BELLOWS FALLS — Visual artist Robert McBride, the founding director of the Rockingham Arts & Museum Project (RAMP), says he does not like to think of Bellows Falls as an artist community.
He prefers to see his adopted hometown as a community where artists live.
Even if the mission of RAMP may be “to integrate the arts in the long-term sustainability of the community,” McBride does not want to suggest that such a championing of the arts has any hierarchal implications.
“I am not saying that those in the arts are better than anyone else, but that artists are an integral facet of the community” he explains. “I see creativity as the language of problem solving. The key here is to create work that is meaningful to you.”
In that way, McBride says that a plumber or electrician can be creative occupations also.
“I have a passion for creativity and the arts and want to share that with my community,” McBride continues. “If we all contribute our individual creativity and passion, then our communities organically become more vital, both culturally and economically.
“If people in Bellows Falls want to come to art-related events, or take part in the arts any way they can, that is great, but they don't have to. We at RAMP do not put a value judgement on it.”
Since 1995, RAMP has been working diligently to demonstrate that artists play a significant role in the sustainability of rural communities both culturally and economically. This year, RAMP is celebrating its 20th anniversary. Throughout 2016, a number of events will celebrate the longevity of RAMP and its founder.
“As I reflect on those 20 years, I continue to firmly believe in the mantra that 'Art Makes Difference,'” McBride muses. “And, from experience, I recognize the important role that artists and the arts play in sustaining the economic and cultural health of Bellows Falls and the region.”
McBride says he suspects that RAMP is different from what people envision community arts organizations to be.
RAMP's central mission is not to host performances and other arts events, although it sometimes does that too. Rather, it works for the benefit of the artists of Rockingham by creating effective partnerships with other organizations and people that initiate and support things that include accessibility, affordable housing, artists town meetings, public art initiatives, and policy making.
“The places you often find RAMP represented is less often at a play or concert than at a discussion of about Amtrak or a housing meeting,” says McBride.
McBride has spearheaded a number of successful projects including creating affordable live/work spaces for artists, public art projects, and artist town meetings that directly engage artists in the community.
Robert McBride grew up in the San Francisco area and was educated at the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a B.A. in painting. To continue his studies at Hunter College, where he earned an M.F.A., he moved to New York City.
He initially had the intention ultimately of returning shortly to the Bay Area. “I thought people always went back to where they grew up, sort of like salmon going upstream to spawn,” he says. “People feel a special connection to where they came from.”
However, thoughts of returning to California were lost as he was swept up into Manhattan's art scene in the 1980s. He became a founding member of Painting Space 122, an alternate art space on New York's Lower East Side.
The focus of McBride's own work as an artist is color: color as painting, color as sculpture.
As he explains in his artistic statement for the PMW Gallery, a gallery where he displays his abstract paintings, “Creating the work allows me to translate much of the stimulation (visual, auditory, emotional) that I take in from living into tangible forms. Often people respond to my work as landscape with a topographical perspective (as if they were looking down from above). The texture of the colors and the groupings of marks add a strong narrative sense to the work."
When McBride ultimately did leave New York, he did not go west back to San Francisco as he once thought, but rather he turned north.
“I first came up to Vermont for some friend's dinner party who had a house in Bellows Falls,” he says.
As early as 1982, he bought a house himself there, but not until 1995 did McBride move to Bellows Falls full-time. However, once there, he quickly he realized that his adopted hometown could use an infusion of the arts, and so he formed the nonprofit which came to be known as RAMP.
“The name came about because when we were first starting out we were based at the Rockingham Free Public Library, and since we were trying to get grants, we needed a name for our organization,” says McBride. “It was the librarians who suggested The Rockingham Arts and Museum Project.”
RAMP quickly settled into the community as an organization that advocated accessibility to the arts and promoted the value of arts programming as an economic driver.
Over the years, it has facilitated and participated in many important projects, including the renovation of the historic Exner Block in 2000 to provide affordable housing for artists; procuring a grant to create the mural on the Flatiron building, and bringing music and theater to the region, such as Stone Church Arts, and concerts and performances by Yellow Barn and Bread and Puppet Theater.
McBride has long recognized the importance of collaboration with other nonprofits, business, and municipal organizations to establish forward-looking initiatives.
“Different things happen because you happen to meet people at the right time,” says McBride. “You then share ideas and collaborate with each other. When the Exner Building went up for for sale, I saw it as a great place to provide low-income housing for artists. When I reached out to Housing Vermont, they said they would buy the property only if we would work with them.”
McBride says that even though he may not have the greatest vision, all the success of RAMP comes from his ability to work with others, and take on the responsibility for what RAMP does.
“We are willing to fall flat on our face, because even if we do, at least we tried,” he says.
“The scale of Vermont makes it possible for people to be part of things,” continues McBride. “The population of the state is 600,000, which would be a few blocks in the Bronx. Bellows Falls has a mere population of 3,600, which makes it quite different even from Brattleboro with its population of 12,000.
“What I enjoy about living in Bellows Falls and Vermont, in general, is that the rural scale naturally encourages access to people, events, organizations, local, and state government. I think we often forget what a gift this is, which offers the possibility of making a real difference in our communities.”
McBride says he relishes living in a place such as Bellows Falls, with all of its diversity.
People often envision Vermont as country life, but it's also a state of thriving small towns.
”I love to go out into the country but I wouldn't want to live there,” confesses McBride. “My home is right here downtown. When my car died last year, somewhat to the shock of my friends I actually considered not replacing it. I can walk everywhere here. About one square mile, Bellows Falls has something cohesive about it that I respond to, with its unique square that opens up like an Italian hill town, even including its tower.”