5-7 p.m.
Join us as we celebrate the Yester House summer exhibitions with the opening of Dwell: Home Is Where the Art Is, MASKED, the Community Portrait Project, and Robert Dugrenier’s VitroVerse with an evening reception. Refreshments will be served.
Prior to the building’s conversion to art galleries in the early 1950s, SVAC’s Yester House was a private estate. Many of the rooms still contain architectural features that remind us of this history, such as fireplaces and linen closets. Dwell: Home Is Where the Art Is brings together four artists—Maxine Henryson, Alejandra Seeber, Ruth Shafer, and Suzanne Wright—who use this history as a jumping off point to explore themes of domesticity and interior spaces in their work.
MASKED, an exhibition of work by 22 Vermont artists with disabilities, is organized by Inclusive Arts Vermont. Each piece offers the artist’s creative expression of the title—which arose in the early moments of the global pandemic. The work included is as complex and layered as the meaning of the word “masked” itself. The artists explore protection, disguise, veiling, all that is enshrouded, and what lies beneath. Artist Judith Klausner’s Coming Out of the Medicine Closet series will be on view as an adjoining exhibition. Klausner, based in Massachusetts, emblazons her own medications—including her inhaler and migraine pills—with Swarovski crystals. In this act of transformation, Klausner hopes the objects’ new hyper-visibility will encourage other medication-users to “come out” about their conditions and, in turn, reduce societal stigmas associated with medication usage.
SVAC invited artist, glassblower, and sculptor Robert DuGrenier to design a one-of-a-kind chandelier for the front entrance of Yester House. His creation, VitroVerse, consists of 200 hand-blown glass planets, each illuminated by an LED light. DuGrenier has given each planet an additional life in the metaverse as an NFT (non-fungible token), a unique digital asset that represents a work of art or collectible. A corresponding display in Gallery 1 illuminates these NFTs on LED screens alongside more of his glass work.
In partnership with artist Matthew Perry of the Vermont Arts Exchange, students from Burr & Burton Academy’s Mountain Campus identified, interviewed, and created mixed-media portraits of change-makers in our community. Over the course of four work sessions, the students sawed, sanded, painted, and glued. They faced challenges with construction and learned to solve problems creatively. The Community Portrait Project aligns with one of the central questions that guides the Mountain Campus experience: “What do people who are making positive contributions do to affect change?” Image: portrait of Carrie Chalmers
Cover image: In SVAC’s archives are the 1917 blueprints for Yester House, submitted by Murphy & Dana architects to Gertrude Ritter, the original owner, who later remarried and changed her surname to Webster. Photo by Abby Raeder.