BRATTLEBORO — Building on the success of a three-day festival in July of 2021 that celebrated Black girlhood and womanhood through poetry readings, film screenings, and curated culinary offerings, Epsilon Spires in downtown Brattleboro will once again team up with co-curator Shanta Lee Gander to present a series of events that brings together artists of color from around New England to exchange ideas across a variety of creative disciplines.
Spearheading the Multidisciplinary Salon Series with Gander is Jamie Mohr, Director of Epsilon Spires.
Gander is an artist, author, and public intellectual whose work has been featured in outlets such as Vermont Public Radio, The Maine Review, and Ms. Magazine.
Her collection of poems, GHETTOCLAUSTROPHOBIA, won the Diode Edition's 2020 Full-Length Book Contest, and she received the Arthur Williams Award for Meritorious Service to the Arts from the Vermont Arts Council in the same year.
The series, which will take place in July 2022, is focused on themes of “embodiment” and “transcendence.”
Gander said in a news release that the salon is“a space for building off of the creative energy that blooms from new relationships when creatives come together from across different disciplines, experiences, and diversities.”
The Multidisciplinary Salon Series will include public events hosted at Epsilon Spires in downtown Brattleboro, as well as outdoor workshops as part of a new artist's residency program at the Green River Bridge Inn in Guilford, which was recently purchased with the vision of expanding on the existing bed-and-breakfast to offer international artist and composer residencies that support the creation of new work to be presented at Epsilon Spires.
“We are excited to present opportunities for creative exploration while encouraging the potential cross-pollination of epiphany,” says Mohr.
Funding for the Multidisciplinary Salon Series is made possible in part by a $5,000 Cultural Recovery Grant from Vermont Humanities and the Vermont Arts Council, which awarded $1.2 million dollars to arts organizations throughout the state to offset the impact of COVID-19 on their operations.
Although the programming was significantly reduced during the pandemic, Epsilon Spires successfully pivoted to host outdoor events through the innovative Backlot Cinema Series. When it was safe to do so, they offered socially-distanced art exhibits and performances in the historic church that the organization transformed into a venue and gallery in 2019.
“I've long been attracted to the way that Epsilon Spires has done a couple of things so well,” says Gander, adding that “this includes encouraging artistic transcendence in a way that inspires creatives to be thinking of ways to push the boundaries of their work to explore the realms of the multi-sensorial and multidisciplinary.”
For more information on the series, contact Mohr at [email protected].