The actor Ralph Bellamy had a long and distinguished career. In 1921, at the age of 16 and having been expelled from school for smoking, he ran away from home to join William Owen’s company of traveling Shakespearean Players. By the end of a lean and itinerant decade, he had made his debut on Broadway and, two years after that, his first screen appearance in a now forgotten picture called THE SECRET SIX, which also happened to feature a rising star by the name of Jean Harlow. Harlow — the original “blonde bombshell” — was dead at 26; Bellamy showed signs of going on forever. Like so many many actors — like so many artists — Bellamy never retired. (An argument, I would suggest FOR, rather than against, a career in the arts.) He was a familiar face on American television until the late 1980s. One of his most memorable appearances in later years was in LA LAW as a once brilliant lawyer whose mind is beginning to fade. His final movie appearance was in PRETTY WOMAN which came out in 1990. He died in 1991. He was 87.

Throughout his long career (since almost the dawn of “talkies”), Bellamy found ways to serve his profession. He was a founding member of SAG, the Screen Actors Guild, and served on its first Board of Directors. He was president of Actors’ Equity for 12 years. During the McCarthy era many of those who were blacklisted in Hollywood found work in the New York theater. Bellamy was instrumental in creating the system that allowed this to happen: by helping to devise ground rules to protect members against unproven charges of Communist Party membership or sympathy.

But Bellamy’s most singular contribution — and I can think of no other actor for whom this is true — is that he gave his name to a PLOT DEVICE. To this day, in a Romantic Comedy, a BELLAMY is the Other Guy (or indeed, the Other Woman). He, or she, is the prime rejected suitor of choice; in horticultural terms, the hardy perennial that will probably survive uncomplainingly in total and arid shade but whose flowers, if ever they should appear, would be small, probably brown, and utterly devoid of scent. The BELLAMY is the earnest, stodgy character that the guy or the girl nearly marries but who — by the gods of story — is destined to be left, dumped, deserted, abandoned, thrown over when the charming but unreliable lead (see Grant, Cary or Hugh) realizes his mistake and stakes his claim. As writer Billy Mernit has pointed out, the BELLAMY has a dual function: by presenting a conceivable alternative to the romantic antagonist (and thus impeding the central romance) the Bellamy helps to define who the protagonist is and who he is not.

Bellamys are paradoxes. They are at once expendable and indispensable. They are the core, the sine qua non, the supporting character without whom there would be no story. To borrow a famous line from Thelonious Monk, whose views on RomComs must remain largely conjecture, for all their outward conventionality, the Bellamy is the “inside” of the tune: “the part that makes the outside sound good.”  Because Ralph Bellamy performed this thankless task so impeccably, essentially patenting the type, what better way to be remembered?

Many thanks to Donald Rae, our guest blogger for the week: Donald Rae is the Executive Director of Focus on Film, the organization that presents the annual Green Mountain Film Festival. He teaches screenwriting at Burlington College, Vermont.

“Welcome to VSA Vermont’s audio tour of the Engage exhibition.  Here language leads to midnight blue, an iridescent orb of misty light, crinkly stems, a downcast eye, clarity and intensity of pigment, the play of light and shadow, the imprecise edges of a forest, vertical strokes like blades of grass, delicate points, angular edges, undulating arms, geometric shapes, panes of color thick and rich, a sense of aliveness like the swarming of a hive.  Here you can listen to all the artist statements and to descriptions of 22 works of art.”

VSA Vermont’s Engage exhibition opens February 26 at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery of the Flynn Center for the Performing Arts.  Engage features the juried artwork of 35 Vermont artists with disabilities.   

Here’s what you won’t find at Engage:  disability on display.  Here’s what you will find:  skilled, varied artwork, information in formats that that delight the senses, like print that’s large enough to read from the back of a crowd, things to listen to, things to touch, to read, to talk about.  Engage is designed to welcome visitors with and without disabilities, together, in the experience of art.

Participating in Engage is a paradox for artists who have disabilities.  Artists want to be recognized for their artwork, period.  So, why participate in an exhibition featuring artists with disabilities?  I’ve been talking to people I meet around town about Engage, showing images whenever I can.  Way too often, people are surprised that the artwork is so good.  That’s why I want to be doing this, to change minds, to raise expectations, to create conditions within the arts that are conducive to pride.  As Engage artist Gwendolyn Evans says, “It’s time to recognize artists with disabilities in a conversation that moves beyond our disabilities.”

I don’t mean to disparage people who are surprised.  We’re all learning together.  It was news to me when I began this project to hear the varied reasons why people who have blindness or low vision might want to attend an art exhibition.  In case it’s news to you, too, sighted artists can develop blindness and feel a thirst for sophisticated conversations about art.  People with blindness can become artists, can sculpt or paint with texture, sometimes remembering and crafting color.  People with blindness have children, friends and lovers who go to galleries, and who wouldn’t want to share important events with loved ones?  Come to the exhibition and see how inclusive practices enrich your own experience. And then let me know.  I’m dying to hear what you will think.

Join us for the Engage opening reception from 4:00 – 6:00 p.m. on February 26 at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery of the Flynn Center.  Stay for a FlynnSpace performance from 6:30 – 8:00 p.m. by Vermont performers with disabilities, including storyteller, Rene Pellerin, dancer Lida Winfield, pianist Michael Arnowitt, poet Eli Clare and VSA Vermont’s Awareness Theater Company.  The Engage exhibition will remain at the Amy E. Tarrant Gallery through April.  For more information see:www.vsavt.org/engage

Many thanks to Judy Chalmer of VSA Arts for this week’s guest blog.

I hear the word community A LOT. I use the word a lot. This word so peppers my life that I started to think I should know exactly what it means.  As it turns out, it means a lot of things.

From dictionary.com:

1. a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage.
2. a locality inhabited by such a group.
3. a social, religious, occupational, or other group sharing common characteristics or interests and perceived or perceiving itself as distinct in some respect from the larger society within which it exists (usually preceded by the): the business community; the community of scholars.
4. a group of associated nations sharing common interests or a common heritage: the community of Western Europe.
5. Ecclesiastical. a group of men or women leading a common life according to a rule. 

The ones I dig the most are 3 and 5. I think it’s important for people to find and know their own communities.  I’m happily a part of the arts community, and greatly appreciate the effect of art on localities and people.

Recent editions of ArtMail have featured stories about two separate grant-funded projects, each planned to be held in villages hit hard by Hurricane Irene (Waterbury-Duxbury School District and Chandler Center for the Arts). They are touching stories.  They involved people who had to decide if a festival should be held despite flood damage. They involved citizens who decided to set aside their pain and tumult to connect with joy and their fellows. The participants were deeply moved by the celebrations, and by the art at the center the activities.

Community seems to be a natural by-product of art. Is every artist who shares their work automatically a community builder? Every exhibit, concert, reading, and showing creates a group of people who will share in the experience. So, what is the role of the artist in a community? Lastly, how do we feel about the idea that “…the true task of the artist is to discover her or his relationship to a community, a community often in desperate need of the artist’s power to see the world anew.” (Historian Page Smith, from the foreword to Art in Other Places: Artists at Work in America’s Community and Social Institutions, an interesting-looking book available here.

The Arts Council is “working to advance and preserve the arts at the center of Vermont communities.” If we are finding a way to fund art and artists, it seems we can’t miss. Is it that simple?

Thanks to Susan McDowell, our Program Coordinator for writing this week’s blog.

I recently read a white paper on Creative Placemaking, written by Ann Markusen of Markusen Economic Research Services and Anne Dadwa of Metris Arts Consulting and published for the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, a leadership initiative of the National Endowment for the Arts in partnership with the United States Conference of Mayors and American Architectural Foundation.  “Creative Placemaking serves livability, diversity, and economic development goals. In Creative Placemaking, partners from public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city or region around arts and cultural activities.  Creative Placemaking animates public and private spaces, rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire and be inspired.”

In the white paper there are a number of examples and case studies demonstrating how Creative Placemaking has made a difference in communities across the country.   I’m proud to say that there are many examples of Creative Placemaking right here in Vermont.  From the Orton Family Foundation’s Art and Soul initiative in the Town of Starksboro to the Town of Brattleboro’s Arts Committee, we can see the power of the arts at work in building Vermont communities.   In addition, a few weeks ago I attended the annual Fall Conference of the Vermont Planners Association in Newport Vermont where they highlighted Vermont’s new Complete Streets legislation. This legislation strives to make communities more walkable and liveable for all users.   Years ago the Vermont Arts Council began a collaborative project with the VT Agency of Transportation and the Town of Danville to envision the re-development and re-design of Route 2 through the village of Danville.  This collaboration used the concept of “context sensitive design” (similar to complete streets) and engaged artists in community planning.  By engaging artists in the community design process, the partners worked together to develop a plan that would enhance the essence of a small, close-knit rural community by providing a safe, attractive and comfortable pedestrian environment in the Village that celebrates its unique historic, built and natural features.  This project is now under construction and within the next year or two the community will see its vision come to life. 

I encourage all of us to think beyond the ordinary as Vermont faces the need to rebuild much or its aging or Irene-damaged infrastructure.   Many people felt a collective sense of shock and sadness at the loss of a number of Vermont’s covered bridges.  These treasured landmarks represented a deep connection to our place and history and let’s not forget - were a significant tourist attraction. We have an opportunity to rebuild the next generation of infrastructure with the same sense of pride and connection to place.  As communities envision new roads, bridges, buildings and community spaces, the principals of Creative Placemaking should play a key role.   Let’s make Vermont a destination, not only for its vast and diverse arts and cultural activities, but also for its wonderfully unique and special “treasured” landmarks that reflect the spirit of Vermont’s creative community.

This week’s blog was written by Program Director, Michele Bailey

There’s a certain give-up phrase we’ve all had to use when our story just isn’t making it. Maybe we start with the data (there were about thirty people standing on this carpet in the middle of a big room), throw in the essence (and what was funny and a little bit ironic is that he had just said…), then, realizing we’re somehow falling short, we dismiss the whole thing by saying “I guess you just had to be there…”

As the National Endowment for the Arts looks at the tools they use for evaluating the impact of grants, the Arts Council is compiling the information from our grantees and wrapping up our own summation for the last fiscal year. The Council is also putting together the Annual Report and continuing the process of strategic planning. In all of this, we are mindful of the importance of the arts in our lives and in our communities. There is always the question of how to tell the story, and this is important in our advocacy efforts. We make the case for continued funding over and over again.

I collect and organize data from our grantees, some of the data actually coded. For example, if someone has created a work of art they were funded for activity 04. If that work of art was a stone sculpture, they were working in discipline 05F. In the required final reports, we’ll find out how many people interacted with the project, separating out the number of youth. We also gather financial numbers: expenses, income and in-kind contributions. The accounting also includes fees paid to artists. The NEA and the Council refer to these as impact numbers. The numbers will have a huge range, like this:

Artist Residency outside of school (grant $1,500)

• Individuals benefiting: 250
• Youth: 104
• Artists Involved: 5
• Expenses: $2,950
• In-Kind Contributions: $300

Music festival (grant $5,000)

• Individuals benefiting: $50,000
• Youth: 6,603
• Artists Involved: 879
• Expenses: $619,631
• In-Kind Contributions: $315,923

What conclusions can be made from sheer numbers?

We also try to get at the essence of projects by asking open-ended narrative questions. We dig even further into some projects, producing profiles of our grantees. 

In that process of digging further, I was moved by the story of a residency that took place at the Highgate Apartment complex, and amazed by a writing circle held first at Northwest State Correctional Facility then in the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility. (This week’s profile is about Writing Inside, a program for incarcerated women.) In both cases the number of people actually involved was relatively low; but these were important projects. An artist development grant is important, also, often reported with only 1 individual benefiting and 0 youth. Consider what that benefit is, though, to the professional artist who acquires a new skill or increases the effectiveness of their marketing effort.

Can the depth of impact be summed up? What do we look for and where do we look? Is there a measurement tool for something that might change the course of someone’s career, or other life circumstance? Is there a method to weigh a catalyst that helps a person re-think the circumstances around something as dramatic as their own incarceration? If there is, what does that tool or method look like?

Sarah Bartlett, from Women Writing for (a) Change offers these ideas:

There are at least three measures of impact I would offer as evidence of the power of our process: one is that the same women return week after week, drawn to the extraordinary opportunity to delve within, to learn from their past, to help envision and ultimately forge a future that follows different steps. A second is their complete reverence, even protectiveness, of the processes and purposes of the circle, manifest in how they approach those there only for handouts; manifest, too, in the weekly written comments in which they share their gratitude for this writing opportunity. Third is the fact that a number of the more dedicated writers continue to keep in touch once they are out – some seeking input on college applications; or feedback on a creative piece they wish to give as a gift…

We have learned, in the course of two years, that the creative outlet we provide grants them a safe vehicle for exploring what might otherwise remain hidden, frightening or inaccessible. By writing to images created by another, for instance, women can express the forbidden in the form of a response to the artwork. By creating their own art, they can reflect on what they see and find deeper meaning to their lives, their purpose, their fundamental values and beliefs.

Sarah’s ideas aren’t vastly different from these from Animating Democracy.

I have enormous respect for artists, and know that creativity is magic in its ability to connect, transform, heal, and teach. Music (discipline 02) is an important part of my life and is the art form that most occupies my soul. I still enjoy spending time making music and preparing for the occasional concert/performance/reading (activity 05) because I’m still learning from doing so. I really don’t know, though, how the impact of art can be measured. We can’t say “I guess you just had to be there.” Any ideas?

This week’s blog was written by Susan McDowell our Grant Program Assistant

A photo to accompany this week’s blog post by Susan McDowell.  Image courtesy of Women Writing for (a) Change.

Earlier this month, the Vermont Arts Council hosted the first annual Vermont Arts Gala during which we honored three luminaries in the arts: Christian Wolff, Julia Alvarez and Sydney Lea. It was a magical evening and the room was dense with Vermonters from all over our fair state. Mr. Wolff received the Walter Cerf Medal for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts, Ms. Alvarez the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and Mr. Lea was appointed Vermont’s newest Poet Laureate.

The evening was filled with music and poetry, at timesweaving these two elements together and bringing to mind some lines from a poem entitled “A moment…” that begins:

Leaping through the tangy grass,
sweet from purple rains and folded songs. 

The poem continues:

This is the ballad, the perfect moment.
Finding beginnings, uncovering ends, shining like a fallen star.
This may be our time or your mind or his heart. 
It may be that street or this world or my home.

The author of the poem was present that night, but it was not Julia Alvarez or Sydney Lea who wrote these words. Rather it was Montpelier High School junior, Siena Facciolo, who had come to provide piano accompaniment for our collective invocation of the Vermont state song at the beginning of the program.

Siena is an accomplished musician and also a thoughtful writer. For the purposes of today’s blog, however, she also serves as a palpable reminder that the Christian Wolffs and Julia Alvarezes and Sydney Leas of the world do not emerge without a context that fosters the cultivation of the creative self to grow, risk, fail, struggle, endure and find one’s own true voice.

Each year, I am privileged to know and work with teachers across the state who provide this context for students every day—they work selflessly and tirelessly to craft learning experiences that allow students to throw open the windows to the world all around them, to understand their place in it. These teachers are our own, local heroes.

A subset of this cadre is the high school English and drama teachers who engage their students in the Poetry Out Loud project, created by the Poetry Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. The Vermont Arts Council runs this program here in the state and every year, it is my pleasure to see these teachers’ students engaging in the near-forgotten tradition of poetry recitation, to observe their eyes dance with a deep understanding and ownership of rich and powerful language, to know that this type of learning extends and expands the students’ experience of what it means to be human.

Robert Frost once defined poetry as a way of remembering what it would impoverish us to forget and I am grateful (apropos, I think, as we enter the season of gratitude and turkey) for the reminder of the vital and positive force that poetry can be in our everyday lives, for those who work at their craft and share it with the world, and finally for those who work to ignite a passion for poetry in others. Thank you.

Blog written by Stacy Raphael, our Education and Community Programs Manager

This week’s blog was written by Sonia Rae, the Council’s Artist and Community Services Manager:

In a recent Americans for the Arts Discussion Group that I subscribe to someone asked the question “Does art save lives?”  Maybe, though history is also littered with artists who have suffered a great deal because of the work they’ve created.  Chinese artist Ai Weiwei and Iranian film maker Jafar Panahi are just two recent examples.  If you rephrase the question to “Is art essential to our lives?” it doesn’t take long to realize it’s importance.  On a very basic level every lamp post, street scape, article of clothing, chair and table is the product of a creative mind. The design of every object requires aesthetic decisions that are, more likely than not, informed by some art historical reference – whether consciously or unconsciously. 
 
In Steve Jobs’ address to Stanford graduates in 2005 he speaks about the importance that a single calligraphy class had on the design of the first Mac and every personal computer since.  “I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.  None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.  But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography.”
 
In his recent biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson writes about Job’s exposure to the Bauhaus movement through the work of Herbert Bayer, and how it influenced Jobs’ own design philosophy. “The modernist International Style championed by the Bauhaus taught that design should be simple, yet have an expressive spirit.”  Jobs stated that Apple products should be “very simple, and we’re really shooting for Museum of Art quality”.
 
That an artist, an art form or an artistic movement can have such a strong influence on a designer of technology shouldn’t come as a surprise (think Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers).  In fact a number of higher education institutions embrace the arts as essential to fostering the type of creative thinking that accompanies scientific discovery. The Lab at Harvard was recently established to “break down boundaries between the arts and sciences to accelerate learning”.   The Arts Lab at the University of New Mexico, the Art Sci Center + Lab at UCLA and the Swiss Artist-in-Labs have similar programs.
 
As an arts administrator I’m always looking for great quotes that speak to the value of the arts.  One of my favorites comes from John D. Ong, Chair Emeritus of the B.F. Goodrich Company.  “People who create in our companies—whether they be scientists, marketing experts, or business strategists—benefit from exposure to the arts. People cannot create when they work and live in a culturally sterile environment.”   Does art save lives?  Maybe. Is art essential to our lives?  If institutions like Harvard, and companies like Apple and B.F. Goodrich get it then why are we still asking these questions?

If you’ve been on State Street in Montpelier lately you may have noticed that things are changing around the Arts Council.  New works of outdoor sculpture are arriving every week, and with each new installation the landscape surrounding our office evolves, each piece adding its voice to the conversation.  When we celebrate the opening of the new Sculpture Garden exhibit on October 7th, there will be works by six Vermont artists in wood, stone, steel and stoneware.  The sculptures are figurative and abstract, whimsical and thought-provoking, grounded yet improbable.  Each artist is contributing their own unique artistry, craft and conceptual perspective to the exhibit.

Thea Alvin has created a site-specific stone arch installation titled “Climate Change”.  The swirls of local Vermont stone swell from the ground on each side, converging in a graceful arch, the shape reminiscent of a hurricane spiral.  James Irving Westermann’s “Divided” is a painted steel arch with stone suspended on one side.  From a distance it may appear that the stone is solid, but on closer inspection you can see that it is really two pieces of stone.  The gap between the stones forms a momentary pause in the sculpture’s movement.  “a tree story”, by Brian-Jon Swift takes shape from a large piece of white pine, the wood’s elegant curves evoke the movement of Matisse’s dancers.  The pine is split in two pieces, one rough and natural the other finished and smooth, the two halves dancing around each other.  An untitled work from Ria Blaas is also formed from pine.  This 8’ sculpture of an abstracted head has a primitive feeling calling to mind the moai on Easter Island.  Soon, Stephen Procter will be bringing a group of large stoneware vessels for installation.  The larger scale of these ceramic pieces creates interesting relationship to the body and invites interaction.  Finally, Rob Hitzig is in the process of creating a new work, titled “Celebration”.  The sculpture will consist of a cedar decagon with running legs installed around the circumference of a tree.

It is my hope that visitors will find the work inviting and engaging, accessible yet challenging, and most of all fun and inspiring.

Please join us on Friday, October 7th for the opening reception as part of Montpelier Art Walk, or stop by any day to explore the sculptures on your own.

In 2010, the U.S. House of Representatives passed a resolution declaring the second week of September as National Arts in Education Week, so I am delighted to have the opportunity to turn our blog’s theme this week to the important work of the arts in transforming the lives of young people.

I recently came across an online video animation of one of Sir Ken Robinson’s talks called “Changing Education Paradigms.” The heart of the paradigm shift that he talks about is here:

“The Arts address the idea of Aesthetic experience. An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak; when you’re present in the current moment; when you are resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing; when you are fully alive. And anesthetic is when you shut your senses off, and deaden yourself to what’s happening… We’re getting our children through education by anaesthetizing them. And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn’t be putting them to sleep; we should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves.”

Isn’t that what we know to be true about quality arts education? Don’t we wish for our own children to be woken up, to experience joy and revelation? Of course it is and of course we do.

But all too frequently the conversations that we have around arts education make a beeline for discussions about budget cuts, lack of resources, and doing without in tough times. With the conversation framed in such a narrow way, champions of arts in schools are relegated to fighting just to maintain the status quo—stuck in a tug of war for resources of time and money, pitted against other, more tested subjects such as reading and math.

Aligned with Robinson’s call for a paradigm shift, National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Rocco Landesman has challenged the field to vision its own paradigm shift in arts education. What if the arts were to serve as a model for education, writ large? “So rather than just fighting for a place at the table, what if we actually helped build a new table?”

The arts excel at modeling and encouraging collaborative learning, integrating curricular content in rich and meaningful ways, and allowing students to shine in diverse modalities that transcend the dominant “school” modes of linguistic and mathematical intelligences.  Many educators have harnessed the power of theatre, music, dance and visual art to create powerful project-based learning, giving students the opportunity to engage with their learning in an experiential way that research has demonstrated to be a highly effective strategy for learning and high student achievement.

And to be sure, this type of “project-based learning is great,” says Landesman. But he pushes further:

“What if we took a different lesson from the arts? One that would drastically re-form our learning environments. What if we took away the lesson of failure? … Productive failure … fail often and succeed sooner … failure as inspiration and drive … failure as fun … failure as permission to try again. These are the values of successful members of American industry. But we are not really talking about this in our schools. Many schools are not teaching the art of innovation, the art of the productive, noble, fun failure.”

As we launch into another school year here in Vermont, I always look forward to learning more about the wonderful ways that our schools encourage students to wake up and fail. Many projects funded by the Arts Council are already underway and these schools and organizations are committed to creating transformative experiences for students and teachers. It is a joy to see this work unfold.

For more information and resources about arts in education, visit the Americans for the Arts website.

Blog written by Stacy Raphael, our Education and Community Arts Program Manager