Curator Ruth Greene-McNally will share the stories of SVAC’s founders and the generations of artists who made Manchester an artistic home.

Afterlives of the Artists chronicles the emergence and growth of the artist colony in Southern Vermont from the early decades of the 20th century through a decade-long project to digitize a publicly accessible archive of the Permanent Collection. Few early 20th-century artists who journeyed to Southern Vermont for the summer season contemplated advancing a permanent art collection or museum to house it. Yet with advances in the fields of science, art, and technology, the Modern Era prompted a redefinition of American values, traditions, and identities, with artists establishing creative societies while actively resisting academic and aesthetic traditions. The Eight, the Ashcan School, the International Exhibition of Modern Art — commonly known as the Armory Show — featured artists experimenting with novel visual languages and, in turn, came to define American Modernism and a parallel movement in American Regionalism.

Securing the founders’ legacy, a core group of trustees assembled an inaugural collection as a record of artistic trends from Manhattan to Manchester. In the tradition of the Hudson River School, which viewed nature as sacred, the “Southern Vermont School” encountered its surroundings as a source of aesthetic pleasure, cultural identity, and economic resource. By any historic measure, the quiet cultural revolution occurring in Southern Vermont, and elsewhere in rural and seaside communities throughout New England, emboldened the nexus between Modernism, American Regionalism, and community life while advancing a network of major American artists, students, patrons, stewards, and audiences who ensured that their legacy would endure. Afterlives of the Artists examines the founders and their commitment to the arts in Southern Vermont.

Enjoy dinner at SVAC’s curATE café. Visit OpenTable for reservations or call 802.362.9100.