“Gretchen Seifert: In Abstraction,” the first show in the Canal Street Art Gallery's new spring solo shows lineup of local artists and artwork, is on view to the public and via the gallery's website through Saturday, April 3.
“I see abstraction as an opportunity to be curious and to discover,” Seifert said in her artist's statement. “There is an important imaginal quality, a dreamlike exploration that occurs. Abstraction has always, for me, been a doorway into the complex of individual-ness, or, how we relate personally to our unconscious. Not what is in thought, but what is embodied, felt.”
Seifert, a prolific and accomplished visual artist and musician, has recently relocated to Brattleboro. This exhibit is an exclusive glimpse into nearly three decades of art making and will exhibit artwork that includes silver gelatin prints of her photographs, multimedia works on paper, paintings, and drawings.
She said her artwork is created to heal trauma through visually representing the relationships between sensations, feelings, and memory. Using her training as a classical musician - she has degrees from Boston University and Northwestern University in cello performance - Seifert said she is inspired by experimental music to create her mainly abstract visual work.
The Guilford Cares Food Pantry moved out of the Broad Brook Community Center (the former Grange building) last week to make way for major renovations to the building. Thanks to the generosity of the Guilford Fair trustees, the Guilford Cares Food Pantry will move to temporary quarters in the...
Fire Chief Michael Bucossi flips through a file containing a career's worth of commendations, certificates, and letters from state officials. “I'm going to miss getting up in the a.m. and coming into a job that has given me so much,” said Bucossi, reflecting as he prepares to retire on...
Last month was Black History Month. This one is Women's History Month. What better time to honor women of color, who, with other women writers, reveal the courage it takes to tell the truth about women's lives through the written word? When thinking of women writers, I recall poet Muriel Rukeyser's question: “What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?” Her answer: “The world would split open.” Historically silenced and admonished to be “good girls and...
Now that nearly a year has passed since the start of this pandemic, the Putney Foodshelf wants to recognize the tremendous support the organization has received over the past year. This support has come in many forms: volunteerism, donor support, donations of fresh produce and eggs, and so much more. We have seen that the people who live in these hills and in this valley have deep compassion, generosity, and the capacity to meet a moment of challenge in remarkable...
I was stunned and appalled to read Malaika Puffer's Viewpoint about the proposed facility that would result in psychiatric incarceration. I have long written about the flaws in psychiatric practice. I also had the unhappy opportunity to witness cruel and inappropriate psychiatric hospital practices when my mother suffered severe episodes of depression and spent long months locked up, dragged into electroconvulsive therapy chambers, and overmedicated against her will in the days of Draconian treatments from which she never recovered. There...
The Fukushima Daiichi Plants 1–4 accident 10 years ago was a catastrophe inside a far larger catastrophe created by a huge tsunami that engulfed a large region of the eastern coast of Japan. More than 20,000 people were killed by the flood, none by the radiation and radioactivity from the core meltdowns of reactors 1–3. The core of reactor 4 was totally out and in the fuel pool during a routine maintenance operation there. Those reactor plants are the same...
The point MacLean Gander makes in “A national dislocation from reality” [Column, March 3] of the importance of how a problem gets defined, who gets to define it, and who then reports on it (hopefully) using “the basic principles of accuracy, fairness, and objectivity” which he also acknowledges as being “shaped in powerful ways by the prevailing culture” seemed more than a little relevant and timely to me. Recently, I remarked that it seems there is no dialogue any more,
The Guilford Free Library has begun its annual “Send a Kid to Camp” raffle to support summer camps held at the library. Tickets are $10 each and will be sold virtually. A drawing will take place at the library on May 22. One winner will receive a collection of gift certificates valued at $200 to the Guilford Country Store and Hazel, India Masala House, and Three Stones, all restaurants in Brattleboro. The camps are free for residents and $25 for...
I want to express my deepest appreciation to everyone who participated in Rockingham's Selectboard elections. It's been such a rough year on all of us. Pandemic fears and restrictions made voting in our town elections especially challenging - not to mention the brutal weather! Nonetheless the total vote wasn't a great deal lower than last year's. I know all five of us on the board this coming year will strive together to do our best to create the brightest possible...
Sense and Nonsense, the sixth in the SOLOs series of performances filmed on the Hooker-Dunham stage, airs Friday, March 19, at 7:30 p.m., and will simultaneously stream on YouTube and BCTV. The showing will be followed by an online public after- party with the cast of the co-production between the Hooker-Dunham Theater and the Rock River Players. Sense and Nonsense consists of a series of monologues that take aim at the destructive nonsense of gender stereotypes. • Cyndi Cain Fitzgerald's...
Milestones • Adeline Flora “Addy” Barker, 82, of South Londonderry. Died peacefully Feb. 20, 2021 at The Gill Home in Ludlow. She was born July 17, 1938, in Oneida, N.Y., the youngest daughter of Ralph and Ruth (Rowley) Soper. Her father was a Seventh Day Baptist minister and moved the family to Arkansas when Addy was a child. While Addy was attending nursing school in Little Rock, she met the love of her life, Richard Barker from Londonderry, who was...
Five new exhibits open at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center (BMAC) on Thursday, March 18. They include an exploration of flowers as a way to mark loss; new work by Jennifer Mack-Watkins that, in the artist's words, “[uses] aesthetics as a form of resistance against the erasure and invisibility of African American culture”; a kinetic sculpture installation by Adria Arch; drawings by Kenny Rivero; and the biennial “Glasstastic” exhibit, including a look back at the first 10 years of...
Coyotes are subject of online talk LONDONDERRY - On Thursday, March 18, at 7 p.m. the Conservation Commission will host a virtual event featuring Chris Schadler of Project Coyote. The presentation, “What's Up With Those Wily Coyotes?,” will also include a discussion. More information about Schadler may be found at www.projectcoyote.org/about/chris-schadler. Login information may be found at tinyurl.com/Zoom-LCC. Other presentations are available on demand at the Conservation Commission's YouTube channel at bit.ly/604-lond-conscomm. Panel to discuss effects of pandemic PUTNEY -
Vermont has elected socialist Bernie Sanders statewide 11 times, and twice voted for him in the Democratic presidential primary. But there's not too much socialism here. Like the other 49 states, Vermont has socialism for the rich and rugged individualism for the poor. The opioid epidemic ravages our communities, but the leading opioid dealers in the country donate to our politicians - including thousands from Purdue Pharma to Gov. Phil Scott - without a peep. The state Legislature has proved...
After a wide-ranging search, Colleen Harris has been selected to direct the graduating students in the ProTrack Training Program's end-of-year performance at the New England Center for Circus Arts (NECCA). This contemporary circus performance is the final Capstone Project for professionally ready students attending the three-year professional program at NECCA. NECCA Cofounder Serenity Smith Forchion said in a news release that Harris's extensive directorial experience in theater, along with a connection to contemporary circus, made her “an ideal directorial choice.”
Two community projects in Windham County have each received $50,000 through the Preservation Trust of Vermont's Paul Bruhn Historic Revitalization Grants to activate and reuse historic structures. The Friends of Vernon Center will use its award to convert the Governor Hunt House into a community center, while the town of Athens will use its funding to renovate its 19th-century Meeting House. A total of $625,000 has been awarded for these two projects and seven others through the state. The grants...
This month marks 10 years since an earthquake and tsunami touched off three nuclear meltdowns and multiple hydrogen explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, an ongoing nuclear disaster some scientists say will continue for the next 100 years. The Japanese government's focus on an eventual summer Olympics in Tokyo, despite the need for rebuilding and ongoing radiation concerns, is a contentious topic in and outside of Japan. On Sunday, March 21, from 4 to 5:30 p.m.,
The season of Representative Annual Town Meeting (RATM) got underway with the first of two informational meetings designed to brief meeting members on the 28 articles they will consider later this week. Town staff and the Selectboard provided updates on the proposed fiscal year 2022 municipal budget, on funding to update the municipal website (brattleboro.org), and on potential efforts to establish guidelines around human services funding. Meeting members also received the unglamorous, but good, news that town finances were weathering...
In 2020, Gov. Phil Scott signed Act 148, an act relating to justice reinvestment. The law intends to reduce Vermont's prison population, reduce recidivism and reduce the state's reliance on out-of-state, private, for-profit, prisons. The act was a result of work by the Justice Reinvestment II Working Group and enacted many of the committee's recommendations. Among the many reforms in this act is the reinstatement of earned good time - giving inmates the ability to earn a small reduction in...
Thanks to all who voted in the recent election. Having no idea what my chances were, I was happily surprised when Justice of the Peace Paul Obuchowski announced the results at the Masonic Temple. My fellow new Selectboard members - Bonnie North and Elijah Zimmer - and I learned of our victories at 7:10 p.m. and were already at work in our first board meeting 20 minutes later. With veteran Selectboard members Peter Golec and Sue Hammond as chair and...
At last Wednesday's Representative Town Meeting (RTM) information session, the Selectboard members were constantly visible and audible while everyone else was muted and with video turned off. The technical bugs had already been worked out during the district caucuses - District 2 was allowed 14 minutes, with no time even to welcome new members. By contrast, when the Selectboard was ready to speak, democracy was intact. Board members' time was unlimited. Selectboard gets unlimited time; RTM members get scraps. This...
I was disappointed with the reporting of the Selectboard election results, with a strong focus on one candidate's opinion of another candidate's position. Brattleboro is a small town. Even if we don't know someone (I don't know Jackson Stein or Evan Chadwick), chances are we know of someone who does. While Stein is entitled to his opinions and to voice them on their media channels, for a community newspaper to report statements of opinion made by one candidate and exclude...
Soon, the third round of COVID-19 relief funds will arrive in the bank accounts or mailboxes of thousands of people right here in Windham County. For some, this will be a welcomed relief and will be spent quickly on basic needs - rent, bills, food, fuel, etc. For others, the need is not so great, but the funds will still be used in ways that directly help them and the economy. Then there are those who don't really need some...
Editor's note: Vermont is obligated under its state constitution to provide equal education opportunity to its students, as determined by a 1997 landmark state Supreme Court decision, Brigham v. State. (You'll see this decision referred to in news reports about school funding as “the Brigham decision.”) As part of reforming the state education funding system to comply with that decision, the state created a fund for collecting tax money from communities and redistributing it to school districts based on student...
There are different kinds of thirst. There's the thirst that California experienced during wildfires this past year, where lives and even whole towns were obliterated. There's the thirst an entire culture can experience when people lose access to art, as in a pandemic. Then there's the thirst that one isn't quite aware of until it is quenched. That's what I experienced, on Flat Street the other day, when I encountered 10 images of artists put on display by the Vermont...
This Saturday at Annual Representative Town Meeting (ARTM), town reps will have a chance to take a simple step to make our town government more inclusive and accessible. Will we take that opportunity? The Selectboard is a powerful body that makes important decisions which impact everyone who lives, works, uses resources, and travels in Brattleboro; however, the job itself is accessible only to a minority of the population. Selectboard members make either $3,000 or $5,000 per year for a sizable...
State Rep. Michelle Bos-Lun of Westminster and State Rep. Mike Mrowicki of Putney, the two representatives of Windham-4, will host an online community meeting for residents of Westminster, Putney, and Dummerston. The event, on Saturday, March 20 at 10 a.m., will update constituents and answer questions about goals, challenges, and legislative bill proposals for this legislative session. The two, both Democrats, will also give updates from the Climate Solutions, Women's, Rural Economic Development, Workers', and Social Equity caucuses. Bos-Lun will...
What is there to say about the final report of the Community Safety Review Project? In fact, there's a lot one could say about it, which should not be surprising, since it's a 224-page document that summarizes months of work relating to important questions of public policy. While most people will probably read the executive summary and perhaps the 22 pages of key findings and recommendations, the full scope of the project - both what was done and what was...
Imagine this: In 1840, 37 immigrants came from Italy to the United States. In 1907 - the year in which novelist Vincent Panella's latest work, Sicilian Dreams, is set, 285,731 did so - the greatest number in history. Such an explosion of dreamers was eager to reboot here in America, among them, Panella's family. Panella lives up on Augur Hole Road, just beyond the Marlboro border, in an 1840 home that she shares with his wife, photographer Susan Sichel. A...
The Route 9 Rivalry between Brattleboro and Mount Anthony, is intense no matter what sport is being played, but the boys' basketball games always seem to be the most heated. The game usually has the biggest crowd of season in the BUHS gym. The fans from both schools are loud and occasionally belligerent, and the play on the floor is always physical. While the BUHS gym on March 12 was devoid of fans due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the intensity...
Take the last 14 minutes of 2001: A Space Odyssey and National Geographic's dramatic docu-series Year Million, which tries to imagine the advanced future of humans post-Earth, and what would you get? Maybe, just maybe, these two projects, plus other elements, would become the visual manifestation of the 103-minute film Truth or Consequences. Hannah Jayanti's film, described as a “speculative documentary,” is set in the town of Truth or Consequences, New Mexico. The film simultaneously brings the audience into the...
The Brattleboro Area Chamber of Commerce held its annual spring Legislative Breakfast on March 15 - but minus the bacon and eggs, as COVID-19 turned the ritual update on happenings in Montpelier into a virtual affair. The morning started with some light trash talking between Rep. Mike Mrowicki and Sen. Jeanette White as the two Putney Democrats traded barbs on whose chamber worked harder. Ten Windham County lawmakers outlined bills they're working on that might interest local businesses, on such...
Our Vermont legislators recently commissioned a state-of-the-art study to investigate how best to apportion funds to schools equitably. Unfortunately for the students of Vermont, it detailed serious inequities in school funding. This study unveiled an outdated distribution of funds to its districts. For 20 years, the tax structure in Vermont has skewed away from fully supporting our most vulnerable students and families. Nearly 60 percent of Vermont schools have been underfunded, leading to higher tax rates, fewer educational resources, and...