to engage children in mural painting in Swaziland, and studied at The Design and Arts College of New Zealand. After earning a BFA at Johnson State College, she focused her attention on the Vermont landscape, its societal trends and concerns, to create pieces she considers funny, poignant, or interesting. Tara, in collaboration with students at St. Johnsbury School, Concord School, Newark Street School, and Walden School, and sponsored by Catamount Arts, created the 16-panel “Musaic Project” mural, depicting four seasons and four genres of music. Tara’s winter panels from “Musaic” are featured at Shatterbox at 166 Eastern Ave.
Janet McKenzie is a native New Yorker, born in Brooklyn and raised in and around New York City. She now lives in the Northeast Kingdom. Janet is a painter internationally renowned for her emotionally compelling and diverse iconography honoring all people – her paintings challenge prejudice and hate. Her inclusive art is regularly carried in vigils and protest demonstrations across the country in support of Black Lives Matter, racial justice and the rights of women, immigrants and the LGBTQ community. In 2016 her art was carried in the Women’s March in Washington DC and a large image of Jesus of the People was placed at the Memorial to George Floyd in Minneapolis, June 2020. McKenzie’. Janet’s work is featured in the Rural Edge Gallery at 418A&B Railroad Street.
Laura Heijn grew up in Massachusetts and studied art and English Literature at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and at Harvard University in Cambridge. She came to Johnson for a Vermont Studio Center residency in 1993, returning there for a staff artist position the next year, and has lived in Johnson ever since, raising three children, running a small dairy operation, and painting the scenery surrounding her home. Heijn’s work is part of the Winter Landscape Group Exhibit in the Garrett Corner Shop Gallery at 462 Railroad Street.
Megan Hack is originally from Chicago, Illinois, and has been living in New England since the 1990s. She is currently living in Burlington, Vermont, and is moving to St Johnsbury in 2021. Megan Hack has been making art since the 90s and graduated from RISD with a degree in illustration. Inspired by the interconnectedness of nature, humanity, and the progression of time, Megan explores these themes through a variety of media, but primarily oils. Hack’s work is exhibited in the Garrett Suite 1 Gallery at 446A Railroad Street.
Anni Lorenzini graduated from a small liberal arts college in Vermont. She went on to study at the Vermont Studio Center and was awarded a Resident Artist Fellowship. While at the Vermont Studio Center, she visited with many renowned artists and she draws upon these conversations as she travels along the painter’s path. Anni Lorenzini has received Grants, Juror, and Popular Choice awards. Her work is collected throughout the United States and is included in the permanent collections of the State University of New York at Potsdam, Palmina F. and Stephen S. Pace Galleries at the University of Southern Indiana, and Chazy Public Library in Chazy, New York. Lorenzini’s work is part of the Winter Landscape Exhibit in the Garrett Corner Shop Gallery at 462 Railroad Street.
Jeff MacQueen recently moved to St. Johnsbury from Orford, NH. He currently teaches art in Lebanon, NH. Jeff grew up in New York and attended SUNY Oswego where he majored in biology education with an art minor. He has no formal art education, but credits instructors from the NH Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston and the Alliance for the Visual Arts in Lebanon where he has taken classes since college. Since moving to the Northeast Kingdom, he has enjoyed the distinct character of its landscape with its more colorful houses and outbuildings. Jeff’s work is part of the Winter Landscape Group Exhibit in the Garrett Corner Shop Gallery at 462 Railroad Street.
Ezra Ranz is an artist and engineer based out of Greensboro and Burlington, Vermont. He works in a wide range of traditional media including a focus on kinetic sculpture and generative art. His recent focus has been on moving sculptures and specifically robotic flowers, of which one early-stage prototype arrangement can be seen here in St. Johnsbury. The flowers are being developed as an interactive product. Using various dynamic elements of movement, light, sound, and scent, these flowers will magically come alive and delight the viewer. The flowers will eventually come in all different varieties, shapes, and sizes. Ezra’s exhibit can be viewed in the Garrett 5 Window Gallery at 452 Railroad Street.
Delia Robinson states, “A life given to art has revealed to me my interest is in what is hidden.” She uses paint and clay and song to explore mysteries behind apparent reality. Robinson, mines dreams, alienation, and tragedy as source material. She believes that if there is a funny side, so much the better. Her art is personal and iconoclastic, speaking with her own vocabulary of color and image. Every story has successively deeper underlying stories, and this overlapping terrain is what she likes to explore. When she layers up images and color she hopes that a given story can be read at different depths. Delia’s work can be viewed at 142 Eastern Avenue.
Sachiko Yoshida was born in Niigata, Japan and graduated from Niigata University, where she specialized in art and education. Yoshida’s paintings and sculptures have been exhibited province-wide in Japan. After years of teaching art, she joined Japanese Volunteers (their equivalent of our Peace Corps) and lived two years in a mountain town in Honduras. She then returned to teaching school in Niigata. Yoshida now resides in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. Sachiko’s work is exhibited in the Garrett Suite 1 Gallery at 446B Railroad Street.
Do you need more art?
The Frame Dames Grateful Art Project: A Community Art Project gave out free 10×10 panels and asked community members to create a piece of art about something or someone that they give thanks for. The Frame Dames storefront is now a collage of panels of gratitude created by the community. The exhibit will hang through the holidays.
Dr. Tom Turek will not be held back by COVID. He has found a new location for the Holiday Train Display adjacent to the Star Movie Theater. The Display will be up and running Friday, November 27th through the end of the year and will be available for viewing 8am – 8pm. The train display has a lit holiday village, a flying Santa, a flashing diner sign and animated ice skaters. Take in the joy at 17 Eastern Avenue.
First Night North: An At-home Celebration of the Arts, presented by Catamount Arts and Kingdom Access Television with Modern Times Theater. This online event will feature over 25 artists, including First Night North favorites the Kingdom All-Stars, Modern Times Theater, Marko the Magician, and Tritium Well. Additional exciting acts include Troy Wunderle’s Big Top Circus, Broadway star Ray Walker, comics Nathan Hartswick and Natalie Miller, Colin McCaffrey, Dana and Sue Robinson, Shady Rill, the Gaelic trio Footworks, the close four-part harmony of Windborne, and the world music sextet Northern Harmony. First Night North always introduces new artists, and this year is no exception. Notable newcomers include folk favorites Pete’s Posse, pianist Annemieke McLane, and Celtic musicians Rachel Clemente and Dan Houghton.
This online celebration of the arts is FREE, family friendly, and set to air on Thursday, December 31st from 4pm-midnight. Watch on Spectrum Cable 192 or on-line at KATV.org. More information at catamountarts.org.
Most of us know that St. Johnsbury is home to an active arts community, which boasts of the regional and national treasure, St. Johnsbury Athenaeum. Dominating the gallery from its inception has been the magnificent canvas, ten feet by fifteen feet, The Domes of the Yosemite, by Albert Bierstadt. If you haven’t taken a moment to tour the gallery now may be the time to take a pause. The Athenaeum is located at 1171 Main St. Open M, W, F 10-4, T, TH 12-4, Sat. 10-2. 802-748-8291.
The Northeast Kingdom Artisans Guild joyfully presents their Annual Holiday Show, November 27, 2020 to January 6, 2021. Guest artisans are highlighted in the Back Room Gallery with our own members to present an array of special handmade wares. We have ornaments to decorate your home for the Holiday Season (and all year) as well as gifts, from paintings to pottery, jewelry of all kinds, hats, mittens and scarves to keep you warm, woodworks from furniture to kitchenware, sculptures large and small, stained glass to brighten up your windows, and hand blown glass for your décor or dining table. Come and see a world of unique, one-of a-kind handmade gifts that are perfect for that special person, made right here, in the Northeast Kingdom of Vermont. The Guild follows Covid-19 sanitary precautions for your safety and health. The Guild is located at 430 Railroad Street. Their hours are 11 until 5:30 M-Sun.
Whirligig Brewing is proud to announce their premiere exhibit with Harlan Mack. Harlan is a multidisciplinary artist based at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont. He employs blacksmithing, steel fabrication, painting, and oral storytelling to build an expanding, constellated narrative that invites viewers and listeners into an imaginary future. This world is generated and inspired by Harlan’s life experience, exploration and thoughts around identity, labor, perception, contemplation, fiction, community, emergence and afro-futurism. Harlan’s recent body of work incorporates brightly painted reclaimed wooden fence and blackened forged steel, constructed into symbolic references depicted within his narrative future. Harlan’s use of forged steel faces and animal figures plays as a distilled reference to the elements of complex individualities within a moment lived. Through this type of distillation and combination, Harlan invites the viewer to contemplate and revive the potential of disuse as a cornerstone to what comes next. Whirligig is currently doing take-out Thur 5-8pm, Fri 4-8pm, Sat 11am-6pm,grab a peek during these hours at 397 Railroad Street.
Check out St. Johnsbury’s newest mural by ARCY at the Three Rivers Path Trailhead Pavilion. The mural was commissioned with the assistance of an AARP Grant. ARCY has been defining his skills for over a decade as a street artist known for his large scale, paint-splashed style. As he travels the globe, ARCY continues to demonstrate his growing desire to leave his mark wherever he goes, giving back to humanity through public art. The Pavilion itself is worth a trip to view St. Johnsbury’s first example of modern architecture. The Three Rivers Path Trailhead is located on Bay Street across from the Ide Building.
Take a moment and head over to Central Cafe and appreciate Shaun Terhune‘s stunning photography, including a 72″ Franconia Ridge metal panorama. Shaun grew up in Vermont, home to rolling green mountains, cows, and maple trees and tin sap buckets. He claims it’s hard to sum up his childhood in the Northeast Kingdom, where he was raised and his family still lives in the log house they built there. Many formative happy years were spent on their little homestead. Shaun now lives with his wife Elisabeth and works his craft in northern New Hampshire – their personal idea of paradise. His history with the White Mountains goes back to his teen years, when he regularly hitched rides into the wild places to experience a remoteness and ruggedness he couldn’t find anywhere else in the East. Central Cafe is open 8am-4pm, closed on Tuesday and is located at 418 Railroad Street.
Check out Emma McGuire’s lovely artwork at Cosmic Cup Cafe – Good Coffee/Good Art. Emma McGuire is a self-taught visual artist from the Barrio of Tucson, Arizona. Emma’s love for art and animals began at a very young age. Her passion was nurtured by the arts-rich curriculum at Flagstaff’s Pine Forest Waldorf School. She then continued to refine her skill in the advanced placement art program at St. Johnsbury Academy. Her favorite things to paint are predators such as wolves and foxes, capturing their soft and innocent, yet occasionally unsettling appearance. She says, “To see the beauty in everything is a wonderful gift, and I believe we should all strive to do so.” Cosmic Cup Cafe is open M-F 7am-4pm, Sat 8am-4pm, Sun 8am-1pm and is located at 139 Eastern. Next up is Chuck Trotsky in January stay tuned.
Bill and Kim Darling are co-owners of Gatto Nero Press in St. Johnsbury, Vermont. They have both taught visual art at St. Johnsbury Academy, an independent high school, for over 20 years. Bill Darling was born in White Plains, New York in 1955. He studied painting and printmaking at The Art Students League of New York. Bill teaches and works in diverse mediums, but intaglio printmaking is his passion. Kim is a visual artist with studio and teaching practices firmly rooted in observational drawing. She has worked in a variety of mediums, including oil and fresco painting and “Moving Drawing” video installations. Her current studio work is mainly in intaglio printmaking. Kim’s educational background includes a BFA from Alfred University in Alfred, New York; extended study at the Art Students League of New York, of which she is a life member; and an MFA from Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vermont. Teaching is an important part of Kim’s artistic practice. Gatto Nero Press Studio and Gallery host exhibitions, teach workshops and create and publish intaglio prints. In 1996 Bill and Kim founded The Intaglio Society at St. Johnsbury Academy, and for the past twenty years have brought their students to Florence, Italy. Gatto Nero Press located at 190 Eastern Avenue and is open by appointment, contact Kim Darling at kdarling@stjacademy.org.
The Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium presents Inside Out: Hidden Art in Natural History Collections as part of the 2020 Vision: Seeing the World Through Technology, a statewide initiative of the Vermont Curators Group. This exhibit lets you see beyond the surface of our taxidermy collections. This intriguing exhibit is a collaboration between the Fairbanks Museum and Northeastern Vermont Regional Hospital (NVRH) that peels away our surface understanding of objects to reveal what’s inside. This unusual concept combines radiographs of some of our oldest and most mysterious taxidermy with contemporary portraits of the same mount. What’s revealed are the bones, wires, pins, and human touch in mounts created by different taxidermists using different equipment to achieve life-like representations. The Fairbanks Museum & Planetarium is open W-Sun,10am-5pm and is located at 1302 Main Street.
For more local art there is the gallery at Artful Eye at 443 Railroad Street open M-F; 10am-5pm and the selection is always changing.