About Us
Mission
The mission of the Southern Vermont Arts Center is to make both the visual and performing arts an integral part of the life of our community and region by:
- Presenting the finest quality exhibitions and performances;
- Providing education and instruction in the arts;
- Exhibiting and marketing the work of member artists;
- Providing opportunities for community service in promotion of excellence in the arts.
History
That simple plan was hatched in Dorset, Vermont, on a late summer day in 1922. On that day, Edwin B. Child, Francis Dixon, Wallace W. Fahnstock, John Lillie, and Herbert Meyer, five gentlemen who would come to be known as the Dorset Painters, got together to show their wares at the Dorset Town Hall.
"On that August day," says historian Mary Hard Bort, in Art and Soul, her definitive history of the Arts Center, "local people came to see the work of their neighbors, visitors stopped by to see what was going on, summer people came to assess the quality of the work, and the ladies of the village served punch, tea and cookies to all. It was a Dorset social event and the start of something much bigger that would encompass the entire Battenkill Valley."
Two years later, Francis Dixon and Frank V. Vanderhoof, a summer resident and fellow painter, arranged an exhibition of paintings at Manchester's Equinox Pavilion by a group that would come to be called the "Southern Vermont Artists." It was just three years after that, in August of 1927, the ten-day Fourth Annual Exhibition of the Artists of Southern Vermont featured over 100 paintings and drew more than 1,600 visitors from twenty-eight states, Canada, Norway, England, Wales and Algeria.
This annual celebration of art relocated to the gymnasium of the Burr and Burton Seminary (now Academy) and continued to strengthen and grow yearly, attracting soon-to-be internationally known talent – Luigi Lucioni and Ogden Pleissner first exhibited in the 1930s; Dean Fausett in 1940; Norman Rockwell joined in 1945. And while art and artists blossomed in the foreground, a group of prominent residents and business owners, looking to insure the longevity of this budding organization, formed the Southern Vermont Artists, Inc.
Mary Hard Bort tells us that "Eleven men and one woman, only one of them an artist, signed the Articles of Association. These incorporators were, variously, the president of the Village and former proprietor of the Equinox House, wealthy benefactor and chairman of the Beechnut Packing Co., Manchester's poet laureate and prominent businessman, president of the Factory Point Bank, artist and summer resident, grandson of Robert Todd Lincoln, husband of artist Harriet Miller, prominent Bennington attorney, prominent Dorset businessman and owner of the marble quarries, summer visitor and Bennington County Probate Judge."
The various people behind those impressive titles – Mrs. George Orvis, Bartlett Arkell, Walter R. Hard, William H. Roberts, H.D. Schnakenberg, Lincoln Isham, Harlan Miller, Luther R. Graves II, Ernest West, Edward F. Rochester, and Edward Griffith – were, in effect, the first board of trustees for the Arts Center.